The View From 1776

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A central message of religious Judaism and Christianity is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  In our world of frenetic egoism, however, few of us even stop to think how that might be applied to our daily lives.  John Lawrence, ever a voice of calm reason, charts the path.

THE UNCOMMONNESS OF COMMON THINGS 

by John Lawrence
 
If I am not mistaken, the word common denotes something that is in abundance. It is with curiosity then what type of world it must have been where folks coined the terms common decency, common sense, and common courtesy, because where I live, these are scarce and rare to find.

We all know what the above terms mean, but it is only by our intentional efforts that they can indeed remain common. I have wanted to write a piece on common courtesy for awhile now, because it is sadly missing from most of us.

I was at a mall on Friday, apparently the busiest shopping day of the year. In a time of year where soldiers used to lay down their guns to sing songs with those in the enemy trenches, it seems that our generation has no concept of what the spirit of giving and forgiveness means.

I purchased my lunch and went back to my vehicle to eat in peace and quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the busy food court. It astounds me that people allow themselves to get swept away in the shopping frenzy. In their defense, I realize that they aren’t even aware of their attitudes or anxiety, but they could easily change their countenance with a little effort. It is simply a matter of being made aware that we have become caught up in the frenzy and are no longer an individual, but just another character in a drama that unfolds quicker than we realize.

I enjoy sitting back and watching people. I never cease to be amazed at our behaviour. I see some screaming at others in the frustration that comes with driving around for what seems as long as hours looking for somewhere to put your vehicle. Others throw their head around in disgust having to wait a whole 15 seconds for a clerks attention. Still others insist on being rude to the salespeople, perhaps in an attempt to relieve their stress level. Being rude, however, does not release stress, it simply adds to it and transfers a lot to some innocent bystander.

The reason I am talking about this is because we have all been that rude person, and they appear in an instant, as they live just below the surface of our skin. We walk around wearing masks of civility, but once in a while, when we allow life to get out of control, most of us allow the mask to slip.

Myself, I have changed my behaviour. It didn’t just happen, it was a conscious effort, an intentional shift in my way of thinking. Common courtesy is now a part of my vocabulary and my actions. I have been practicing it for most of my life, and I think that I have the hang of it. I am now training my children in its usefulness and everyday applications.

When I go to a shopping plaza and begin to get frustrated at the lack of parking, I stop and let someone in, or allow someone to turn in front of me. I smile and my stress level immediately drops. I know that the stress level of the person I was kind to also felt the same thing. I remind myself that we should be kind to one another and I put the situation into perspective. Having to wait for a spot is not the end of the world, and I use the time to unwind a bit. It is amazing.

When I walk into the mall, I always hold the door for the person behind me, and I always offer a polite and sincere ‘thank you’ to the person who does the same for me. When I walk in front of somebody, I say ‘excuse me’.

When it is getting late and I am running out of time for all I have to do, I step back and stop myself. I remember the important things in life. My errands are important but they are not who I am and they are not my life. They are simply things that need to be done, and I will do them as quickly as I can, but they will not define the kind of day I am having.

I find that the more I rush, the less I accomplish and the more stress I add. By placing an unreasonable timeline on the things that I would like to accomplish in a day, I set myself up for a horrible day. I simply will not do that anymore.

I see the people running through the stores; unkind, hurried, and obnoxious. Take any of these individuals out of the crowd and the atmosphere of the mall. Place them in a setting that is serene and calm, and they will tell you that they love this time of year. It is a time of love, and of hope, and of peace and kindness. Now put them back in the mall, and ask yourself if you still believe them.

When you are returning something that you received as a gift this week, and the returns line is 3 blocks long, try the following. I guarantee the results are as stated. Instead of stamping your feet and looking forlorn, smile at the person beside you. Start a nice conversation about something positive. See the salesperson at the counter? They aren’t having fun, either, but you have the opportunity to make their day awful, or just another day at work. When you get to the counter, smile again. Be pleasant and look into their eyes. You will be rewarded by a look of thankfulness, and will undo the stress that the idiot that was there five minutes ago heaped upon the staff. The best part of the whole thing is that when you leave that store, having consciously done this, you will have tended to your own health.

It is amazing what kindness and courtesy can do for your body. You will feel invigorated, stress free, and giddy. Medical research will also support the claims about tending to your own health.

Our moods are mostly determined by our attitudes and our consciousness about them can determine what kind of attitude we choose to wear. Those people who are positive and happy have less health problems and live happier lives. They get the most from other people and they give the most back. Having a healthy, happy society requires each of us giving a darn, and the benefits are amazing.

I think that if you are still reading this article at this point, you are one of those who care. Together, I believe if we teach our children and our grand-children these attitudes, then the courtesy that I speak of could once again be common.

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For a couple of reasons it’s useful to examine the policies and tactics of the IWW, a labor organization from the first half of the 20th century:

First, the policies espoused by the IWW still are part of the doctrine that finds favor with today’s liberal-Progressives.  John Steinbeck’s novels, for instance, depict IWW members, anarchists, and socialists as heroes struggling against the criminality of capitalism.  It’s an interesting coincidence that in the movie version of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” the workman hero was played by Henry Fonda, the father of Hanoi Jane Fonda.

Second, the IWW set the pattern for the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the CIO, the mass industrial union organized by Communist Party members Victor and Walter Reuther. Their confrontational tactics, modeled on those of the IWW, were actively supported in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and still by liberal-Progressives on both sides of the political aisle.  In retrospect, the excesses of industrial unionism amounted to eating their seed corn.  Unsustainably high labor costs imposed by union tactics since the 1930s threaten bankruptcies today at General Motors and Ford.  The IWW pattern of militancy temporarily improved the status of union members, but it was at the expense of today’s workers, who must face the cold forces of economic reality from the rest of the world.

