Free Republic

A book called "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press) shouldn't promise uplift and spiritual renewal. I know. I wrote it. That said, the story of "betrayal" that my new book lays out -- betrayal enabled by a de facto Communist occupation of Washington by American traitors loyal to Stalin, which would solidify in the 1930s under FDR and be covered up by successive U.S. administrations and elites -- is not without inspiration. I am talking about the inspiration of the truth-tellers. "American Betrayal" presents a rewrite of most of World War II and Cold...

Syndicated columnist Diana West says the ultimate conclusion of her new book shocked even her. “Americans have been betrayed … by our leaders going back to FDR’s administration in the 1930s because we were penetrated by Soviet agents to such an extent that our policies and, indeed I argue, our character as a nation was subverted,” she explained in an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas about her book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.” “I don’t believe we won World War II,” West added. “I believe that we were actually carrying out Soviet strategy due...

Get ready for the last straw. First, though, I’d like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a “forbidden” column. Yup, I am about to say something about the Great Barack Obama Identity/Eligibility Scandal again. I know that this is one rich and urgent topic that doesn’t see the light of day in certain so-called news outlets – and I say that from the experience of watching my own syndicated columns fail to appear when covering...

Before we heard that Al Gore's Current TV had rejected Glenn Beck's The Blaze TV as a buyer for, as Beck put it, "legacy" reasons and selected Al Jazeera as its white knight instead, Fjordman passed along this December 25 Deutche Welle interview with Aktham Suliman, Al Jazeera's former Berlin correspondent. Suliman argues that Al Jazeera's coverage is a policy instrument of its owners the Qataris, who, as he puts it, "tend toward the Muslim Brotherhood." Saudi-investor-funded Al Arabiya TV, on the other hand, is more Salafist. Big difference? Hah -- not when it comes to extending sharia. "Generally speaking,...

Why has the President spent millions to suppress his ID and who is he really? As President Barack Obama completes four years in office and runs for re-election in November, a majority of Americans – 55% – believe he was born in the United States. However, 20% of Americans do not believe Obama was born in the US, while another 25% aren’t sure where he was born. Never before have so many Americans doubted the fundamental basis of their president’s identity. Why is this so? On one level, the answer is easy given the absence of verifiable bona fides attesting...

One answer is because people who do not believe in Allah, from Sarah Palin to Gen. David Petraeus to assorted ministers and rabbis, have succumbed to a specifically Islamic brand of blackmail (the "or else" of violence or other outbreaks of "extremism"), thus accommodating and even lobbying for the uniquely Islamic prohibitions against written, pictorial or symbolic criticism. In so doing, they have also succumbed to the Islamic narrative. That narrative, or rationale, tells us that burning a Quran causes murder and mayhem, putting our troops, our citizens, our cities and our interests at increased risk. In this narrative, the...

He did discuss COIN principles, which begin with "securing and serving the people." Not the American people, mind you; but local populations within and of the Islamic world. It is the disastrous vacuousness of COIN doctrine that it ignores the existence of Islamic culture, Islamic law, as I've written many, many times, but it is the disastrous vacuousness of COIN doctrine that now, by the general's telling, influences all US military thinking. Worse than thinking, however, is how COIN doctrine manifests itself in unconscionable rules of engagement predicated on "courageous restraint" as a means, COIN theory goes, to make them...

My brother and I have a running conversation about whether it is a good thing that John McCain didn't become president. We both voted for him, but I decided early on, as much as I oppose every Marx-tinged thing President Obama stands for, I was glad Obama had won and McCain had lost. At least, I was glad McCain had lost. That's because only out of ashes may the phoenix be reborn. The liberal-lite frustrations of a McCain administration would have smoldered on the Right but lit few fires, dampening the possibility of real post-Bush regeneration. From Bush's "compassionate conservatism"...

Writing at Brussels Journal today, Thomas Landen brings the attempted assassination of Kurt Westergaard on Friday in Denmark into vivid focus by comparing the horrific moment of crisis -- Westergaard and his five-year-old granddaughter in his steel-reinforced secure room (the bathroom) as the Muslim would-be assassin struck at the door with an axe yelling "blood!" and "revenge!" -- to the well-known scene in "The Shining" when the wife and child of Jack Nicholson cower behind a door as Nicholson strikes at it with an axe yelling, "Heeeere's Johnny!" The piece is aptly titled "Heeeere's Mohammed!" Was this Somali man, dada-esquesly...

