► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Sandinistas’

Bill de Blasio and the Jews of New York City

by Mojambo ( 72 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Communism, Crime, Hipsters, History, Liberal Fascism, Marxism, Progressives at October 4th, 2013 - 7:00 am

It is ironic that the fellow who plays upon the class warfare rhetoric of “Two New York’s” lives in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn (Park Slope) which is populated with hipsters and yuppies who came to New York City only because Rudolph Giuliani and Nanny Bloomberg made it a safe place to be. I do recall John Edwards playing the “Two America’s” card too but that did not work out for the pretty boy ambulance chaser did it?

by Daniel Greenfield

The Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, the city with the largest Jewish population in the country, was a strong supporter of a Marxist regime that ethnically cleansed its Jewish population, conducting a reign of terror that included informants, arrests, expulsion and attacks on a synagogue. And he did this not before the truth about Nicaragua was known, but long after it was known.

Bill de Blasio won 38% of the Jewish vote in the New York City Democratic Primary. Despite the liberal reputation of Jewish voters in the Big Apple, these numbers were roughly even with those of other religions and demographics.

The latest Marist poll, which shows de Blasio with a 43% lead, also shows the Jewish vote leaning toward him by only 55%. Republican challenger Joe Lhota scores 36% of the Jewish vote—his best numbers among any group except White Catholics (41%) and Conservatives (39%).

De Blasio’s weak polling may reflect the growing numbers of the New York City’s Orthodox Jews who tend toward a natural conservatism, but it may also reflect wariness toward any candidate, who  favors undermining the police and dispensing with the city’s needed fiscal reforms.

Bill de Blasio began his career in New York City politics with David Dinkins, whose administration’s policies were responsible for the city’s first pogrom against the Jewish community of Crown Heights. In the subsequent election, Giuliani won 68% of the Jewish vote while Dinkins took home 32%. In the next election, the very Jewish and very liberal Ruth Messinger had to make do with 27% to Giuliani’s 72%.

With Giuliani actively campaigning for Joe Lhota, one of his former deputy mayors and a man with a striking resemblance to his bulldog personality, while Dinkins associate Bill de Blasio holds down the Democratic ticket campaigning on weaker law enforcement and more social welfare, the election looks like a rerun of the 1993 grudge match between Dinkins and Giuliani.

For now Bill de Blasio is pulling in more of the Jewish vote than his old boss did, but that may change once Jewish voters realize what he really stands for.

[………..]

Bill de Blasio is probably the most radical left-wing Democratic nominee for the office in the history of the city. In a system where Democratic candidates usually keep a wary eye on the working class, he is a typical leftist Park Slope yuppie with an activist past that he parlayed into a profitable class warfare present living in an area where home prices run into the millions.

Not long before Bill de Blasio joined Team Dinkins, he was a member of Team Sandinista. The Sandinistas, or FSLN, a radical Marxist terrorist organization, took over the country and drove out most of Nicaragua’s Jewish community. By the time they were done, the ADL blasted Nicaragua as “a country without Jews, but not without anti-Semitism.”

This was the revolution that de Blasio supported while volunteering at the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York.  […….]

The New York Times describes Bill de Blasio as one of the first eager subscribers to Barricada, the Sandinista paper. This was the Barricada that denounced the “traditional ‘Jew-style’” of the United States Congress for not immediately providing the money to finance an election in Nicaragua.

[………] That energy included throwing firebombs at a synagogue during Shabbat services while shouting “Death to the Jews”, “Jewish Pigs” and “What Hitler started we will finish.”

Bill de Blasio worked as a political organizer for a left-wing group raising money to aid a regime that had deprived the Jews of their property, their homes and even their house of worship. The president of the synagogue that the Sandinistas had attacked was forced to sweep the streets, a scene reminiscent of Nazi behavior in occupied Europe, before being forced to leave the country with the clothes on his back.

The synagogue was seized and transformed into a Sandinista youth center decorated with Anti-Zionist posters. The Jewish community of Nicaragua fled to Miami and Costa Rica.

A few years after Bill de Blasio had moved on from Nicaraguan politics to New York politics, his new boss watched as mobs tore through a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn only a few miles away from where he now lives while shouting, “Death to the Jews.”

[……..]

