How to Achieve Energy Security and Lower Gas Prices

THE FOLLOWING email was sent to ACT! for America members by Kelly Cook, ACT's National Field Director. We at Jurisprudence fully support ACT's commitment to this issue, and we urge you to help make this happen. The stakes could not be higher. And now, Kelly Cook's message:

Face it. We’ve been played.

OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) is playing a deadly game with America. Their oil price fixing mechanism is legendary in the unjust world of anti-trust schemes.

The fact is that oil prices in the $15 to $20 a barrel range provide plenty of fair and reasonable profits for any oil exporting nation. Then why are oil prices today over $100 per barrel? OPEC is laughing all the way to the bank.

Here’s the game: OPEC, through the willingness to price fix among its 12 nation partners, gradually ratchets up the price of oil through secretly agreed-to reductions in supply. They don’t care if they’re not producing as much oil. The skyrocketing prices on the oil they do produce are more than enough to provide for their lavish lifestyles and...their generous donations to worldwide Islamic jihadist operations.

As soon as the American public starts to really feel the pain at the pump and begin to lobby their members of Congress to do something about it, oil supplies “magically” increase and the price of gas settles down just enough to prevent the outrage that was about to boil over. And so the cycle goes — by design!

We at ACT! for America are tired of being played in this deadly game of supplying the enemy with the resources to attack us. This is why we are fully supporting the Open Fuel Standard ACT of 2011. We are calling for Members of Congress to enthusiastically co-sponsor this vital legislation.

Why the Open Fuel Standard Act? Imagine you’ve got a flex fuel car — a car that has been retro-fitted to accept at least 2 different kinds of fuel. You notice the price of regular gas just hit $4.10 per gallon. Because you can also run on methanol (or electricity, natural gas, etc), you check the current price for methanol which is approximately $1.65! Now that you’ve got “Fuel Choice,” you fill up with methanol! Methanol can be produced from natural gas and biomass (common trash, plant wastes, landfill materials, etc). Therefore, it’s a potential environmental winner as well.

What happens when tens of millions of consumers start taking advantage of fuel choice and switch to other fuels? OPEC is forced to bring down its prices in order to compete. Game over. The price of oil per barrel would plummet down to its natural market trading range of $10 to $25 per barrel.

How can we be so sure of this? Brazil has already done it — back in the 80’s and it’s still working for them! Do you know that two of the major car suppliers to Brazil’s flex fuel market are GM and Ford? Brazil’s proven success demonstrates that a single nation can employ this strategy successfully as a solitary nation against the forces of worldwide markets.

Why shouldn’t the U.S. and other major oil consuming countries follow suit? The transition costs are minimal when compared to the tremendous savings and security we all will enjoy through fuel choice!

I know some of you are asking: “What about Drill Baby Drill”? We are enthusiastically in favor of developing all strategies to disarm OPEC and their deadly allies. We need to develop all forms of energy, especially our unfathomable supplies of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy technologies. Encouraging fuel choice through the Open Fuel Standard ACT of 2011 will only enhance these and other needed developments.

***Action Items***

1) Invest 5 minutes to support fuel choice for your gas tank and for the nation! Contact your member of Congress and urge them to be a co-sponsor for H.R. 1687, the Open Fuel Standard Act of 2011. We are starting to pick up real momentum in this process! Please make sure your member of Congress is a co-sponsor. Click Here to complete this simple process.

2) Check out the amazing new website dedicated to the passage of the Open Fuel Standard Act of 2011. Please sign up for email updates and find out the many reasons we need to actively promote this bill. The resources this site has amassed are considerable. There are many factors involved that we just don’t have the space to cover in a single email. Please avail yourself to this vital information. Click Here for this creative new website!

What Does "Freedom" Mean in Islamic Terms?

An an interview with Bernard Lewis, he said:

One has to understand not so much the differences between the [West and the Muslim world] as the differences in the political discourse. In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever. You can see in the ongoing debate in Arabic and other languages the puzzlement with which the use of the term freedom was first perceived.

They just didn’t understand it. I mean, what does this have to do with politics or government? Eventually, they got the message. But it’s still alien to them. In Muslim terms, the aim of good government is justice.

The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice. If one follows that particular discourse in the Arab and more generally the Muslim world, it would be more illuminating.

One of the Days That Would Have Lived in Infamy That Never Happened

Because of information gathered during interrogations, the mastermind of 9/11 — Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) — was captured, and he, in turn, was interrogated. His questioning produced many intelligence reports. In an article about a new book, the author says:

In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the “Bojinka plot” to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean.

