The American Left and the Crisis in Egypt

by David Horowitz
Posted on January 30 2011 4:41 pm
David Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of NewsReal Blog and FrontPage Magazine. He is the President and CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His most recent book is Reforming Our Universities

The Mubarak dictatorship is crumbling, the Muslim Brotherhood is warning that regimes will fall all over the Middle East and the radical left in America and internationally is cheering them on. Of course. The unholy alliance between the radical secular left and the forces of the Islamic jihad was forged a long time ago in the crucial of the Palestinian Islamic jihad against Israel and the West. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood as are the Muslim Students Association, CAIR and every major Muslim organization in America. The MSA and the pro-Palestinian left was part of the coalition of radical organizations that defended the Saddam regime during the lead up to the Iraq war and was on the steering committee of the International Answer demonstrations. Yassir Arafat was one of Saddam’s leading cheerleaders when Iraq tried to swallow Kuwait, triggering the first Gulf War. The roots of the alliance we see shaping up in the Egyptian struggle are deep.

We saw the unholy alliance at work in the Hamas inspired campaign to break the Gaza blockade. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were leaders of the American wing of the Hamas coalition against the blockade and went to Gaza to meet with Hamas shortly before the terrorist Flotilla was intercepted by Israeli forces. The Gaza blockade was jointly instituted by Israel and Egypt – by the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood’s army. If the Muslim Brotherhood topples the Mubarak regime, Hamas’s war against the Jews will be immeasureably strengthened. The radical left in America and internationally is committed to Hamas and its genocidal campaign against the Jews and its general war against the United States. That is why the fate of Egypt in this crisis resonates for all of us.(source)

The Left's Pitiful Attempts to Rewrite The History Of Reagan

The other day I heard a caller on CSPAN's Washington Journal trumpet the Left's proudest example that CONSERVATIVES ARE RACISTS: the Neshoba County speech of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The under-educated caller spewed, "Well everyone knows that Reagan chose to start his presidential campaign where those three civil rights workers were killed in 1964." For him, the proof was in the pudding: a white Republican talking to whites in Mississippi equals a Klan meeting. If the speech doesn't come right out and say, "When it comes down to good whites like you and those blacks, we're with you", then there has to be some coded phrase or tone that means the same.

This sad instance of looking-for-a-racist-under-every-rock is typical in today's impoverished understanding of history. With hateful people in our universities who are intent upon brainwashing the last three generations of teachers, this is the natural result. The entire beauty and grandeur of America has been reduced to a Howard Zinn bumper-sticker.

Here is a column from David Brooks which details the facts about Reagan's speech in Neshoba County, MS, in 1980 (but, unfortunately, for simple-minded haters like Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman, never let the facts get in the way of a good fairy tale):

History And Calumny

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

The Reaganites then had an internal debate over whether to do the Urban League speech and then go to the fair, or to do the fair first. They decided to do the fair first, believing it would send the wrong message to go straight from the Urban League to Philadelphia, Miss.

Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/reagan/reaganneshoba.mp3. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff. (source)

The CSPAN caller can't be blamed by himsef, of course. Listening to Pied Pipers like Bob Herbert obviously kept the man from thinking for himself. Here is an example of the kind of propaganda that the NYT has been pushing for years, now (ironically, you are about to witness an African American mention a Jewish person without the same Crown Heights-type hate and animosity that accompanies much of African America's regard of them today):

Righting Reagan's Wrongs

Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.

Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.

They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote.

It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.”

After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.

Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.(source)

Stanley Ann Dunham And The Left's Exploitation Of Women

Stanley Ann Dunham with her father, Barry, and daughter


By Robin of Berkeley

Obama's mother, the oddly named Stanley Ann, died of cancer about fifteen years ago. There's little known about Stanley Ann, aside from the details provided by Obama and his handlers. Of course, the truth about Obama's past is shrouded in secrecy.


But what can be pieced together about Obama's mom from the information at hand? For one, Stanley Ann was given her strange name by her strange father, Stanley Dunham, who desired a boy instead. Dunham was a volatile, hard-drinking man, who was expelled from high school for punching his principal. Mental illness may have run in the Dunham family; as a boy, Stanley discovered his mother dead of an apparent suicide.


