Patrick Fitzgerald, On the Case Again

This is fascinating. No idea what to make of this. Excerpts:

...The search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers...

The apparent targets, all vocal and visible critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America, deny any ties to terrorism. They say the government, using its post-9/11 focus on terrorism as a pretext, is targeting them for their political views.

This would of course be the same government being run by the guys on their side of the political aisle, correct?  The government that, as is pointed out repeatedly in this piece, is in power in part because of their help? So what the heck?

They are “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders,” said Michael Deutsch, a Chicago lawyer and part of a legal team defending those who believe they are being targeted by the investigation...

All 23 of the activists invoked their right not to testify before a grand jury, defying U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, whose office is spearheading the investigation.

A spokesman for Fitzgerald, the Chicago prosecutor whose past work has sometimes riled both political parties, declined to comment.

And as soon as his name comes up, I get very, very interested. What has he found? Why does he think it important? This guy is not apparently partisan in his investigations--he went after both Libby and Blagojevich.

It is uncertain whether Obama is aware of the investigation. A White House official referred questions to the Justice Department, where spokesman Matthew Miller said the agency will not comment on an investigation, but he disputed any assertion that people would be targeted for political activities...

The union’s statewide group, which says it represents 46,000 workers, called on Obama to investigate and passed a resolution expressing “grave concern” about the raids. Similar resolutions have been approved by statewide AFSCME and SEIU affiliates in Illinois...

 Of course, the problem is they helped him get elected. There's a picture with the piece of one of the activists shaking then-Senatorial candidate Obama's hand. If the President calls off this investigation, especially when it's being run by a prosecutor famous for being bipartisan in hunting down powerful baddies, he'll have a lot of explaining to do.

If there are indictments, the case could test a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that found the ban on material support for designated foreign terrorist groups does not necessarily violate the First Amendment — even if the aid was intended for peaceful or humanitarian uses. The ruling held that any type of support could ultimately help a terrorist group’s pursuit of violence...

Search warrants, subpoenas and documents show that the FBI has been interested in links between the activists and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hezbollah...

So they appear to have links to long-time anti-American terrorist organizations.  Interesting.  I wonder if material support passed from them to these groups.  This gets especially difficult when one considers that these unions and "peace organizations" (if these so-called peace activists supported Hezbollah, et al., they really need a new title) also helped the President reach his current position.

In Chicago, the raid at the home of Weiner, 49, also targeted her husband, Joe Iosbaker, 52, a University of Illinois-Chicago office worker and a union steward for his SEIU local. The couple are among the grassroots activists close to the world once inhabited by Barack Obama who have been caught up in the investigation...

Like others, Weiner and Iosbacker have been fixtures on the local liberal political scene, protesting police actions, attending antiwar rallies, leading pay equity fights and even doing some volunteer work for Obama’s past campaigns.

Tom Burke, who received a subpoena Sept. 24, had in 2004 discussed the plight of murdered Colombian trade unionists with then-state senator Obama.

“He was a sympathetic ear,” Burke said, recalling that Obama told him the murders were a “human rights problem.”

Hatem Abudayyeh, one of seven Palestinians to be subpoenaed in the investigation, recalls encountering Obama in the community during his years as a state legislator. Abudayyeh, 40, is executive director of the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago advocacy group that hosted then-state senator Obama for at least two events...

Kind of unbelievable. Really interesting. God bless Patrick Fitzgerald and keep him in your prayers, folks--for judgment, for protection, that he do the right thing, that he not chase shadows nor fail to chase true criminals, that he steer straight and work for justice.

On The Muslim Brotherhood

One recurring player in the drama in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood. CNN has an overview. Excerpts follow:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a religious and political group founded on the belief that Islam is not simply a religion, but a way of life. It advocates a move away from secularism, and a return to the rules of the Quran as a basis for healthy families, communities, and states.

In short--they advocate Sharia law as the governing code of a state. They are, therefore, not pro-freedom of religion. A state under their control is a theocracy.

The movement officially rejects the use of violent means to secure its goals. However, offshoots of the group have been linked to attacks in the past, and critics blame the Brotherhood for sparking troubles elsewhere in the Middle East. Many consider it the forerunner of modern militant Islamism...

Offshoots of the Brotherhood include Al Qaeda, as Lawrence Wright recounts in The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been part of the political scene in Egypt for more than 80 years. It was formed there by Hassan al-Banna in 1928.

Teacher Al-Banna and his followers were initially united by a desire to oust the British from control in Egypt, and to rid their country of what they saw as "corrupting" Western influences...

They don't merely originate in Egypt.  They have affiliates and connected groups all over the globe, as discussed in The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West.

...Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, developed the doctrine of jihad, and the radical group Hamas is believed to be an offshoot of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood.