Third, the avowed aims of the IWW to take over the government and reshape it into a Soviet people’s republic has to a dangerous extent been realized by today’s non-industrial unions, the teachers and government workers unions.  In that regard, see Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops and the City Journal article by Steven Malanga, The Real Engine of Blue America.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known also as the Wobblies, came into existence in 1905, because its founders believed that other labor unions were not sufficiently radical.  Initially there was close cooperation between the Socialist Party and the IWW.  Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for President, spoke at the original organizational meeting. But even the Socialists were too tame for the IWW.

In 1908, the preamble to the IWW constitution was amended to read:
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.  There can be no peace as long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

“Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.....

“It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.  The army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown.  By organizing industrially, we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

Methods to be used for overthrowing the existing Constitutional government were described in an IWW pamphlet written by Vincent St. John:

“As a revolutionary organization the Industrial Workers of the World aims to use any and all tactics that will get the results sought with the least expenditure of time and energy.  The tactics are determined solely by the power of the organization to make good in their use.  The question of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ does not concern us....

“Where strikes are used, it aims to paralyze all branches of the industry involved....  Failing to force concessions from the employers by the strike, work is resumed and ‘sabotage’ is used to force the employers to concede the demands of the workers..... Interference by the government is resented by open violation of government orders, going to jail en masse, causing expense to the taxpayers, which is but another name for the employing class.  In short the I.W.W. advocates the use of ‘militant direct action’ to the full extent of our powers to make good.”

Sabotage was defined by other writers as slowing production rates, deliberately turning out substandard products, breaking machines, spoiling products, and generally disrupting a factory.

Such amoral tactics are essentially the same approach employed by the Mafia, with the exception that the Mafia just wants your money, but has no designs to seize revolutionary control of the United States government.

Grover H. Perry amplified the foregoing in “The Revolutionary I.W.W.” published by the IWW Publishing Bureau:

“.... We are going to do away with capitalism by taking possession of the land and the machinery of production.  We don’t intend to buy them, either.  The capitalist class took them because it had the power to control the muscle and brain of the working class in industry.  Organized, we, the working class, will have the power.  With that power we will take back that which has been stolen from us.  We will demand more and more wages from our employers.  We will demand and enforce shorter and shorter hours.  As we gain these demands we are diminishing the profits of the bosses.  We are taking away his power.  We are gaining that power for ourselves...... The Industrial Workers of the World are laying the foundation of a new government.  This government will have for it legislative halls the mills, the workshops, and factories.  It legislators will be the men in the mills, the workshops, and factories.  Its enactments will be those pertaining to the welfare of the workers..... Classes will disappear, and in their place will be only useful members of society – the workers.”

To capitalize on the American public’s initially favorable impression of the Russian revolution, the I.W.W. claimed to be the sole representatives in the United States of those principles and tactics which had proved so successful in Russia.

In an article in the March 1919 issue of “One Big Union Monthly,” John Gabriel Saltis wrote: “The I.W.W. contains the identical potentialities of the Soviet… The I.W.W. is the American soviet.”

In part, this posting is in response to critical emails from Alan Johnstone of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Jon Bekken, Editor, “The Industrial Worker,” Industrial Workers of the World.  Both objected to my passing mention of the IWW in Truth, in which, seeking to illuminate the pseudo-Christianity of the early 20th century Social Gospel, I wrote:  “[Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York ] also was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which actively defended the terrorist tactics of the radical IWW labor organization, whose members murdered more than a dozen employees and executives of industrial companies they sought to intimidate with demands for labor seizure of management control.”

Mr. Bekken’s email stated “No historian of the IWW has ever found that the union engaged in terrorist tactics. A number of IWW members have been tried on murder charges, it is true, though none were ever charged with killing “executives.” In most cases these were victims of employer lynch mobs who were charged with defending themselves against their attackers. In one case, the owner of a small restaurant was killed when he brandished a gun against a picketing IWW member, threatening to kill him. There is of course the case of Joe Hill, now universally acknowledged to have been a frame-up.

“Any fair-minded student of history must conclude that it has been the IWW that was the victim of terrorism, not the other way around. It is I think telling that your essay cites not a single verifiable fact in support of its wild smear.”

My response is that, no doubt, no IWW historian ever has found anything to criticize about the IWW.  But the IWW’s own words, quoted above, make ridiculous Mr. Bekken’s assertion that the IWW never engaged in terrorist tactics.

A few examples to the contrary:

--Idaho’s Governor from 1896 to 1900, Frank Steunenberg, adhering to state law, used the militia to defeat a strike against the Bunker Hill Mines Company.  Subsequently he was killed by a bomb planted at his home.  IWW leader William “Big Bill” Haywood was indicted and tried for conspiracy to murder, but, owing to the extreme difficulty in proving such conspiracy cases, he was acquitted.

The general understanding, nonetheless, was that the assassination was by an IWW member in retaliation for Governor Steunenberg’s strike-breaking, because of the “eye for an eye” policy avowed by the IWW.

-- For example, in 1909 during the IWW strike against the Pressed Steel Car Company of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, IWW leaders warned the Pennsylvania state constabulary that for every IWW man injured or killed one of the constabulary members would be murdered.  The IWW delivered on that threat by murdering half a dozen members of the state constabulary.

--In 1916, in Everett, Washington, IWW members organized a strike in the lumber-shipping port activities.  The local sheriff, seeking to disband the strikers in accordance with existing law, ran into the same violent street tactics by armed IWW members that had occurred in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.  In the armed assault by the IWW a deputy sheriff and a lumber company official were murdered and 24 non-union members were wounded.

--In 1914 Salt Lake City former policeman John Morrison and his son Arling were shot dead by gunmen as they were closing their small grocery store for the night.  Before being shot to death, Arling managed to fire the store’s pistol at the intruders.

