Jihadists love liberal "coexist" nonsense

How did Islam coexist with the Buddhists in what is now Afghanistan? Jihad annihilated every single Buddhist and their libraries and monasteries.

There is a massive data base of the coexistence between Islam and the rest of the world at thereligionofpeace.com. It catalogs more than 20,000 jihad attacks around the world since 9/11 2001. Here is a chart of the data of the top 4 nations as victims of jihad:

Put another way, this is how Islam coexists today with Jews, Buddhists, Christians and Hindus. It practices jihad against all non-Muslims, Kafirs.

The idea of coexist has a social ring to it, we’re all one big happy family. But how do we talk about all religions and not get into which one is right or best? Well, there is an easy way to do it. If you are not a member of a religion, the only thing you care about is how you are treated by those who belong to that religion. In short, you only care about the ethics and character of the adherent.

All of the world’s religions have an ethical code that is rooted in the Golden Rule. Islam 

does not have a Golden Rule. Mohammed’s life is the perfect example of how not to be a good neighbor. How do you coexist with a neighbor who has the ethical choice of jihad of murder and deceit?

What do religious leaders in American think about coexisting with Islam? They love it. Coexist is the mental mush that fills the heads of the useful idiots that go to the Family of Abraham religious dialogues. The ministers and rabbis who go to these dialogs know as much about Islam as what is found on the Coexist bumper sticker. Really, their ignorance is astounding. They are there to coexist and the imam is there to dominate. Dhimmi Christians and Jews want to tie, the Muslim wants to win.

Read it all here.


Related reading:  Jihad weapons cache found in Nigeria

Religious Intolerance in Sudan

The Secretary of State first designated Sudan as a CPC in 1999, and most recently redesignated it in August 2011. Consequently, the country was ineligible for aid under Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Sudan’s Interim National Constitution (INC) and other laws and policies restrict religious freedom and, in practice, the government generally enforced legal and policy restrictions on this right. The trend in the government’s respect for religious freedom did not change significantly during the year. The government at times enforced laws against blasphemy and defaming Islam. Authorities harassed religious practitioners of unregistered groups and limited the freedom of the four registered religious groups. There were instances of abuse and mistreatment. The security services detained foreign English teachers on suspicion of proselytizing, and ultimately deported them, along with several family members, without court proceedings. State governments and local authorities razed two churches.

In Sudan, most non-Muslim groups refrained from public proselytizing due to a vaguely worded law that allowed the government to charge them with supporting apostasy. The government stepped up its efforts to prosecute suspected proselytizers. In October the security services detained several foreign English teachers, who were Christians, on suspicion of proselytizing, which the teachers denied. Authorities held two teachers for several weeks before ultimately deporting them, along with several family members, without court proceedings.

In Sudan, there were credible reports that state governments and local authorities razed two churches. In June, authorities in Khartoum State overrode a longstanding informal agreement and destroyed a building used as an Episcopal church, and two days later, a Catholic church. In Eritrea, the government continued to harass members of unregistered religious groups, and detained many without due process, occasionally for long periods of time, sometimes by informally charging them with threatening national security. At year’s end, NGOs estimated the total of those imprisoned because of their religious beliefs at 1,500, including several dozen members of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In April, in Sudan, rioters in Khartoum brushed aside inadequate local police forces and burned an evangelical church compound used by a mix of Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Sudanese worshippers. The authorities did not charge any of the attackers by year’s end.

Information from International Religious Freedom Report for 2012

Criminal World's Bank of Choice

Associated Press 

"Calling it perhaps the biggest money-laundering scheme in U.S. history, federal prosecutors charged seven people Tuesday with running what amounted to an online, underworld bank that handled $6 billion for drug dealers, child pornographers, identity thieves and other criminals around the globe. 

The case was aimed at Liberty Reserve, a currency-transfer and payment-processing company based in Costa Rica that authorities say allowed customers to move money anonymously from one account to another via the Internet with almost no questions asked. 

U.S. officials said the enterprise was staggering in scope. The probe involved law enforcement in 17 countries “and is believed to be the largest money laundering prosecution in history,” the prosecutor’s office said. Over roughly seven years, Liberty Reserve processed 55 million illicit transactions worldwide for 1 million users, including 200,000 in the U.S. The network "became the bank of choice for the criminal underworld," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.

Quote of the Week - Fr. Robert Hart

"The Scriptures we read also call us to overcome the enemy within, the fallen nature that is inclined toward sin, that sympathizes with all that is deadly and destructive. A half-hearted commitment based on one’s own idea of nice religion is not going to provide any genuine motive for engaging in that battle."-- Fr. Robert Hart (From here.)

Immigrants Riot in Sweden

STOCKHOLM — Eva Bromster, an elementary school principal, was jolted awake by a telephone call late Thursday night. “Your school is burning,” her boss, the director of the local education department, told her.

Ms. Bromster rushed to the school, in the mostly immigrant district of Tensta, north of Stockholm, and found one room gutted by fire and another filled with ankle-deep water after firefighters had doused the flames. It was the second fire at the school in three days.

In Stockholm and other towns and cities last week, bands made up mostly of young immigrants set buildings and cars ablaze in a spasm of destructive rage rarely seen in a country proud of its normally tranquil, law-abiding ways.

The disturbances, with echoes of urban eruptions in France in 2005 and Britain in 2011, have pushed Sweden to the center of a heated debate across Europe about immigration and the tensions it causes in a time of deep economic malaise.

Read it all here.