We can make some inferences about Stanley Ann's childhood based on how her parents raised young Barry. Stanley Dunham designated the purported Communist, bisexual pedophile, Frank Marshall Davis, as Barry's mentor. Not only was Barry left alone with Davis, but Davis and Dunham would booze and tell dirty jokes in the boy's presence. Given the poor judgment Dunham exercised, he likely raised his daughter in the same reckless manner.


As for Stanley Ann's mom, Madelyn Dunham, she was the main breadwinner of the family; however, she, like most women of that generation, deferred to her husband. Thus, she allowed him to choose their daughter's peculiar name.

Frank Marshall Davis

Madelyn also permitted Frank Marshall Davis to carouse and smoke pot with her husband, even to mentor the impressionable Barry. Of course, Obama demonstrated no warmth towards his grandmother whom he dismissed as a "typical white person."


What else can we deduce about Stanley Ann? There's conjecture that Stanley Ann was raised in a radical family with Communist leanings. She spent her adolescence on progressive Mercer Island; the left-leaning Unitarian Church they attended there was known as the Little Red Church, while the school board's chairman was a self-identified communist. Of course, the family's connection with Frank Marshall Davis lends credence to the theory of a radical childhood.


As the official story goes, Stanley Ann met Obama Sr. at college, and their relationship produced Barack. However, American Thinker's Jack Cashill has highlighted doubts about Obama's paternity, including the possibility that Frank Marshall Davis may be father.


If Obama Sr. were Obama's father, this is a troubling scenario since Senior was a married man, seven years older, with an apparent alcohol problem. But even more disturbing is the prospect of Frank Marshall Davis being Obama's father. Davis was decades older than Stanley Ann, and a purported pedophile. Davis penned a thinly veiled memoir celebrating his and his wife's sexual relationship with a l3 year old girl.[i]


It was highly unusual for girls in the 1950's to have interracial relationships, much less babies, with a man of a difference race. During this time, however, the Communist Party of the United States encouraged women members to use their feminine wiles to entice men, especially black men, into the movement, as well as to reward the ones who joined up. Did Communist brainwashing play some role in Stanley Ann's choice of partners and her subsequent pregnancy?


Davis himself boasted, "The number of white babes interested in at least one meeting with a Negro male has been far more than I can handle." If Frank Marshall Davis were truly Obama's father, was Stanley Ann one of his many conquests?

While there is no way of knowing, there are reasons to be concerned. The American Left certainly has a long history of exploiting women. For instance, during the 60's, Leftist girls were expected to, according to the slogan: Say Yes to Boys Who Say No [to the Draft].


Communist movement recruiting poster

Much of the Left's dirty laundry has been expunged and reconstructed, particularly regarding its treatment of women. But women have always been viewed as the movement's maids -- and their mattresses. In the 60‘s, radical girls were expected to serve the food, as well as service the men sexually.

Activist Stokely Carmichael articulated the general vibe in an infamous, and candid, response. When asked the role of women in the Students for a Democratic Society, Carmichael replied, "The position of women in the movement is prone."


Radical women were brainwashed to believe that they needed to sacrifice their bodies for the Revolution. The women of the Weather Underground, for example, were required to have sex with any male who asked for it.


If a woman balked and demanded equality, she was told that women's rights were secondary to liberating blacks and stopping the war. (Interestingly, the early suffragists were also instructed to put their needs on hold, which is why American women couldn't vote until 1920, 50 years after black men.)


On the rare occasion that a movement woman would protest, she'd face swift and harsh retribution. When SDS member Marilyn Webb dared to take to the stage and advocate for women, she was besieged with cat calls and obscenities. After the event, Webb received death threats.[ii]


The Left's use and abuse of women did not stop with the 60‘s, nor with the feminist revolution of the 70's, which was launched, in part, because of the misogynist Left. And the Left's misuse of women, the life-bearers, is emblematic of the hypocrisy and the heartlessness that is at the core of the progressive movement.


Today, we see the sad spectacle of a new female generation being manipulated just like their foremothers. Egged on by radical professors, young women are falling for the same propaganda.


The pressure to be cool, progressive girls -- along with the media's force feeding of hedonism -- is corrupting millions of young women. And the fallout has been far-reaching, not only in broken lives, but in a public health crisis of STD's, cervical cancer, and abortions.