A younger son, who was in the rear of the store when the gunmen burst into the store, heard one of them shout, “We’ve got you now.” It was noted in the subsequent trial that Morrison had quit the police force because of threats from IWW members whose activities he had confronted while enforcing the law. 

An hour and a half after the murders, Dr. Frank McHugh was awakened at his home by IWW member Joe Hill, who had a gunshot wound in his chest.  As he was being treated, a revolver slipped from his pocket to the floor.  Hearing about the Morrison murders the next day, Dr. McHugh alerted the police.  Joe Hill was arrested, convicted, and executed for the murders.

The IWW, of course, argues that every charge against its members was a frame-up and that its members were all innocent victims.  Looking at the record, however, and the exact congruence with the IWW’s proclaimed policy of using any available force, without regard to right or wrong, to bring capitalism to its knees, it’s difficult to accept that characterization.  Wherever they went, the IWW were armed with lethal weapons and spoiling for a fight.  They were simply lawless thugs.

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Prostitution of science is using its good name for base purposes: falsifying data, and misinterpreting statistics to support a new theory, with the objective of gaining personal fame and fortune. 

Recent publicity about such debased conduct should have two consequences: (1) people ought to become more skeptical about new scientific pronouncements, and, as they do, (2) they ought to become more aware that the supposedly sharp dichotomy between scientific certainty and metaphysical inquiry is simply an illusion.

With regard to the second consequence, more in the social sciences than in the physical sciences, atheistic liberals have characterized their socialistic nostrums as pure thought based on materialistic reality.  That strand of rationalism was called by Marxians scientific socialism.  They look condescendingly upon religion, morality, and philosophy as relics of earlier civilizations beyond which humans have evolved to higher standards of certainty and understanding. 

To the contrary, science, in liberal-Progressive publications like the New York Times, amounts to little more than the Fad of the Month.  If a “scientific” thesis puts business or religion in a bad light, it’s proclaimed on page one as truth incised in stone for all eternity.  Wait six months or a year, however, and new studies will contradict yesterday’s certainty.  But if the new study discredits one of the Times’s editorial hobby horses, it will be ignored or buried deep within the back pages.

Even a cursory review of “scientific breakthroughs” over recent decades makes increasingly obvious that grounding one’s beliefs exclusively in materialistic science is like building a house on quicksand in the path of an onrushing hurricane. 

An article by Brian Martin, published in the June 1992 issue of “Prometheus” explains the tenuous nature of scientific research the appears in the media as rock-solid, established “scientific fact.” Mr. Martin writes:  “Ask most scientists about scientific fraud and they will readily tell you what it is.  The most extreme cases are obvious: manufacturing data and altering experimental results.  Then there is plagiarism: using someone else’s text or data without acknowledgement.  More difficult are the borderline cases: minor fudging of data, reporting only the good results and not citing other people’s work that should be given credit.  Because obvious fraud is thought to be both rare and extremely serious, the normal idea is that it warrants serious penalties. 

“That is the usual picture, anyway, for public consumption. Probe a bit more deeply into scientific activities, and you will find that fraud is neither clear-cut nor rare....In the heads of scientists are various half-formed ideas, long-held desires, prejudices, and the vague recollections of articles read, seminars attended, conversations with colleagues and discussions with collaborators.......

“One of the most common misrepresentations in scientific work is the scientific paper itself. It presents a mythical reconstruction of what actually happened. All of what are in retrospect mistaken ideas, badly designed experiments and incorrect calculations are omitted. The paper presents the research as if it had been carefully thought out, planned and executed according to a neat, rigorous process, for example involving testing of a hypothesis. The misrepresentation of the scientific paper is the most formal aspect of the misrepresentation of science as an orderly process based on a clearly defined method .”

With regard to the first consequence, let’s stipulate that most scientists are not crooks.  But too many of them have uncalibrated moral compasses, and we pay for it in ignorance and retardation of true science, increased health risks, wasted public funds, lost jobs, bankrupted companies that can no longer fund pensions, and new products that never get to market for fear of litigation. 

Prostitution of science runs mainly along three tracks:

1.  so-called expert scientific witnesses prepared to support any bogus claim in court for a fee;

2.  researchers corrupted by lust for fame and fortune who falsify or misinterpret research data;

3.  and ‘“scientists" so intent upon propagating the gospel of secular materialism that they betray the most basic processes of science and even work to prevent consideration of new and contradictory evidence.

A few examples:

-- Newspapers reported within the past few days that South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk allegedly falsified results of stem-cell research once hailed as a major breakthrough.  Stem-cell research, of course, is a matter of almost religious worshipfulness to liberal-Progressives.

-- The Boston Globe, in its March 18, 2005 edition, reported:  “In the worst case of scientific fakery to come to light in two decades, a top obesity researcher who long worked at the University of Vermont admitted yesterday that he fabricated data in 17 applications for federal grants to make his work seem more promising, helping him win nearly $3 million in government funding.”

-- The BBC, on June 4, 1998, reported that: “Doctors have warned that medical researchers who fake evidence are risking lives.  A major new report has concluded that fraud and fabrication is widespread throughout medical research. The practice has potentially devastating implications because doctors base treatment on published research....The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was set up last year following mounting concern among editors of scientific publications that research studies contained faked results.  It is thought that increased pressure to achieve results to obtain scarce funding resources has pushed many scientists into acting dishonestly. The COPE report cites 25 cases of scientific fraud.  In one case a[n American] scientist who claimed to have transplanted black skin onto a white mouse had in fact simply coloured the mouse with a felt-tip pen.  A British Medical Association spokesman said that members of the committee had been approached by a “phenomenal” number of people revealing cases of fraud and misconduct, and that the problem was far more widespread than was first thought.

