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Whenever I see some college student sporting the iconic image of Che Guevara, the psychopathic physician whose romantic tale of blood and gore has thrilled the hearts of liberals every where, I chuckle. His now legendary diary, The Motorcycle Diaries, almost a total fabrication by the Cuban Ministry of Propaganda, has been the subject of many books and feature films. Here is a hint for all you thoughtful liberal documentary filmmakers, biographers, and journalists: if your source of information is published and distributed by a communist entity called the “Ministry of Propaganda” then every word of the source material is suspect at the very least. But of course, liberals love anything communistic and, as we all know, Cuba can do no wrong. Oh for the glory days of Mao and Stalin…what liberal’s heart doesn’t leap to fondly remember them.

Here are some bullet points for all you Che admirers out there:

- Twice, Che plotted terrorist attacks against New York City. In November 1962, the FBI cracked a terrorist plot by Cuban agents who targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Grand Central Terminal. They planned to blow up those landmarks with 12 incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT the day after Thanksgiving. Several months before visiting New York in December 1964 and being feted by the toast of the city’s intelligentsia, Che hatched a plan with the Black Liberation Army to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument. The plotters were infiltrated in 1965 by a sharp-eyed NYPD cadet.

- Che detested rock and roll and railed against “long hairs,” “lazy youths,” and homosexuals. At one point, he wrote that the young must always “listen carefully - and with the utmost respect – to the advice of their elders who held governmental authority.”

- Che sidelined black Cubans and mocked those who were part of the revolutionary movement. He once told radio host Luis Pons, “We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.”

- Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad, which he supervised at his jungle headquarters in Cuba. He also hosted book burnings, torching thousands of books owned by suspect intellectuals and librarians.

–Che enjoyed viewing executions and had a special window constructed in his study so he could watch men and women being shot to death. What a hero!

He’s the ultimate symbol of radical chic but Che Guevara was really a homophobic, racist square who personally ordered the jailing and executions of innocent men, women and children?

According to Humberto Fontova, the author of “Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him,” Guevara probably would have imprisoned or punished most of his celebrity fans, from Johnny Depp to Angelina Jolie.

Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America

By the recently Nobel Peace Prize nominated Kenneth Timmerman 

Two nuggets of inestimable value surfaced in this book for me. First, it is the realization that the stupefying double-speak of so many Islamic voices is made possible by the fact that they say different things in English than they say in Arabic.

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The End of Days by Gershom Gorenberg

Here is yet another alarmist tome by an author who can’t seem to see the truth that is exploding all around him. I suppose I can be considered a fundamentalist. I believe that because the scripture compels me to “love my neighbor just as I love myself” that I should actually do everything in my power to do just that. I know hundreds of other fundamentalists and I am dismayed by these books from journalists or commentators who are clearly secular if not agnostic/atheist in their world view who attempt to analyze the state of fundamentalism. How absurd. It’s alike a rich white kid from Beverly Hills writing books about the pitfalls of being a welfare mother in Compton.

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THE MIDDLE EAST by Bernard Lewis

Historians know a dirty little secret (actually thousands, but lets just talk about this one).  It is a fact that should be shouted from the mountain tops, but is carefully overlooked by the “useful idiots” on the left who apologize humbly to the terrorists that any of us are rude enough to still be alive to impede their expansion.  A peek into the history of the regions of Islam will reveal an incredibly germane, but ignored key to understanding the Muslim world.  Here it is: (I am whispering now, so lean in close) they were slaughtering people (each other and others) before any non-Arab (think white) or colonizing power ever made contact with them.  What? What what? What was that?  I thought they only kill in response to the “policies of the West”  or because of Israel or because of “W” or because of Oil or because of the injustices of the colonial powers (building all those terrible rails, roads, hospitals, and schools!)

No.  The fact is, the House of Islam was flowing with rivers of blood before any oil ever fired the imagination of a white man and before any European powers ever made an impactful appearance in the Arab world.  Yep.  They just kill people…well…because their bible tells them it is what god likes.  Of course it says the opposite too (Muhammad could have used one of those Hollywood continuity assistants to check for contradictions).
You can find the historical foundations of this modern mess right here from Bernard Lewis.  This is an excellent book which I highly recommend.