Bill de Blasio has blasted NYPD surveillance of mosques sayings that “all surveillance efforts, and anything that is not based on specific leads should not continue.” Such a policy would prevent the NYPD from engaging in any meaningful information gathering until it was too late.

And this time it isn’t the synagogues of Nicaragua that are on the line. It’s the synagogues of New York.

In 2009, four Muslim men were arrested by the FBI and charged with, among other things, plotting to blow up synagogues in the Bronx. Their targets included the Riverdale Jewish Center and the Riverdale Temple. One of the Muslims boasted, “With no hes­i­ta­tion, I will kill 10 Yahudis.”

In 2011, two Muslim men were arrested by the NYPD and charged with a plot to blow up Manhattan synagogues.  [………]

What both cases had in common was that they relied on informants drawing out potential terrorists, instead of waiting blindly for them to strike. If Bill de Blasio has his way, that will no longer be something that the NYPD will be able to do. And like the worshipers of Nicaragua’s Congregación Israelita, the first that the Jews at Shabbat services will know of the plot will be when they smell the smoke and hear the cry, “Death to the Jews.”

But while Bill de Blasio may have his scruples about spying on mosques, his Sandinista friends had recruited informants to gather information about the Jews of Nicaragua to begin a campaign of intimidation that led to the attack on a synagogue, to arrests, threats and ultimately the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Nicaragua. If Bill de Blasio ever criticized his beloved Sandinistas for these crimes, it isn’t in the record.

At one of Bill de Blasio’s final meetings with the NSN, he spoke of a need to “build alliances with Islam.” That red-green alliance has since pervaded Latin America. In 2012, Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praised Saddam Hussein and denounced the US “occupation” of Afghanistan.

[…….]

This was the glorious revolution that Bill de Blasio never gave up on.  “People who had shallow party sympathies with the F.S.L.N. pretty much dropped everything when they lost,” one of his old NSN friends said. “Bill wasn’t like that.”

“They gave a new definition to democracy,” Bill de Blasio told the New York Times. And now he risks giving a new definition to democracy in New York City.

Cities and countries are precarious places. That is something that Jews have found out in countless places from Nicaragua to Iran. The Jews of Brooklyn discovered in 1991 how precarious a place New York City could be. The decades of peace since then only became possible because Bill de Blasio’s old boss was forced out of office.

If Bill de Blasio moves from Park Slope to Gracie Mansion, his old dreams for Nicaragua could become his new dreams for New York.

Read the rest –  Bill de Blasio and the Jews of New York

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Anti-semitism, Communism, Crime, Hipsters, History, Liberal Fascism, Marxism, Progressives | 72 Comments »

Back to the future with Bill de Blasio; and a politician’s philosophy tends to be consistent, abroad and at home

by Mojambo ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Cuba, Democratic Party, Economy, Liberal Fascism, Politics, Progressives, Socialism, taxation at September 26th, 2013 - 12:00 pm

Since 1978 New York City has been run reasonably well (under Mayors Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg – yes Bloomberg is annoying with his nannyisms but the City for the most part has still been well run) the exception being the four years of hell (1990 -94) under David Dinkins. Sadly it appears we are about to go back to the future of the “good old days” of the 1970’s.

by Michael Goodwin

Extra, extra, read all about it. Not all New Yorkers have the same incomes! Not all have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams! And most — gasp! — don’t live on Park Avenue or have nannies and housekeepers!

If this doesn’t strike you as breathtaking news, then you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and join Bill de Blasio’s movement. I say movement because de Blasio doesn’t just want to be mayor. He has discovered there is poverty in Gotham and many other pesky outcomes where some people do better than others. And he intends to end that disparity.

“Fighting inequality and fighting economic injustice,” as he put it, is what he’s all about.

Good luck with that, but before New Yorkers jump onto the Democrat’s bound-for-utopia bandwagon, some history is required. We could start with Karl Marx, but we’d just get lost trying to decode the incomprehensible differences among Marxists, Leninists and Trotskyites.

Instead, let’s look at Cuba, which, strictly by the numbers, reflects the paradise de Blasio describes. Fidel and Raul Castro had their way for 54 years and pulled off the socialist dream: The island nation had the least income inequality in the world, a survey found. North Korea also was off the charts.