-- The British Medical Journal issue of May 1999 reported: “Half of the US biomedical researchers accused of scientific fraud and subjected to formal investigations in recent years have been found guilty of misconduct, a new review has found.  In the biggest review of scientific fraud ever published, the US Office of Research Integrity, has released data on nearly a thousand allegations investigated over the five years from 1993 to 1997. The review covered inquiries into allegations of misconduct into research funded by the US Public Health Service, which has a budget of $15bn (£9bn).”

-- An article in the New York Times’s December 13, 2005, issue by Gina Kolata is headlined: Environment and Cancer: The Links Are Elusive

Within the article, the reporter notes: “But pinning cancer on trace levels of poisons in the environment or even in the workplace is turning out to be a vexing task. There has been recent progress in addressing the issue, but the answers that many people believe must be out there remain elusive.... Researchers, for their part, say they have not given up the quest. In their search for answers, they are trying a variety of methods. They are looking for reliable ways to detect environmental exposures and determine whether they are linked to cancer risk. They are studying the bewildering array of factors that can determine a chemical’s effects on individual people. And they are looking at cancer statistics and asking whether there are blips in cancer rates that may point to an environmental cause.”

In other words, scientists who believed passionately in environmentalism and consequently blamed private businesses for most of our problems, set out with a preconception and have spent decades and billions of dollars looking for proof, rather like Monty Python’s make-believe, comical quest for the Holy Grail.  So much for the popular image that scientists dispassionately scrutinize raw data and inductively reach logical conclusions.

-- Reporting on the massive asbestosis claims under the tort bar’s class-action suits, the Wall Street Journal, in its November 5, 2005, issue notes: “...asbestosis litigation, which had previously focused on malignancies and other debilitating injuries, shifted radically from the traditional model of an injured person seeking a lawyer to an entrepreneurial model. Lawyers spent millions to sponsor mass screenings of upwards of 750,000 industrial and construction workers. Of the 850,000 asbestos claimants that have so far brought suit against over 8,400 different defendants, about 600,000 have been recruited by these mass screenings....This all became clear when 10,000 of the 35,000 pending silica claims were centralized into a federal multi-district litigation (MDL), presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, a Clinton appointee. During the course of the MDL, one of the doctors recanted all 3,617 of his diagnoses of silicosis, provoking Judge Jack to observe that “it’s clear this . . . [diagnosing] business is fraudulent.”....Judge Jack concluded that “the lawyers, doctors and screening companies” were “all willing participants” in a “scheme [that] manufactured [diagnoses] for money”—the equivalent of a finding of pervasive fraud.....Asbestos litigation, meanwhile, prevented the creation of 500,000 jobs because of the diversion of capital in over 70 asbestos-related bankruptcies.”

The next time you hear climatologists stating that “all the world’s scientists” support the green-house gases hypothesis, or biologists declaring that Darwinian evolution has been scientifically proved, know that they are stating falsehoods, or, at best, no more than their speculative hypotheses. 

When only the crooks write the statue books, crime will cease to exist.  When only global-warming theorists and Darwinians are permitted to define “science,” no contradictory facts will be admitted as science.  Don’t be surprised that they will fight to prevent students from hearing the vast array of inconsistencies and gaps that make their hypotheses improbable if not impossible.

The next time you see a court case report mentioning testimony from “scientific experts,” scrutinize it with a large measure of skepticism.  In too many cases, “scientists” are merely plying their trade for their whoremasters, the tort bar.

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The following article is scheduled for publication in the forthcoming Republican Voices newsletter.

Socialism that is taught as multi-culturalism and political correctness in our colleges and universities today was planted and cultivated more than a century ago.  The bitter fruit of this industry is our liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats, who find repugnant the ethos of 1776 upon which our nation was founded.

Liberal-Progressive anti-Americanism and opposition to national defense are explicit in the doctrine espoused openly from the late 1800s through the Vietnam era.  Today’s liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans, seeking political advantage even at the expense of emboldening terrorists in Iraq and disheartening our troops, are simply reading from the socialist scripts of 1916-17, the 1930s, and the 1960s.

Even before the 1917 Russian Revolution, leading universities in the United States had begun a transition from the Christian roots of our nation into atheistic, secular materialism in their teaching of the so-called social sciences.

Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism.  Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century.  Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity. 

Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him.  The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.

To believe that Social Gospel is true Christianity is to believe that the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was truly democratic.

In “Christianizing the Social Order” (1912), Professor Rauschenbusch wrote:

“The Socialists found the Church against them and thought God was against them, too.  They have had to do God’s work without the sense of God’s presence to hearten them.....Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools in the hands of the Almighty.......Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age......God will raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God’s ends.”

Two other prominent seminaries, among many others, were active promoters of socialism.  Their spokesmen also were nationally known figures: Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York and Dr. Bernard Iddings-Bell of St. Stephens College in Annandale, New York.

Dr. Ward wrote “The New Social Order,” to express sympathy for Socialism and to laud the Bolshevik revolutionary movement in Russia, which he regarded as a desirable replacement for the Russian Orthodox Christian Church.  Dr. Ward also was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which actively defended the terrorist tactics of the radical IWW labor organization, whose members murdered more than a dozen employees and executives of industrial companies they sought to intimidate with demands for labor seizure of management control.

Dr. Iddings-Bell in “Right and Wrong After the War,” in this case World War I, advocated Sigmund Freud’s version of Marxian materialism, in which human life is controlled by hunger and the sex urge.  From this theory of secular and materialistic human nature, he concluded that (1) private property should be abolished; (2) income earned from investments, savings accounts, and rental property is robbery; (3) the family as a social unit should be abandoned except as a temporary arrangement for purely sexual relations. 

