The Real Che Guevara!

Hollywood is kicking off 2009 with a monumental deception: Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Spanish-language epic Che, rendering a sadistic Marxist killer as, according to the New York Times, a “true revolutionary through the stations of his martyrdom.”[1] The word “stations” suggests the adoration of Christ in the Stations of the Cross. The movie’s protagonist, Benicio del Toro, does indeed compare “the Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara” with Jesus Christ.[2]

Soderbergh’s Che is a fiction once created by the KGB community, including my Romanian espionage service, the DIE, and at that time that placed me squarely in the picture. The real Che was an assassin who presided over communist firing squads and founded Cuba’s ghastly gulag system. He was also a coward who called upon others to fight to the death for the communist cause and sent to the scaffold hundreds who did not do that, yet he surrendered himself to the Bolivian army without a fight even though he was armed to the teeth. “Don’t kill me,” Che begged his captors. “I am worth more to you alive than dead.”[3] Soderbergh’s movie omitted this part—it would have demolished his Che.

I could write a book on how the terrorist Che was built into an inspiring leftist idol—like a beautiful monarch butterfly emerging from a disgusting caterpillar—and someday I may well do so. For now, here is a summary of how the KGB community created its fictional Che.

In the 1960s, the Soviet bloc’s popularity stood at an all-time low. The Soviets’ brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and their instigation of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis disgusted the world, and every bloc ruler tried to save face in his own way. Khrushchev replaced the “immutable” Marxist-Leninist theory of the world proletarian revolution with a policy of peaceful coexistence, and pretended to be an advocate for peace. Dubcek gambled on a “socialism with a human face” and Gomulka on “Let Poland be Poland.” Ceausescu announced his “independence” from Moscow and portrayed himself as a “maverick” among communist leaders.

The Castro brothers, who feared any liberalization, decided to just plaster a romantic revolutionary façade over their disastrous communism, which was starving the country. They chose Che as poster-boy, because he had been executed in Bolivia, at that time a U.S. ally, and could be portrayed as a martyr of American imperialism.

“Operation Che” was launched to the world by the book Revolution in the Revolution, a primer for communist guerrilla insurrection written by French terrorist Régis Debray, which praised Che to the skies. Debray dedicated his life to exporting Cuban-style revolution throughout Latin America, but in 1967 a Bolivian special forces unit trained by the U.S. captured him, along with Che’s entire guerrilla band.

Che was sentenced to death and executed for terrorism and mass murder. Debray was sentenced to 30 years in jail, but he was released after three years following the intervention of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, a communist romantically involved with the KGB, who was also the ideologue of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist band. Sartre proclaimed Guevara “the most complete human being of our times.”[4] In 1972 Debray returned to France, where he served as adviser for Latin America to French president François Mitterrand, and he dedicated the rest of his life to spreading hatred against the United States.

In 1970, the Castro brothers shifted Che’s sanctification into high gear. Alberto Korda, a Cuban intelligence officer working undercover as a photographer for the Cuban newspaper Revolución, produced a romanticized picture of Che. That now-famous Che, wearing long, curly locks of hair and a revolutionary beret with a star on it, and looking straight into the viewer’s eyes, is the logo advertising Soderbergh’s movie.

It is noteworthy that this picture of Che was introduced to the world by a KGB operative working undercover as a writer—I. Lavretsky, in a book entitled Ernesto Che Guevara, which was edited by the KGB.[5] The KGB entitled the picture “Guerrillero Heroico” and disseminated it throughout South America—Cuba’s area of influence. Italian millionaire publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, another communist romantically involved with the KGB, flooded the rest of world with Che’s picture printed on posters and T-shirts. Feltrinelli became a terrorist himself, and he was killed in 1972 while planting a bomb outside Milan.

I first heard Che’s name in 1959 from General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the former chief Soviet intelligence adviser to Romania, who afterwards directed Castro’s “revolution” and was rewarded by being promoted to head the almighty Soviet foreign intelligence organization, a position he held for fifteen years. He landed in Bucharest with his boss, Nikita Khrushchev, for consultations on West Berlin and “our Cuban Gayane.” Gayane was the overall code name of the operation for Sovietizing Eastern Europe.

At that time, the Soviet party bureaucracy believed that Fidel Castro was just an adventurer, and it was reluctant to endorse him. But Sakharovsky had been impressed by the devotion to communism of Fidel’s brother Raúl and of his lieutenant, Ernesto Guevara, and he made them the main protagonists in “our Cuban Gayane.” The two were brought black to Moscow to be indoctrinated and trained, and were given a KGB adviser.

Returned to the Sierra Maestra, Che proved to be a real, cold-blooded assassin in the mold of the KGB—which killed over 20 million people in the Soviet Union alone. “I fired a .32 caliber bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain that came out through his temple,” Che wrote in his diary, describing the execution of Eutimio Guerra, a “traitor of the Revolution” whom he shot in February 1957.[6] Guerra was the seventh person Che had killed. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is not necessary,” he explained. “These procedures are archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolution must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”[7]

On January 1^st, 1959, the “Cuban Gayane” succeeded, and the KGB charged Che to cleanse the whole Cuba of “anti-revolutionaries.” Thousands were sent to “el paredón” (the wall) and shot. Javier Arzuaga, who was chaplain at La Cabaña prison in early 1959, wrote in his book, Cuba 1959: La Galeria de la Muerte, that he had witnessed “the criminal Che” ordering the execution of some two hundred innocent Cubans. “I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy who was only 16 years old. Che did not budge. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located. … I went to Mexico for treatment.”[8]



Che in Moscow in November 1964, just before he secretly left to fulfil his dream of spreading communist revolution to Bolivia.