Montana Man Survives Wrong Diagnosis

A Montana man brain cancer diagnosis shows how difficult it is to determine whether or not a person has a "terminal illness". Mark Templin was awarded US$59,000 for expenses and emotional stress after his doctor wrongly told him in 2009 that he had only six months to live. "It is difficult to put a price tag on the anguish of a man wrongly convinced of his impending death," said the judge. "Mr. Templin lived for 148 days ... under the mistaken impression that he was dying of metastatic brain cancer."

One of Templin's daughters asked the doctor how her father would die and "he explained one of the tumors would grow 'like cauliflower' and Templin would die from a brain bleed."

After that disturbing diagnosis, Mr Templin sold his truck and quit his job. He put his affairs in order and displayed a large sign in his home saying "Do Not Resuscitate". His family held a "last birthday" dinner for him and he paid for a funeral service. His son-in-law made a wooden box for his ashes. He entered a hospice for dying patients.

He even considered shooting himself to spare himself and his family the pain of a terminal illness.

However, Mr Templin began to get better, not worse. He booked himself out of the hospice and had more tests. These revealed that he had had a stroke and that he did not have a brain tumor.

Good thing he didn't live in a state like Oregon or Vermont that pushes euthanasia!

Syria Willing to Talk

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich told a news conference in Moscow, "'We are pleased to announce that Damascus has expressed its readiness in principle to participate in the international conference [on Syria] in order for Syrians themselves to find a political path to a solution of a conflict that is so disastrous for the nation and the region."

The peace conference, dubbed 'Geneva 2' and expected to be held in June in the Swiss city, would be aimed at ending the raging Syrian civil war, which in two years has killed more than 80,000 people.

'Demands to immediately set a concrete date for convening the conference, with no clarity about who will speak on behalf of the opposition and what powers they will have, cannot not be taken seriously,' Lukashevich cautioned.

Read it all here.

Bolivian Radio Station Destroyed

Reporters Without Borders condemns the destruction of Radio AM 1080 La Voz de las Mayorías, a community radio station based in Caranavi, 160 km northeast of La Paz, on 21 May 2013.

Affiliated with the network of Radios of the Original Peoples (RPO), the station was destroyed in clashes between two rival peasant groups, the Provincial Agrarian Federation of Peasants of Caranavi (FAPCA) and the Special Agrarian Federation of Peasants of Carrasco.

Accusing the station of biased reporting, a group of protesters stormed into its offices, located inside FAPCA headquarters, and threatened to kill journalist Franz Eddy Loza, who fled and found refuge with neighbours. The protesters then smashed all the equipment.

“Nothing is left of the radio station,” Loza told Reporters Without Borders. “I kept a few papers, including the operating licence, but nothing else.”

Other journalists were threatened or attacked by protesters during the clashes. They included Radio Televisión Caranavi cameraman Juan Carlos Mazarro, who was hit and whose camera was taken. Around 30 people were injured.

“Several radio stations were the target of dynamite attacks last year, including Radioemisoras Bolivia 1.450 Khz AM, a community radio that was attacked on 26 June,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“The media should not be made to pay for the violence resulting from social and political conflicts. The safety of journalists and their right to work must be respected.”

Source: IFEX

State Dept: Drones Killed 4 US Citizens

The Obama administration Wednesday for the first time acknowledged killing four U.S. citizens in “counterterrorism operations” abroad.

The deaths of three of the Americans — Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abd al-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan, all of whom were killed in drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 — had been previously reported. The death of the fourth, Jude Kennan Mohammad, a Florida native apparently killed in Pakistan, had not been.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Game of Drones; Obama's Drone Legacy; Americans Protest Drone Strikes in Pakistan

"Sweeping" Immigration Bill Approved

A Senate committee approved a sweeping immigration reform bill Tuesday that would provide a path to citizenship for up to 11 million illegal immigrants, setting the stage for the full Senate to consider the landmark legislation next month.

After five days of debate over dozens of amendments, the Judiciary Committee voted 13 to 5 in support of the bill, with three Republicans joining the committee’s 10 Democrats. The legislation emerged with its core provisions largely intact, including new visa programs for high-tech and low-skilled workers and new investments in strengthening border control.

Read it all here.

Quote of the Week - President Obama

"We have cleared away the rubble of crisis," President Obama reported in his 2013 State of the Union address, "and we can say with renewed confidence that the State of our Union is stronger."

In the world today what we say often comes back to haunt us.

President Obama also optimistically referred to neuroscience as having a payback to the American economy. He said: "Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy -- every dollar," he said. "Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer's. They're developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation."

Most neuroscientists are not so optimistic.

Politics News Alert - Monday, May 20, 2013 White House officials knew about IRS probe but did not tell Obama, Carney says Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday. The White House had previously said that counsel Kathryn Ruemmler did not learn about the investigation until the week of April 22nd, but it made no mention that McDonough and other White House aides had been informed. On Monday, Carney said the chief of staff and other aides learned of the investigation the week of April 16. From here.

Related: Obama's Messy Second Term

Iran and Boko Haram Stir Trouble in Nigeria

"The president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will come for a two-day visit in our country beginning on Monday," according to a government statement read out on national television Saturday.

"He will lead a large delegation and both our nations will discuss cooperation and means of strengthening it," Iran's ambassador said after meeting Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou.

Mohammad Nikkhah said the visit would yield "excellent opportunities that will benefit both peoples".

He did not elaborate but Niger is one of the world's top producers of uranium, which Iran has long been seeking to acquire for its controversial nuclear programme.

Investigations have also revealed that the Iranian leader is to meet secretly with leaders of Islamic sect Boko Haram who operate in the north of Nigeria.