Like robotic Stepford Wives, progressive women of all ages follow their mostly male leaders. Even women's studies departments have been hijacked by the Radical Left; feminist professors support Radical Islam, regardless of the honor killings, stoning, and genital mutilation.


When I think of the Left's sordid history, I recall another time and place, and another woman who stumbled upon a heavily concealed secret. Her name was Iris Chang, and she exposed an even more iniquitous period, the Rape of Nanking. In her landmark book, Chang revealed the mass violation of Chinese women by the invading Japanese troops during World War II.


Tragically, hearing the horrific details, and receiving death threats, proved too much for Iris Chang. She suicided a few years after the book's release.


Perhaps someday, someone with Chang's courage (and the resources for personal bodyguards) will write a similar-type book about the Left's abominable treatment of its women. The narrative should include Diana Oughton, a once ebullient and lively woman who morphed into an emaciated zombie after she joined the Weather Underground. Oughton was killed in a botched bombing plot.


There are so many other women, like the nameless, anonymous readers who have emailed me, sharing their stories, sometimes for the first time. Many of these women were Leftists who turned conservative because of harrowing experiences in radical movements.


Was Stanley Ann Dunham one of them; was she a brainwashed victim of a Communist upbringing? Or was she simply an independent thinker, who willingly and happily forged her life's path?


I don't presume to know. But I do know that millions of American women have been hoodwinked by those sweet-talking progressives. And each new day, another young woman falls under their hypnotic spell.


A frequent American Thinker contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley. You can reach Robin through her blog www.robinofberkeley.com. Comments for this article can be posted here. Robin's articles are intended for informational and entertainment purposes, not to offer treatment or definitive diagnoses.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] Davis has confirmed that his novel, Sex Rebel: Black, with its description of sex with a l3 year old girl, was autobiographical. Davis also described himself as "a voyeur and an exhibitionist," with an interest in group sex, sadomasochism, water sports, simulated rape, and bondage.


[ii] From: A Conservative History of the America Left, by Daniel Flynn. (source)

Honor Killing in America

Muzzammil Hassan with his wife Aasiya Zubair Hassan.

The trials of two "honor killers" are underway in America this week: one in Buffalo, New York, and the other in Arizona.


In Buffalo, the moderate Muslim beheader and bridge-builder to the West, Muzzammil Hassan, was granted the right Monday to act as his own attorney. That should make for some interesting trial transcripts. Hassan had an attorney, Jeremy Schwartz, but Schwartz told the judge that he met with Hassan on Friday and they had an impasse and "irreconcilable differences and opinions" that go to the heart of the defense.


Muzzammil Hassan was a respected Muslim businessman in Buffalo. He founded the BridgesTV network several years ago to improve the image of Muslims in the United States. But now he is standing trial for the decapitation of his estranged wife, Aasiya Zubair Hassan, in February 2009. He beheaded her at his company's office in Orchard Park, New York -- that's right, in the offices of BridgesTV. Police records show that Muzzammil Hassan had abused Aasiya for years. And that means that the Buffalo-area Muslim community writ large ought to be on trial as well; they knew of the brutal violence Aasiya suffered and apparently kept silent. The Muslim community knew of Hassan's abuse.


And in Arizona, an Iraqi Muslim named Faleh Almaleki went on trial this week for murdering his daughter for being too "westernized." The Almaleki trial damn near didn't happen. They were negotiating a plea deal for this cold-blooded adherent to the sharia. But readers of my website AtlasShrugs.com called, wrote, and e-mailed, and in a huge victory for Atlas readers who fought the impending plea deal, it was withdrawn.

Faleh Almaleki and daughter Noor Almaleki

Muslim dad Faleh Almaleki ran over his daughter, Noor Almaleki. He is now showing his utter contempt for the infidel system of jurisprudence by saying that he ran down and murdered his daughter with his car accidentally while he was "concentrating on spitting at another woman." Spitting on a woman: the metaphor should not be lost on anyone. This disgusting defense and out-and-out lie contradicts Faleh Almaleki's admission in November 2009 (here) that, according to state prosecutor Stephanie Low, Faleh Almaleki admitted that he ran over his daughter on purpose:


By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family. This was an attempt at an honor killing.


Then-prosecutor Low said "attempt" because Noor Almaleki had not yet succumbed to her injuries. She hung on by a thread for two weeks.


After her father ran her over, he backed up his vehicle and ran her over again. Was this, too, in an attempt to spit?