According to Arzuaga, Che last words to him were: “When we take our masks off, we will be enemies.”[9] It is now time to take off Che’s smiling mask and reveal his true face. The Cuban Memorial displayed at Tamiami Park in Miami, Florida contains hundreds of crosses, each bearing the name of an identified victim of Raúl’s and Che’s communist terror.[10]

It is also time to stop the fifty-year-long lie, reinforced by Soderbergh’s movie, that the Castro brothers and their hangman Che were independent nationalists. In 1972 I attended a six-hour public speech in which Fidel preached the same lie. The next day I went ocean fishing with Raúl. The other guest on the fishing boat was a Soviet who introduced himself as Nikolay Sergeyevich. “That's Colonel Leonov,” Sergio del Valle, my Cuban counterpart, whispered into my ear. Earlier he had identified Leonov to me as Raúl’s and Che’s KGB adviser in the 1950s and 1960s. There, on that boat, it hit me more clearly than ever before or since that the KGB was holding the reins of the Castros’ revolutionary wagon. Ten years later, Nikolay Leonov was rewarded for his handling of Raúl and Che by being promoted general and deputy chairman of the whole KGB.

In the 1970s, the KGB was a state within the state. Today the KGB, rebaptized FSB, is the state in Russia, and Soderbergh’s Che is manna from heaven for its Latin American surrogates. A couple of months ago two Kremlin’s puppets, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, expelled on the same day the U.S. ambassadors to their countries. Thousands of people carrying the portrait of Soderbergh’s Che took to the streets calling for Russian military protection. Russian military ships are now back in Cuba—and newly in Venezuela—for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis.

“Deception works like cocaine,” Yury Andropov, the father of contemporary Russia’s era of deception, used to tell me when he was KGB chairman. Then he would explain. “If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man.” Mao put it his own way: “A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth.” Soderbergh’s movie on Che is proving both correct.

Notes:

[1] A. O. Scott, “Saluting the Rebel Underneath the T-Shirt,” The New York Times, December 12, 2008.

[2] Guillermo I. Martínez, “Guevara biopic belies his ruthlessness,” The Sun Sentinel, January 1, 2009, p. 13A.

[3] Idem.

[4] Idem.

[5] I. Lavretsky, “Ernesto Che Guevara, “Progress Publishers, 1976, ASIN B000B9V7AW, p. 5. Initially published in Russian in 1973.

[6] Matthew Campbell, “Behind Che Guevara mask, the cold executioner,”The Sunday Times, September 16, 2007.

[7] Mark Goldblath, “Revenge of Che: no amount of Hollywood puferry will change the fact that commies aen’t cool,” The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2008.

[8] “The Infamous Firing Squads,” p. 1, as published in http://therealcuba.com/page5.htm.

[9] Idem.

[10] Ibidem,

THE REAL HAMAS LEADER: JIMMY CARTER!

Besieged by Israeli forces and rebuked by its Arab League allies, Hamas has seen the worst of the recent fighting in Gaza. But however bleak their present fortunes, the terrorists still have a faithful friend in ex-president Jimmy Carter.

It has become an odious annual routine. On no obvious invitation, the 39^th president inserts himself into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to excuse Hamas terror – the demonstrable source of which is the genocidal jihad against Jews and their national home set forth in Hamas’s founding charter – as the inevitable response to some imagined Israeli provocation. Carter’s latest act of solidarity with terror came last week, when he took to the pages of the Washington Post in a strained attempt to cast Israel as the true instigator of the fighting underway in Gaza.

Presenting the roots of the current conflict, Carter explained that “Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.” Instead, a brief ceasefire-took hold on June 19, 2008. “And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.” To sum up: Hamas had hoped for a broader peace, but Israel, ever the aggressor, resisted, before breaking the ceasefire and triggering the current fighting.

Of all that can be said about Carter’s account of recent history, Mary McCarthy’s famous evisceration of Lillian Hellman – “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘but.’” – is perhaps the most apposite. For starters, the notion that Hamas had wanted a wider ceasefire only to be frustrated by Israel is a perverse parody of the truth. In fact Hamas has never even abided by its previous ceasefires. Back in 2006, when apologists like Carter claimed that Hamas was faithfully honoring the ceasefire of the moment, over 1,000 Gaza-fired rockets pounded southern Israel. The June 19 “state of calm,” as the most recent ceasefire was called, repeated the grim pattern.

Under the terms of the ceasefire, even a single act of terrorism would have constituted its violation. Yet, in the weeks and months after June 19, Hamas fired at least 18 rockets and at least a dozen mortar shells into southern Israel. On July 6, Palestinian snipers opened fire on Israeli farmers in Kibbutz Nahal in southern Israel. On October 31, Israeli soldiers caught Palestinian terrorists trying to plant an “explosive device” alongside the Israeli security fence in the Sufa crossing near Gaza. Each of these attacks constituted a violation of the ceasefire and a casus belli for Israel to retaliate, though Israel held its fire. Each of these attacks, moreover, occurred before the November 4 strike on Hamas’s tunnel that Carter asserts to be the trigger of the current fighting. 