Boko Haram have been in a fierce battle with the Nigerian state since 2009 and have claimed over 4,000 lives.

SOURCE : AFRICA EAGLE

Related reading: Boko Haram Butchers Christian Factory Workers; Boko Haram Murders 9 Polio Workers; North Korean Doctors Murdered by Boko Haram; Boko Haram is a Terrorist Group; Nigerian Muslims Condemn Boko Haram;Nigeria Tolerates Persecution of Christians

Ron Radosh on IRS Scandal

"One must remember that many liberals and leftists see their actions as non-partisan. After all, they are only serving the public interest by stopping conservatives from organizing and expressing their views."--Ron Radosh


The story of the IRS’s policy of targeting right-leaning groups, which played out over several years in Cincinnati, Washington, and dozens of other cities and towns, was one of a bureaucracy caught in a morass of uncertainty and outside pressure. The actions also confirmed the suspicions of many conservatives after they had complained for years of harassment by the tax agency.

According to the inspector general’s report, as IRS officials in Cincinnati tried to decide what to do about the groups — political advocacy organizations seeking what is known as 501 (c)(4) status — they sent out intrusive questionnaires seeking donor lists, copies of meeting minutes and reams of other documents. Applications sat around for months, sometimes years; some organizations ended up folding while awaiting answers that never came.

Read it all here.

You too may experience IRS harassment

The Internal Revenue Service's watchdog told top Treasury officials around June 2012 he was investigating allegations the tax agency had targeted conservative groups, for the first time indicating that Obama administration officials were aware of the explosive matter in the midst of the president's re-election campaign.

The disclosure to the Treasury general counsel and the deputy secretary was a cursory one, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. He said he didn't reveal conclusions of the probe, which was in its early stages, and his disclosure came as part of a routine update to Treasury leaders. At the time, Republican lawmakers were complaining publicly about alleged IRS targeting of tea-party groups.

Read it all here.

Lots of people seem indifferent to this scandal. I find that a cause of anxiety.  Perhaps we need to hear these wise words from Eli Wiesel:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

“Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.” 

Justice Department collected 2012 AP records

The Associated Press (AP) has revealed that the U.S. Justice Department secretly collected telephone records of 20 of its phone lines from April and May 2012. The records may contain communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by the AP.

Read it all here.

Messy Second Term: Incompetence, Ignorance or Indifference?

Too much golf and too many White House parties (on the tax payer's dime) may be affecting the President's focus.  He shows signs of slacking, maybe from indifference.

By Dan Balz

After answering questions Monday morning about two of the controversies that have undermined his administration, President Obama flew off to New York to raise money for the Democratic Party. There, before partisan donors, he reflected on his second term and said he will continue to reach out to Republicans. “I sure want to do some governing,” he explained.

Obama’s words suggest that he believes there is a way to compartmentalize the business of his second term: legislative and other business here, scandals over there. But things are too messy for that right now. A politician who has counted good luck as part of his skill set will need all the breaks he can muster to pull off that bit of political jujitsu.

Even in the best of times, Obama’s outreach to Republicans produced little in return — and these are no longer close to the best of times. The question is whether the barely civil relationship between the White House and the opposition party has been irreparably damaged. A related question is how much the controversies will weaken Obama’s standing with the public. Together, the answers will decide how effectively he can govern.

It is too early to draw any broad conclusions about the long-term damage to Obama’s presidency from the news that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups and that the Justice Department collected two months of phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors. But in the moment, these controversies — along with the ongoing congressional investigation of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya — have created major challenges for the administration.

The president and his advisers have tried to insulate the White House from the actions of the IRS and the Justice Department, claiming ignorance. The IRS, officials argued Friday, is quasi-independent. It took the president three days to express his outrage at the agency’s actions. As for the Justice Department’s leak investigation, White House officials said Monday night that it was a department decision that was not forwarded to the president.

Those are temporary responses that probably will not be sufficient over time. The White House may have known nothing about either, but both are now the president’s problem. And both reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Another diplomatic mistep: Promoting gay rights abroad; Libya attacks reveal failure of Administration; IRS officials knew of Conservative harassment in 2011

IRS Acting Director said what ?

President Obama said on Tuesday that the acting commissioner of the IRS, Steve T. Miller, would resign in his administration’s first action in response to the disclosure that the IRS had targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny.

Read it here.


Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller said that partisanship was not the motivating factor behind his agency's targeting of conservative groups. "I do not believe partisanship motivated" the political and donor questions posed to Tea Party and other applicants, Miller told the panel. "Foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient."

Nope! I'm not buying that.

Another diplomatic mistep: Promoting gay rights abroad

As June approaches, get ready for the official celebration of “Gay Pride Month” by US embassies abroad.

If sodomy and same-sex marriage are constitutional rights, what is their relationship to American foreign policy? Despite the tremendous controversy regarding these issues within the United States, the Obama administration has gone ahead and placed them at the center of US diplomacy. Why? In Libido Dominandi, E. Michael Jones wrote that the rationalization of sexual misbehavior “could only calm the troubled conscience in an effective manner when it was legitimized by the regime in power… [which] went on in the name of high moral purpose to make this vision normative for the entire world.”

Therefore, the Obama administration, after promoting homosexual rights and marriage in the US, has undertaken the task of universalizing the rationalization for sodomitical behavior and is doing so with high moral rhetoric – in this case, by appropriating the language of human rights.

