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John W. Gaissert, the police chief of Commerce, Georgia, near the MOA camp in Franklin County, is a retired Navy commander who has spent a career in law enforcement, working directly on military and civilian counter-terrorism issues. Gaissert was a security consultant for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and also testified in 2010 to a U.S. House Subcommittee on Intelligence. He believes it would be a mistake to dismiss Jamaat Fuqra and Muslims of America as merely pietistic Muslims trying to live in peace out in the countryside. “Their spiritual mentor is Sheikh Gilani and his concept is to...

The final acts of the Obama foreign policy will play out in the next two years. Unfortunately, bad things happen when the world concludes that the American president has become weakened, distracted, or diffident about foreign policy. As Richard Nixon became increasingly paralyzed by Watergate in late 1973, the enemies of Israel felt that it was an opportune time to launch their so-called Yom Kippur War. The next year, the negotiated armistice in the Vietnam War collapsed, and the North Vietnamese seized the Mekong Delta and prepared for a final offensive against South Vietnam. In 1979, after two full years...

On the 69th floor of one of the skyscrapers that dominate the Chinese city of Shenzhen—a fishing village 35 years ago that is now home to 14 million people—are life-sized wax figures of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher, seated together with pots of tea before them. Most visitors view Communist China’s one-time “paramount leader” and the former British prime minister as polar opposites who managed to work out a peaceful resolution for the future of Hong Kong. But they are actually more like yin and yang figures, according to Christian Caryl, author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The classical definition of a hero is a person who puts himself at risk for the benefit of others. That certainly describes Adolfo Calero, who died June 2 at the age of 80. The obituaries of this remarkable man hardly do justice to his courage, perseverance, faithfulness and humility. Here is the Adolfo Calero I knew, admired and called a friend for nearly three decades: A graduate of Holy Cross High School in New Orleans and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., he was a devout Roman Catholic and educated to be a...

Hitler's Muslim Nephew Comes to New York September 24, 2007 FrontPageMagazine.com Kenneth R. Timmerman What was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinking? Apparently the former Democrat believed that escorting Iran’s Hitler-wannabe president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the site of the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero would generate a terrific photo op. “Here I am with world leaders,” that type of thing. After all, Bloomberg has already made his appearance at the “World Leaders Forum” at Columbia University, so he was in the zone. And last year, U.S. News & World Report crowned him as one of America’s “best leaders.” But...

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events - or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries. Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign. Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at...

Paul Ryan delivered a blistering speech against President Obama on foreign policy Monday, saying because of the president's policies, the Middle East looks like Tehran during the mob protests on the U.S. embassy in 1979. Ryan, speaking in Lima, Ohio, was referencing Nov. 4, 1979, when Islamic revolutionaries in Iran attacked the U.S. embassy and took more than 50 Americans hostage. Ryan said that Obama has failed to fulfill promises to bring peace to the Middle East. "I mean, turn on the TV and it reminds you of 1979 Tehran but they're burning our flags in capitals all around the...

Despite repeated, self-serving claims by Obama officials that the Administration did everything it could to head off and then respond appropriately to the violence against American facilities in Libya and Egypt last week, their blunders in policy, intelligence and security illustrates an incompetence every bit as profound as exhibited by the administration of Jimmy Carter in Iran 33 years ago. It appears nothing has been learned in more than three decades; despite significant gains in technology available to the U.S. government during those intervening years. In 1979, the Carter Administration precipitously abandoned the Shah of Iran, Washington’s long-time and loyal...

The seizure of more than 60 Americans in our Embassy in Tehran has provoked strong feelings here at home. There is outrage. There is frustration. And there is deep anger. There is also pride in the courage of those who are in danger and sympathy for them and for their families. But the most important concern for all Americans at this moment is safety of our fellow citizens held in Tehran. The President shares these feelings. He is pursuing every possible avenue in a situation that is extremely volatile and difficult. His efforts involve many countries and individuals. Many of...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George SantayanaI'm having the strangest sense of deja vu over the last eighteen months or so, and the attacks on two diplomatic missions in the Middle East over the last 24 hours has only intensified it. Once again we have an American government that either tacitly or actively undermined an ally in the region in favor of supposedly democratic Islamist radicals, and once again we have an American government that gets taken by surprise when the government that results either fails to protect our embassies and consulates or...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Wednesday that Khalid Al-Jawary, a dangerous Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist convicted of a 1973 New York City bomb plot and implicated in multiple terrorist attacks spanning two decades, was deported to Sudan. He had served only half of his thirty year sentence. Recently declassified information additionally reveals that Al-Jawary got help from New York's Iraqi diplomatic mission in communicating with his PLO masters. In March of 1973, Al-Jawary and possible accomplices planted three powerful car bombs: two along 5th Avenue near Israeli-owned banks, and one at Kennedy Airport. Timed to explode upon...

Hat tip to Chris Moody for this clip. This comes from a film called Early Warnings. It shows a 1979 protest in New York on the 50th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash. See if the vibe isn’t familiar:

The soundtrack to the 1979 Disney space epic has been remastered, expanded, and now available from Disney and Intrada records. The music was composed by the late English movie music master John Barry, who is widely known for his work on the James Bond films between 1963 and 1987. Here is a suite of the OST on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpzDdTrw5II Ayn Rand's response when asked about the topic of a female president.

While Britons celebrated the royal wedding last Friday, one of Iran’s greatest intellectuals willingly fell to his death from the sixth-floor balcony of his Tehran apartment. Siamak Pourzand, aged 80, had held out long enough against the Islamic Republic..... Pourzand was an already prominent cultural commentator and foreign correspondent long before Ayatollah Khomeini boarded a plane from Paris, full of big ideas, in 1979.... Secular and cosmopolitan to the core, Pourzand had no time for the guardianship of the sadists and made a point of saying so, especially in the late 1990s when he began writing for various opposition newspapers...

A growing number of former U.S. officials — both Republicans and Democrats — have hopped on the bandwagon to demand that the State Department delist the Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization (MKO) from its list of terrorist groups.I consider the MKO a terrorist group for good reason. There is no doubt that the MKO has targeted Americans, and no amount of slick public relations should erase that. During my time in Iran, it was clear that while Iranians respect the United States and have little good to say about their own government, they all detest the MKO.The enemy of my enemy...

The White House said Friday that Iran is scared it could be next after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gave up power. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, briefing on his last day on the job, hailed the Egyptian protesters and said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government is “quite frankly scared of the will of its people.” Gibbs said that if the Iranian government is as confident in the righteousness of its power it “would have nothing to fear” from mass protests like those that have gripped Egypt. “They're not confident,” Gibbs said. “They’re scared.” Protestors demonstrating for reforms in Iran...

Egyptian intelligence warned American officials about a week before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden's network was in the advance stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, it will be reported on Tuesday (in the NY TIMES)... MORE... A senior U.S. intelligence official denied the warning was received...

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...