Years later, an observant CIA officer notices that the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appear to match KSM’s description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack.

In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot. On the night of Aug.9, 2006 they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects. They find a USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven trans-Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other:

United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at 2:15 p.m.;
Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00 p.m.;
Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15 p.m.;
United Airlines Flight 959 to Chicago departing at 3:40 p.m.;
United Airlines Flight 925 to Washington departing at 4:20 p.m.;
American Airlines Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 p.m; and
American Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 p.m.

They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives. And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared.

Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much. Few Americans are aware of the fact that al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude.

And still fewer realize that the terrorists’ true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Melvin Bledsoe on the Radicalization of His Son

The following is from an ACT! for America email. This is the testimony of Melvin Bledsoe. He explains how his son (who Muslimized his name to Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad) become a dedicated orthodox Muslim, waging jihad against his fellow Americans, and how this transformation started right here in the heart of America: A Nashville, Tennessee mosque.

Committee on Homeland Security: US House of Representatives, Washington DC, March 10, 2011. Testimony of Melvin Bledsoe:

Thank you very much for allowing me to come here and tell the country what happened to my son. This hearing today is extremely important to begin the discussion about the issue of Islamic radicalization in America and my hope is that this Committee can somehow address this issue in a meaningful, productive way.

First, I would like to express my deepest sympathy to the family of Private William Long, and to the wounded soldier, Quinton Ezeagwula. I would like to talk about those complicit in Private Long’s murder – the Islamic radicals who programmed and trained my son Carlos to kill.

I want to tell the American people and the world what happened to my son. We sent him off to college at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee in the fall of 2003. Our dreams about his future ended up in a nightmare.

Carlos is my only son. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My wife and I operate a tour company in Memphis, Tennessee and Carlos started helping out with the family business at the age of eight. He loved talking to the traveling public; and he had a lot of fun interacting with the customers.

After graduating from high school, he wanted to get a degree in Business Administration. We thought perhaps he would come back to Memphis to run the business and give my wife and me early retirement.

After the fall of 2005 – his sophomore fall in Nashville –Carlos came home that Christmas for the holidays.

We were sitting around in the family room, Carlos’s only sister, Monica, her husband and I, having a normal conversation about life in general. But at a certain point, Carlos and his brother-in-law Terrell got into a heated conversation about the Muslim religion. Then and later, we felt like Carlos’s personality changed when we spoke about Islam. We thought maybe he had some Muslim friends in college and was offended by our comments.

The next time Carlos came home, we saw another side of him that we hadn't seen before. During the night, he took down all the pictures from the walls in the bedroom where he slept. He even took Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. picture off the wall. We asked Carlos: "What is going on with you?”

He replied that he is now a new convert to Islam and that everything he does from now on will be to honor Allah. We got very concerned: While he was growing up, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s picture had always hung on his bedroom wall; but now treated the picture as if Dr. King was nobody to him.

We asked Carlos not to take Dr. King's picture off the wall, but he took it off the wall anyway. This became a big concern to us. We went to visit him in Nashville because we wanted to learn more about what was really going on with Carlos.

We discovered that Carlos had dropped out of school, at the beginning of the 2005 fall semester. He was working a temporary job. He had gotten a dog while in college, and now we found out that he had turned the dog loose in the woods because he was told that Muslims consider dogs dirty creatures. I really couldn't understand how he could do that, because Carlos grew up with a dog in the house since he was five years old.

So my wife and I thought that there something or someone was getting in his head and changing the way he thinks. It had gotten to the point where he had no interest in coming home, even for the holidays.

All of this was part of brainwashing him, and changing his thinking a little bit at a time. He had a job in Nashville, together with some Muslims, who would tell him that according to Islamic law, his employer had to let him pray at certain times of the day, regardless of what was going on at the job. As a business owner, I told Carlos that it would be very difficult for an employer to do this for all of his employees.

As the next step on his process of radicalization, Carlos was convinced to change his name. He chose the name Abdulhakim Muhammad. At this point, his culture was no longer important to him, only the Islamic culture mattered.

Some Muslim leaders had taken advantage of my son. But he’s not the only one being taken advantage of: this is going on in Nashville and in many other cities in America.