The effort began in earnest on International Human Rights Day, December 6, 2011, with a powerful pair of events. President Obama issued a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies, directing them “to ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons”. Mr Obama said that, “The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human rights”.

The departments and agencies included the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Export Import Bank, the United States Trade Representative, and “such other agencies as the President may designate.” All US agencies engaged abroad were directed to prepare a report each year “on their progress toward advancing these initiatives”.

Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, explained,

“They have directed their embassies everywhere to monitor and assist domestic homosexual movements whether the host country and their people accept it or not. The US is very powerful and can force governments to submit to its social-policy views. They are intent on forcing homosexual ‘marriage’ and homosexual adoption on countries that are offended by such things. They are intent on forcing sexual orientation and gender identity as new categories of non-discrimination that will trump the rights of religious believers… Most people recognize that the homosexual lifestyle is harmful to public health and morals. The effect of the Obama policy is to offend billions of people and force this view on reluctant governments. This is most especially offensive to countries that are predominantly Christian and Muslim. In fact, Christianity and Islam are among the chief obstacles of this agenda and policy.”

State Department sophistry

While President Obama took the action, Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, gave the rationale in an International Human Rights Day speech on the same day, December 6, in which she proclaimed that that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. She also announced that the US would give more than US$3 million to a new Global Equality Fund in order to help civil society organizations promote homosexual advocacy.

Mrs. Clinton came energetically to the defense of those “forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm. I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people”, whom she described with a strong Rousseauian echo as “human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity…” But, if they were born free, why are they not free now? No doubt, because society oppresses them, just as South Africa once oppressed its black population through apartheid – an example Mrs. Clinton gives. But history overcame that, and since, as Rousseau taught, man is a product of history, history can overcome this, too. Thus, Mrs. Clinton ends with the admonition, “Be on the right side of history”.

It is a testimony to the influence of Rousseau that Secretary Clinton should have appealed to history for the vindication of “gay” rights rather than to moral principle. Had it been the latter, she would have had to say rather that, in order “to protect themselves from harm”, LGBT persons should “suppress” precisely that part of themselves inclined to indulge in disordered sexual acts, just as anyone should resist their inclinations to immoral acts, whatever their kind.

Mrs Clinton averred that “being LGBT does not make you less human”. That is certainly so, unless you consistently give in to one of these disordered inclinations. In a parallel case, being an alcoholic also does not make you less human. However, practicing alcoholism by living life in an inebriated stupor does make you less human in the Aristotelian sense that it impairs your Nature or incapacitates you fulfilling it. If it is virtue that enables man to reach his natural end in becoming fully human, then it is vice that prevents him from doing so, thus making him less human.

Fully embracing the rationalization of the same-sex cause, Secretary Clinton espoused “gender identity” as equivalent to being black or being a woman. It is “who they are”. In a moment of humility, she stated that, “my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country.”

It was? What was it? Being homosexual or lesbian was not a crime in the United States, so what was she referring to? Mrs. Clinton never said, but the it to which she alluded is sodomy, the elephant in the room. She repeated the mantra that “it is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay…” and “it should never be a crime to be gay”. One would have to agree in so far as persecution of and violence against homosexuals is concerned but, as Austin Ruse has pointed out, “Such attacks upon individuals are already recognized as violations of human rights in international law particularly in the 1966 Covenantsimplementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other existing treaties”. This, then, is moving beyond that to the moral and legal endorsement of certain behavior. Some governments continue to have laws against homosexual acts, which is not the same thing as violating their rights as human beings. Was Mrs Clinton saying that it is a violation of human rights to declare sodomy illegal?

Apparently, for that would be consistent with an understanding of Section 1 in the Obama directive, instructing agencies abroad to engage in “Combating Criminalization of LGBT Status or Conduct Abroad”(emphasis added). What kind ofconduct might this be? The only conduct that is or has been consistently criminalized by many countries is sodomy. Morally speaking, sodomy is a fairly unattractive act. Why should it not be criminalized? Perhaps there are prudential reasons for not doing so, but what might be the moral objections to such laws?

The somewhat evasive answer in the Presidential Memorandum is because “no country should deny people their rights because of who they love…” In her speech, Mrs Clinton echoed this response and set this test: “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How would it feel if it were a crime to love the person I love?’”

Well, that depends.

What if the person one loves is already married? What if the person one loves is a sibling? How about a teacher in love with a student? Or a pastor in love with a choir boy? Or an uncle with his niece? Acting upon any of these loves in a sexual relationship is, in most places, a crime. It is not so much whom one loves, but howone loves. How it would feel does not really matter since, in each of these cases, it is morally wrong to sexualize the relationship. Feelings do not change the moral nature of an act.

Why, if all the above cases deserve prohibition, do homosexuals deserve an exemption when it comes to sodomy? Secretary Clinton never said why we should feel for them and not for any of those mentioned above, nor did she raise any of the above examples of criminal love as violations of human rights. Why not?

Rationalizing immoral behaviour

As with all rationalizations for moral misbehavior, Mrs. Clinton’s speech was rife with denials of reality, three of which came in one sentence. She said, “Now, there are some who say and believe that all gay people are pedophiles, that homosexuality is a disease that can become caught or cured, or that gays recruit others to become gay. Well, these notions are simply not true”.

Well, these notions have to be seen as not true for her to promote the “gay” agenda internationally and get away with it. I have never met anyone who believes that all homosexuals are pedophiles, but many of them are certainly pederasts. By setting up the pedophile straw man, Mrs. Clinton avoids this unpleasant reality. Whether homosexuality is a disease or not (it is certainly a disorder), there is ample evidence that it can be cured. Of course, a fair number of people float into homosexuality in their youth and float out again as they mature – no cure required. So much for its being an immutable characteristic.

