ISLAM..THIS IS FOR THE PROPHET,HAPPY EARTHDAY
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
Monday, December 28, 2009
QABABAL GOD TV presents PINK TANK PUSSY MOUSE
ANOTHER 10 MINUTE MASTERPIECE..THANK ME LATER EARTHLINGS!!
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
KRS ONE Speaks on Kanye West with SABIR BEY
KNOWLEDGE REIGNS SUPREME OVER NEARLY EVERYONE!!!
THE TEACHERS BRINGS THE LIGHT ON MANY ISSUES,MOST NOTEABLY YA "BOY" KANYE..
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
KNOW THE LEDGE TV presents TAJ TARIK BEY "THE MASTER MOOR"
THE MASTER TEACHER TAJ TARIK BEY DROPS SOME JEWELS FOR THE MASSES TO DIGEST..
Thursday, September 10, 2009
HAPPY ETHIOPIAN NEW YEAR
HAPPY ETHIOPIAN (COPTIC) NEW YEAR-9/11Share
Today at 1:41am
Originally 9/11 was always a cause to celebrate, it's our ANCIENT KUSHITE NEW YEAR!!!
The Ethiopian calendar (Amharic: የኢትዮጵያ ዘመን አቆጣጠር yä'Ityoṗṗya zämän aḳoṭaṭär), also called the Ge'ez calendar, is the principal calendar used in Ethiopia and also serves as the liturgical calendar for Christians in Eritrea belonging to the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahdo Church, Eastern Catholic Church and Lutheran Evangelical Church of Eritrea. It is based on the older Alexandrian or Coptic calendar, which in turn derives from the Egyptian calendar, but like the Julian calendar, it adds a leap day every four years without exception, and begins the year on August 29 or August 30 in the Julian calendar. A seven to eight year gap between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars results from alternate calculations in determining the date of the Annunciation of Jesus.
Like the Coptic calendar, the Ethiopian calendar has twelve months of 30 days each plus five or six epagomenal days, which comprise a thirteenth month. The Ethiopian months begin on the same days as those of the Coptic calendar, but their names are in Ge'ez. The sixth epagomenal day is added every four years without exception on August 29 of the Julian calendar, six months before the Julian leap day. Thus the first day of the Ethiopian year, 1 Mäskäräm, for years between 1901 and 2099 (inclusive), is usually September 11 (Gregorian), but falls on September 12 in years before the Gregorian leap year.
The current year according to the Ethiopian calendar is 2001, which began on September 11, 2008 CE of the Gregorian calendar. The year 2002 will begin on September 11, 2009.
CHARLIE SHEEN URGES PRESIDENT OBAMA TO REOPEN 9-11 INVESTIGATION
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Actor Charlie Sheen has followed up on his “20 Minutes With The President” letter by directly addressing President Obama in a You Tube clip to request he use his executive power to reopen the investigation into 9/11 and its aftermath.
On Tuesday, Sheen published a fictional account of a meeting with the President on radio talk show host Alex Jones’ Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com websites in which Obama was confronted about what Sheen alleges is a cover-up surrounding 9/11. In his letter, Sheen requests a real meeting with Barack Obama.
Now Sheen has taken his challenge a step further by appearing in a You Tube video that asks Obama to “be on the right side of history” by reopening an investigation into 9/11, while highlighting that the majority of the 9/11 Commission members have publicly dismissed the official government version of the attacks as a deception, with former Senator and Commission member Max Cleland labeling the government response to the Commission’s questions as “disgusting” and “a scam”.
Sheen highlights several issues in the video, including the unexplained collapse of WTC 7, a 47-story building that was not hit by a plane yet collapsed in free fall fashion into its own footprint within 7 seconds later in the afternoon on September 11. He also cites multiple reports from firefighters, police, first responders and others who were at ground zero and who all described explosions before the collapse of the twin towers and Building 7.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
He also discusses how former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds broke her gag order to go public with the revelation that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were working with the U.S. government right up until the day of 9/11.
Sheen also demands to know why NORAD’s standard operating procedure was not followed on 9/11, allowing the hijacked jetliners to find their targets, asking, “Where were the planes?”
