CAIR acts as a foreign agent, so it should register as one

Think about this for a moment: Foreign Agents Registration Act

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA is a disclosure statute that requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities. Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Registration Unit of the Counterespionage Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Act.

Is that clear in your mind? Good. Now keep it in mind as you read this press release from CAIR (with a tip-o'-th'-hat to Little Green Footballs):

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to drop a campaign advisor who offers rhetorical support to a group designated as "terrorist" by the U.S. government.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Daniel Pipes, who recently signed on to Giuliani's campaign as a foreign policy advisor, is a vocal supporter of the terror group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Earlier this year, Pipes even participated in a foreign rally for MEK leader Maryam Rajavi.

Shouldn't CAIR be required to register as a foreign agent under FARA?

Good thing Netflix doesn't operate in Gaza

Otherwise these people would be renting The Great Escape or Stalag 17 to learn how it's done: Hamas operative dies while digging tunnel.

A Hamas operative was killed Wednesday while digging a tunnel between the Gaza Strip and Israel, Palestinian News agencies reported.

The operative, 21-year-old Muhammad Salakh, was a member of a "tunnel unit" belonging to Hamas's Izzadin al-Kassam Brigades.

Hamas reported that Salakh was killed early Wednesday during a "special Jihad mission."

Three weeks ago, a Hamas operative was killed and two more were injured when a tunnel they were digging collapsed. Hamas's military wing also reported then that the operative was killed during a "Jihad mission."

Oh, say, can you see...?

Senator Barack Obama won't wear an American flag lapel pin, because it's not "true patriotism" to do so. Read his explanation, and then learn what it really means:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he doesn't wear the American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for "true patriotism" since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Asked about the decision Wednesday in an interview with KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Illinois senator said he stopped doing so shortly after the attacks and instead hoped to show his patriotism by explaining his ideas to citizens.

"The truth is that right after 9-11 I had a pin," Obama said. "Shortly after 9-11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.

"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said in the interview. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testament to my patriotism."

If wearing a lapel pin is not an expression of true patriotism, why did Obama wear one "right after 9-11"? Because 9-11 was the defining moment for Progressives and Liberals: it was finally okay to love America, because America was a wounded victim.

Victimhood is the only basis for holding the moral high ground in the minds of American Leftists. Only the weak and oppressed deserve sympathy, admiration and solidarity. All others are oppressors, who deserve to be despised.

The classic example of this phenomenon is Israel. The Left felt sympathy and admiration for Israel when the perception was that Israel was comprised of victims of white European oppression. The Six-Day War changed things: ever since, Israel has been an outpost of white European oppression against the noble and long-suffering Arab and Muslim peoples of the Middle East. (Never mind that a large number of Israelis or their parents fled the nations neighboring Israel to escape Muslim oppression.)

So, too, has the United States fallen from grace in the eyes of Progressives and Liberals. They mourn the fact that President Bush had the audacity and short-sightedness to strike back at our enemies, thus "robbing America of its moral authority" and "squandering the goodwill of the world." Their oft-repeated lament, that "after 9-11, the whole world was on our side," tells you what they truly believe: they are ashamed of an America that isn't weak, wounded and helpless. They also completely misunderstand the nature of America's enemies, for rather than feeling remorse or shame at the 9-11 attacks, our enemies felt emboldened, invigorated and thirsty for more American blood.

This is why Obama says, "I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great" -- not, "I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe makes this country great." For Obama and the other Progressives and Liberals, America ascendant and victorious in military battle is the opposite of a great country, and only an America that bows and scrapes to its enemies -- and subordinates its own national interests to the "greater good" defined by those enemies -- can be truly great. They love this country so much that they want to see it destroyed in order to become the ultimate morally admirable victim.

Palestinian civil war in the refugee camps of Lebanon

The Hamas-Fatah internicine war that divided the Palestinian government into a Gaza Hamas administration and a West Bank Fatah one is now playing itself out in the Palestinian refugee camps in other countries. Here is an example from Lebanon.

The clash erupted in the Miyeh Miyeh camp near the main southern coastal city of Sidon at about 1 am (2200 GMT Wednesday) and raged for about 90 minutes before calm was restored, a Palestinian source said.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's secular Fatah faction has been in open conflict with Hamas since the Islamist movement's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June.

The fighting broke out over a dispute between a Hamas militant and a Fatah rival over electricity supplies to a sector of the camp, the source said.

"It was an isolated incident that was rapidly brought under control," said Munir Maqdah, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's official in southern Lebanon.

"We don't want the events of Gaza to happen in the Lebanese camps."

Abu Mahmud, a Hamas official in Miyeh Miyeh, accused Fatah of "provocation" saying its supporters had ripped up posters of the late Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantissi, who were both assassinated by Israel.

The two injured men, who suffered bullet wounds, were identifed as a Fatah militant and a Lebanese who lives next to the camp.

After the events at the Nahr al-Bared camp, the Lebanese are in no mood to continue hosting Palestinian refugees if the camps are going to break out into open civil war.

Suicidal tendencies

A strange suicidal madness is spreading: FOX News Poll: Nearly 1 in 5 Democrats Say World Will Be Better Off if U.S. Loses War.

Nearly one out of every five Democrats thinks the world will be better off if America loses the war in Iraq, according to the FOX News Opinion Dynamics Poll released Thursday.

The percentage of Democrats (19 percent) who believe that is nearly four times the number of Republicans (5 percent) who gave the same answer. Seven percent of independents said the world would be better off if the U.S. lost the war.

Click here for results of the poll.(pdf)

Overall, 11 percent of Americans think the world would be "better off" if the U.S. lost the war, and 73 percent disagree.

Opinion Dynamics Corp. conducted the national telephone poll of 900 registered voters for FOX News from Sept. 25 to Sept. 26. The poll has a 3-point margin of error.

My question for those affirmative respondents is, better off how, exactly?

Congressional water torture

Not that there is any credible evidence that the Bush Administration has authorized torture, but key Democrats in Congress are demanding that the Bush Administration turn over "alleged" directives authorizing torture.

House Democrats demanded Thursday that the Justice Department turn over two secret memos that reportedly authorize painful interrogation tactics against terror suspects — despite the Bush administration's insistence that it has not violated U.S. anti-torture laws.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department said a memo written in February 2005 on this subject did not change an administration policy issued in 2004 that publicly renounced torture as "abhorrent."

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., promised a congressional inquiry into the two Justice Department legal opinions that reportedly "explicitly authorized the use of painful and psychological tactics on terrorism suspects."

"Both the alleged content of these opinions and the fact that they have been kept secret from Congress are extremely troubling, especially in light of the department's 2004 withdrawal of an earlier opinion similarly approving such methods," Conyers, D-Mich., and fellow House Judiciary member Nadler wrote in a letter Thursday to Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler.

It's wonderful to see that Democrats have their priorities straight. No matter what the threat to the lives and safety of Americans, the real thing they keep first and foremost in their minds is not being unduly mean to terror suspects.

"The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security," Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said in a statement. "We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer — it is a fundamental part of the problem with this administration's approach."

Here's the fundamental question for Obama, Nadler and Conyers: how many Americans are you willing to let die to keep to your anti-torture principles? If "torture is not part of the answer," excluded from "whatever it takes" to defend America from terror attacks, then you must state explicitly that America must never torture any terror suspect, no matter how many American lives are lost by foregoing the information that suspect has. Tell us that you truly believe that the human rights of the terror suspect to be exempted from torture outweigh the rights of American civilians to be exempted from being murdered.