Gadahn's a Traitor - What about Hanoi Jane?

Much to the delight of those of us who thought that the legal concept of treason was dead in the water in these politically correct times, American convert to Islam and al-Qaeda propagandist Adam Gadahn is being charged with treason and providing material support to al-Qaeda.

Otherwise known as aka Azzam al-Amriki or "Azzam the American," Gadahn's anti-Western video rants on behalf of al-Qaeda have become an all too familiar sight these days. Not to mention his call for Americans to convert to Islam or die and for authors such as Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes to repent their infidel ways.

Unfortunately, Gadahn is not yet in custody, but unlike the slap on the wrist jail time meted out to "American Taliban" (or "Rat Boy" according to Michael Savage) Johnny Walker Lindh, at least he's actually being called what he is - a traitor.

Now if we could just do the same for actress and liberal activist Jane Fonda whose 1972 broadcasts on Radio Hanoi have just been made available by the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation.

WWII had its Tokyo Rose and the Vietnam War had its Hanoi Jane.

Fonda recorded 19 propaganda interviews for the "Vietnamese Committee of Solidarity with the American People." Mostly, they consisted of attempts to demonize and demoralize American soldiers, paint America as the bad guy and the Vietnamese Communists as freedom fighters, and in a nauseatingly familiar gesture, equate then President Richard Nixon with Adolph Hitler (Bushhitler, anyone?). The rhetoric is straight out of the leftist propaganda playbook and still being used today by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Medea Benjamin, et al.

Leftist author and professor extrordinaire Noam Chomsky (a favorite of dictators and Islamic terrorists worldwide) also paid a visit to Hanoi in the 1970's and found time to deliver his own fawning speech to Vietnamese Communism on Radio Hanoi (hat tip: Tim Starr).

The activities of other so-called antiwar activists such as Tom Hayden, Joan Baez and yes, John Kerry, also bordered on treasonous, a subject I wrote about a while back in a column titled "The Left's Vietnam Syndrome."

But unlike Adam Gadahn, none dare call it treason.

Or do they?

Update (9/09): Unfortunately, it looks like the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation website no longer exists and hence, the link I provided above to Jane Fonda's Radio Hanoi broadcasts is defunct. Please go to Winter Soldier instead.

Long Live the Manly Virtues!

A friend forwarded me University of Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen's ode to pathetic wimpiness (which is posted at SFGate.com, for whom I also write), "Men being men is a bad deal, Guys should evolve beyond masculinity."

Guys should evolve beyond masculinity? Let's hope not.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm one of those ladies who actually appreciates the manly virtues, not to mention the incredible damage it does to a society to try and suppress them. Walter Newell's excellent book, "What Is a Man? 3000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue" expands on this thesis and should be required reading in our colleges, particularly for the likes of Professor Jensen.

Beyond being a typical lefty America/Israel hater (hat tip: Jeremayakovka), Jensen makes the mistake of equating maleness with being a jerk. This is standard fare for those indoctrinated by years of post-1960's feminist pap. The modern feminists' obsession with making men and women not simply equal, but exactly the same, has led to the downsizing (pun intended) of masculinity in American society.

The rampant metrosexuality around me in San Francisco is a case in point. If I have to see one more (straight) man walking a small, foofy dog, I'm going to puke! Then there are the guys who can't operate a screwdriver or change a lightbulb, both of which I've run into filling in as an apartment manager.

I guess the best we can hope for is that men like Jensen will phase themselves out by not breeding. And something tells me that's entirely possible...

Update: For some hilarious, thoughtful and blatantly offensive (in a good way) commentary on Jensen's article, check out this Free Republic thread.

[Update: In contrast to the Robert Jensens of the world, click here, here and here for some examples of real men!]

Cross-posted at Kesher Talk.

Pete Wilson Faces the San Francisco Inquisition

Well, it looks like the San Francisco Thought Police is up to its old tricks again.

Demonstrating the sort of Stalinist tendencies for which the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has become infamous, supervisors Tom Ammiano, Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi are demanding the resignation of KGO talk show host Pete Wilson. Assemblyman Mark Leno has chimed in for good measure.

It seems self-described "moderate" Pete Wilson (who's really a conservative and just doesn't know it yet) committed the cardinal sin for San Francisco. He dared to question the local liberal gay (LGBTQWERSIPOKJ...) community.

Wilson was critical of the platonic co-parenting (as it's known around here) of gay supervisor Bevan Dufty and his lesbian friend Rebecca Goldfader, who recently gave birth to their baby. The two are planning to move into the same building in November and raise the child together. Wilson had the audacity to refer to the coupling of sorts as "non-loving" and the baby as an "experiment," among other things.