Sheen expresses his hope that President Obama has read his letter, adding, “We have questions Mr. President, lots of questions….people of the United States and the world demand the truth sir,” adding that Obama has the power and the responsibility to initiate “a truly independent Congressional investigation into the events of 9/11 as well as its aftermath.”
“We want our country back Mr. President, therefore I’m not just calling on you I’m calling on your team, I’m calling on each and every American citizen to wake up, stand up, and demand the truth,” states Sheen in the video.
Watch the clip below or visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyKR2-A0KPU
Red Pill,Bobby Hemmitt, Phil Valentine, Bro Panic: METAPHYSICS/MAGIC!!!!!
wake up to REALITY !!!!!!!!
Monday, August 3, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
7-7-09 POPE URGES FORMING NEW WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER
By RACHEL DONADIO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: July 7, 2009
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.”
He criticized the current economic system, “where the pernicious effects of sin are evident,” and urged financiers in particular to “rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity.”
He also called for “greater social responsibility” on the part of business. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty,” Benedict wrote in his new encyclical, which the Vatican released on Tuesday.
More than two years in the making, “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in Truth,” is Benedict’s third encyclical since he became pope in 2005. Filled with terms like “globalization,” “market economy,” “outsourcing,” “labor unions” and “alternative energy,” it is not surprising that the Italian media reported that the Vatican was having difficulty translating the 144-page document into Latin.
Reportedly delayed to take into consideration the financial crisis, it was released by the Vatican on the eve of the Group of 8 industrialized nations summit meeting, which opens in Italy on Wednesday, and before Benedict is expected to receive President Obama at the Vatican on Friday.
“It’s not an encyclical done for the crisis,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, said at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he added, “if the encyclical had come out before the crisis, you would have said it was prophetic.”
In the encyclical, Benedict wrote that “financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”
In many ways, the document is a puzzling cross between an anti-globalization tract and a government white paper, another signal that the Vatican does not comfortably fit into traditional political categories of right and left.
“There are paragraphs that sound like Ayn Rand, next to paragraphs that sound like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ That’s quite intentional,” Vincent J. Miller, a theologian at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio, said by telephone.
“He’ll wax poetically about the virtuous capitalist, but then he’ll give you this very clear analysis of the ways in which global capital and the shareholder system cause managers to focus on short-term good at the expense of the community, of workers, of the environment.”
Indeed, sometimes Benedict sounds like an old-school European socialist, lamenting the decline of the social welfare state and praising the “importance” of labor unions to protect workers. Without stable work, he noted, people lose hope and tend not to get married and have children.
But he also wrote, “The so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favor of the shareholders.” And he argued that it was “erroneous to hold that the market economy has an inbuilt need for a quota of poverty and underdevelopment in order to function at its best.”
Benedict also called for a reform of the United Nations so there could be a unified “global political body” that allowed the less powerful of the earth to have a voice, and he called on rich nations to help less fortunate ones.
“In the search for solutions to the current economic crisis, development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all,” he wrote.
John Sniegocki, a professor of Christian ethics at Xavier University in Cincinnati, said one of the most controversial elements of the encyclical, at least for some Americans, would be the call for international institutions to play a role in regulating the economy.
“One of the things he’s saying is that the global economy is escaping the power of individual states to regulate it,” Mr. Sniegocki said. He said the encyclical also contained elements “very critical” of how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “have required cuts in social spending in the third world.”
Michael Novak, a philosopher and theologian at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a conservative research organization, said he thought that the encyclical was stronger on principles than policy suggestions. He said he was particularly uncomfortable with the idea of a strong international institution to regulate the global economy.
“I like limited government. I would much prefer to have many limited governments than one overriding authority,” Mr. Novak said by telephone.
Benedict, arguably the most environmentally conscious pope in history, wrote, “One of the greatest challenges facing the economy is to achieve the most efficient use — not abuse — of natural resources, based on a realization that the notion of ‘efficiency’ is not value-free.”