Remember that these are not isolated incidents or actions of a "fringe" element within Islam. They are happening with increasing frequency. The Harry Potter actress Afshan Azad was recently almost killed by her father and brother in another attempted Islamic honor killing. How much more in the mainstream can you get? Yet despite who she is, the celebrity of the victim, still the dhimmedia shills for, aids, abets, and covers for Islamic misogyny. And even more galling was Azad's family's concern -- not with their Afshan, but with "what the Muslim community will think." That was their worry and obsession.


The horror of these young girls, terror-stricken victims who live in homemade concentration camps, is given the imprimatur of the West in its complicit silence. Notice how news accounts never mention the religion of the people involved. The West is intent upon putting an urbane face on bloodthirsty savagery. The West looks away, and more girls lead desperate, brutal lives. The "feminists" look away and pretend that Islamic honor killing is outside the realm of women's rights. The leftists are tools of Islamic jihad: these useful idiots are on someone's payroll, or else they fear Islam so much that they are willing to see these girls die.


Either way, get out of the way. Shame on all of you for failing our women, our children, our girls, our very way of life. How dare you throw away our superior culture with both hands?


As Muslim populations grow in the West, the status of women diminishes. The horrific murders of wives, daughters, moms, and sisters are the worst and ultimate punishment of Islamic gender apartheid, and something we see on the rise in the West. It should be a capital crime in America. (source)

Sign Of Our Times: Things You Never See In Civilized Communites (The SC IHOP Brawl)

Sign Of Our Times: Things You Never See In Civilized Communities (Teenage Girls Viciously Beat A Wendy's Cashier)

Vicious Attack on Wendy's Worker: MyFoxNY.com

China Bank Moves to Buy U.S. Branches

China's biggest bank signed an agreement that would make it the first Beijing-controlled financial institution to acquire retail bank branches in the U.S., though regulators could still block the deal.

Under the deal, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., by some measures the world's largest bank, agreed to acquire a majority stake in Bank of East Asia Ltd.'s U.S. subsidiary. ICBC will pay $140 million for an 80% stake. Bank of East Asia, which is a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong, has a total of 13 branches in New York and California. ICBC and Bank of East Asia have talked to U.S. regulators about the deal, these people said.

The move represents what could be the start of big expansions by Chinese financial institutions in the U.S.

Signed in Chicago on the last day of Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit to the U.S., the move, comes as both Beijing and Washington are calling for greater commercial ties between the two countries.

Both Beijing and Washington are eager to showcase their willingness to strengthen the business ties between the two countries, despite the many issues that will continue to hinder the relations. China is prodding the U.S. to ease its export controls, especially those involving high-technology products, aimed at its biggest economic rival. The U.S. is asking for more Chinese purchases of made-in-America goods and services.

The transaction is expected to be carefully scrutinized by U.S. regulators, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as CFIUS, because of the state-controlled nature of the Chinese bank. A previous deal by a Chinese bank to acquire a bank in the U.S. was rejected by regulators. "It is going to be a long process," a person familiar with the matter said.

If ICBC's deal to acquire Bank of East Asia's U.S. subsidiary goes through, Americans could walk into the retail branches, open check and savings accounts and, most significantly for many investors, open yuan accounts to trade the currency.

ICBC, as the bank is known, is based in Beijing and is 70% owned by the Chinese government. It has become increasingly comfortable venturing outside its home markets, which still account for the bulk of its profit. Last year, ICBC got into the broker-dealer business in the U.S. with a symbolic $1 purchase of the U.S. brokerage unit of Fortis Securities, controlled by France's BNP Paribas SA. That deal didn't subject ICBC to tight U.S. regulatory restrictions on foreign purchases of retail-banking operations.

U.S. regulators often demand that foreign banks prove they are adequately supervised in their home markets and have proper antimoney-laundering procedures in place before allowing them to set up retail operations, legal experts say.

The agreement was signed at the Hilton Chicago as part of a slew of pacts announced by roughly 60 U.S. and Chinese companies at a giant "signing ceremony" organized on Friday by China's Commerce Ministry and its U.S. counterpart.