Others who have become immersed in this life and who later wish to leave it have successfully done so through a variety of therapies. In 1995, the New York Timesreported that “Dr Charles W. Socarides offered the closest thing to hope that many homosexuals had in the 1960s: the prospect of a cure. Rather than brand them as immoral or regard them as criminal, Dr Socarides, a New York psychoanalyst, told homosexuals that they suffered from an illness whose effects could be reversed.” Dr Socarides said that his cure rate was about one third. For Secretary Clinton to deny this is an enormous disservice to the very people whose rights she purports to be defending.

Lastly, the bigger the lie, the bolder the assertion – as in Mrs. Clinton’s outright denial that “gays recruit others to become gay”. In my professional career in the arts, I witnessed such recruitment, saw its occasional success, and was several times the object of it. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the homosexual subculture could not possibly make such a statement.

Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton could have referred to homosexual literature, such asLavender Culture (1994), in which Gerald Hannon described the need for a youth recruitment campaign: “I believe…we have to behave in a certain way vis-à-vis young people. I believe that means we have to proselytize… The answer is to proselytize. Aggressively so”. He added that, “To attract young people to the gay movement in large numbers should be the challenge to the next phase of the movement. It is a challenge we have set ourselves…” This is not to say that all homosexuals recruit, but to assert that none do is a complete denial of reality – which, after all, is the point of the rationalization.

The State Department celebrates

What this is all about was very clear from the 2006 Yogykarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, adopted by the International Commission of Jurists, the International Service for Human Rights, and homosexual activists to influence the interpretation of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all UN human rights treaties, and international law as a whole. One requirement of thePrinciples is to: “Repeal criminal and other legal provisions that prohibit or are, in effect, employed to prohibit consensual sexual activity among people of the same sex who are over the age of consent…” This is the nub of the issue. It is not the status of homosexuals that is so much the matter, as it is the status of their conduct.

In 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France introduced a statement at the UN General Assembly, titled Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights. It proclaimed that, “We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention”. The Statement was signed by 66 nations.

Under the George W. Bush administration, the United States declined, but in 2009 the Barack Obama administration signed the Statement. While the Statement did not go as far as the Yogykarta Principles, it was clearly headed in that direction. The majority of the criminal penalties it was decrying were not, as the Statementdisingenuously suggests, aimed at orientation, but at activity. It is the activity that must be vindicated and blessed as a universal human right.

One of the most immediate results of the priority given to the homosexual cause by President Obama and Secretary Clinton has been the profusion of “gay pride” commemorations and celebrations in US embassies abroad. June is the month singled out for this because, in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month”, with the last Sunday reserved as Gay Pride Day. June was chosen to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots as the beginning of “gay” liberation. Ever since, every government agency has observed it. As of 2011, it moved overseas as part of US foreign policy.

Therefore, the US Embassy in Islamabad celebrated its first-ever lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) “pride celebration” with an event on June 26, 2011. The embassy said the purpose of meeting was to demonstrate “support for human rights, including LGBT rights, in Pakistan at a time when those rights are increasingly under attack from extremist elements throughout Pakistani society.” Richard Hoagland, the US deputy chief of mission, was quoted on the embassy website, as saying, “I want to be clear that the US Embassy is here to support you and stand by your side every step of the way”.

However, it is Pakistan’s Penal Code, not extremist elements, that, in Section 377 (introduced at the time of British colonialism), states, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished… with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

If the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC held a public event in which it encouraged that the domestic laws in the United States be changed in order to re-criminalize sodomy, we might be somewhat surprised and irritated. Why should the Pakistani people be less annoyed by the US Embassy telling them to change its laws in order to decriminalize sodomy? Why exactly is that our business?

All Islamic groups in Pakistan condemned the “pride” event as a form of “cultural terrorism” against democratic Pakistan. Students protested against what they called “the attempts of the United States to promote vulgarity in Islamic societies under the pretext of human rights”. One speaker at a demonstration said, “Now the United States wants to project and promote objectionable, unnatural, abnormal behaviors under the pretext of equality and human rights, which is not at all acceptable… If you destroy the morality of the society, you have destroyed it completely.”

In Nairobi, Kenya, June, 2012, the US Embassy hosted what is thought to be the first “Gay Pride” event in that country. John Haynes, a public affairs officer at the US embassy, introduced the event: "The US government for its part has made it clear that the advancement of human rights for LGBT people is central to our human rights policies around the world and to the realization of our foreign policy goals". Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya, just as they were in parts of the United States until 2003. Now, as part of our foreign policy, apparently we tell Kenya to change its laws.

The US Embassy in Vientiane, Laos, proudly displays webpage news from its 2012 “first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride event on June 25 in Vientiane. The event, called ‘Proud to be Us!’, was produced by a group of young Lao LGBT activists and featured music, dance, skits, and dramas exploring issues faced by LGBT people in Laos today, such as discrimination, gender roles, and sexual health”.