Monday, June 22, 2009
NORTH KOREA ACCUSES OBAMA OF PLOTTING NUCLEAR WAR
via Breitbart
North Korea has accused US President Barack Obama of plotting a nuclear war on the communist nation by reaffirming a US assurance of security for South Korea, the North’s state media said.
In a first official response to last week’s US-South Korean summit, the state-run weekly Tongil Sinbo said in its Saturday edition Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak “are trying to ignite a nuclear war”.
“The US-touted provision of ‘extended deterrence, including a nuclear umbrella’ (for South Korea) is nothing but ‘a nuclear war plan,’” Tongil Sinbo said.
It said it wasn’t a coincidence that the United States has brought “nuclear equipment into South Korea and its surroundings and staged massive war drills every day to look for a chance to invade North Korea.”
Pyongyang has created weeks of tension by conducting a second nuclear test and test-firing missiles.
At a summit with Lee in Washington Wednesday, Obama warned that North Korea is a “grave threat” and vowed to defend South Korea.
A Seoul presidential official told Yonhap news agency Lee would seek a written US commitment to provide a nuclear “umbrella” for Seoul as part of “extended deterrence” against Pyongyang.
North Korea detonated its second nuclear device on May 25, following the first one in 2006. It also went ahead with what Washington said was a disguised test of a long-range missile in April.
The United Nations Security Council in response agreed to tighter cargo inspections, a stricter arms embargo and new targeted financial curbs to choke off revenue for the North’s nuclear and missile sectors.
In response Pyongyang has vowed to build more nuclear bombs and start enriching uranium for a new atomic weapons program.
Some analysts say the sabre-rattling is part of an attempt by 67-year-old ailing North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il, to bolster a succession plan involving his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un
IRANIAN UNREST:EVIDENCE OF WESTERN MEDDLING
Iranian Unrest: Evidence Of Western Intelligence Meddling
Current events and historical precedents highlight covert operations
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, June 22, 2009
The following summary, with extensive links, highlights the major evidence that suggests western intelligence agencies are aiding in stirring up unrest inside Iran as part of a “color revolution” to foment regime change.
Current events:
The announcement of the results of the election were planned in advance:
Corporate-controlled media mouthpieces had already declared Mousavi the winner even before the people of Iran had had an opportunity to cast their vote. When the result turned out to be contrary to their perceived wisdom, it was immediately denounced as “rigged”. It seems even Mousavi had fallen for this propaganda because as soon as the polls closed, he told a press conference in Tehran that he had “won”. How he could make such a claim when no results had come in?
CIA/Mossad flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages, Twitter Feeds:
The news of alleged election fraud has spread through Tehran like wildfire, pitching ayatollah Rafsanjani’s supporters against ayatollah Khamenei’s in street confrontations. This chaotic situation is secretly stirred by the CIA which has been spreading confusion by flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages and Twitter feeds. The temporary loss of the mobile phone network in Iran during the announcement of the election results, was blamed on the government.
Sophisticated cyber attacks on Iranian government websites:
Sites belonging to Iranian news agencies, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were knocked off-line with tools designed to barrage these websites with traffic. The media blamed activists opposed to the Iranian government. The temporary loss of access to websites such as Facebook and Youtube and Iranian news websites, during announcement of the election results was blamed on the government.
Western media focus on opposition rallies, hype protests:
The Western media supported the opposition’s claims by focusing the news on opposition rallies and demonstrations against Ahmadinejad, while ignoring the pro-Ahmadinejad rallies which were on some occasions much bigger. The BBC was so desperate to push the pro-Mousavi cause, it claimed that pictures of a massive pro-Ahmadinejad rally were of a pro-Mousavi rally. A retraction followed after we pointed out the grossly misleading claim. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, said Monday that some European countries and the US have played a major role in provoking the post-election violence that killed scores of people in the past few days.
CIA has Distributed 400 Million Dollars Inside Iran to Evoke a Revolution:
Former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig claims the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has distributed 400 million dollars inside Iran to evoke a revolution.
Kissinger Calls for Iran Attack if Color Revolution Fails:
It is sincerely creepy to watch master globalist criminal Henry Kissinger call for an invasion of Iran in this BBC new clip. Herr Kissinger says that if the color revolution fails — and it is now obvious the protests in Iran are orchestrated by the CIA and the usual “democracy” NGO suspects — an outside alternative will have to be used in the name of “regime change,” in other words shock and awe à la Baghdad.