In Nashville, Carlos was captured by people best described as hunters. He was manipulated and lied to. That’s how he made his way to Yemen. Carlos was hoping to go there for a chance to cross over to Saudi Arabia and visit Mecca, as he was taught all true Muslims must do at one time in their life. He was taught that he would get to walk on the ground where Prophet Muhammad walked be able to travel around the area. But these hunters had other plans for him. They set him up, telling him that he could teach English at a British School in Aden in South Yemen, This school turned out to be a front and Carlos ended up in a training camp run by terrorists.

Carlos’s joining in with Yemeni extremists was facilitated by their American counterparts in Nashville. We have since discovered that the former Imam of a Nashville mosque, the Al Farooq Mosque, wrote the recommendation letter Carlos needed for the school in Yemen. We also discovered that the school functions as an intake front for radicalizing and training Westerners for Jihad.

From what I understand, the FBI had been following Carlos since before he left Nashville and continued to do so after he came back from Yemen. When Carlos was arrested for overstaying his visa in October of 2008, he was interviewed by an FBI agent based in Nashville even before the U.S. Embassy was alerted about the arrest. According to the Embassy, the FBI was alarmed about what they learned from Carlos.

We wish they could have told us - his family – about what they learned. If we knew how serious his extremism had become, we could have put in every effort to prevent the tragedy in Arkansas from happening.

When my son was arrested in Yemen, my family cried out for help in bringing our son back to America from our Government. We got in touch with the U.S. Embassy and the State Department. We also asked for help from our U.S. Representative, Steve Cohen’s office, and from FBI Special Agent Greg Thomason, who had been tracking my son since Nashville.

After our son was finally released and brought home to us. No one said anything to us about what might have happened to him in Yemen or what they may have learned that so alarmed the FBI agent who interrogated Carlos while he was in the custody of Yemen’s Political Security Organization.

Carlos’s experience in Yemeni political jail was the final stage of his radicalization. He was in there with true evil-doers – hard-core Al Qaeda members who convinced him to get revenge on America.

Something is wrong with the Muslim leadership in Nashville. What happened to Carlos at those Nashville mosques isn’t normal. I have other family members who are Muslims, and they are modern, peaceful, law abiding people, who have been Muslim for many years and are not radicalized.

I also have several uncles and brothers in the military. Our family has fought for the United States in every war since the Civil War. I have nephews who are currently in Afghanistan, as I speak, fighting for democracy and freedom for all Americans.

It seems to me that the American people are sitting around and doing nothing about Islamic extremism, as if Carlos’s story and the other stories told at these hearings aren’t true. There is a big elephant in the room, but our society continues not to see it.

This wrong is caused by political correctness. You can even call it political fear - yes, fear. Fear of stepping on a special minority population’s toes, even as a segment of that population wants to stamp out America and everything we stand for.

I must say that we are losing American babies – our children are in danger. This country must stand up and do something about this problem. Yes, it’s my son’s tragic story you’re hearing about today, but tomorrow it could be your son or your daughter. It might be an African-American child that they went after in Nashville, but tomorrow their victim might have blonde hair and blue eyes. One thing is for sure, it will happen again.

We must stop these extremist invaders from raping the minds of American citizens on American soil. Here in America today, there are people with radical Islamic political views who are organizing with one goal in mind: to convert our citizens and to turn them against the non-believers. This is a big problem now in Nashville, on college campuses and in the nearby area. Nashville has become a hot bed for radical Islamic recruiting.

Carlos grew up a happy-go-lucky kid. He always had a big smile on his face, and loved to crack a joke or two. Everyone liked him. He loved to play team sports like basketball and football. He loved swimming, dancing, and listening to music.

Today we have two families that have been destroyed. This could have been prevented. I would like to see something change so that no other family in this great country of ours has to go through what our family is facing now.

GOD HELP US! GOD HELP US!

Freeing the Slaves in 2011

Charles Jacobs, of PeaceAndTolerance.org, wrote:

I witnessed the redemption of 160 black Christian jihad slaves last week in South Sudan. They were taken out of bondage by my partners from Christian Solidarity International. South Sudan is a newly formed break-away Christian state, having essentially defeated the Islamic Republic of Sudan which waged a self-declared jihad ("holy war") on the Christian and tribalist south for decades, murdering almost 3 million and enslaving hundreds of thousands.