Both Beijing and Washington are eager to showcase their willingness to strengthen the business ties between the two countries, despite the many issues that will continue to hinder the relations. China is prodding the U.S. to ease its export controls, especially those involving high-technology products, aimed at its biggest economic rival while the U.S. is asking for more Chinese purchases of made-in-America goods and services. The contract-signing event in Chicago was hailed as "the most important event" in conjunction with President Hu's visit, according to officials in the Chinese delegation.

The move by ICBC underscores the desire by Chinese banking executives to transform their strength into a greater presence globally, as Chinese banks have emerged from the global financial crisis largely unscathed. Their hope is to better support Chinese companies and guard against losing customers to U.S. and European banks that already have networks world-wide. Meantime, Beijing has encouraged Chinese companies to expand overseas in recent years. In light of the huge foreign-exchange reserves China has, Beijing has encouraged its banks to invest more overseas.

In a speech at the event Friday, Chen Deming, China's Commerce Minister, said one of the priorities for the Commerce Ministry is to "encourage our companies to go out." He pointed to the vast foreign-exchange reserves held by China, saying that "we should turn those reserves into capital and assets." Otherwise, the reserves could decline in value because of inflation, Mr. Chen said.

While China's resource and construction companies have moved aggressively into new markets, its financial institutions generally have been slow to follow.

Bank of East Asia is led by prominent Asian banker Sir David Li. Mr. Li drew unwanted attention to himself in the U.S. and Hong Kong in 2007 when the former board member of Dow Jones became the target of an insider-trading case involving News Corp.'s buyout bid for Dow Jones. Mr. Li later agreed to pay $8.1 million to settle the civil charges. Mr. Li couldn't be reached for comment.

So far, most Chinese investments in the U.S. financial sector have involved the Chinese taking passive, minority stakes in firms such as Blackstone Group LP and Morgan Stanley. Taking a majority stake in Bank of East Asia is a change of tactic for ICBC

At the same time, Bank of East Asia is no stranger to ICBC. It sold a 70% stake in its Canadian operations to ICBC last year and all of its six branches in Canada have since been rebranded ICBC Canada. Bank of East Asia has 13 branches in the U.S., concentrating in New York and California—two states that boast the largest numbers of Chinese immigrants. The bank formed its U.S. banking subsidiary in 2001 through the acquisition of Grand National Bank, of Alhambra, Calif.

The deal, if approved by U.S. regulators, would allow ICBC to gain relatively quick access to American depositors. Right now, ICBC has one branch in New York, but it isn't involved in the retail-banking business. Bank of China Ltd. is the only mainland Chinese bank that has a retail license in the U.S. market. The bank, also state owned, has two branches in New York and one in Los Angeles. It recently has started allowing American customers to buy and sell the Chinese currency through its U.S. branches.

The decision by Bank of China is the latest move by China to allow the yuan, whose value is still tightly controlled by the government, to become an international currency that can be used for trade and investment.

Chinese banks have encountered uphill battles to gain access to the U.S. market in the past. For instance, it took almost two years for ICBC to get the approval from the Federal Reserve to open its New York branch, which has so far focused on commercial lending. That green light was given shortly before President George W. Bush's trip to Beijing for the Summer Olympics in 2008.

Some Chinese banks' bids to acquire U.S. counterparts have been rejected. A case in point is China Minsheng Banking Corp. In 2008, Minsheng, China's first private bank and a midsize lender, agreed to take a 9.9% stake in San Francisco lender UCBH Holdings Inc., the holding company for United Commercial Bank. When the bank ran into trouble during the financial crisis over bad loans and accounting errors, Minsheng tried to buy it. U.S. regulators rejected the move because of restrictions on foreign investment in U.S. banks, according to people familiar with the matter. Regulators in late 2009 shut down United Commercial Bank and Minsheng had to write off its $130 million investment.(source)

Barry As President: CHINA'S MILITARY RISE MEANS Appeasement Is The Proper Policy Towards Confucian China

We all learned at school how the status quo powers mismanaged the spectacular rise of Germany before World War I, a strategic revolution so like the rise of China today.

And we all learned how the Kaiser overplayed his hand. That much was obvious.

Yet it is difficult to pin-point exactly when the normal pattern of great power jostling began to metamorphose into something more dangerous, leading to two rival, entrenched, and heavily armed alliance structures unable or unwilling to avert the drift towards conflict. The Long Peace died by a thousand cuts, a snub here, a Dreadnought there, the race for oil.