Iran finds US-backed MKO/MEK fingermarks in riots
The terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) has reportedly played a major role in intensifying the recent wave of street violence in Iran.
Historical precedents:
KEY ARTICLE - CIA Covert destabilization campaign is ongoing:
Military, intelligence, and congressional sources say a secret war is being vamped to bring down the current Iranian leadership. This involves funding anti-government terrorist groups inside Iran, such as Jundullah and the MEK/MKO.
On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”
The U.S. has laid economic siege to Iran for 30 years
Recently, Congress voted $120 million for anti-regime media broadcasts into Iran and $60-75 million in funding for opposition, violent underground Marxists and restive ethnic groups such as Azeris, Kurds and Arabs under the “Iran Democracy Program.”
US Policies May Have Contributed to Iran Revolution, Study Says
A report based on declassified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations, angry with the shah for his support for raising oil prices, worked to curb his ambitions.
The 1953 CIA coup in Iran:
Recently admitted to by Obama, in 1953 the CIA and MI6 carried out Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX), a covert operation by the United Kingdom and the United States to remove the democratically elected nationalist cabinet of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, to support the Pahlavi dynasty and consolidate the power of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in order to preserve the Western control of Iran’s hugely lucrative oil infrastructure.
The ousting was achieved by means of staged bombings and shootings which were blamed on the Iranian government in order to antagonize the population and enable the coup.
During the coup, the CIA also bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets.
Both the US and the UK have given Iran the materials it needs to go nuclear:
After installing the Shah Globalists like Henry Kissinger opened the door for Iran to develop sophisticated nuclear energy programs which laid the foundation for today’s crisis. Twenty three reactors were built with the help of American corporations like General Electric and Westinghouse.
Iranian Professor: US and Israel have Been Trying To Divide Iran For Years:
Prominent Iranian political science professor, Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, has emphasized that Iran and the US signed an agreement in 1978 which allowed Tehran to seek nuclear technology in order to meet its future energy demands but no one now talks about the agreement. He has also asserted that Zionists in Israel in co-operation with neoconservatives in the US have intentionally been trying to divide Iran for decades.
Cheney, Neocons Considered Killing Americans in Pretext to Attack Iran:
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reveals how the neocons convened around Dick Cheney and brainstormed ways to kick off World War IV, as they fondly call their pet project to take out the Muslims and foment a contrived “clash of civilizations.”
Cheney Call For Iran Attack PR Blitz - 2007:
The New Yorker magazine reported that Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that “instructions” had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.
Baiting Iran with aggressive maneuvers:
U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups are routinely deployed to the Gulf in order to send a clear signal to Iran that they will be crushed if they continue to defy the wishes of the US government by enriching uranium.
Fabricated 2008 Strait of Hormuz incident:
A respected American Journalist accused a Pentagon spokesman of falsifying events surrounding the encounter between Iranian patrol boats and a US navy vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, which was eventually labeled a “provocation” by the White House.
Operation Praying Mantis:
This provocation operation began after a US warship had entered mined Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.
The Shoot down of Iran air flight 665:
The fallout of Praying Mantis also resulted in the U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian commercial airliner.
Monday, June 15, 2009
HAVE SCIENTISTS FOUND THE SECRET OF IMMORTALITY??
Scientists are working on mutations to generate immortality. This is not a comic book. Early experiments have greatly extended the lifespan of bioengineered worms, enhancing their genetic integrity and giving them resistance to many things that would normally kill them. Again, this is not a comic book. Or a horror movie.
Caenorhabditis Elegans, or C. Elegans for scientists who don’t want to waste half their life saying the first word, are the all rounders of the genetic modification world. An extremely simple and easy-to-incubate lifeform, they nevertheless model many vital genetic aspects and have been used in everything from cancer studies to biological computing prototypes.