Thomas Sowell (born 30 June 1930), is an American economist, political writer, and commentator, generally from a socially conservative and economically laissez faire perspective. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. In 1990, he won the Francis Boyer Award, presented by the American Enterprise Institute. In 2002 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal for prolific scholarship melding history, economics, and political science. Conservative British author Paul Johnson has described Sowell as “America’s leading philosopher”.

Quotes from the Man

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

“‘Entitlement’ is not only the opposite of achievement, it undermines incentives to do all the hard work that leads to achievement. It is the people who were born and raised in the welfare state atmosphere who seem to have great difficulty finding jobs.”

“The next time some academics tell you how important ‘diversity’ is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

“The real minimum wage is zero [unemployment].”

“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

“Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.”

“Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them. It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

My best advice to any thinking American who might stumble across this post is to go out and buy everything you can from this man, read it, assimilate it, and pass it on.
 
My current recommended Sowell tome: Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of essays by Thomas Sowell, published in 2005.
 
Another brilliant book you might like is: Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study 2004 by economist Thomas Sowell.
 
(Mr. Burke)
 
Here’s a brief review of it:
 
 Already known as a critic of affirmative action or race-based hiring and promotion, Sowell, himself African-American, analyzes the specific effects of such policies on India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, four countries with longer multiethnic histories and then compares them with the recent history of the United States in this regard.
 
 According to Dutch Martina’s review of this book:[1]
 
 Among the common consequences of preference policies in the five-country sample are:
 They encourage non-preferred groups to redesignate themselves as members of preferred groups to take advantage of group preference policies;
 
They tend to benefit primarily the most fortunate among the preferred group (e.g. black millionaires), often to the detriment of the least fortunate among the non-preferred groups (e.g. poor whites);
 
They reduce the incentives of both the preferred and non-preferred to perform at their best — the former because doing so is unnecessary and the latter because it can prove futile– thereby resulting in net losses for society as a whole; and
 
They engender animosity toward preferred groups as well as on the part of preferred groups themselves, whose main problem in some cases has been their own inadequacy combined with their resentment of non-preferred groups who– without preferences– consistently outperform them.

HATRED’S KINGDOM by Dore Gold

I am embarrassed to realize the extent of my own ignorance regarding the Wahabi menace. As a lover of history and one who could draw a fairly accurate survey of the events that shaped the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I was grievously unaware of the monstrous theology and murderous campaign of Ibn `Abd Al-Wahhab. One wonders how the terrors of the crusades could compare to the genocidal murder of “impure” Muslims by the fanatical armies of Wahab. One wonders still why the West fails to see the ever-present and growing threat posed by the Wahhabi poison which spans out from Saudi Arabia (our allies?) to infect Muslims around the world.

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WHAT WENT WRONG by Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis is always described as the “imminent historian and commentator on the Middle East” and I suppose I can concur.  However, I have come to believe that the answer to the question posed in this little volume is best answered by theologians and psychologists, not historians.  What went wrong is Islam itself. Islam went wrong. Islam is wrong. Islam is an inherently violent belief system that vehemently silencing the moderating voices of modernity. Until Islamic scholars have the freedom to condemn violent and bigoted ideology, Islam will be a force for evil on planet earth. –Mr. Burke

Amazon.com Editorial Review
Bernard Lewis is the West’s greatest historian and interpreter of the Near East. Books such as The Middle East and The Arabs in History are required reading for anybody who hopes to understand the region and its people. Now Lewis offers What Went Wrong?, a concise and timely survey of how Islamic civilization fell from worldwide leadership in almost every frontier of human knowledge five or six centuries ago to a “poor, weak, and ignorant” backwater that is today dominated by “shabby tyrannies … modern only in their apparatus of repression and terror.” He offers no easy answers, but does provide an engaging chronicle of the Arab encounter with Europe in all its military, economic, and cultural dimensions. The most dramatic reversal, he says, may have occurred in the sciences: “Those who had been disciples now became teachers; those who had been masters became pupils, often reluctant and resentful pupils.” Today’s Arab governments have blamed their plight on any number of external culprits, from Western imperialism to the Jews. Lewis believes they must instead commit to putting their own houses in order: “If the peoples of Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, [and] poverty and oppression.” Anybody who wants to understand the historical backdrop to September 11 would do well to look for it on these pages. –John Miller