On the webpage of the US Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic, a joint statement was issued which the US ambassador, Norman Eisen, had signed. It declared: “On the occasion of the 2nd annual Prague Pride Festival (2012), we express our solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities of the Czech Republic in their celebration… The Prague Pride Festival reminds us that ensuring LGBT rights is an important aspect of fulfilling our broader international human rights commitments since the full recognition of those rights is still one of the world’s remaining human rights challenges. Safeguarding human rights and guarding against intolerance requires constant vigilance in the Czech Republic, as in all our countries. Therefore today, we align ourselves with the Prague Pride participants…”

This type of thing at US embassies has become standard. As then-Secretary of State Clinton proclaimed in June, 2012: “United States Embassies and Missions throughout the world are working to defend the rights of LGBT people of all races, religions, and nationalities as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a priority of our foreign policy. From Riga, where two US Ambassadors and a Deputy Assistant Secretary marched in solidarity with Baltic Pride; to Nassau, where the Embassy joined together with civil society to screen a film about LGBT issues in Caribbean societies; to Albania, where our Embassy is coordinating the first-ever regional Pride conference for diplomats and activists to discuss human rights and shared experiences”.

Forcing other countries to adopt US standards

As in Pakistan, there has been some blowback from the effort to legitimize sodomy and promote same-sex marriage. When the acting ambassador in El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, wrote an op-ed in a major Salvadoran newspaper, La Prensa Grafica, implying that the disapproval of homosexual behavior is animated by “brutal hostility” and “aggression” by “those who promote hatred”, a group of pro-family associations fought back. On July 6, 2011, they wrote,

“Ms. Aponte, in clear violation of the rules of diplomacy and international rights laws, you intend to impose to (sic) Salvadorans, disregarding our profound Christian values, rooted in natural law, a new vision of foreign and bizarre values, completely alien to our moral fiber, intending to disguise this as ‘human rights’… The only thing we agree with from your article, is to repudiate violence against homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc.; Against these, just the same as against skinny, fat, tall or short ... This of course does not mean accepting the legal union between same sex individuals or to add new types of families like bisexual, tri-sexual, multi-sexual and the full range of sexual preferences. Not accepting the legitimacy of ‘sexual diversity’ does not mean we are violating any human right. There can be no talk of progress if this is how ‘modern’ is defined. We prefer to feel proudly ‘old fashioned’, keep our moral values, preserve our families and possess the clarity of what defines good and evil.”

As mentioned above, Secretary Clinton said that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. The problem with this should be self-evident. The promotion of gay rights must come at the expense of the promotion of human rights because the two notions are immiscible. One is founded on the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the other on moral relativism, which eviscerates the very idea of natural rights and the natural law on which they are based. If you have one, you cannot have the other. You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else – not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation.

I deplore, for instance, the persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression.

Were we to construct such a thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes straight?

One does not possess or attain rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by virtue of one’s human nature – not due to any other specificity regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.

If the United States wishes to promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay” rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact, by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries, including Christianity and Judaism.

If we wish to make this part of American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but here, as well.

But, of course, democracy is not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.

Robert R. Reilly is the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. He is currently completing a book on the natural law argument against homosexual marriage for Ignatius Press.

Related reading: Obama's foreign policy directive: Promote LGBT rights

Israeli Police Attacks on Christians Denounced

JERUSALEM (Ma’an) -- Patriarchs and heads of Christian churches in Jerusalem on Sunday released a joint statement denouncing attacks by Israeli police officers on worshipers and pilgrims during Holy Saturday at the Church of Holy Sepulcher.

Signatories of the statement highlighted that they saw “awful scenes of the brutal treatment to clerics, average people and pilgrims in Jerusalem during Holy Saturday.”

They added: “A day of joy was turned into a day of severe sadness and pain for several of our faithful brothers who were mistreated by a number of Israeli police officers at the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.”

It is unacceptable, according to the statement, that clergymen and average people “get beaten brutally and indiscriminately and be denied access to their churches under the pretext of keeping order.”

The statement urged the Israeli government to denounce the violence that police practiced against worshipers and clergymen.

The patriarchs and heads of churches also denied claims of those who blamed the churches for what happened during the Holy week in Jerusalem. “These claims are counter to what happened in reality, and all heads of churches condemn the Israeli procedures and violations of the Christians’ rights,” the statement said.

The statement was signed by heads of all recognized churches in the Holy Land including the Roman Orthodox Church, the Latin Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church, the Custodian of the Holy Land, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Maronite Church, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the Armenian Catholic Church.

Israel apology

Israel on Thursday officially apologized to Egypt after Israeli police officers attacked Egyptian diplomats and a Coptic clergyman at a church in Jerusalem.

Egypt's Foreign Ministry summoned Israel's ambassador in Cairo after the attack during Orthodox Easter celebrations at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Israel Broadcasting Authority said.

Israeli police say they were not notified of the attack but that they will investigate immediately, the IBA reported.

Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Amr Roshdy told Egypt's daily Al-Ahram that Israeli authorities tried to stop Egyptian diplomatic officials from attending Coptic Easter mass.

From here.

What does US accomplish by Guantanamo force feeding?

Of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, about 100 are on a hunger strike. About 20 are being force-fed, according to the New York Times. About 40 medical staff have arrived to ensure that the detainees are fed.

The men want their cases heard before a court. Many of them have been at Guantanamo for 12 years without being charged.

What are the medical ethics of force-feeding? It seems to violate the norms of informed consent and refusing burdensome treatment. The American Medical Association sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on April 25. It quoted the 1975 Tokyo Declaration of the World Medical Association which takes an umambiguous stand on the issue: "Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially".

It is not clear how many doctors, if any, are involved in the force-feeding.

However, President Obama has ignored the niceties of medical ethics for the hunger strikers. He simply told the media, "I don't want these individuals to die." Politically it is impossible to release the detainees; legally it is hard to try them. So they remain in limbo, frustrated and angry.