Harvard medical school staff have engaged in (Elegans) immortality research based on a simple observation: certain cell lines are immortal. You’ll be gone by the end of the century, and your current skin’ll be gone before the end of the month, but in your very existence the immortality of the first primate lives on. While “somatic” cells (the cells that make everything except babies) wither and die, the “germ” cells (sperm and ova for us) make new organisms, which then replicate and make new germ cells, and are effectively immortal.
There’s more to this than Reader’s Digest essays on living on through your children – germ cells are far, far better at staying alive than their somatic siblings. Specially designed to convey genetic information to offspring (the entire point of a species), germ cells express enhanced immune abilities and resistance to many genetic stresses which break up regular cells. And the Harvard team have tricked their somatic cousins into acting the same way.By modifying the DAF-16 transcription factor the team gifted the millimeter-scale worms with extended lifespans, and if you guessed that there are an insane number of extra effects beyond “one single gene tweak” then congratulations on understanding genetics better than Hollywood does.
Don’t worry about overcrowding or hiring Soylent chefs just yet, though. While the research is applicable to mammalian cells in many ways, the simple fact is that you are your neurons, not your germ cells, and those neural cells are pretty different from the C Elegans model. It’s certainly conceivable that we could adapt neurons the same way (though conceiving isn’t something we’ll want to do when everyone lives eternally), but unless the Einstein and Feynmann of genetics already exist and are the same person, you’re one or two generations too early.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/foundations/articles/researchers-learn-how-mutations-extend-life-span
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature08106.pdf
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
TEXT:HOMEGROWN TERRORISM PREVENTION ACT
Indypendent, November 16, 2007
Title: “Bringing the War on Terrorism Home”
Author: Jessica Lee
In These Times, November 2007
Title: “Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act”
Author: Lindsay Beyerstein
Truthout, November 29, 2007
Title: “The Violent Radicalization Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007”
Author: Matt Renner
Student Researchers: Dan Bluthardt and Cedric Therene
Faculty Evaluator: Robert Proctor, PhD
In a startling affront to American freedoms of expression, privacy, and association, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955) passed the House on October 23, 2007, by a vote of 404–6. The Senate is currently considering a companion bill, S. 1959. The act would establish a national commission and a university-based “Center for Excellence” to study and propose legislation to prevent the threat of “radicalization” of Americans.
Author of the bill Jane Harman (D-CA) explains, “We’re studying the phenomenon of people with radical beliefs who turn into people who would use violence.”
The act states, “While the United States must continue its vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States. Understanding the motivational factors that lead to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States.”
The act’s purpose goes beyond academic inquiry, however. In a press release Harman stated, “The National Commission will propose to both Congress and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff initiatives to intercede before radicalized individuals turn violent.”
The act states, “Preventing the potential rise of self radicalized, unaffiliated terrorists domestically cannot be easily accomplished solely through traditional Federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts, and can benefit from the incorporation of State and local efforts.”
Harman, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment, also has close ties to the RAND Corporation, a right-wing think tank, which appears to have influenced the bill. Two weeks prior to the introduction of H.R. 1955 on April 19, 2007, Brian Michael Jenkins of RAND delivered testimony on “Jihadist Radicalization and Recruitment” to Harman’s subcommittee.
In June, Jenkins was back before Harman’s subcommittee discussing the role of the National Commission. “Homegrown terrorism is the principal threat that we face as a country and it will likely be the principal threat that we face for decades. . . . Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time,” he stated. In a 2005 RAND report titled “Trends in Terrorism,” one chapter is devoted entirely to a non-Muslim “homegrown terrorist” threat—the threat of anti-globalists.
In an effort to prevent people from becoming “prone to” radicalization, this preemptive measure of policing thought specifically identifies the Internet as a tool of radicalization: “The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens,” says Harman.
The legislation authorizes a ten-member National Commission (the Senate bill calls for twelve members) appointed by the President, the Secretary of Homeland Security, congressional leaders, and the chairpersons of both the Senate and House committees on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
After convening, the Commission is to submit reports at six-month intervals for eighteen months to the President and Congress, stating its findings, conclusions, and legislative recommendations “for immediate and long-term countermeasures . . . to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence.”