The German historian Fritz Fischer has in a sense muddied the waters with his seminal work, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for World Power). He draws on imperial archives in Potsdam to claim that Germany’s general staff was angling for a pre-emptive war to smash France and dismember the Russian Empire before it emerged as an industrial colossus. Sarajevo provided the “propitious moment”.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s court allegedly made up its mind after the Social Democrats (then Marxists) won a Reichstag majority in 1912, seeing war as a way to contain radical dissent. This assessment was tragically correct. War split the Social Democrats irrevocably, allowing the Nazis to exploit a divided Left under Weimar.

The Fischer version of events is a little too reassuring, and not just because the Entente allies had already fed Germany’s self-fulfilling fears of encirclement and emboldened Tsarist Russia to push its luck in the Balkans. A deeper cause was at work.

"The only condition which could lead to improvement of German-English relations would be if we bridled our economic development, and this is not possible," said Deutsche Bank chief Karl Helfferich as early as 1897. German steel output jumped tenfold from 1880 to 1900, leaping past British production. Sound familiar?

Is China now where Germany was in 1900? Possibly. There are certainly hints of menace from some quarters in Beijing. Defence minister Liang Guanglie said over New Year that China’s armed forces are “pushing forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction”.

Professor Huang Jing from Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew School and a former adviser to China’s Army, said Beijing is losing its grip on the colonels.

“The young officers are taking control of strategy and it is like young officers in Japan in the 1930s. This is very dangerous. They are on a collision course with a US-dominated system,” he said.

Yet nothing is foreordained. Which is why it was so unsettling to learn that most of the leadership of the US Congress declined to attend the state banquet at the White House for Chinese President Hu Jintao, including the Speaker of House.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Mr Hu a “dictator”. Is this a remotely apposite term for a self-effacing man of Confucian leanings, whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, who fights a daily struggle against his own hotheads at home, and who will hand over power in an orderly transition next year?

Or for premier Wen Jiabao, who visited students in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, narrowly surviving the “insubordination purge” that followed? These leaders may be wrong in their assessment of how much democracy China can handle without flying out of control, but despots they are not.

President Barack Obama has bent over backwards to draw China into the international system through the G20, the World Bank and the IMF, in practical terms recognizing Beijing as co-equal in global condominium.

You could say Mr Obaba has won little in return for reaching out, but as Napoleon put it, “a leader is a dealer in hope”. What, pray, would a policy of crude containment do to China’s psyche?

Heaven protect us from unreconstructed Neo-cons such as ex-UN ambassador John Bolton, who wants to send aircraft carrier battle groups into the Straits of Taiwan, as if we were still living in that lost world of American pre-eminence in 1996, when China was still too weak to respond, and did not have operational missiles able to sink US carriers far at sea. Yet variants of the Bolton view are gaining ground on Capitol Hill.

Yes, China’s leaders should be careful not to succumb to the Wilhelmine illusion that economic and strategic momentum is the same as actual power.

There is a new edge to Chinese naval policy in the South China Sea, causing Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines to cleave closer to the US alliance. Has Beijing studied how German naval ambitions upset the careful diplomatic legacy of Bismarck and pushed an ambivalent Britain towards the Entente, even to the point of accepting alliance with Tsarist autocracy?

Factions in Beijing appear to think that China will win a trade war if Washington ever imposes sanctions to counter Chinese mercantilism. That is a fatal misjudgement. The lesson of Smoot-Hawley and the 1930s is that surplus states suffer crippling depressions when the guillotine comes down on free trade; while deficit states can muddle through, reviving their industries behind barriers. Demand is the most precious commodity of all in a world of excess supply.

The political reality is that China’s export of manufacturing over-capacity is hollowing out the US industrial core, and a plethora of tricks to stop Western firms competing in the Chinese market rubs salt in the wound. It is preventing full recovery in the US, where half the population is falling out of the bottom of the Affluent Society. Some 43.2m people are now on food stamps. The US labour force participation rate has fallen to 64.3pc, worse than a year ago. Only the richer half is recovering.

The roots of this imbalance lie in the structure of globalisation and East-West capital flows – and no doubt the deficiencies of US school education – but China plays a central role, and this will not tolerated for much longer if Beijing is also perceived to be a strategic enemy. China’s economic and military goals are in conflict. One defeats the other.

