Story Behind Gaza Flotilla

Actual IDF Video on Gaza Flotilla

We’ll see how the Main Stream Media (MSM) handles the supposed relief ship headed to the Gaza Strip, when the actual story (see IDF video) may be different.

The Israeli Defense Force has blocked ships from entering Gaza ports, due to weapons and terrorist smuggling operations.     So when the supposed relief flotilla headed to Gaza and attempted to break through the IDF Naval blockade, the Israeli military intercepted the boats in the flotilla.

Here is the videos http://www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk   

A bit different story on what the MSM will be reporting, as compared to what actually happened.    Unfortunately there were lives lost and injuries on both sides, but only after the people on the supposed relief mission attacked the Israeli soldiers sent in to intercept the ships.

It gets more interesting.  Based on research reports in the Weekly Standard, drawn from the US Department of the Treasury, the sponsoring organization of the flotilla is the Turkish based IHH, a known terrorist organization with ties to Hamas.

The Turkish organizers of the Gaza Strip-bound flotilla that was boarded this morning by Israeli commandos knew well in advance that their vessels would never reach Israeli waters. That's because the organizers belong to a nonprofit that was banned by the Israeli government in July 2008 for its ties to terrorism finance.

The Turkish IHH (Islan Haklary Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi in Turkish) was founded in 1992, and reportedly popped up on the CIA's radar in 1996 for its radical Islamist leanings.  Like many other Islamist charities, the IHH has a record of providing relief to areas where disaster has struck in the Muslim world. 

However, the organization is not a force for good. The Turkish nonprofit belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). Notably, the Union is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known best for his religious ruling that encourages suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.  According to one report, Qardawi personally transferred millions of dollars to the Union in an effort to provide financial support to Hamas.

In 2008, the Israelis banned IHH, along with 35 other Islamist charities worldwide, for its ties to the Union of Good.  This was a follow-on designation; Israelis first blocked the Union of Good from operating in the West Bank and Gaza in 2002.  

Interestingly, the Union of Good may not only be tied to Hamas. Included in the Israeli list of 36 designees was the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO).  In 2006, both the U.S. government and the United Nations designated the IIRO branch offices in Indonesia and the Philippines for financing al Qaeda.  French magistrate Jean-Louis Brougiere also testified that IHH had an "important role" in Ahmed Ressam's failed "millennium plot" to bomb the Los Angeles airport in late 1999.   Source:  The Weekly Standard on-line   www.weeklystandard.com    Jonathan Schanzer

So while the secular world and anti-Isreal Arab world is “outraged”, according to MSM reports, the real facts would indicate that under the guise of a humanitarian mission, a flotilla of pro-Gaza protesters (infiltrated by terrorists) was on their way to Gaza.    

© 2010, Jasper Welch, Four Corners Media   www.jasperwelch.org  

The Weekly Standard Blog

The Weekly Standard Blog

Most leading political and news publications have Blog sections on their web site pages.    Usually the key reporters, colunmists, pundits and writers will pen short reports, feature web links and release breaking news.   The Weekly Standard has a great blog

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/TWSFPView.asp

With the recent 2009 mid-term election, health care debate and news that unemployment is over 10%, the Weekly Standard   www.weeklystandard.com   has plenty of articles, columns and punditry.

(c) 2009, Jasper Welch, Four Corners Media, www.jasperwelch.org  

The ACORN nut is cracked open

The ACORN nut is cracked open

Editors Note:  This excellent article by Charlotte Allen on the web that ACORN has woven was released in November 2008 by The Weekly Standard.     Recent video’s (www.biggovernment.com) have exposed serious issues with ACORN field offices, resulting in de-funding by Congress for some ACORN activities.    The US Census has also pulled funding.   But as Charlotte Allen’s article points out, the seeds of this ACORN corruption and collusion under the name of community organizing have been growing since their inception in 1970.

From Little ACORNs, Big Scandals Grow

Barack Obama: torn between two models of community organizing.

by Charlotte Allen     www.weeklystandard.com

11/03/2008, Volume 014, Issue 08

The in-your-face Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is currently being investigated for voter-registration fraud in 13 states. ACORN is often referred to as the spawn of Saul Alinsky (1909-72), the godfather of radical community organizers, whose most famous aphorism was "Keep the pressure on." ACORN's founders certainly had Alinsky's principles in mind when they founded the organization in 1970.

There is a web of connections between Alinsky, ACORN, and the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. From 1985 to 1988, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based consortium operated by several Alinsky disciples on Chicago's poverty-plagued South Side. The DCP was imbued with Alinsky's philosophy of helping poor people band together at the grassroots level to confront a city government that frequently neglected them. (Obama contributed to the anthology After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, touting the "impressive results" his Alinsky-inspired project had achieved.) Just before he left Chicago for Harvard Law School, Obama also went through training with the organization Alinsky founded in 1940, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), and which carries on his legacy today.