In his sermon delivered on May 23, 1920, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dr. Iddings-Bell gave his support to revolutionary labor demands for abolishment of the wage system and control of industry by communistic labor unions. 

He declared that the New Social Order had arrived and that people were obliged to accept it.  Among other things, that meant that internationalism must replace American patriotism.

The American Federation of Teachers, in the May-June, 1918, issue of its house journal the “American Teacher,” carried an article expressing the revolutionary industrial theory that children should be taught to demand “industrial democracy,” of which it said, “...it is by the people who do the work that the hours of labor, the conditions of employment and the definition of property is to be made.  It is by them the captains of industry are to be chosen, and chosen by the servants, not masters.”

The InterCollegiate Socialist Society was organized in New York in 1905.  Its monthly magazine, the “Socialist Review” and volumes of socialistic pamphlets, were distributed to chapters in 87 colleges and universities, including, of course, Harvard and Yale.  Its influence was even greater than this alone suggests, because its founders included prominent writers Upton Sinclair and Jack London, whose novels became part of the required canon of American literature in university curricula.  Their socialistic views still today are being absorbed by callow students who assume that the writers’ status in the literary canon confers authority for their views.

According to the InterCollegiate Socialist Society’s year book, “...in 1915-1916 John Spargo, Rose Pastor Stokes and Harry W. Laidler spoke in 120 colleges before over 30,000 students and 12,000 others.  They addressed some eighty economic and other classes and spoke before over a score of entire college bodies.”

Out of this milieu in 1919 came New York City’s New School for Social Research, dedicated to teaching manifestations of socialism in all academic disciplines.  Among its founders were historian Charles Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, and philosopher John Dewey, all active and avowed socialists.

Meanwhile, in the prestigious Ivy League, Harvard set the trend in motion and went farther than most universities toward full embrace of socialism as revealed truth.  Given the nature of Marxian materialism, economics was not surprisingly the discipline in which socialism was particularly prominent in the 1920s and 1930s.  Harvard was, in fact, the launching pad for Keynesian economics in the United States.

John Maynard Keynes’s doctrines have filled many books.  The relevant points can be stated as (1) the Depression was caused by people saving too much and not spending enough on consumption items to keep factory workers fully employed; (2) private business (capitalism) was unable in the modern world to sustain full employment at good wages; (3) therefore the government had to assume the role formerly occupied by private business and fund economic activity and research in order to restore full employment via running Federal deficits, the first such outside of war times; (4) government should raise taxes high enough to redistribute private wealth from the rich to the poor, via government transfer payments (the welfare state); (5) government departments should regulate all phases of economic activity, because academically trained administrators were smarter and better equipped to manage business than businessmen, who exploited workers for their own profit.

Harvard’s economics department has sheltered some prominent socialists and avowed communists.  One of the more notorious was Harry Dexter White, a Rooseveltian New Dealer.  Being a professor at Harvard opened the doors to major Federal appointments.  White was closely involved in establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and was a friend of John Maynard Keynes, whose socialistic economics doctrines he taught at Harvard. 

There was just one small fly in the ointment.  After his death, the FBI in 1950 positively identified him via the Venona project as a Soviet spy operating under the code name ‘Jurist.’ This confirmed testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers that White had been involved in the Communist party underground in the 1930s and had been an active Soviet spy during World War II.

Lauchlin Currie, another Harvard economics teacher of Keynesianism, was appointed from the Harvard faculty to staff position in the 1930s New Deal at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.  It was Currie who drafted the 1935 Banking Act which brought the Federal Reserve Board more directly under President Franklin Roosevelt’s control.

After World War II, Currie was also identified by Elizabeth Bently and Whittaker Chambers as a Soviet agent.  Rather than face trial here, he sought refuge in Columbia, beyond U.S. repatriational jurisdiction.

Yet another of the thirteen Harvard faculty members who spied for the Soviets was Alger Hiss.  While at the State Department, he delivered confidential information to his Soviet handlers, as Whittaker Chambers testified and KGB files verified after the end of the Cold war.

Other prominent, or notorious, socialists who taught at Harvard or graduated from that institution were Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann (who later saw the error of his ways), Roger N. Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Stuart Chase (who coined the term New Deal and urged President Roosevelt to run rough-shod over the Constitution in order to abolish private property); Graham Wallas (British socialist leader who coined the term Great Society, later borrowed by President Lyndon Johnson); Bertrand Russell (a dean of world socialism); and Harold Laski (Harvard faculty member and close friend of socialist Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later professor of economics at London School of Economics, which was dedicated to the teaching of socialism).  John Reed, a Harvard graduate (1910) wrote for Max Eastman’s “The Masses” and, after the 1917 revolution, went to Soviet Russia, became a Bolshevik convert, wrote “Ten Days That Shook The World,” died in Russia, and was declared a hero of the Soviet Union.

In the decades between the two world wars, it was considered respectable for an educated, liberal person to be a socialistic adherent of the policies of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, a Fabian socialist, or a follower of John Maynard Keynes’s economic doctrines.  These are the liberals who, like Nelson Rockefeller, are nominal Republicans or Democrats, but in fact are true-blue socialists.  People of that persuasion in the inter-war decades abhorred a communist party leader like Earl Browder or Joseph Stalin, or National Socialist Fuhrer Adolph Hitler.  Yet all of these people were reading from the same socialistic texts and pursuing the same ends, even if by somewhat different means.

During the Cold War, Harvard’s swing all the way to the socialist left was documented by The New York Times on May 16, 1960, when it reported that “1,359 Harvard faculty members and officers urged [President] Eisenhower, at the eve of the abortive Summit Conference, to agree to stop testing nuclear weapons even without inspection or control.” The Times article goes on to note that this was exactly the position advocated by the Kremlin in its worldwide propaganda campaign intended to disarm the United States.