The “calm” before the storm: A Sderot home is damaged by a Kassam rocket fired on June 24, during the Hamas “ceasefire.” (Source: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)

It is a measure of Carter’s credulity – or, what is the same thing, his hostility to Israel – that his recounting of the November 4 incident is little more than recycled Hamas propaganda. Contrary to Carter’s claim, the tunnel in question was anything but “defensive.” Located about 800 feet from the Israeli security fence in the Gaza Strip, an unlikely defensive position so close to Israeli forces, the tunnel was actually designed as part of a Hamas plot to abduct IDF soldiers. This was not the first time that Hamas had used tunnels to carry out a terrorist attack. In June 2006, Hamas operativestunneled under the Israeli security fence near Gaza and ambushed an Israeli defense force, killing several soldiers and taking one, Gilad Shalit, hostage. If anything deserves to be called “defensive,” it is the November 4 IDF operation that located the tunnel and killed seven armed Hamas fighters. That Carter considers the successful foiling of a terrorist plot to be an act of Israeli provocation is a revealing glimpse into his morally bankrupt vision.


What “defensive” tunnel? (Source: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)

Carter is right that violence escalated after the November 4 operation, but he tellingly omits a critical point: that it took the form of a revived Hamas terror campaign. Between November 4 and 12, Hamas pummeled Israel with a deadly barrage of 91 rockets and 38 mortar shells. By the time the “ceasefire” officially collapsed on December 19, Hamas had fired a total of 223 rockets and 139 mortar shells into southern Israel – all during the “state of calm” it was supposed to be preserving.

All in all in 2008, Hamas fired 1,571 rockets and 1,531 mortars into Israel. This makes for a total of 3,484 rockets that have been launched into Israel from Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory and ended the “occupation” that was then cited, not least by Carter himself, as the principal cause of Palestinian terrorism. If Carter is aware of these details, or their implications for his blame-Israel-first timeline, he is tellingly silent.

This is all par for the course for Carter. Just last April, he paid a call to Hamas’s Damascus-based leader-in-exile, Khaled Meshal, conferring the prestige of a former American president on a terrorist chieftain. So what that Meshal has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction, promising his followers in taped speeches that “Israel with the help of Allah will be defeated.” Never mind, too, that he is an unapologetic supporter of Palestinian suicide bombers. None of that deterred Carter from seeking out Meshal as a voice of compromise.

Carter has gone even further to extol Hamas. In June 2007, he condemned as “criminal” the Bush administration’s eminently sensible decision to reject all dealings with Hamas. That in itself was part of Carter’s campaign – now three years running – to have Hamas recognized as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Such is Carter’s commitment to this goal that, in January 2006, he went so far as to call for the United States and European countries to skirt international restrictions on financing terrorism and, in effect, launder money to Hamas in the form of relief aid. At every step of the way, Carter has accepted without skepticism the pernicious and self-evidently absurd Hamas spin that what it seeks above all is peace in the Middle East.

It’s easy to ascribe Carter’s one-man ambassadorship for Hamas to the delusions of a failed statesman. But the most unfortunate aspect of his campaign is not that it has shamed Carter or demeaned the American presidency, if only by its tainted association with a onetime occupant, but that it has hurt the people it is intended to help.

At the latest count, nearly half of the 900 Palestinians killed in Gaza are civilians, the victims of Hamas’s calculated strategy of hiding among the general population and goading Israel into a deadly but inevitable retaliation. That number does not even account for the reign of terror that Hamas has been waging against its own people, killing rivals and resisters on trumped-up charges of “collaboration” with Israel, while singlehandedly sinking Gaza further into social sickness and economic despair. Jimmy Carter has certainly emerged as a leading advocate of the Palestinian cause. Woe to a people that finds such saviors.

ISLAM AND PEDOPHILIA!!!!

Besides their well-known penchant for anti-Semitism, misogyny and nihilistic violence, Muslim extremists are also gaining a disturbing reputation among British security agencies as collectors of child pornography.

According to a report on The Times website last week, police in Great Britain are discovering that their investigations into Muslim terrorism are leading them into the depraved world of child sexual exploitation. The reverse is also occurring with child protection officers encountering people who are “preparing to carry out terrorist acts.”

At one time, the link between the two deviant behaviours was considered so strong that security officials considered establishing an anti-terrorism project involving child welfare experts, but never followed through because Scotland Yard’s hands were too full with other terrorist investigations.

But demand is growing in Great Britain for the setting up of such a task force that could help security agencies understand the terrorist mindset and prevent future attacks.

“This is an important development,” said Labor MP Andrew Dinsmore. “We have to do more than just police work. It needs child protection, criminological and psychological work. It could become a very important weapon in the fight against terrorism.”

Police say they are already noticing a similarity in methods Muslim terrorists and paedophiles use in manipulating and grooming young people for their corrupt purposes. This usually involves introducing them to their deviant behaviour and then convincing them over time that it is normal.

British security personnel first became aware of a connection between Muslim extremism and child pornography in 2006. When investigating the terrorist connections of an east end London mosque preacher, Abdul Makim Khalisadar, a former primary school assistant, the 26-year-old’s DNA was found to match that of an unsolved rape case of a woman. Upon his arrest, police discovered Khalisadar also had a large amount of hardcore child pornography material on his computer.

In the same year, police made a similar discovery after raiding a suspected Muslim terrorist’s home, looking for a chemical bomb. While no explosive device was found, police did discover 44 “indecent” pictures of children on the 23-year-old man’s home computer and cell phone. Child porn, The Times reports, has been found “during investigations into some of the most advanced suspected plots.”

European security officials first discovered child porn images in a Muslim extremist’s possession when they raided a mosque in Milan, Italy, in 2001. Embedded in the disturbing images, though, they found hidden messages sent by fellow Islamists, causing Italian security agents to believe the terrorists were copying a clandestine method paedophiles use in communicating with one another. At that time, police believed this form of communications camouflage (called steganography) accounted for the child porn’s presence in the mosque.