Of course, there are some peculiar facts about Cuban exceptionalism. Everybody is equally poor, with average monthly wages of $19, while children’s shoes can cost nearly as much.

And that much-ballyhooed health-care system? It’s a joke. Bring your own sheets, bedpans and food to the hospital, and pray you don’t die of infections or neglect. True, it is free, so your family won’t get stuck with a capitalist-size bill to bury you. What a relief that must be.

On my visit to Cuba, I was struck by the total breakdown of everything except the police state. Havana’s once-glorious architecture is crumbling, and there are chickens and pigs, but no running water, in large parts of the central city.

Half the cars are owned by the government, and the other half belong in antique shops. Smaller cities look as though they are stuck in the 19th century, with public transportation consisting of a man guiding a horse-drawn wagon.  [………]

I’m not suggesting de Blasio could take New York back that far, at least not in one term. But his rhetoric about a “tale of two cities” and his repeated promises to use City Hall’s power to erase inequality mean we would be fools not to take him seriously. As Barack Obama is proving on a national scale, a charismatic, ambitious ideologue with no understanding of economics can do a lot of damage in a short time.

Even more troubling, de Blasio is not alone. Council Member Letitia James, one of two candidates left in the race to succeed him as public advocate, blasted Mayor Bloomberg Friday for saying it would be a “godsend” if “we could get every billionaire around the world to move here.”

[……..]

Hers is a common mistake on the left. The obvious resentment she has about other people’s money leads her to assume that success and failure alike depend on government, and that the poor would be rich if only the government helped them more. If you believe that, it follows that bureaucrats should aim to level the results.

Sooner and later, more socialism means more human misery. But true believers never grasp the basic fact that, if you penalize success, there won’t be any. Remove the consequences of failure and there will be more of it.

Naturally, utopia will be led by elites who know what’s best for everyone else. Whether in Cuba, North Korea or Washington, the mandarins will be cosseted by comforts taken from others.

People who know de Blasio well say he is smart, just as many say Obama is smart. But smart is as smart does, and we ought to save the word for those who can help make the economic pie bigger instead of just trying to re-divide the pie we have. That would be the smart thing to do if you wanted all New Yorkers to prosper.

Read the rest – De Blasio’s Cuban vision for New York City

People such as Bill de Blasio and Barack Obama could never make it in private industry. Only in the field of progressive politics is where mediocrities and ideologues can thrive.

by Michael Goodwin

Trying to defend the indefensible, Bill de Blasio explained his work with Nicaraguan communists this way.

“They had a youthful energy and idealism mixed with a human ability and practicality that was really inspirational,” he told a reporter, before conceding that his heroes were “not free enough by any stretch of the imagination.”

To summarize his argument, on one hand you have energy and idealism, and on the other you have prison and the murder of dissidents. But the leaders meant well and, besides, nobody is perfect.

In a nutshell — emphasis on nut — the Democratic nominee for mayor has outed himself as a supporter of oppression, as long as it comes from the far left. He also expressed his fondness for “democratic socialism,” which is like calling himself a socialist.

The revelations in the New York Times about de Blasio’s warped world view, and history of aiding such despots as Fidel Castro, draw a ho-hum response from fellow lefties. Even if they didn’t know of de Blasio’s admiration for dictators, they surely recognize him as one of their own when he uses the code words of “fighting inequality and economic injustice.”

But for sensible New Yorkers, the emerging portrait of the man poised to be mayor should set off alarm bells. His past, combined with his pro-tax, anti-police agenda, confirm that De Blasio is not your garden-variety liberal like the Democrats he defeated in the primary. Their incremental approach is mainstream compared to his vision of social revolution.

His activism marks him as a hard-line leftist who, as an adult, spouted the idea that the United States was a problem in the world.  [……..]

Where does he stand on the autocratic reign of the late Hugo Chavez? What about the Mideast — is Israel the problem? The more we know about him, the more we need to know.

And not because every mayor has a foreign policy. A politician’s philosophy tends to be consistent, abroad and at home. Someone who favors government power over individual liberty for Latin Americans is likely to hold the same view about New Yorkers.

A charitable way to describe de Blasio is that he is naive. But such charity is itself naive.