This commission has disturbing similarities to the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which was investigated by a US Senate select committee on intelligence activities (the Church Committee), in 1975. The Church Committee found that from 1956 to 1971, “The Bureau [FBI] conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”
H.R. 1955 would give the DHS secretary power to establish a “Center of Excellence,” a university-based research program to “bring together leading experts and researchers to conduct multidisciplinary research and education for homeland security solutions.” the DHS currently has eight Centers at academic institutions across the country, strengthening what many see as a growing military-security-academic complex. Harman, in an October 23 press release, stated that the Center would “examine the social, criminal, political, psychological and economic roots of domestic terrorism.”
Hope Marston, regional organizer with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) warns against the danger of vaguely defined terms in this legislation, which, open to very broad interpretation, mirrors a historical pattern of sweeping government repression.
Jules Boykoff, author and professor of politics and government at Pacific University, is alarmed by the circular definition, for example, of “ideologically based violence,” which itself fails to define the terms “threat,” “force,” or “violence.” Boykoff commented that the bill used the terms “extremism” and “radicalism” interchangeably. “The word ‘radical’ shares the etymological root to the word ‘radish,’ which means to get to the root of the problem,” he says. “So, if the government wants to get at the actual root of terrorism, then let’s really talk about it. We need to talk about the economic roots, the vast inequalities in wealth between the rich and poor.”
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, says of the Act, “Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be ‘extreme.’”
UPDATE BY JESSICA LEE
While civil liberties and religious freedom groups credit independent journalists and grassroots activists with helping to stall the passage of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, some members of Congress continue to push for Internet censorship and racial profiling as necessary to prevent “homegrown terrorism.”
The House of Representatives approved the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act in October 2007 by a 404-6 vote, but widespread opposition forced the Senate to shelve the bill. As of June 1, 2008, no vote was scheduled or expected during the current legislative year.
I became aware of the Act in early November 2007. Other than an article by Lindsay Beyerstein, “Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,” (In These Times, November 1, 2007), no major media outlet had reported on the bill despite the dangers it posed to civil liberties, privacy, and Muslim and Arab communities in the United States. Nonetheless, I did discover active online discussion about the bill, mainly on blogs and videos posted to YouTube.com.
Isabel Macdonald, communications director for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, commented: “Perhaps due to the symbiotic relationship between corporate media outlets and government officials, the corporate media has shown a consistent aversion to offering critical coverage of the erosion of civil liberties. The independent media—and specifically The Indypendent—played a critical role in breaking the story of this bill, and, through coverage in blogs and on Democracy Now!, keeping the story alive.”
Within a month of The Indypendent article, rallies were held from Maine to California, and numerous civil liberties, religious freedom and American Muslim and Arab organizations issued action alerts encouraging people to contact their congressional representatives in an effort to stop the US Senate companion bill, S. 1959.
According to civil rights lobbyists, the public outcry forced Senate committee chair Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) to put the bill on the backburner. However, Lieberman and committee ranking minority leader Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) continue to claim “homegrown terrorism” by Islamists is a grave menace, and on May 8, 2008, issued their own report, without public backing by other committee members, that warned “the threat of homegrown terrorism is on the rise, aided by the Internet’s capacity to spread the core recruitment and training message of violent Islamist terrorist groups.”
In response, more than thirty civil liberties and religious freedom groups sent a letter to the Senate committee on May 30, expressing concern that the report could impinge on freedom of expression, unjustly target Muslims, and define the Internet as a “weapon.”
A group of organizations representing American Muslim and Arab communities also submitted a letter in response to the report and the Senate hearings charging that they have been largely excluded from the legislative process and that the report relies on a discredited 2007 New York Police Department report that attempts to explain the process of “violent radicalization” of Muslim individuals.
Shortly after issuing the report, Lieberman demanded that Google remove YouTube videos produced by “terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.” Google responded May 19 by removing eighty videos that the company agreed violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines, which depict gratuitous violence, advocated violence or used hate speech. Google, however, refused to meet all of Lieberman’s demands, which included censoring all videos mentioning or featuring groups listed by the US State Department as foreign terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaeda.