Back in Chicago in the early 1990s, Obama represented ACORN in a voter-registration suit and directed a voter-registration drive for an ACORN affiliate, Project Vote. He sat on the board of the Chicago-based Woods Foundation that made hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of grants to Project Vote and (according to a report published in an ACORN journal in 2004) ran a session on power as part of ACORN's annual leadership training sessions for several years before his first run for public office in 1996.

To hear it from people connected to IAF, though, Obama took an unfortunate turn when he linked himself to ACORN, whose activist shenanigans would have Alinsky spinning in his grave. These range from allegedly procuring thousands of phony and multiple signatures on voter registration lists (one 19-year-old in Cleveland claimed to have been bribed with cash and cigarettes to register 72 times over 18 months) to using taxpayer funds to strong-arm mortgage companies into lending to the un-credit-worthy, helping precipitate the current financial meltdown.

"Shakedowns" and "blackmail" were the words used by IAF's director, Edward Chambers, a protégé of Alinsky, about ACORN and its activities when I called the IAF's Chicago headquarters (IAF today trains organizers in a loose network of some 57 affiliates in 21 states). It was the day before the New York Times published a story about a June 18 internal report by an ACORN lawyer which contained a laundry list of "potentially improper use of charitable dollars for political purposes; money transfers among [ACORN's 174 affiliates, some of them tax-exempt, others not], and potential conflicts created by employees working for multiple affiliates," as Times reporter Stephanie Strom put it.  One area of potential impropriety detailed in Strom's story is the relationship between Project Vote, registered as a tax-exempt charity with the Internal Revenue Service since 1994 and thus barred from engaging in partisan political activities, and ACORN itself, a membership organization incorporated under Louisiana law that is nonprofit but not tax-exempt and is thus free to be as partisan as it wants. ACORN's political action committee, for example, endorsed Obama in February, and the Obama campaign in turn paid an ACORN consulting affiliate, Citizens Services Inc., more than $832,000 for its work in helping Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

© 2009, The Weekly Standard, LLC      www.weeklystandard.com  

Obama Doubles Down on US Debt

Doubling Down on Government Debt

What does a $3.6 Trillion dollar budget buy?  Well first you have to pay for it with increased taxes, increased debt and less charitable giving.  For what?  More government programs, oversight and overreaching from Washington, DC.  President Obama is determined to double down on Government debt.   In fact, at this rate, his budget proposals over the next 5 years will double the US Government debt, that took 200 years to accumulate.

From the www.weeklystandard.com  “Well, it's about time. The Beltway is waking up to the realities of President Obama's budget plan, which taxes, spends, and borrows as far as the eye can see. The president's vast new commitments in the areas of health care, energy, and education have already spooked small-government Republicans and the foreign investors who help finance America's public debt. Now even some Democrats are beginning to realize that the president's fiscal policies are unsustainable in the long--and maybe medium--run. What took them so long?”   Lead paragraph: A Big, Fat Failure Obama's budget makes a bad situation worse. by Matthew Continetti

 US Senator Judd Greg (R-New Hampshire)  is leading the loyal opposition as the US Senate is debating the FY2010 US Federal budget. http://budget.senate.gov/republican/

Here are the comments of Senator Greg (ranking Republican on the US Senate budget committee) regarding the proposed Obama FY2010 budget on March 28, 2009:

“But what concerns many of us are his proposals in the budget he recently sent to the Congress that dramatically grow the size and cost of government and move it to the left. It is our opinion that this plan spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much.”

Senator Greg continues:  “In the next five years, President Obama’s budget will double the national debt, in the next ten years it will triple the national debt.  To say this another way, if you take all the debt of our country run up by all of our presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush, the total debt over all those 200 plus years since we started as a nation, it is President Obama’s plan to double that debt in just the first five years that he is in office. He is also planning to spend more on the government as a percentage of our economy than at any time since World War II.

“His budget assumes the deficit will average $1 trillion dollars every year for the next ten years and will add well over $9 trillion dollars in new debts to our children’s backs.

 He also is proposing the largest tax increase in history, much of it aimed at taxing small business people who have been, over the years, the best job creators in our economy. And further, he is proposing a massive new national sales tax on your electric bill, so that every time you turn on a light switch in your house you will be hit with a new tax, and it averages over $3,000 per household.”     US Senator Judd Greg, R-New Hampshire

President Obama and his Democrat supporters in Congress are preparing to double down on spending and government programs, thereby doubling the US debt. Now is the time to write or call your Congressman.   And tell you friends that the overspending is out of control at the Federal level.

© 2009, Jasper Welch, Four Corners Media   www.jasperwelch.org