The undervalued yuan is merely the visible tip of the mercantilist iceberg, and is a diminishing factor in any case as leaked dollar stimulus from the Fed’s QE drives up Chinese wage inflation. What matters is that China’s entire credit, tax, and regulatory system is geared towards subsidised capital for exporters.

Professor Michael Pettis from Beijing University argues that a key reason why Chinese consumption has collapsed from 48pc to 36pc of GDP over 12 years – and therefore why China cannot eliminate the trade surplus with the US – is that the banking system has been bailed out with an interest rate subsidy extracted from depositors, shifting income from the people to corporate debtors. Unfortunately, this is about to happen again.

A cocky China needs to watch its step, as does a rancorous America, before resentments feed on each other in a Wilhelmine spiral.

The Chinese have no recent history of sweeping territorial expansion (except Tibet). The one-child policy has left a dearth of young men, and implies a chronic aging crisis within a decade. This is not the demographic profile of a fundamentally bellicose nation.

The correct statecraft for the West is to treat Beijing politely but firmly as a member of global club, gambling that the Confucian ethic will over time incline China to a quest for global as well as national concord. Until we face irrefutable evidence that this Confucian bet has failed, 'Boltonism’ must be crushed.

Appeasement, your hour has come.(source)

CHINESE MILITARY MACHINE: On The Rise

Lift-off: China's J-20 stealth plane has made a successful test flight. Military officials say it is likely the Chinese were able to develop the stealth technology from parts of an American F-117 Nighthawk that was shot down over Serbia in 1999

China was able to build its first stealth bomber using technology gleaned from a downed U.S. fighter, it has been claimed.

Beijing unveiled its state-of-the-art jet – the Chengdu J-20 – earlier this month.

Military officials say it is likely the Chinese were able to develop the stealth technology from parts of an American F-117 Nighthawk that was shot down over Serbia in 1999.

During Nato’s aerial bombing of the country during the Kosovo war, a Serbian anti-aircraft missile shot the Nighthawk. It was the first time one of the ‘invisible’ fighters had ever been hit.

The Pentagon believed a combination of clever tactics and luck had allowed a Soviet-built SA-3 missile to bring down the jet.

The pilot ejected and was rescued but the wreckage was strewn over a wide area of farmland.

Civilians collected the parts – some the size of small cars – as souvenirs.

‘At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,’ says Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia’s military chief of staff during the Kosovo war.

‘We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies... and to reverse-engineer them.’

A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up ‘in the hands of foreign military attaches’.

In what appears to be a clear message of its military might, China staged the first test flight of the new stealth jet earlier this month - at the same time that U.S. defence chief Robert Gates was in Beijing on the second day of an official visit.

The fighter jet's successful test follows reports that China is planning to launch its first aircraft carrier and has tested a ballistic missile capable of sinking U.S. vessels in the Pacific.

The prototype jet was shown in flight, with civilians and air force personnel watching on, in pictures on several unofficial Chinese military websites, after local media outlets had claimed a successful test flight had taken place.

While the Chinese government is renowned for its stringent approach to state secrets, photos and reports of the J-20's test have remained online.

According to international agencies, the scheduling of the test flight to coincide with Mr Gates' visit to China, coupled with the seemingly relaxed approach to reports about the flight, indicated Beijing's willingness to be more open about its military intentions.

Nonetheless, reports of the stealth's successful test will do little to quell anxieties about the speed of China's military progress.

The U.S. F-22 Raptor is currently the only operational stealth fighter in the world, while Russia's Sukhoi T-50 jet is expected to enter active service in the next four years.

But pictures of China's J-20, which looks larger than the F-22 or T-50, will be of concern to the Taiwanese government, whose antiquated aircraft and radar systems would provide little resistance to radar-evading Chinese jets.

The U.S. has claimed China would not be capable of developing a stealth jet for years and production of the F-22 was recently capped.

But the J-20's successful test, coupled with reports of the development of an aircraft carrier and missile system, confirms China's growing military might.(source)

Islamofile 012411: Suicide Bomber Kills 35 At Russia's Biggest Airport

A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people at Russia's busiest airport on Monday, state TV said, in an attack on the capital that bore the hallmarks of militants fighting for an Islamist state in the North Caucasus region.