But other, less doubtful, cases have cropped up since then. When arrested, Abdelkader Ayachine, a suspected Muslim terrorist currently awaiting trial in Spain, possessed almost 40,000 child pornographic movies and images, a number far exceeding any need for encoded communications. Ayachine was connected to the Casablanca bombing terrorist group that killed 45 people in 2003 and stands accused in the Spanish court of inciting jihad and recruiting fighters for the Iraq war. Prosecutors say his child pornography collection consisted mainly of “minors having sex, among themselves and with adults.”

Muslim extremists’ attraction to child pornography has been attributed to cultural factors. An Italian magistrate involved in the Milan mosque case said possession of child porn by Islamists did not necessarily indicate paedophilic tendencies, but rather was the result of cultural differences. Girls, he stated, often become wives in the Muslim world at age 11 and 12.

The Islamists’ interest in boys as sex objects is generally owed to their beliefs and social milieu. Their strict religious convictions do not allow them to be with a woman outside their own families, let alone touch one, before marriage. Moreover, in some Muslim countries, males can’t even catch a glimpse of the demonized female form because of the body-encompassing clothing she is forced to wear. In such a gender segregated environment, homosexual behavior develops, especially towards boys.

Even the Taliban, which executed homosexuals when it ruled Afghanistan, could not eradicate the sexploitation of boys, even in its own ranks. Among the 30 commands it issued to its fighters, Rule No. 19 forbid them from taking young boys without facial hair into their barracks. After the Taliban regime fell, a Fox news report indicated pederasty in Afghanistan returned to its previous place as an accepted social norm.

Sexual exploitation of boys in Muslim countries also has a long history. The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (an anonymous pseudonym), wrote in his column, Sufism, Sodomy and Satan, that, in the High Middle Ages, Sufism, Islam’s mystic branch, “is the only case in which a mainstream current of a major world religion preached pederasty as a path to spiritual enlightenment.” He then cites a German historian who claims this Sufi practice “persisted in many Islamic countries until very recent times.” The 2007 movie, The Kite Runner, located in Afghanistan, showed a “last vestige” of Sufism’s pederast side when dancing boys appeared in female dress.

Perhpas not altogether insignificant in this grotesque phenomenon is that the Koran itself promises to put pre-pubescent boys at the service of jihadi martyrs not interested in the female virgins awaiting them in paradise. The boys will be like “scattered pearls” of “perpetual freshness” (Suras 52:24, 56:17, 76:19).

The consequences of Islamist misogyny, gender segregation and sexual abuse of Muslim boys are far-reaching. Besides growing up to be sexual deviants who collect child pornography and may victimize other children, such sexually traumatized Muslim boys are predisposed to become involved in terrorism as a way of expressing their sexual rage. It therefore comes as no surprise that one anti-terror source told the Times: “A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are is to go through the child porn sites.”

BLACK RACISTS RECRUITED TO GUIDE JIHAD!!!!

Black Muslim lawyer Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour recently made news when it was revealed that he was a patron of Barack Obama and recommended him for admission to Harvard Law School in 1988. Back in the 1960s, al-Mansour, whose “slave name” was then Don Warden, was deeply involved in Bay Area racial politics as founder of a group called the African American Association. A close personal adviser to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, al-Mansour helped the pair establish the Black Panther Party but later broke with them when they entered coalitions with white radical groups. After becoming a Muslim, al-Mansour found not only an ideological justification for his racism but also a political purpose. That was, in the words of a memorandum produced by the Muslim Brotherhood and seized by the FBI as part of its probe of the Holy Land Foundation, to “eliminate and destroy the Western civilization from within.” Many black racists like al-Mansour are key figures in this “stealth” jihad, whose prime recruiting grounds are the U.S. prisons and mosques where inmates and worshippers alike are taught to embrace a radical Islam engaged in an apocalyptic battle against America.

Al-Mansour met Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in the mid-1970s and formed a relationship that led to al-Mansour’s hiring as attorney to King Saud. He has since been an adviser to Saudi billionaires who fund the stealth jihad and spread Wahhabi extremism in America.

Other black racist Islamists play less glamorous but equally significant roles as Imams at major mosques in the U.S.; as chaplains in prisons and jails; and as radical figures who haunt American higher education by advising and speaking for organizations such as the Muslim Students Association (MSA) on campuses across the nation. Whatever audience they target, they speak a lingua franca of anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American hatred—all in the name of Allah.

And why is it that black racists such as al-Mansour constitute a significant proportion of these hate mongers? In large part, it is because blacks have been specifically and aggressively targeted for recruitment by leaders of the worldwide jihad, just as they were targeted for recruitment by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s. Black grievance, combined with the evangelism of the Nation of Islam over the last seventy years, has established an audience for the ideology of hate.

The prison, as the last bastion of racism and racial separatism, has become a prime recruitment center for radical Islam. Al Qaeda training manuals found by U.S. troops in Afghanistan reveal that America’s black prisoners, who constitute nearly half of the nation’s two million inmates, are viewed by terrorists as a potentially bountiful source of new jihadi recruits. The immensely wealthy Saudi government, which has made the propagation of radical Islam in America a top priority, has shipped tens of thousands of copies of the Koran to U.S. jails in recent years. Through the National Islamic Prison Foundation, Saudi money finances an extensive “prison outreach” program that seeks to convert inmates to Islam and to anti-Americanism. Prison chaplains are typically Wahhabis (practitioners of Saudi Arabia’s most extreme, fundamentalist form of Islam) who have been certified and trained as religious officials by either the Islamic Society of North America or the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, both of which are currently under federal investigation for ties to terrorism. Islam expert Stephen Schwartz states that “radical Muslim chaplains … acting in coordination to impose an extremist agenda … have gained a monopoly over Islamic religious activities in American state, federal, and city prisons and jails.” Some 135,000 inmates convert to Islam annually, and almost all of these converts are African Americans.