Consider that de Blasio and his wife snuck into Cuba for their honeymoon in 1994. It was apparently an illegal trip, which would explain why they first flew to Canada. It could also explain why they didn’t tell their children, according to their daughter, who said she recently learned of it. She hailed the trip as “badass.” Indeed.

She’s not alone in needing a lesson about the Cuba of those days. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of vital subsidies and most of Cuba’s trade. The island nation, after 45 years of Castro and communism, looked to be in a death spiral.

America saw a chance for improving relations, and President Clinton sent Harry Belafonte and others to meet with Castro about easing the trade embargo. “Forget it, leave it as it is,” Castro responded, according to a member of the delegation.

Castro feared ordinary Cubans would revolt if they tasted the political, economic and religious freedom that would follow an opening. Nor did he and his gangster government want to give up control of the lucrative black market in goods and oil. [……]

So when de Blasio went to help, he was not helping the Cuban people. Similarly, his support for the Sandinistas added to the misery of ordinary Nicaraguans, yet he remains proud.

“I have an activist’s desire to improve people’s lives,” he told the Times.

George Will recently observed that the whole point of modern liberalism is for liberals to feel good about themselves.

By that standard, de Blasio’s waltzes with dictators are a roaring success for his self-esteem. For everyone else, there is only tyranny and misery.

Read the rest – De Blasio’s warped world view should set off alarm bells

Tags: , ,
Posted in Cuba, Democratic Party, Economy, Liberal Fascism, Politics, Progressives, Socialism, taxation | 113 Comments »

John Kerry: the radical careerist

by Mojambo ( 102 Comments › )
Filed under Communism, Progressives at January 29th, 2013 - 7:00 am

John Kerry would have made a God awful president. The fact that he came as close as he did in 2004 reminds us of how important we need to have strong candidates to run for president.

by Daniel Greenfield

November 1971. The Anti-War movement was moving into high gear even as the Vietnam War was fading away. Americans troops were leaving Vietnam in large numbers and the last American offensive in Vietnam had begun the year before. But for the Anti-War movement, the actual war was only a pretext for undermining their country and promoting themselves.

Few men fit that description better than John Forbes Kerry who had not needed a weatherman to know which way the winds of political fortune were blowing. Vietnam Veterans Against the War became the platform for an aspiring Congressman seeking to remake his image. Despite its name VVAW was as bent on attacking the men fighting the war, as the war itself. Its publicity stunts, such as Operation RAW or Kerry’s own Senate testimony, were calculated to cast returning veterans as war criminals and murderers.

Toward the end of 1971, VVAW was balanced on the edge of its own irrelevance. The publicity stunts had brought it fame and undermined America’s position in negotiating a departure from Vietnam, but the departure was still underway. Rather than speeding it up, Kerry and VVAW had slowed it down to make the most of their moment in the sun, but once the public and VVAW’s membership realized that the war really was ending, so would their popularity.

For John Kerry, VVAW had accomplished its goal by making him famous. […….] But not every VVAW activist had a political exit strategy. Some had a more violent one in mind.

At the Kansas City leadership meeting of VVAW, a proposal was put forward to use the Christmas recess to murder several senators. Murdering senators would not be helpful to Kerry’s career plans, but neither would informing the authorities of the plot. Unlike much of the VVAW, Kerry didn’t want to storm the Senate, he wanted to work there. And so the man of nuance found a compromise, he resigned without telling anyone of the plot.

Three months later he was running for Congress.

Kerry’s second desertion was to become a pattern in his career. While some in the VVAW were career radicals, Kerry was a radical careerist. Leftist politics were his way up the ladder, but he never let them get in the way of his own career.

Over 40 years later, Kerry, the fake war hero turned fake anti-war hero, would try to pull off the same trick a second time, going from pro-war to anti-war in Iraq.

During his Senate testimony, Kerry had said, “We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now.” But John Forbes Kerry had always been a summer soldier, a straw man playing a part, a traitor to everything but his own career. John Kerry had gone to Washington not to tell the truth, but to tell the profitable lie.

Kerry was willing to lie, to portray himself as a war hero when it suited him and as a war criminal when it suited him, and to switch from one to the other, as quickly as he switched from supporting a war to opposing it. He was willing to cover up the planned assassination of United States senators, to throw away medals that he claimed were his before claiming that they weren’t, and to make common cause with America’s enemies, so long as it got him where he needed to go.