“Senator Lieberman stated his belief . . . that all videos mentioning or featuring these groups should be removed from YouTube—even legal nonviolent or non-hate speech videos,” Google said. “YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view.”
Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the Boston-based Political Research Associates, said that he believes Lieberman’s actions are a “political dirty trick” with the motive of trying to push the presidential candidates towards accepting a more aggressive stance in the Middle East.
Organizations leading the effort to oppose the legislation include Defending Dissent Foundation (http://www.defendingdissent.org), the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (http://www.bordc.org), the Center for Constitutional Rights (http://www.ccrjustice.org), the American Civil Liberties Union (http://www.aclu.org), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (http://www.cair.com).
UPDATE BY LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN
The Homegrown Terrorism bill has been bogged down in the Senate since last October. The bill sailed through the House with little public comment but subsequently encountered stiff opposition from across the political spectrum. Until recently, it appeared that civil liberties groups and Muslim civic organizations had successfully blocked the Senate version of the bill.
The bill seemed destined to die in committee—that is, until Sen. Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, signaled his eagerness to revisit the issue by releasing a new report and picking a fight with YouTube.
On May 8, Chairman Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins (R-ME) released “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” a bipartisan report based on hearings before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.
Even before it was released to the public, the report drew fire from a coalition of civil liberties organizations spearheaded by the ACLU. The coalition outlined its concerns about the report in a May 7 memo to committee members.
“Our concern is that this focus on the Internet could be a precursor to proposals to censor and regulate speech on the Internet. Indeed, some policy makers have advocated shutting down objectionable websites,” the memo said.
Lieberman reinforced those misgivings on May 19 when he wrote to the CEO of Google (YouTube’s parent company) demanding that an unspecified number of Islamic propaganda videos be removed from the popular video-sharing site. Lieberman alleged in the letter that the clips were the work of a sophisticated Islamic propaganda network discussed in his committee’s recent report. He also claimed that these videos violated YouTube’s community guidelines.
YouTube rules expressly forbid gratuitous violence, hate speech, threats, harassment, and depictions of crimes such as bomb-making. Hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to the site daily. Rather than prescreening the content, YouTube relies on users to flag material that violates community standards. Content that breaks the rules is routinely removed.
After reviewing the clips, YouTube refused to remove the bulk of the material flagged by Lieberman’s staff. A handful of clips that violated community standards were taken down, but the rest stayed up.
“Most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines,” read a statement issued by the YouTube Team. The statement went on to affirm the right of YouTube users to express unpopular points of view.
Lieberman was not satisfied with the response.
“No matter what their content, videos produced by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda that are committed to attacking America and killing Americans should not be tolerated. Google must reconsider its policy,” Lieberman stated on May 20.
No vote has been scheduled, but Lieberman’s fight with Google has pushed the Homegrown Terrorism bill back into the spotlight. After months of silence, the established media are finally beginning to ask questions about the government’s increasing enthusiasm for monitoring “radical” speech online. The New York Times sharply criticized Lieberman and the bill in a May 25 editorial. The op/ed called Lieberman a “would-be censor” whose efforts to restrict constitutionally protected speech on YouTube “contradict fundamental American values.”
Readers can make their views on the Homegrown Terrorism bill known by contacting their senators and the members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. The two frontrunners in the 2008 presidential race are senators. Now is a good time for voters to pressure the presidential candidates to take clear positions on the Homegrown Terrorism bill. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) sits on the Homeland Security Committee, but did not contribute to the report. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is closely allied with Sen. Lieberman, especially on issues pertaining to terrorism.
UPDATE BY MATT RENNER
A controversial plan to study and profile domestic terrorism was scrapped after popular push back, but the spirit of the legislation lives on in Senator Joe Lieberman’s office.
H.R. 1955, “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007” passed the House in October 2007 with almost unanimous support. The bill immediately came under fire from civil liberties watchdogs because of what many saw as a deliberate targeting of Muslims and Arabs and the possible chilling effect it might have on free speech.
The original bill intended to set up a government commission to investigate the supposed threat of domestically produced terrorists and the ideologies that underpin their radicalization. The ten-member commission was to be empowered to “hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable to carry out its duties.” The bill also singled out the Internet as a vehicle for terrorists to spread their ideology with the intention of recruiting and training new terrorists.