Focusing their efforts and fortunes not only on prisons, the Saudis also have spent many millions of dollars funding a majority of America’s mosques, and have dispatched Imams from a number of Middle Eastern nations to settle in the U.S. as missionaries. Faheem Shuaibe, an Imam at a predominately black mosque in California, says that Saudi Arabia has set up “a very deliberate recruitment process … trying to find black Muslims who had a real potential for Islamic learning and also for submission to their agenda” of Wahhabi extremism. According to Islam scholar Daniel Pipes, there are approximately “a million American-born converts to Islam (and their descendants) in the United States and most of them have shifted allegiances away from their native country.” Pakistani religious leaders Sami ul-Haq and Fazrul Rehman predict that “in the next 10 years, Americans will wake up to the existence of an Islamic army in their midst—an army of jihadis who will force America to abandon imperialism and listen to the voice of Allah.”

The racial composition of this jihadi army is, of course, influenced by the Saudi targeting of African Americans. According to Reza Safa, an authority on Wahhabism’s spread throughout the world, “as many as 90 percent of American converts to Islam are black.”

The somewhat shadowy Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour embodies the marriage of racism and Islamism that characterizes the stealth jihad. Using his legal training to leverage his standing in the Islamic world, al-Mansour is a black nationalist and an outspoken hater of the United States, Israel, and white people generally. In recent years he has accused the U.S. of plotting a “genocide” designed “to remove 15 million black people, considered disposable, of no relevance, value or benefit to the American society.” He has told fellow blacks that “whatever you do to [white people], they deserve it, God wants you to do it and that’s when you cut out the nose, cut out the ears, take flesh out of their body, don’t worry because God wants you to do it.” Alleging further that Palestinians in Israel “are being brutalized like savages,” he accuses the Jews of “stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America.”

Other black racists who echo al-Mansour’s ideas include Imam Abdul Alim Musa, founder and director of the As-Sabiqun movement, which aims to “enable Islam to take complete control of … the lives of all human beings on Earth.” In 2004 the San Francisco Bay View described Musa as “one of the highest-ranking Islamic leaders in the Black community, nationwide and specifically in the Islamic movement.” Born in Arkansas as Clarence Reams, Musa was raised in Oakland, California. During the 1960s, he embraced the violent ideology of the Black Panthers. He went on to become a leading cocaine-exporter in Colombia, a crime for which he eventually was incarcerated. While in prison, he converted to Islam and took his present name. An avid supporter of Iran’s lateAyatollah Khomeini, Musa calls for Islam to “take over America.”

He praises Muslim suicide bombers as “heroes” who courageously “strike at the heart of Zionism.” He predictsthat “this way of life known as Islam will dominate all other ways of life.” He lauds those who seek to honor Allah by means of violence. He says that America holds values and attitudes consistent with those of the Ku Klux Klan. He has praised Osama bin Laden, Hezbollah, and Hamas. And he holds that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were orchestrated jointly by the U.S. and Israeli governments in order to provide a pretext for waging war against Islam.

Warith Deen Umar (formerly Wallace Gene Marks), who was repeatedly incarcerated as a teenager, is a retired Muslim cleric who spent two decades helping to run New York’s Islamic prison program. A confidante of Nation of Islam kingpin Louis Farrakhan, Umarpersonally recruited and trained dozens of chaplains. With help from the Saudi government, he brought that country’s fanatical brand of Islam to New York’s Muslim inmates. Hebelieves that the 9/11 hijackers should be honored as martyrs, and that the U.S. risks further terrorist attacks because it oppresses Muslims around the world. Viewing black prisoners as potential soldiers in such attacks, Umar says, “Prisons are a powder keg. The question is the ignition.” He wrote in an unplublished memoir, “Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud” the hijackers. The Koran, he added, does not condemn terrorism against oppressors of Muslims, even if innocent people are killed in the process. “This is the sort of teaching they don’t want in prison,” he said. “But this is what I’m doing.”

Sheikh Khalid Yasin is a U.S.-born, Atlanta-based Muslim convert (and a Malcolm X disciple) who has been a popular guest speaker at Muslim Students Association (MSA) events across the United States. He candidly states that America one day will be governed by Sharia (Islamic Law); that Muslims should steadfastly refuse to become friends with non-Muslims; that 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. and/or Israel; that homosexuals should be killed in accordance with Koranic mandates; and that AIDS was invented at a U.S. government lab for the purpose of killing nonwhites around the world.

Former Nation of Islam member Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali is a black Imam in Oakland who also has become a familiar figure on U.S. campuses where he speaks for the MSA. A passionate supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, he endorses suicide bombings as a legitimate “resistance” tactic of Muslim “martyrs.” He calls for “an Islamic revolution” that will lead to the creation of “an Islamic state” where “Allah controls every place—the home, the classroom, the science lab, the halls of Congress.” He maintains that “the Zionist Jews” were responsible for the Danish cartoon controversy that sparked Muslim riots around the world in 2006. He accuses the “apartheid State of Israel” of carrying out a “holocaust” and a “genocide” against the Palestinian people. Referring to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch of straight-up punks,” he warns Jews: “[Y]our days are numbered…. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious.”