President Dmitry Medvedev vowed to track down and punish those behind the bombing, which also injured over 150 people, including foreigners, during the busy late afternoon at Moscow's Domodedovo airport.

Islamist rebels have vowed to take their bombing campaign from the North Caucasus to the Russian heartland in the year before presidential elections, hitting transport and economic targets. They have also leveled threats at the 2014 Winter Olympics, scheduled for the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, a region some militants consider "occupied."

Dense smoke filled Domodedovo's international arrivals hall and a fire burned along one wall.

"Taxi drivers lined up in the arrivals hall were blown up. Pieces of their bodies covered us and my left ear doesn't hear very well at all," Artyom Zhilenkov, 30, told Reuters as he pointed to pieces of human flesh on his coat.

Thick drops of blood were scattered across the snow-covered tarmac outside the arrivals hall, where Interfax news agency said traces of shrapnel were found.

"I heard a loud boom... we thought someone had just dropped something. But then I saw casualties being carried away," a check-in attendant who gave her name as Elena told Reuters at Domodedovo, which is some 22 km (14 miles) southeast of Moscow.

The prosecutor's office said the bomb had been classified as a terrorist attack -- the largest since twin suicide bombings on the Moscow metro rocked the Russian heartland in March.

"The blast was most likely carried out by a suicide bomber"

State television said the blast was the work of a "smertnik," or suicide bomber.

U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the "outrageous act of terrorism" and offered Moscow help. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was shocked, state TV said.

A decade after federal forces drove separatists from power in Chechnya in the second of two wars, the mainly Muslim North Caucasus is wracked by violence.

Medvedev, who has called the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus the biggest threat to Russian security, wrote on Twitter: "Security will be strengthened at large transport hubs."

"We mourn the victims of the terrorist attack at Domodedovo airport. The organizers will be tracked down and punished."

Medvedev, due to open the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, delayed his Tuesday departure to the Swiss city of Davos.

No group has yet taken responsibility for the attack, but dozens of Internet surfers, writing in Russian, praised the suicide bomber on unofficial Islamist site kavkazcenter.com.

Russia's ruble-denominated stock market MICEX fell by nearly two percent following the blast, but traders said they expected little long-term impact.

"It (the blast) is moving the market in the short term, but there is no fundamental reason for the market to fall. If you remember, the market didn't react strongly to (previous blasts)," said trader Alexei Bachurin from Renaissance Capital.

The attack raised questions over Russian security -- one month after it won the right to host the 2018 World Cup.

SPREADING INSURRECTION

Twitter users posted mobile video phone footage of dozens of people lying on the floor amongst severed limbs and pools of blood as thick smoke filled the hall and a fire burned along one wall.

Airport staff were shown using flash lights to pick their way through the chaotic scene taped off immediately after the blast. Later videos showed emergency workers wheeling injured people out of the terminal on stretchers.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who shares power in a 'tandem' arrangement with the less influential Medvedev, has staked his political reputation on quelling rebellion in the North Caucasus.

He launched a war in late 1999 in Chechnya to topple a secessionist government. That campaign achieved its immediate aim and helped him to the presidency months later; but since then insurgency has spread to neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan.

"It does not ... bode well for Russian ties to the North Caucasus and is yet another sign that what Putin started in 1999 by invading the rebellious republic of Chechnya has come home to roost again in the Russian capital," said Glen Howard, president of the U.S. Jamestown Foundation research institution.

Tensions between ethnic Russians and Muslims -- at 20 million they make up one seventh of Russia's population -- flared dramatically last month in a string of clashes, which involved thousands of Russian nationalists who attacked passersby of non-Slavic appearance, many of whom were from the North Caucasus.

Analysts say rebels are planning to increase violence in the run up to 2012 presidential elections, that may well see Putin returning to the presidency.

"It is a clear jab at the FSB (Federal Security Services) and at the elections," said Adil Mukashev, an independent expert on terrorism issues.

Security has been tightened at Moscow's other two airports, which will also receive diverted passengers who were flying toward Domodedovo, media reported.

Moscow suffered its worst attack in six years in March 2010 when two female suicide bombers from Dagestan set off explosives in the metro, killing 40 people.

The worst incident involving North Caucasus rebels took place in 2004 when militants seized control of a school in Beslan. When Russian troops stormed the building in an attempt to end a siege, 331 hostages, half of them children, were killed.(source)