The military has not released much information about the force-feeding regimen. But in The Daily Beast, infectious diseases expert Kent Sepkowitz, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, makes it sound excruciating:

"Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients. The nose--as anyone knows who ever has received a stinger from an errant baseball--has countless pain fibers. Some patients may scream and gasp as the tube is introduced; the tear ducts well up and overflow; the urge to sneeze or cough or vomit is often uncontrollable... The procedure is, in a word, barbaric. And that's when we are trying to be nice."

However, he also is unsure what is to be done.

"In this debate individual doctors are stuck at a crossroads of unusual complexity. Sworn to alleviate pain and prevent death where possible, we also are sworn to respect the wishes of the individual. For us, there is no simple way out. Though sharing some similarities, the situation is distinct from respecting the wishes of a patient dying from an untreatable illness--starvation has a remedy."

From here.

Related reading:  Yemen detainee dead at Guantanamo; Obama signs order to close Guantanamo (What happened with that?); Amid hunger strikes Obama renews effort to close Cuba prison

Quote of the Week - Eugene Ohu

"Africa has more than one story. When we get to know it well and completely, we surprisingly discover a continent that is big, joyful, generous, enthusiastic and optimistic. It is today the darling of many foreign investors, and the world's superpowers are competing to lay first claim to it, not now as lords as in times past, but with a desire to be first to be regarded Africa's friends. So much has it grown in many facets, economy included, that it portends hope for many peoples.

A one-word Ibo proverb "Nkoli" loosely translates to "tell your own story". Harambee blog sets out to contribute local brush strokes to build the real story about Africa told by Africans themselves.

There is much hope Africa can offer the rest of the world; from its love of life and family, to the heroic examples of people who have withstood great odds with a smile on their lips, and great stories of innovation achieved with limited resources." --Eugene Ohu, a Nigerian freelance journalist

IRS Knew of Conservative Harassment in 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner.

The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt s

Read it all here.

Keynes' Work and his Sexual Preference

John Maynard Keynes was a brilliant, boastful and argumentative figure. He loved to verbally fence with some of the most outstanding minds of his time. About Keynes, Bertrand Russell wrote, "Annihilating arguments darted out of him with the swiftness of an adder's tongue. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands."

Keynes's seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) is far from "general" in that it details short-run techniques for manipulating the economy, specifically addressing one of capitalism's chronic problems: employment. He introduced the concept of a national balance sheet to regulate the level of employment and the level of consumption and investment. The balance of which he writes is between the size of a nation's total resources and the demand for them. Keynes was convinced that nothing is "built in" to the economic machine. There is no invisible hand, no regulator, and no going back to some idealized economic past.

Lawrence Malkin (Time Magazine) wrote, "By demonstrating how to manipulate large forces in the economy, Keynes unwittingly drew the blueprint for an economic juggernaut that must eventually, if it has not done so already, kill the individual values and personal variety he passionately sought to preserve." (Horizon, Ug. 1969, p. 110)

Was Keynes's work blemished by the fact that he was a staunch eugenicist, a homosexual, and a bigot?  Ricardo Crespo, an expert on Keynes, believes that these factors are not significant in evaluating Keynes' contribution.

Ricardo Crespo

John Maynard Keynes, the last century’s most famous economist, was in the news this week. Harvard’s celebrity economic historian Niall Ferguson was addressing the Altegris strategic investment conference in California, an event for investors and financial analysts, when he was asked a question about Keynes’s impact upon modern economies.

John Maynard Keynes

To the consternation of his audience, he said that the great man’s economic theories had been influenced by his homosexuality: as a childless man he cared little for future generations. According to notes from a finance reporter he said:

“Keynes was a homosexual and had no intention of having children. We are NOT dead in the long run… our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today. Short term fixes, with a neglect of the long run, leads to the continuous cycles of booms and busts. Economies that pursue such short term solutions have always suffered not only decline, but destruction, in the long run.”

His remarks prompted a lot of hostile discussion in the media. Subsequently Ferguson later offered “an unqualified apology” on his blog.

The thesis of the influence of homosexuality on Keynes’ thought was proposed by Charles Hession in his 1984 book John Maynard Keynes. Ted Winslow also emphasised this point in a 1990 article in the journal Social Research.

But my feeling is that the key to understanding Keynes does not lie here. Rather, it is the ethical worries of the Bloomsbury group which helped Keynes to develop the philosophical theories which are at the root of his economic thought.

However, this storm in a teapot over the sexual orientation of the great economist may serve a positive purpose. It ought to remind us that the economy is not just about economics. As a human reality the economy is subjected to a multitude of influences, but the academic discipline of economics normally only takes economic arguments into account.

In addition, the current trend in economics is to examine all human activity through a narrow economic perspective. Input from other social sciences, psychology and sociology is systematically excluded as the logic of economics is substituted for the logic of social sciences. To get the flavour of this, just check out the blog Freakonomics, where economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner offer an economic explanation of everything from child abuse to the Kentucky Derby.

This is what has been called the “scientific imperialism of economics”, a research program that has predominated from the second part of the 20th century. It has originated concepts or disciplines such as law and economics, human and social capital, the economics of crime, the economics of the family, the constitutional political economy, and the economics of religion.

Today, however, we are in the twilight of homo economicus. Economists are realising that they need import insights from other social sciences rather than export the logic of economics to them.

The referee for a fruitful interchange among these disciplines is ethics.