Such are the commitments of the figures who have become the spearpoint of the Islamic jihad in America. Moving out from the hidden corners of American society into universities and other public places, these preachers of hate have made racism and Islamism into a potent toxin that they release under the cover of diversity and religious pluralism.

TIGHTENING THE NOOSE!!!!

As the war in Iraq recedes and a defeated al-Qaeda removes its surviving assets to Pakistan, the Afghan front is increasingly becoming the top American military priority.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, stated this week more troops and economic aid were needed “as quickly as possible” for the seven-year-old counterinsurgency battle. The core of McKiernan’s military aid request is four more combat brigades and helicopters, indicating Afghanistan will have a “surge” of its own.

“We’re in a very tough fight,” said McKiernan to reporters at the Pentagon last Wednesday. “The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”

But McKiernan’s request should not be read to mean that Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are “gaining” in Afghanistan, as one New York Times story indicated. Even though military deaths this year have already exceeded the 117 American dead in 2007 and currently stand at a record 134, this is still low in comparison to Iraq and American casualty figures in Vietnam and World War II – especially considering there are about 50,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

The much-reported 30 percent increase in violence in Afghanistan this year has also been accompanied with very little context. One publication, Strategy Page.com, pointed out that country-wide violence will cause 6,000 deaths in Afghanistan this year, which averages out to 24 dead per 100,000 people. In contrast, South Africa, a country at peace, will see 50 citizens out of every 100,000 die violently in 2008, mostly because of its high crime rate. Other countries, especially failed states like Somalia, probably have an even higher death rate from violence, but are unable to keep proper statistics. So the Afghan situation, while not laudable, is also not dismal.

Moreover, much of Afghanistan’s violence is also unrelated to the war. Constant tribal feuding has been a way of life for centuries in Afghanistan’s rural areas and accounts for many of the country’s killings. The tribesmen are armed, proud of their martial spirit and barely acknowledge the central government. Like most lawless regions, there are also few, if any, law enforcement officials to be found there.

Afghanistan’s drug gangs are also big contributors to the country’s lack of security and cause much of the violence. They have their own armed retainers who battle both government forces as well as each other. One American humanitarian aid worker witnessed such Afghan drug violence when he was inadvertently caught in a shootout between two rival groups but escaped unharmed.

But the biggest contribution drug gangs make to Afghanistan’s turmoil is the tax money they pay to the Taliban, which then hires fighters and buys weapons to use against Western forces and the Kabul government. Afghanistan now produces about 90 percent of the world’s heroin in its southern provinces. And although a poor poppy crop was reported this year, one estimate still puts the Taliban share at about $70 million.

The drug money has also led to Afghanistan’s biggest problem: corruption. Afghan government officials are suspected of being on drug gang payrolls. Even Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, was accused of being involved in the trade. The drug cancer, combined with officials stealing Western aid intended for the poor and dispossessed, has cost the Kabul government much of the people’s confidence and support. So like the American experience in Vietnam, the US army may win the military battles, but the country could be lost because of other, non-military factors.

Nevertheless, McKiernan is correct in asking for more troops at this time. The Taliban and al Qaeda are currently under severe pressure in their Pakistani base areas. The new Zardari government launched an all-out military offensive in August against the two terrorist organizations in their tribal agency strongholds and refuses to negotiate with them, giving them the stark options of either surrendering or leaving.

McKiernan has called the offensive’s initial results “encouraging.” About 1,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have been killed in the long overdue attack. A Pakistani newspaper reported that Taliban fighters have even left Afghanistan to confront the Pakistani army, leading to a noticeable lowering of insurgent activity in American-patrolled Kunar province. After years of American complaints about jihadists crossing unhindered into Afghanistan, a senior Paksitani military official ironically commented: “The Pakistan-Afghan border is porous and is now causing trouble for us in Bajaur (tribal agency).” To keep the pressure on the enemy, the American military also announced it will also stage a winter campaign.

An expansion of the Afghan army will accompany the arrival of more American troops. Currently about 70,000 strong, Afghan forces will number 90,000 by the end of the year and 130,000 soldiers in about three years. General David Petraeus calls this Afghan military expansion a “thickening” of the local forces. An increase in numbers on both sides will, like in Iraq, allow troops to hold areas the Taliban simply reoccupies after allied forces leave.

But besides the top down strategy of meeting the enemy head on militarily, both McKiernan and Petraeus intend to increase their bottom up strategy of increasing humanitarian aid and engaging local Afghan tribal and government leaders. The Taliban also recognizes the value of this strategy, as a UN report released this week stated it had killed 30 aid workers so far this year, attacked 22 food convoys and 59 schools.

But the only hitch to McKiernan’s request for the extra brigades is that they may not arrive immediately. As American troops leave Iraq, they will probably need a few months rest at home before being sent to the Afghan-Pakistan theater. Which is probably why Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently he is prepared to send thousands of troops to Afghanistan in the spring. So, after years of empty Taliban promises to capture Kabul in a spring offensive, it will instead be facing one of its own.

PALIN POUNCES ON OBAMAS' AYERS/REZKO CONNECTION!!!

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign's effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.

Palin's reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground. Its members took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the tumultuous Vietnam War era four decades ago. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, served on a charity board with Ayers several years ago and has denounced his radical views and activities.

The Republican campaign, falling behind Obama in polls, plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of presidential candidate John McCain's message with a month remaining before Election Day.

Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."

Palin, Alaska's governor, said that donors on a greeting line had encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide then advised her, "Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go get to them."

The escalated effort to attack Obama's character dovetails with TV ads by outside groups questioning Obama's ties to Ayers, convicted former Obama fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko and Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.

Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school-reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s.

Palin cited a New York Times story published Saturday that detailed Obama's relationship with Ayers. In an interview with CBS News earlier in the week, Palin didn't name any newspapers or magazines that had shaped her view of the world.

Summing up its findings, the Times wrote: "A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.'"

Earlier Saturday, Palin spent 35 minutes at a diner in Greenwood Village where she met with Blue Star Moms, a support group of families whose sons or daughters are serving in the armed forces. Reporters were allowed in the diner for less than five minutes before being ushered out by the campaign.

Palin, whose 19-year-old son, Track, deployed last month as a private with an Army combat team, was overheard at one point commiserating with one of the mothers: "Any time I ask my son how he's doing, he says, 'Mom, I'm in the Army now.'"

Taking one question from reporters about competing in battleground states, Palin repeated her wish that the campaign had not pulled out of Michigan, a prominent state in presidential elections where Obama leads by double-digit percentage points in recent polls.

"As I said the other day, I would sure love to get to run to Michigan and make sure that Michigan knows that we haven't given up there," she said. "We care much about Michigan and every other state. I wish there were more hours in the day so that we could travel all over this great country and start speaking to more Americans. So, not worried about it but just desiring more time and, you know, to put more effort into each one of these states."

GEERTS WILDERS' WAR!!!!

New York - Say what you will about Geert Wilders – and his critics, not least the Islamic clerics who issue near-daily fatwas commanding his death, have made their views plain – there is no gainsaying that the man has guts. Ever since 2004, when the Dutch politician emerged as one of Europe’s more forthright foes of Islamic fundamentalism, Wilders, 45, has been the subject of considerable obloquy, both in his native Netherlands, where he is scorned by the political elite, and abroad, where he is the target of untold assassination plots.

But not only has his international infamy not deterred Wilders from declaring against Islamic extremism –and, more controversially, Islam as a whole – but it has actually spurred him to become even more outspoken about what he considers to be its mortal threat to Western civilization. Most recently, he made the point in his provocative 15-minute film, “Fitna” (“challenge” in Arabic), released on the internet last May to much handwringing in Europe’s political salons and the obligatory denunciations and death threats in the Muslim world. Agree or disagree with its message, there is no disputing its subtext: Geert Wilders will not be silenced.

This much was apparent during his September 25 stop in New York. Part of an outreach tour by Wilders and several members of his two-year-old political party, the rightist-populist Party for Freedom, the visit was designed to forge links with ideological allies in the U.S. and to explain just how parlous is the state of affairs in a Europe that is, as Wilders sees it, if not yet lost to Islam, nevertheless on the cusp of cultural and political surrender. At a lunch sponsored by the Hudson Institute, the conservative think tank, Wilders – tall, slightly tense and sporting the signature peroxide-blond bouffant that makes him look like a right-wing Mozart – offered an apt demonstration of what it is that has his European colleagues discomfited and his jihadist revilers literally clamoring for his head.

For those who’ve followed his career, it was vintage Wilders. Whether it was his recommended response to immigrants who refuse to assimilate (“there’s the door and there’s the shredder for your passport”), or his politically incorrect references to the “so-called prophet” Mohammed (“mass murderer and a sick pedophile”) and the Koran (the Muslim “Mein Kampf”), or his nod to the Iranian government (“crazy lunatics”), Wilders could not be accused of excessive diplomacy. And he was never more animated than on the subject that fuels his more health-hazardous tirades. At one point, Wilders presented what he called a lesson in “Islam 101.” It went like this: “Islam is not a religion. It’s a political ideology. If you want to compare it then the only thing you can compare it to is communism. It’s a totalitarian ideology.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, Wilders added that there was no such thing as moderate Islam. “Sure, there are moderate Muslims,” he said. “But there is no moderate Islam.”

Kindred themes feature in his film “Fitna.” To say that Wilders does not present Islam as a religion of peace is to put it mildly. “Fitna” juxtaposes graphic footage of Islamic terrorism – including the 9-11 attacks, the Madrid train bombings, and the beheading of Nicholas Berg – with Koranic verses and clips of Islamic clerics preaching murder of non-Muslims and Jews. Low-budget and unabashedly one-sided – Wilders seems uninterested in the possibility that there is more to foundational Islamic texts than murderous calls to arms – it is not exactly a polished work, something Wilders readily concedes. “I’m a lawmaker not a moviemaker,” he says. But like its creator, the film is nothing if not direct.

However one judges its content, the fact that “Fitna” has been released at all is something of an achievement. State-owned Dutch television stations refused to screen it last spring. Meanwhile, Dutch Muslims, unwittingly confirming Wilders’s skepticism about the compatibility of Islamic mores and democratic values, called for the film to be banned. The political establishment, too, failed to distinguish itself. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende did nothing to discourage the hotter heads in the Muslim community when he announced that “Fitna” “serves no other purpose than to cause offense.” Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen similarly urged Wilders not to show the film because it could “endanger the lives of Dutch nationals” abroad. (Appearances notwithstanding, Verhagen insisted that he was “not trying to meet demands from anti-democratic forces and terrorists in the Middle East.”) “It was an absolute disgrace,” Wilders recalls of such reactions.

