Monthly Notes

Briefly Noted: January 2016


President Obama’s Chicago-based nonprofit group, Organizing for Action (OfA), has trained “more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in [Saul] Alinsky street tactics,” according to the Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry. This “army of social justice bullies” will carry on Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform America after he leaves office in January 2017, continuing his push to punish America for its imaginary sins and to promote manufactured controversies. Some observers have compared OfA to the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Cuba’s Castro brothers use to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents. OfA units brought muscle to the 2011-12 fight in Wisconsin over laws that reformed the state’s out-of-control government labor unions. OfA has also bludgeoned Democrats that Obama deemed insufficiently left-wing, especially red-state congressional Democrats who had been wavering on Obamacare.

The terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wants to make America safe for Sharia law. So it’s not surprising that on Dec. 2 after 14 Americans were gunned down in San Bernardino, Calif.—an event the Heritage Foundation labeled the “75th Islamist-inspired terrorist attack or plot in the U.S.” since Sept. 11, 2001—CAIR tried to grab hold of the media narrative. CAIR, which the United Arab Emirates designated a year ago as a terrorist group, set to work crafting a storyline about the mass-murdering Muslim married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik to ensure Islam wouldn’t be blamed for this latest massacre committed in its name. CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush, who is also an Executive Board member of the California Democratic Party, first played dumb, saying at a press conference, “We don’t know the motive. Is it work, rage-related? Is it mental illness? Is it extreme ideology? At this point it’s really unknown to us and it is too soon for us to speculate.” Two days later on CNN, Ayloush changed his tune, blaming America for the shootings. “Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy, as Americans, as the West, have fueled that extremism.”

GOP presidential contender Ben Carson is calling for the government to investigate CAIR’s links to the terrorist underworld. In a policy paper he unveiled last month, he urged that war be formally declared against Islamic State and that the State Department open a probe into CAIR, which he called “an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of terrorism.” Carson earned the ire of CAIR previously by saying that a Muslim who wished to implement Sharia law should not become U.S. president.

“Hardball” host Chris Matthews was offended last month when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) called Islamic State terrorists “animals” but didn’t explain why he was miffed. Matthews said the terrorists should be called “bad guys.” “And also, animals! I mean, call them what they are, bad people. But what’s this animal thing that Christie’s throwing around?” said Matthews, a longtime Democrat who wrote speeches for the Carter administration and served as chief of staff to the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.).

Student radicals at Atlanta’s Emory University are demanding end-of-semester course evaluations that would allow them to report professors for committing “microaggressions” against them. “The explicit goal of such a question on evaluations would be to punish professors who engaged in speech that offended students,” Reason.com reports. Two proposed questions are “Has this professor made any microaggressions towards you on account of your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language, and/or other identity?” and “Do you think that this professor fits into the vision of Emory University being a community of care for individuals of all racial, gender, ability, and class identities?” As Reason notes, there is “no standard for what counts as a microaggression—they are, by their very nature, vague, subjective, and inconsequential.” Microaggressions, according to some college bureaucrats, can consist of statements such as, “Where are you from?” and “America is the greatest country.”

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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