In recent years, and particularly after the global financial crisis, many economists have turned to the father of the systematic study of both economics and ethics, Aristotle. A good example is the publication last year of Reckoning with Markets: The Role of Moral Reflection in Economics, by James Halteman and Edd S. Noell. They argue that economics is not a “value-free” discipline and that it has always incorporated moral reflection into its equations and diagrams. One chapter deals almost entirely with Aristotle’s contribution to economics.

Robert and Edward Skidelsky published another widely-discussed book last year which was based on Aristotle’s notion of the good life. In How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life the father and son team contend that something is wrong if we work harder and hard but enjoy life less and less. Arguing that economics is essentially a moral science, they trace the notion of “the good life” from Aristotle to Keynes.

And then there is Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, also published last year, in which the popular Harvard professor rings alarm bells about our drift from being a market economy to a market society. (See the MercatorNet review here.)

The list gets longer: Debra Satz, of Stanford University; the late Albert Hirschman; Deirdre McCloskey; and very especially the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, Amartya Sen. Most of these authors use Aristotle as a reference point.

Why Aristotle? Joseph Schumpeter answers this question in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis:

"But only a small part of his analytic performance is concerned with economic problems. His main work as well as his main interest, so far as social phenomena are concerned, was in the field we have decided to call economic sociology or rather it was in the field of political sociology to which he subordinated both economic sociology and technical economics. It is as a treatise or textbook on state and society that his Politics must be appraised. And his Nicomachean Ethics—a comprehensive treatise on human Behavior presented from the normative angle—also deals so preponderantly with political man, with man in the city-state, that it should be considered as a companion volume to the Politics, making up together with the latter the first known systematic presentation of a unitary Social Science.”

This is what modern economists appreciate in Aristotle: he does not deal with the economy in isolation, but as part of the reality of politics. This is why it requires interdisciplinary attention and analysis. The loss of this unity is at the root of our political, social and economic crises.

And to some extent, Keynes was a forerunner of the revival of the ethical dimension of economics. Because he drifted into economics as a career, it is often forgotten that he studied philosophy at Cambridge. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, he was immersed in an environment which esteemed lively discussion of philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and mathematics.

The Bloomsbury group, although its members had complicated personal lives, was centered on an essentially moral concern. Was it possible to create an authentic alternative to the decadent and hypocritical Victorian ethical system? The young Keynes began his research into inductive logic from a fundamentally ethical position.

As far his economics goes, the fact of his homosexuality is a red herring. My feeling is that it had no substantial influence upon the formation of his economic theories. What did matter, however, is that he placed an ethical system at the heart of economics. That is an insight on which contemporary economists can build.


Ricardo Crespo is professor of economics at IAE Business School in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the author of El Pensamiento Filosófico de Keynes: Descubrir la Melodía, a study of the philosophical underpinnings of Keynes’s thought. He has also written on Keynes in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. This year he published Theoretical and Practical Reason in Economics. Capacities and Capabilities (Springer). Another book, A Re-assessment of Aristotle’s Economic Thought will be published in October (Routledge).


Related reading: The Media's "sea of fire"; Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes for Homosexuality; Ferguson's Open Letter Apology to Harvard

IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

Read it all here.

Libya Attacks Reveal Failure of Administration

Three State Department officials on Wednesday provided a riveting, emotional account of last year’s fatal attack on U.S. installations in eastern Libya as they accused senior government officials of withholding embarrassing facts and failing to take enough responsibility for security lapses.

The testimony provided new details on the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults on U.S. installations in Benghazi and their aftermath. But the new information failed to break the political logjam the attacks spawned, with Republicans and Democrats offering starkly different interpretations of what happened and who within the U.S. government is to blame.

Read it all here.

Americans lives were lost and the Republicans and Democratic shamelessly argue about who is to blame. Remember when President Obama said that the ultimate responsibility for government mistakes rests with him?

US Military and Sexual Assault

Today, the Department of Defense released the fiscal 2012 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military and announcing a series of actions to prevent and respond to sexual assault in the armed forces.

Annually, as required by the Ike Skelton National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011, the department released Fiscal Year 2012 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military. To date, this is the ninth report DoD has issued.

In fiscal year 2012, there were a total of 3,374 reports of sexual assault involving service members as victims or subjects, an increase from the 3,192 reports received in fiscal 2011. These reports involved offenses ranging from abusive sexual contact to rape.

Read it all here.

Hicks reported Libya terrorist attack

Burnt building at the US consulate Libyan city of Benghazi two days after an attack late on Sept. 11

The second-ranking U.S. official in Libya during last year’s deadly attack on the mission in Benghazi immediately considered it a terrorist attack rather than a spontaneous event, according to a transcript of his interview with congressional investigators.

“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go,” Gregory Hicks, a foreign service officer and former deputy chief of Libyan operations, told investigators, according to excerpts of the interview displayed today on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “I never reported a demonstration, I reported an attack on the consulate.”

His account contrasted with comments made by Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, after the attack on Sept. 11, 2012. She said it grew out of a “spontaneous” demonstration against an anti-Islamic video that was “hijacked” by militants.

Hicks said he wasn’t contacted by State Department officials before Rice spoke on five Sunday talk shows Sept. 16, according to the interview with congressional investigators.

The Benghazi attack killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and became a flashpoint in last year’s presidential campaign. Republicans criticized officials including Rice for their early accounts of the circumstances.

Hicks is scheduled to testify at a May 8 hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, in a May 1 statement announcing the hearing, accused President Barack Obama’s administration of offering “a carefully selected and sanitized version” of the Benghazi attack.

Read the full report here.

Related reading:  Benghazi Continued: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion; Special ops halted from responding to Benghazi attacks; The PJ Tatler on Benghazi Hearings