After significant public pressure, the bill stalled in the Senate. However, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), the current chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, embraced the thrust of the legislation and has been working to push forward some of the goals of the original bill, including an attempt to weed out terrorist propaganda from the Internet.
On May 19, Lieberman sent a letter to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt demanding that YouTube’s parent company Google “immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube.”
“By taking action to curtail the use of YouTube to disseminate the goals and methods of those who wish to kill innocent civilians, Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort,” Lieberman wrote.
Google fired back, refusing to take off material that did not violate the site’s code of conduct. “While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view,” Schmidt said in response, adding, “we believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate, we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds.”
Google removed some of the videos that violated their rules against posting violence and hate speech, but made a point to write, “most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines.”
According to civil liberties activists, Chairman Lieberman has been spearheading an effort to censor speech on the Internet. His committee recently released a report titled “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” a report detailing the use of web sites and Internet tools to spread pro-terrorism propaganda.
The report repeatedly blames websites and chat rooms for “radicalization,” calling the websites “portals” through which potential terrorists can “participate in the global violent Islamist movement and recruit others to their cause.” As civil liberties groups have pointed out, the report focuses solely on terrorism seen as associated with Islam.
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington, DC, legislative office, said that Lieberman “is trying to decide what he thinks should go on the Internet,” which, she said, “reeks of an interest in censoring all sorts of different dialogs.”
“If someone criticizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and favors Hamas, should that be censored?” Fredrickson asked.
Links:
“Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat”: http://hsgac.senate .gov/public/_files/ IslamistReport.pdf.
New York Times editorial on Lieberman’s attempt to censor YouTube: http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/05/25/opinion/25sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin.
Lieberman’s response to the New York Times editorial: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/opinion/ 25sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion &oref=slogin.
COMMENT BY MICKEY S. HUFF, author of Chapter 14
The coverage of this story by these journalists is highly commendable. However, another element that appears to have been censored regarding the possible application of H.R. 1955 and S. 1959, even in the independent and progressive press coverage, is the specificity of possible domestic activists mentioned in the hearings Representative Jane Harman held in Washington, DC. While the aforementioned authors allude to animal rights activists and anti-globalists as potential targets of these bills, none mention 9/11 Truth activists and scholars even though they were mentioned by name in the Harman hearings at the Capitol. (For possible explanations, see Censored 2008, Chapter 7, for more on the propaganda model inside left progressive press.)
Among the claims of those testifying to Congress about the “need” for H.R. 1955 was that anyone who questions the official government line on 9/11 is akin to a terrorist or a material supporter to terrorism. One speaker, Mark Weitzman of the Wiesenthal Center (ironically founded by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal to educate the public about war crimes), claimed that architects, engineers, and scientists that question the official 9/11 narrative are the same as alleged violent jihadist groups. This was further implied in a Powerpoint presentation in which Weitzman showed architect Richard Gage’s website, http://AE911Truth.org, alongside alleged violent jihadist sites. Gage has criticized the 9/11 official story about the destruction of the Twin Towers and WTC7. On the basis of his professional expertise of steel frame buildings, Gage contends the buildings could not have been brought down the way the government has explained and offers alternative theories supported by evidence. Regardless of whether one believes the counterarguments about the events of 9/11, free speech and questioning of the government on such crucial issues should not be criminalized.
This is the latest round of official conflation between terrorists and activists in the US. Is there a proven link between these aforementioned groups? No, there is not. But that didn’t stop people from simply saying so on the public record while providing no evidence. And Jane Harman, Democratic cosponsor of the bill, didn’t ask for any, nor did she invite rebuttal. This is reminiscent of McCarthyism of the Red Scare period of the 1950s.
I originally wrote about this issue here:
http://mythinfo.blogspot.com/2007/11/state-terror-hr-1955-weapon-of-mass.html
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2007112285903892.
For C-Span video footage of the hearing (just after thirty-nine minutes), see:
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product _video_info&products_id=202123-1.
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