The historical illiteracy of the statement "Qutb...developed the doctrine of jihad" is staggering. Astounding. As just a few counter examples, I point you to the jihad waged against America...in the 1700s, as well as The Legacy of Jihad.  And no, jihad did not begin as a response to Christian crusaders.  Further, the Muslim Brotherhood is no friend of America.

Hamas and the Nature of Jihad

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict constitutes a small but important part of a broader struggle (jihad) that has been waged for centuries. Indeed, Israel’s war for survival could never merely be viewed as an isolated regional struggle—the history of Israel and the Jews usually exists as a microcosm, fractally resembling macrocosmic realities—but must be understood in the wider context of the history of dhimmitude, the nature of the jihad instituted by Mohammed in the latter years of his life and expanded by the Righteous Caliphs coming after him, and the world scenario today. 

The Mumbai attacks made abundantly clear the international scope of the current conflict when Pakistani jihadists singled out Chabad House, perhaps the only institutional presence of Judaism in all of India, as a special target. Pakistani "militants", according to much of the news coverage, could have no special grievance against Jews--so what could possibly have caused such odd profiling? Islamic sources for centuries have viewed the Jews with special contempt for failing to live up to the revelation given them by God. Further, the Jews have had the temerity to take back from Islamic hands lands once gained by jihad. They refuse to accept the status of the dhimmi (protected) class, preferring instead to maintain control of their ancestral homeland and refusing to give way to sharia and Islamic rule. 

The purpose of jihad is the imposition of sharia. American history makes that clear. The American struggle against the Barbary pirates remains little remembered, but it helped give rise to the Constitutional Congress and our modern day system of government. These pirates were not merely out for plunder, though. In March of 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with the Tripolitan ambassador in Britain and asked him why the Barbary pirates attacked the U.S. His answer, as recorded by Jefferson and Adams in a letter to John Jay, deserves to be sent to every federal official, every leader and media representative as the best summary of jihadi warfare extant. The Ambassador replied:

…that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

This, of course, makes sense of the current warfare exploding around the globe. His answer rings true when compared to the Hamas Charter, to the Madrid train bombings, to 9/11, to the London Tube bombings, to any one or all of Islamist terror attacks in recent years. The non-Muslim world faces, once again, a determined effort to place us under Islamic rule in obedience to doctrines enshrined in the Islamic sources of orthodoxy by a certain set within Islam. It has been ever thus since the time of Mohammed.

For more on all this, see  The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, and The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam, for starters.

2008 Retrospective: Did It Really Hurt That Much?

2008 is gone. The retrospectives sounded staggering, really. How often does one realize that in a single year, each month provided some event of such magnitude that they would have defined any other year? The Chinese earthquake, and then the Olympics; the collapse of Bear Sterns, then later Lehman and possibly the US financial system; the Russian invasion of Georgia, and then the Israeli invasion of Gaza; and so forth, till I realized how much I’d forgotten. Unimaginable times, only set to burgeon the more. We are told to expect worse things from the economy—recession in the US economy, continued contraction in the world economy. The effects of such a recession promise to be profound and unpredictable—especially for the younger generations used to ongoing prosperity and a continuous climb away from poverty and hunger towards the bright new World of Man. We cannot expect Hamas and Israel to ever come to an accord without Hamas altering its stated first principles, those fundamentals upon which all its policy is based and around which all its actions center—among which is perpetual jihad till Israel exist no longer. The Israeli invasion cannot properly be considered a crisis in the sense of a sudden worsening of a previously stable situation. Israel and Palestine have been at war for generations, now, no matter PNA President Abbas’s stated focus on a two state solution. If the Palestinian government had truly been interested in a two state solution, the suicide bomber and “one Palestine from sea to sea” propaganda would have been stopped and Hamas put out of existence a long time ago. China stands on the edge of a knife. A lot of economists and world scene watchers hold out hope for China’s quick recovery. They hope it shall be able to take the role of the US in the world economy, shall rise stronger than ever—a prospect which ought to be more feared than hoped for. There’s something a little mad about desperation for another nation of mass consumers—especially when this involves completely ignoring such inconvenient facts as the means by which China’s export economy is maintained, what happens to political prisoners when they disappear in the dark of night, religious oppression under Chinese rule, etc., etc., ad nauseam. If China rises while the West falls, a great many things promise to be swept away, among them freedom, human rights, and possibly the countries surrounding it in Asia. The Church continues mixed. Benedict leads. Some follow. He works hard, and the West yawns. Locally, the bishops of the U.S. have mapped out different courses this past year through reaction to President-elect Obama’s campaign and platform, through reaction to Representative Pelosi and Vice-President Elect Biden. Politics does not give a real reading of a Catholic bishop—their primary job remains to be Lords Spiritual and not Temporal—but in times to come, the state of the nation may intrude more into the affairs of the Church than is comfortable.