More menacing was the preemptive outrage in the Muslim world. In a grim replay of the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005, Dutch flags were burned, as muftis promised bloodshed if the film were shown. In Indonesia, where protestors brandished banners proclaiming “Kill Geert Wilders,” the government appealed to Dutch authorities to outlaw the film and, failing to get its way, permanently barred Wilders from entering the country. The Taliban, after getting word of the film’s release, vowed to increase attacks on Dutch troops in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda-linked groups issued internet death threats against Wilders.

While some of the threats proved empty, others were all-too credible. Indeed, today Wilders is in more danger than ever – no small feat for a man who just a few years ago was forced to spend nights in high-security prison cells and safe houses to avoid the gruesome fate of another Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, who was savagely murdered by Moroccan Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri in November 2004. In the past two months in particular, the threats have multiplied. “It’s embarrassing even to talk about it,” Wilders says when I ask him about his security arrangements. For obvious reasons, he doesn’t want to divulge the size of his security detail, but he does say that “they would have to clear the street” in Amsterdam to accommodate them all. Even in the relative safety of Manhattan, Wilders takes no chances. As he spoke, two tall men in black suits and crew cuts sat watchfully by the door.

Safety concerns have limited Wilders’s public presence, but they have not diminished his political stature. Just the opposite: His Party for Freedom (PVV) now has nine members in the 150-member Dutch parliament, where it continues to press for its Wilders-inspired platform of restricting immigration from Muslim countries; for more aggressively monitoring domestic extremism, including radical mosques; and for reducing an indulgent welfare state that allows immigrants to live comfortably without assimilating. To be sure, these remain minority views in Dutch politics. “We vote every Tuesday and it’s always the same,” says Martin Bosma, a PVV MP. “Nine people raise their hands and the other 141 stare at their shoes.” Nonetheless, Bosma says that “we have a lot of reasons to be optimistic.” The PVV currently has around 10 percent support in national polls, he notes. Double what it attracted when it first stood for election in 2006, this would translate into 15 seats in the parliament in the next general election in 2010.

The PVV also has another thing going for it: Its animating anxiety about the dangers of Islamic extremism is now shared by large parts of the Dutch electorate. In a 2004 poll, 47 percent of the Dutch admitted to fearing that they would have to live according to Islamic rules in the Netherlands at some point. Similarly, in a May 2005 poll, 43 percent of the Dutch said Islam was incompatible with Western society, results that were more than matched the following year, when a poll found that the majority of native Dutch found Islam intolerant (52 percent), violent (40 percent), and hostile to women (70 percent). Increasingly, it seems, Wilders is preaching to the choir.

To his political adversaries, these polls are proof of Wilders’s malign influence on Dutch politics. In this exegesis, it is only Wilders and the PVV’s “racism” and “xenophobia,” bolstered by “an alarmist presentation of Muslim immigration to the Netherlands and Europe,” that is causing the Dutch to doubt the model of all-tolerant multiculturalism that has prevailed for so long.

The reality, though, is more complex. Although, at around one million, the Dutch Muslim community still is only about 5.8 percent of the population, it is increasingly a majority in some neighborhoods – and a hostile one at that. Overtoomse Veld, the west Amsterdam neighborhood of Theo Van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri, is by some estimates 80 to 90 percent Muslim. Major Dutch cities like Rotterdam, now home to the Islamic University of Rotterdam, are nearly half Muslim. On their face, such statistics may seem unobjectionable. But it has not escaped notice that these cities, with their restive and unassimilated immigrant populations, boast some of the highest crime rates in the Netherlands and serve as havens for religious radicalism. Nor do Dutch voters need Wilders to wonder about some Muslims’ capacity for tolerance. A spate of attacks on gay men by young Muslim thugs in Amsterdam, once the self-styled “gay capital of Europe,” has convincingly made the case for him.

Among those disinclined to debate him, it’s fashionable to dismiss Wilders as a populist vulgarian who revels in giving offense. The writer Ian Baruma, writing in the New Yorker, has quipped that Wilders sees “delicacy as a sign of fraudulence.” But this is something of a misconception. Despite his exuberantly confrontational rhetoric, Wilders himself is thoughtful, personable, and hard to mistake for the Muslim-hating bigot that some imagine him to be. For instance, as he was doing an interview in New York, a man tapped him on the shoulder. It was Ebby Moussazadeh, a board member at the Hudson Institute. Pointing to his nametag, Moussazadeh said, faux-menacingly, “It’s a Muslim name.” Wilders brightened. “Iranian,” he said. “I recognize it.” Wilders explained that he had travelled to Iran a number of times before his recent notoriety and said that he would one day like to return to the country when it is politically free.

Still, it’s true that Wilders comes across as too hard-edged for some. Even as he recognizes that, he is not about to moderate his take-no-prisoners style. On the contrary, he sees it as a way of injecting urgency into the European debate about Islam and multiculturalism. “In Europe, we have consensus in our veins,” Wilders told me. “What we did for the last 30 years is compromise all the time; it was all carrots and no sticks. All we have to show for it is a lot of orange and a lot of trouble.” No more, he says. “You have to be heard. Right now, people are speaking without really saying what they mean. It’s not enough to talk about immigration. You have to get to the core of the issue, which is that Islam is incompatible with democracy.”

Since the conversation has turned to Islam, his combative side resurfaces. Although Wilders isn’t ready to go into further detail, he reveals that he is planning to make a sequel to “Fitna.” This time, though, it is Wilders who offers the preemptive threat, directed at Islamic radicals: He will not be stopped. “If I stopped talking about this, the people who want to kill me would have a holiday,” he explains. “I cannot let them win.”