By the end of World War II, “Lux et Veritas” (light and truth) had been effectively snuffed out at Yale, as William F. Buckley, Jr. documented in detail in his 1951 “God and Man at Yale.” Faculty, textbooks, and course materials had been thoroughly permeated by socialism.

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Larry Auster, at View From The Right, posts a forthright explanation for Muslims’ refusal to accept the laws and customs of Western nations where many thousands of them now live.  Muslims everywhere not only fail to condemn beheadings and suicide bombings of thousands of innocent people; they cheer Al Qudea barbarians.  Experience here and in England, France, Holland, and Germany demonstrates that Muslims themselves will not identify for legal authorities their fellow religionists who are known within the Muslim community to be terrorists. 

Liberals’ atheistic secularity leads them to oppose anything resembling profiling of potential terrorists, when every grain of common sense makes obvious to anyone not willfully blind that profiling is both legitimate and effective.  Liberal-Progressives’ reluctance comes from their history in the 19th and 20th centuries endeavoring to replace our Constitutional government with socialism.  Every time our public authorities question the subversive actions of liberal-Progressives, socialist media like the New York Times shriek “hysterical Red Scare tactics.” We now know from KGB archives that, far from hysteria, the charges, whether against State Department personnel or the notorious Hollywood black-list, communist-party cadre, were in fact true.

Liberal-Progressive organizations like the ACLU, of course, know that the charges are true.  That’s why they fight like cornered tigers against the Patriot Act or any program that can put a spotlight on both their own anti-Constitutional designs, and those of Islamic terrorists.  Judicial activism aimed at broadening the definition of the First Amendment was the top priority on the ACLU’s agenda, beginning with the First World War. 

Their circular argument has always been that the Bill of Rights protects liberal-Progressives in their actions intended to destroy the Bill of Rights itself, along with the whole Constitution.  While pursuing their objective in different ways, the aims of Islamic terrorists and liberal-Progressives are the same: to wipe out the Christian heritage of the United States and forcibly subject our nation to their political and religious domination, the one secular and materialistic, the other Islam.

The bottom line with regard to Islam is that it is both a political and a religious faith that refuses to accept the fundamental tenets of our Constitution.  A devout believer in Islam cannot accept any political authority except that of the ulemas and the caliphs who rule in conformity with their interpretation of the Koran.

If liberal-Progressives succeed in gutting the Patriot Act, however, they can’t expect any sympathetic exemption from violence by Muslim terrorists.  Muslims dislike atheistic, secular liberals even more than Christians.

The following is Mr. Auster’s post describing the Vatican’s realistic assessment:

TOP VATICAN HISTORIAN SPEAKS THE SAVING TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM

In the midst of my criticisms yesterday of Pope Benedict, I said that I admired and liked him. That may have sounded like hypocritical cover, but I meant it. And here’s a reason why. Even as the pope was issuing what I described as liberal boilerplate about the Muslim riots in France, his own Vatican was showing a true and realistic and therefore confrontational attitude toward Islam, something that would have been inconceivable under the ecumenism-soaked pontificate of his predecessor. At a meeting held this month at the Pontifical Lateran University on “Christianity and Islam, Yesterday and Today,” monsignor Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, delivered a speech on “Christianity and Islam in History."

Unlike the Bernard Lewises and the Daniel Pipeses and the Francis Fukuyamas and the Olivier Roys and the entire respectable intellectual establishment of the secular West, Brandmüller focused, not on some secondary social problem afflicting Islam, such as “poor development” or “discrimination” or “cultural dislocation,” that supposedly makes Muslims today troublesome (as though they hadn’t been troublesome for the last 1,400 years), but on the character of Islam itself, as a religious/military/political movement seeking power over the world. If our so-called leaders and intellectual lights understood the simple, true points made in the below excerpts from the speech, the current nonsense about “moderate Islam” versus “radical Islam”—nonsense that leads us to try to “engage” with Muslims and “democratize” Muslims and “assimilate” Muslims and “integrate” Muslims instead of defending ourselves from Muslims—would vanish in the wind.

I thank Paul Cella for bringing this important and very encouraging speech to our attention. Here are excerpts:

But on the part of the Muslims, from the earliest times, even while Mohammed was still alive, conversion was imposed through the use of force. The expansion and extension of Islam’s sphere of influence came through war with the tribes that did not accept conversion peacefully, and this went hand in hand with submission to Islamic political authority. Islamism, unlike Christianity, expressed a comprehensive religious, cultural, social, and political strategy. While Christianity spread during its first three centuries in spite of persecution and martyrdom, and in many ways in opposition to Roman domination, introducing a clear separation between the spiritual and political spheres, Islam was imposed through the power of political domination.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the use of force occupies a central place in Islamic tradition, as witnessed by the frequent use of the word “jihad” in many texts. Although some scholars, especially Western ones, maintain that jihad does not necessarily mean war, but instead a spiritual struggle and interior effort, Samir Khalil Samir again clarifies that the use of this term in Islamic tradition—including its usage today—is essentially uniform, indicating warfare in the name of God to defend Islam, which is an obligation for all adult Muslim males. Those who maintain that understanding jihad as a holy war constitutes a sort of deviation from the true Islamic tradition are therefore not telling the truth, and history sadly demonstrates that violence has characterized Islam since its origin, and that Mohammed himself systematically organized and led the raids against the tribes that did not want to convert and accept his dominion, thus subjecting the Arab tribes one by one. Naturally, it must also be said that at the time of Mohammed warfare was part of the Bedouin culture, and no one saw anything objectionable about it. [. . .]