But the truth is, both of these observations are accurate. Dufty and Goldfader do not in fact have any romantic attachment to each other, for obvious reasons. And such nontraditional families are experimental. We won't really know the outcome until these children grow up.

But just the fact that Wilson was critical in any way, shape or form was enough to put him on the chopping block. Supervisor Dufty, to his credit, has not joined in the call for Wilson's head. But his colleagues are now demanding not only Wilson's resignation, but also an on-air apology and a KGO listener and advertiser boycott.

Thus far, KGO has stood by Wilson, but it remains to be seen how owner ABC7 will react. Board president Aaron Supervisor warned ominously that "it is...our job to tell you and the public when your industry makes a mistake and abuses your power."

Abusing power by voicing an opinion?

All of this is starting to sound eerily familiar.

Perhaps Pete Wilson and The Pope should be comparing notes....

Self-Censorship Threatens the West

My latest column at SFGate.com:

Self-Censorship Threatens the West

Read it and weep.

Update: The column's been excerpted and linked at Phyllis-Chesler.com.

[Update: Received a very nice e-mail from "Muslim Refusenik" Irshad Manji in response to the column, as well as Bernard Henri-Levi's agent who thanked me for mentioning the Redeker situation.]

My Interview with CJOB

I did an interview last night with the Canadian radio station (based in Manitoba), CJOB. "The Night Hawk" host Geoff Currier and I discussed my latest SFGate column, Self-Censorship Threatens the West, and in the process, the larger question of Muslim/Western coexistence. We talked for over half an hour and covered a lot of territory that the politically incorrect would likely appreciate.

If anyone would like to listen to the interview, it's been archived at the CJOB Audio Vault. Just enter in "Oct. 12" and "9pm" and it starts about five minutes in.

Update: The interview's been blogged and made available as an mp3 file (sans commercials) at Proud To Be Canadian, a conservative Canadian blog to whom I contribute. Many thanks to blogger Joel Johannesen!

Chappaquiddick Revisited

Unfortunately for the Democratic Party and its boosters in the MSM, the Foley scandal didn't work out quite as planned. The attempts to force Speaker of the House Rep. Dennis Hastert to resign have fallen flat and the American people have already moved on to greener pastures.

Meanwhile, the Dems have their own dirty laundry to contend with in the form of Dirty Harry Reid. Not to mention that grand statesman of the Democratic Party, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, whose past, shall we say, indiscretion, has recently reared its ugly head.

Sen. Kennedy was in Connecticut last week to help raise money for Diane Farrell's 4th Congressional District campaign. It just so happens Farrell's was one of the more strident voices calling for Hastert's resignation. But Republican Rep. Christopher Shays had just about enough of his opponent's hypocrisy and according to the Hartford Courant, he actually mentioned the unmentionable---Chappaquiddick that is:

"We don't know what he has or hasn't done," Shays said of Hastert. "But she had a fundraiser for Sen. Kennedy, and we know what he did."

Then Shays elaborated:

"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died. "Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody," he added

As Lance deHaven-Smith, professor of public policy at Florida State University, put it,

"Democrats need to be careful...this could backfire on them."

Indeed.

Cross-posted at Kesher Talk.

From Dingy Harry to Dirty Harry

In a post on the so-called Foleygate scandal, I had this to say:

Let's face it, there's much corruption (both monetary and moral) among the upper ranks of government, and both parties are involved.

As if to prove my point, along comes news of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid's crooked real estate dealings. It seems Reid made $1.1 million in a Las Vegas land sale involving property he hadn't actually owned for three years. And the shenanigans didn't stop here. AP's got all the gory details.

Perhaps its time to change his nickname from Dingy Harry to Dirty Harry.

Suddenly those Democrats frothing at the mouth a week ago over what turned out to be inappropriate but not illegal conduct on the part of now-resigned Republican Rep. Mark Foley, are suddenly playing coy. Could it be that their indignation was purely political? Nah, of course not.

Speaking of purely political, The American Thinker opines on the MSM's curious lack of interest in the Harry Reid story. After the feeding frenzy surrounding the Foley scandal, it seems just a tad suspicious.

Hypocrisy, thy name is liberalism.

Columbia University Sabatoges Walid Shoebat Event

After last week's shameful display of mob violence during Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist's talk at Columbia University, the suppression of free speech on campus continues.

This time the targets were two former Islamic terrorists, Walid Shoebat and Zakaria Anani, and ex-Nazi Hilmer Von Campe, all of whom became devout Christians and now disavow their previous beliefs, particularly their former hatred for Jews. They were invited to speak by the Columbia College Republicans and e-mail invitations were sent out to the public.