Today's column is for all hawkish Americans currently wrestling with looming doubts about the pointlessness of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and clubbing those doubts down with the much-mentioned perils of leaving Afghanistan to "the terrorists." In short, it's about how to "lose" Afghanistan and win the war. And what war would that be? Since 9/11, the answer to this question has eluded our leaders, civilian and military, but it remains the missing link to a cogent U.S. foreign policy. It is not, as our presidents vaguely invoke, a war against "terrorism," "radicalism" or "extremism"; and it is not, as...

Question for Americans: How can we as a nation even consider using our military for another "surge" in Afghanistan when the "surge" in Iraq has left little more imprint on the sands of Mesopotamia than the receding tide? This, to clarify, is not the antiwar Left writing. I am writing from a pro-military, anti-jihad point of view that has long seen futility in the U.S. nation-building strategy in Iraq, and now sees futility in the rerun in Afghanistan. Problem is, the same blind spot afflicts both strategies: the failure to understand that an infidel nation cannot fight for the soul...

At some point of embittering clarity, Americans will open their eyes to the glaring significance of the Obama era and see the Power Grab Years for what they are. Whether this realization comes in time to stave off the eradication of the United States as we thought we knew it, or whether it comes too late, I predict it will surely come. If it comes in time, the realization that the nation dodged history's bullet will produce massive waves of relief. If it comes too late, the understanding of our fallen state will live on as the lost lore, not...

Having been in transit during the start of the Iranian election protests, I've taken a little time to come up to speed on the issue. Scanning English-language (UK) papers in airports, I will say that my initial reaction to the euphoria I saw breaking out all over the West -- especially the US? -- to the obtusely labeled "green" revolution was, Why should we be so happy about Mousavi? When I learned that Mousavi was Mullah Rafsanjani's boy, that A-jad was Mullah Khameini's boy, my wonder deepened, as in: What's the diff? When I read John Bolton's piece at Politico...

Forced to the ramparts to defend Rush Limbaugh against spurious, low-down attacks from the Obama White House and assorted Obamedia, conservatives, in their understandable zeal to defend a salient voice of conservatism, are letting the real enemy slip away unnamed. Who would that be? The answer is George W. Bush, whose stealthy political legacy stands as taking what is popularly known as "conservatism" on a disastrously leftward lurch. A shocking statement, maybe. But I came to believe long ago -- at some point after the insipid limpness of former President Bush's theories of world democracy, delivered in his second inaugural...

We interrupt regular column writing to ... imagine John McCain ahead in the polls. Imagine that McCain had spent the last 20 years in the pews of a white supremacist church that supported an apartheid-like separationism from black people, and also that, until a few months ago, McCain had proudly claimed the church's white racist pastor as his "friend, mentor and pastor" -- even taking the title of his best-selling 2006 memoir from one of this man's sermons. Imagine further that, in the 1990s, McCain had directed foundation funding toward a white-separatist educational program supported by this same pastor. Now...

A high school sophomore asked me this week whether Sept. 11 would always be remembered. Would it always be, as she put it, "somber"? Lacking a crystal ball, I have no answer. And, frankly, looking back seven years to that cataclysmic jihadist atrocity, I realize I'm probably not the most dependable prognosticator because never would I have imagined back in 2001 how successful that heinous strike would be in utterly changing us and our world. Blame ignorance, blame cowardice: The strangest effect of 9/11 has been, on balance, an accelerated campaign of accommodation of Islam's law in the West, a...

‘Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth’s promise. No more,” Diana West writes in her book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization. West is worried that “eternal youth” is “fatal” and recently took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez. Kathryn Jean Lopez: You note that more adults watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. Surely, you’ve seen Jack Cafferty. Is this really a problem? Diana West: Not if that were the only statistic...

As a dutiful American columnist, I should probably be pondering the half-baked presumption behind Barack Obama's bizarre "presidential" seal. Or shaking my head at John McCain's hair-trigger panic over an aide's answer to a question about terrorism's political impact. Or clucking over the irresponsibly childish $300 billion goodie bag -- I mean, mortgage bailout bill -- that just passed in the U.S. Senate. But I can't stop thinking about Europe. No surprise there. I just returned from a swift-moving, fact-finding journey through six European countries. And that tally doesn't even include two side-trips: one to Luxemburg just to buy cheaper...

So there I was, listening to a few of the major "architects" of the war in Iraq -- Paul Wolfowitz, formerly No. 2 man at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld; Douglas J. Feith, formerly No. 3 man at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld; Peter Rodman, another former senior adviser to Rumsfeld; and Dan Senor, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They had assembled at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., for a discussion of Feith's new book, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism," but what they were...

Speech...The Death of the Grown-Up...Heritage Foundation This is one book I'd like to buy. I had trouble finding it at the bookstore. For all you insomniaks (sp?) Ann Coulter is on CSPAN at 1:18 AM.