If this characterization of Islam is destined to remain unchanged in the future, as it has been until now, the only possible outcome is a difficult coexistence [yes, co-existence, which we maintained for 40 years with the USSR while containing it, not being friends with it] with those who do not belong to the Muslim community: in an Islamic country, in fact, the non-Muslim must submit to the Islamic system, if he does not wish to live in a situation of substantial intolerance.

Likewise, on account of this all-embracing conception of religion and political authority, the Muslim will have great difficulty in adapting to the civil laws in non-Islamic countries, seeing them as something foreign to his upbringing and to the dictates of his religion. Perhaps one should ask oneself if the well-attested difficulties persons coming from the Islamic world have with integrating into the social and cultural life of the West are not explained in part by this problematic situation.

We must also recognize the natural right of every society to defend its own cultural, religious, and political identity. It seems to me that this is precisely what Pius V did.

Pius V was the pope under whom the forces of Christendom won the great naval battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans in 1571. Brandmüller, bless him, is saying that Europe must defend itself from Islam—culturally, politically, and even through the use of military force.

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What Will 2006 Bring? A Political Analysis
 
By Rob Hood
 
It is not long until we see a new year. While none of us can predict the future I think I can try to predict the political spectrum of events to unfold.
 
I know that the Judge Alito confirmation process will probably bring a heated battle between liberals, moderates, and conservatives over the issues of abortion, privacy, and religion in the public square, not to mention Second Amendment rights.
 
That, I believe, is a fair and accurate assumption to make considering what we already know how the left feels about this particular nominee. I personally cannot see why they are getting their feathers so ruffled over the issue. President Bush won the election fair and square in 2004 and has every right to pick who he wants. Then again, I would probably have acted somewhat the same if John Kerry had won the election and picked some one to the far left as a judicial nominee. It’s basic human nature to cheer for someone you have something in common with and jeer for the other side. That goes for life itself, not just politics.
 
I believe that we will see even more progress being made in Iraq in 2006 that we did in 2005. I feel that we probably can and will start pulling troops out sometime in 2006, but you have to realize that it takes time to train soldiers. It takes time for the U.S. military to train soldiers and obtain officers after training. It is a slow process and we must be patient.
 
I do not regret the fact that we did invade Iraq with the presumption that we would find weapons of mass destruction which could still happen. The weapons are probably buried deep in the sands across the Syrian border. I doubt whether Saddam was actually dumb enough not to hide them from us before we arrived. He may be a mean man, but he knows how to play politics better than anyone in Washington ever could. His style is deception and trickery.
 
In 2006 I hope we do see better progress in immigration reform, social security reform (if the liberals let us), and a better view of the war on terror. Perhaps we will even find and capture Osama Bin Laden himself. I hope we do. That would make my day to see Osama imprisoned and stripped of his anti-American, anti-Christian rhetoric.
 
Like I said before none of us knows the future and none of us knows if we will even be alive tomorrow or not. We are not guaranteed life, be we are granted freedom by a document that some of the greatest minds have ever drafted before. That document is the United States Constitution. I am proud to be an American and know that I have the right to free speech, the right to freedom of religion, and other personal freedoms that we all, liberal and conservative, take for granted sometimes.
 
We can make this nation and this world a better place in 2006 if we only try to get along and show respect for each other and for our founding fathers’ intentions of the drafted Constitution. We owe it to ourselves and the world to be the prime example of freedom and democracy in a world that is somewhat hostile to those ideals. Together we can make the difference!
  
 
Rob Hood is a columnist for The American Daily ( http://www.americandaily.com ), The Conservative Voice ( http://www.theconservativevoice.com ), News By Us ( http://www.newsbyus.com ) and for The View from 1776 (http://www.thomasbrewton.com ). He also has his own blogs at http://robhood.us and http://www.standfortruthonline.com .

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The statistics posted in We’ve Lost the War in New Orleans, DC, and Detroit were wrong, because I used numbers for U. S. cities that were murders per 100,000, but for U.S. casualties in Iraq, I calculated rates per 1,000 average troops deployed.

The corrected numbers are the following:

Murders per 100,000 population:

New Orleans--------53.1

Washington, DC---45.8

Detroit--------------42.0

New York City-------7.5

Seattle---------------4.5

U.S. troops in Iraq:

All causes------------465.8

Hostile Fire---------366.4 (total hostile fire deaths 1,693)

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My thanks to Maggie’s Farm for the weblink to UCLA news, where the following article was published.

UCLA News

Media Bias is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist




Date: December 14, 2005

Contact: Meg Sullivan ( msullivan@support.ucla.edu )

Phone: 310-825-1046


While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”

“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100” is the most liberal and “0” is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo’s method assigned both a similar ADA score.

“A media person would have never done this study,” said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. “It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don’t think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches.”

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
Five news outlets — “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown,” Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet.  Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.

An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS’ “Evening News” and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74.

Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC’s “World News Tonight,” NBC’s “Nightly News,” USA Today, NBC’s “Today Show,” Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR’s “Morning Edition,” CBS’ “Early Show” and The Washington Post.

Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op‑Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts.

Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center.

“One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites,” said Groseclose.  “Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media.”

Yet another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom relates to National Public Radio, often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. But according to the UCLA-University of Missouri study, it ranked eighth most liberal of the 20 that the study examined.

“By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet,” Groseclose said. “Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post’s. If anything, government‑funded outlets in our sample have a slightly lower average ADA score (61), than the private outlets in our sample (62.8).”

The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias — or the appearance of same — in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research.

“No matter the results, we feared our findings would’ve been suspect if we’d received support from any group that could be perceived as right- or left-leaning, so we consciously decided to fund this project only with our own salaries and research funds that our own universities provided,” Groseclose said.

The results break new ground.

“Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers,” Groseclose said. “Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity — politicians.”