One would think that such figures would be considered the true freedom fighters of the day, but in an age when terrorist sympathies in the name of "resistance" has become the norm on college campuses, these three instead were treated with contempt.

Not only did the administration send out a last-minute e-mail disinviting all but a very small group of guests and causing great inconvenience to those who showed up, but the student magazine, Columbia's Blue and White Blog, gleefully crowed about sabatoging the event with no-shows. As they put it, "We want pretty pictures of empty chairs."

This is a sad statement indeed. In the name of fighting "fascism," students and campus faculty are themselves becoming the fascists.

Kesher Talk and Solomonia have the details, plus accounts from those who did manage to catch the lecture.

On a somewhat related note, I wrote about a similar experience two years ago involving a Daniel Pipes speech at UC Berkely that was disrupted by the Muslim Students Association, among others. Click here to read "Fascism at Berkeley."

Hollywood Director David Zucker: Another 9/11 Republican

As a self-proclaimed 9/11 Republican who started an online discussion group for people like myself called the 9/11 Neocons (as in new conservatives), I've been following the various additions to our ranks with great interest. And Hollywood has been the source of more than one 9/11 "convert." Actors Ron Silver and James Woods and comedian Dennis Miller come to mind.

It's no coincidence that Jews figure prominently among the ranks of Hollywood (and otherwise) former lefties, as the rising anti-Semitism on the left continues to alienate the non-suicidal among us.

Now it seems comedy director David Zucker (who directed one of my all-time favorite comedies, "Airplane") has joined the fold. Like some others in this political sphere, Zucker has retained some of his liberal attitudes towards social issues. But when it comes to national security, it's the Republican Party, not the Democrats, that inspire his confidence. Not only that, but Zucker is directing Internet election ads for pro-Republican, tax-exempt 527 groups. This Jewish Journal article provides the juicy details:

David Zucker, the producer and director of "Airplane," "The Naked Gun" and "Scary Movie 4," embraced the Republican Party in 2004 and voted for President Bush, largely because of security concerns. Once a liberal activist and campaign adviser to President Bill Clinton, he made a low-budget anti-Kerry ad that ran mostly in Ohio and kept his political change-of-heart largely under Hollywood's radar.

Not now.

Zucker sees threats to America and Israel mounting, and he believes the Democrats are unable or unwilling to confront those challenges, so he has decided to go public with his belief that the Democrats have lost their way. Starting Oct. 9, the first of two ads Zucker directed and co-wrote will begin running on the Internet in hopes of helping the Republicans retain control of the House in the November elections. Like his movies, Zucker's edgy spots employ his trademark fast-paced, gag-a-second-slapstick humor that has made him the undisputed king of spoof.

Zucker's hilarious ad spoofing the Democratic Party, and particularly the late, not so great, Clinton administration Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is a must-see. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Mentally Ill also makes a cameo performance...sort of. Watch it at YouTube. (And yes, it's been flagged as "inappropriate.")

And welcome to the right side, Mr. Zucker. We're more than happy to have you!

Update: According to Drudge, GOP strategists are refusing to use Zucker's ad because they consider it too controversial. What a bunch of wimps! They could learn a thing or two about media savvy from us former lefties, INMHO...

Update: The plot thickens over at Hot Air.

Cross-posted at Kesher Talk.

Blogging Interrupted

No sooner had I gotten started blogging last week, when life interrupted. Hence my absence for the last several days. The Fleet Week festivities took up most of my time, not to mention a friend visiting from out of town.

Needless to say, it was a quite a weekend. I watched the Blue Angels air show both days, once from down among the crowds at the waterfront and then from a roof deck with a view of the entire bay.

The incredible sonic boom (which many of us dubbed "The sound of victory") of the Blue Angels aside, my favorite moment was when all six jets, after flying straight up, descended downwards in formation in complete silence. A beautiful sight indeed.

As expected, it was a time of rare patriotism and military pride for San Francisco. Locals got to enjoy the spectacular air acrobatics and fighting acumen (many of them have served in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond) of the various air show pilots, go aboard docked Navy ships, and see cute sailors wandering all over town! And on top of it all, the weather was gloriously fog-free.

Other than that, I've been hard at work on my next SFGate column. It will focus on self-censorship in the west when it comes to critiquing Islam in any way, shape or form. Beginning with the Pope's recent comments, a series of capitulations have occurred across the western world, which I examine from the international to the local level. Anyway, I hope it will do justice to this important topic.

So for now, and as Porky once said, that's all folks...