Leah Burrows wrote:

Christian Solidarity is trying to free as many of the estimated 40,000 remaining slaves as possible before July, when the secession becomes official. The Americans spent several hours with the Sudanese, listening to their stories. Most are Dinka, the largest ethnic tribe in southern Sudan. Before being captured, they had lived in small villages with thatched huts, farming and herding cattle. Many were forced to convert to Islam by their masters. One woman, who was enslaved for 21 years, told Jacobs and the Polaks of being repeatedly raped and beaten for refusing to say Muslim prayers.

For more on modern day human bondage see www.iabolish.org.

Islamic Doctrines Include Instructions to Create a Totalitarian Islamic State

Definition of totalitarianism: A political system where the state, usually under the power of a single faction, recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life.

As Abdullahi Warfa wrote (and as so many others have pointed out):

"Islamic thought relates to the government’s role in every sector of the society including education, business, labor, sports. This school of thought regulates every aspect of individual behavior through a wide range of Islamic jurisdiction."

The idea is that "only Allah is the creator, sustainer, and master of the universe and of all that exists in it. He alone has the right to command or forbid. Hence, we must act according to Allah’s teachings. Furthermore, Allah alone is the ruler and his commandments are the laws that govern our daily activities politically, economically, and legally..."

Read more about the basic elements of Islam.

Muslims Who Love Death

Suhail Khan:

"The early Muslims loved death, dying for the sake of almighty Allah, more than the oppressors loved life," said an impassioned Khan, who wiped away tears throughout his speech.

Major Nidal M. Hasan

"We love death more then [sic] you love life!"

Hasan al-Banna':

"The Quran has commanded people to love death more than life."

Osama bin Laden:

"We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two."

Hasan Nasrallah:

"We are going to win because they love life and we love death."

Hamas Motto:

"We love death more than the Jews love life."

Khomeini:

"We love death more than you love life."

Based on the Criteria in the Koran, "Moderate Muslims" Are Not Really Muslims

IN AN article in Canada's National Post, the author did a great job depicting Geert Wilders and his mission. The author, Jonathan Kay, was surprisingly fair and open-minded. It is as if he just listened and didn't pre-judge.

I've read the Koran twice now, and what Wilders says here is accurate. Here is an excerpt from Kay's article:

"Now, you can certainly make a distinction among the people," says Wilders. "There are moderate Muslims — who are the majority in our Western societies — and non-moderate Muslims."

"But Islam itself has only one form. The totalitarian ideology contained in the Koran has no room for moderation. If you really look at what the Koran says, in fact, you could argue that 'moderate' Muslims are not Muslims at all. It tells us that if you do not act on even one verse, then you are an apostate..."

Mr. Wilders sees Islam as akin to communism or fascism, a cage that traps its suffering adherents in a hateful, phobic frame of mind. Mr. Wilders describes Muslim as victims of bad ideas, in other words. In this way, his attitude is entirely different from classic anti-Semites and racists, who treat Jews and blacks as debased on the level of biology.

Of course, in the modern, politically correct Western tradition, hatred expressed toward a religion typically is held on the same level of human rights opprobrium as hatred expressed toward a race or an ethnicity. But Islam is not really a religion at all, as Mr. Wilders sees it, but rather a retrograde political ideology with religious trappings.

He notes that while other religions draw a distinction between God and Caesar, between the secular and the spiritual, Islam demands submission in every aspect of human existence, both through the wording of the Koran itself and the Shariah law that has developed in its shadow. The faith also supplies a justification for aggressive war, vilifies non-believers and pronounces death upon its enemies. In short, Mr. Wilders argues, it has all the ingredient of what students of 20th-century history would recognize as a fully formed totalitarian ideology. "I see Islam as 95% ideology, 5% religion — the 5% being the temples and the imams," he tells me. "If you would strip the Koran of all the negative, hateful, anti-Semitic material, you would wind up with a tiny [booklet]."

It's easy to see why many Europeans casually jump to the conclusion that Mr. Wilders is a hatemonger. He wants to halt non-Western immigration to the Netherlands until existing immigrants can be integrated, and he wants to deport any foreigner who commits a crime — the same sort of policies as those advocated by genuine xenophobes.

But even so, his insistence on the proper distinction between faith and ideology is an idea that deserves to be taken seriously. For it invites the question: If we permit, and even encourage, the excoriation of totalitarian cults created by modern dictators, why do we stigmatize, and even criminalize, such excoriation in the case of arguably similar notions attributed to a 7th-century Bedouin taking what is claimed to be divine dictation?

It's a good question. And as far as I know, Geert Wilders is the only Western politician taking it seriously.