-UCLA-

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My friend Emil Pavone sent me the following email, which sums up the situation nicely.

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For those who missed this letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal today:
 
“Perhaps the most eloquent exposition of the strategy George Bush is following was in Winston Churchill’s May 13, 1940, speech, his first as prime minister:
“‘You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.’”

S. Paul Posner

New York

In Munich, on September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain, a British Conservative Party member serving as Prime Minister of a coalition government, and French Premier Édouard Daladier, caved in to Hitler’s demand that part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, be ceded to Germany.  The Czechs, helpless against their powerful neighbor, could only watch as Europe’s great powers gave part of their nation away.  Chamberlain returned to England, talking about having achieved “peace in our time,” and “peace with honor.” 
 
In March 1939, less than six months later, Hitler’s troops seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain’s pathetic, pusillanimous effort to maintain peace at any price collapsed.  He finally allowed himself to see that there’s no appeasing a predator.  On August 24th, Britain signed a defense pact with Poland, but that did not deter the German predator.  One week later, on September 1, 1939, Hitler’s troops invaded Poland.  Two days later, on September 3rd, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. 
 
Chamberlain continued as Prime Minister, but he appointed Winston Churchill, his most prominent critic to his cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty.  Churchill was a very different man, a very great man, and throughout his long life a very brave man.  Chamberlain’s political support dissolved and, on May 10, 1940, he resigned as Prime Minister.  He was succeeded by Winston Churchill, who first addressed the House of Commons on May 13th, making the remarks quoted by the Wall Street Journal’s letter-writer above.  In that same speech he uttered the famous line, “-- I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
 
It’s interesting to note that, at this early point in World War II, not much was happening — indeed, it was referred to as the “phony war.”  But Churchill knew what was coming, and it did come.
 
It strikes me that we Americans are the world’s Churchill in this War on Terror.  We know what’s coming and we are trying desperately to get others to open their eyes. 
 
The terrorists are religious zealots.  That’s nothing new.  Throughout history there have been religious zealots who believed they would be rewarded in an afterworld for sacrificing their lives in this world.  The word “assassin” provides an exceptionally pertinent example.  It comes to us from an Arabic word that was applied to an order of Muslim fanatics, active in Persia and Syria from about the 11th to the 13th centuries (200 years!), whose chief object was to murder Crusaders.  The Arabic word is rendered in our alphabet as “hashshashin,” and translates literally as “eaters of hashish,” the narcotic derived from hemp.  (Interestingly, I read the other day that random post mortems on suicide bombers in Iraq often show evidence of opium ingestion.) 
 
The word “zealot” comes out of Jewish antiquity, describing a fanatical sect that opposed the Roman domination of Palestine and, like today’s Sunnis, who kill fellow Muslims in Iraq, killed fellow Jews in Palestine.
 
And then you have the Kamikazes, the Japanese fanatics of World War II, who believed their emperor to be a God, and believed they served him by sacrificing their lives in suicide missions.
 
Our country faces a 21st Century threat of Muslim fanaticism.  This doesn’t mean all Muslims are fanatics.  It does mean that in today’s world, just a handful of Muslim fanatics can wreak thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of deaths and almost inconceivable physical damage.  In the face of this threat, consider what’s going on right now: the President is accused of lawbreaking for monitoring calls made from U.S. telephones to known terrorist organizations, and the political posturers seek to vilify him for trying to protect us against another terrorist attack.  They choose to forget 9/11.
 
The President hasn’t forgotten 9/11, and I haven’t forgotten 9/11.
 
I believe we are facing a war that will go on for a number of years before fanaticism is rooted out of the Muslim nations.  Certainly, we’ll have to address Syria and Iran soon, and I believe we will do so whether we have a Republican or Democratic administration in power.  And if another terrorist attack occurs in an American city, we will assuredly deal with them sooner, rather than later, and the pious politicos of the left will finally decide to cast their lot with our country.

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Two thousand plus deaths is not a small number, but it must be seen in perspective.  The annualized death rate, from all causes, of American troops in Iraq is a small fraction of the murder rates alone in most major U.S. cities.

Public support for the war in Iraq has declined, almost entirely because of the daily pounding of American casualty statistics by the liberal news media.  When the death total recently passed 2,000, we were treated to an eruption of protest demonstrations, editorials, and speeches. 

Senators Ted Kennedy (the hero of Chappaquiddick) and John Kerry (who, in case you have forgotten, served in Vietnam), along with Representative John Murtha (who used to be claimed by Marines as one of them), have proclaimed that we’re mired in a losing war in Iraq and/or that our troops must be withdrawn very soon, if not immediately.

In no way to minimize the importance of every death, Iraqi and American, at the hands of Islamic thugs, let’s put the numbers into perspective.

In the 33 months since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, our average number of troops in Iraq has been roughly 167,800.  That number is based upon published reports that we had 130,000 troops initially and raised the total to 180,00 in November, 2003.

Using the average number of troops, we can calculate the annual death rate per 1,000 troops at 4.66.  Remember that number includes deaths from accidents, roadside IEDs, direct enemy fire, and suicide bombers.  Moreover, the monthly numbers of deaths have been declining since the start of the war, so the 33-month average is higher than the latest monthly rates.

Let’s compare that rate to 2002 murder rates, the latest I can find on the internet:

Murders per 1,000 population:

New Orleans--------53.1
Washington, DC---45.8
Detroit--------------42.0
New York City-------7.5
Seattle---------------4.5

U.S. troops, all causes:
Iraq------------------4.7

If we are to accept the logic of liberal-Progressive politicians and media pundits, we must pull out of Iraq because we can’t win.  Using that same logic, we should disband all of our big-city police forces, because murders keep happening, at a far higher rate than the death toll in Iraq, no matter what the police do.

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