John Kerry has spent thirty years holding public office, twenty-eight of them as a United States Senator, and he has spent that time pushing the same bankrupt politics of international appeasement. The Kerry who made up imaginary war crimes in Vietnam while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee became a member of that same Committee while making up imaginary war crimes in Nicaragua.

The career of Senator Kerry is bookended by his support for the Sandinista terrorists at its inception to his recent support for Assad. In that time, the man who would be Secretary of State demonstrated that he had learned nothing from his constant mistakes.

In 1985, Kerry insisted that America needed to put its faith in the goodwill of the Sandinistas, as he had earlier expected it to puts its faith in the goodwill of the Viet Cong’s peace offer that he had announced in Washington D.C.

In 1970, as Kerry was taking aim at his first Congressional campaign, he told the Harvard Crimson, “I’m an internationalist. I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”  [……..]

In 1985, Kerry finally became Senator Kerry. Shortly thereafter, Senator Kerry announced that he was going to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinistas as a Vietnam Veteran to avoid “repeating the mistakes we made in Vietnam.”

To Kerry, Nicaragua was just another Vietnam. The Comandante, Daniel Ortega, was just another Ho Chi Mihn and the old winter soldier was back in the saddle galloping to the rescue of another Communist dictatorship. […….] In his Senate floor speech a year later, he argued against military aid to the Contra rebels by invoking Vietnam.

“Mr. President, how quickly do we forget? How quickly do we forget? No one wanted to widen the war in Vietnam.” Then followed the usual tale of young Kerry suffering through Christmas in Cambodia and a plea not to send off another generation of American soldiers to die in Nicaragua. It was a shameless speech that Kerry would repeat with tedious regularity throughout his long political career of finding new Vietnams around the world.

While Nicaragua did not have much in common with Vietnam, the Sandinistas and the Viet Cong both had Kerry selling their agenda in Washington. In the Senate, John Kerry did exactly what he had done outside it… represent the interests of the Communist foe.

Having found himself another Vietnam, Kerry obstructed Reagan’s policy as much as he could. He met with Ortega and brought back his proposal to block all aid to the contras. […….] It claimed that the Sandinistas were non-aligned, when they were aligned with the USSR, and Ortega’s visit to Moscow shortly thereafter would humiliate and discredit pro-Sandinista Democrats like Kerry. Kerry’s claim that he was not illegally negotiating with Ortega, but only passing along a message, was an even thinner tissue of lies.

When Reagan imposed sanctions on the Sandinista regime, Kerry denounced it as an “unpardonable” “unilateral display of arrogance.”  [……]

John Kerry defined himself as a veteran, but the one consistent attitude that he has shown is contempt for the American soldier.

As far back as his Yale days, Kerry had been insisting that American’s foreign policy problems were caused by its military. Kerry’s political career began with his demonization of American soldiers in Vietnam and it wrapped up with his demonization of American soldiers in Iraq.

In 1971, Kerry had accused American soldiers of cutting off ears and heads, raping women and behaving in a way reminiscent of Genghis Khan. Thirty-four years later, Kerry accused American soldiers in Iraq of terrorizing women and children.

[……]

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” he told students.

John Forbes Kerry, Yale man, was far too smart to get stuck in Iraq or Vietnam. Instead he did his homework and finessed his way out of Vietnam and into Washington DC. Unlike those fools in the military who believed in winning wars, he believed in losing them and profiting politically from the defeat.

This was the lesson that Kerry had taken away from his work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the same lesson that he had taken away from every war, that it was safer to be the senator than the soldier, the critic rather than the commander. […….] It is the lesson that he intends to bring with him to his work as Secretary of State.

For all his cleverness, John Kerry has always been a pawn of foreign interests. Kerry let himself be used by the Viet Cong and by the Sandinistas, by the Soviet Union and by half the Muslim world. As Secretary of State, he will go on being used, no longer as a Senator, but as the most important foreign policy figure in the Obama Administration.

If John Kerry becomes Secretary of State, then every terrorist group that he panders to and every tyrant that he plays up to will ascend that post with him. The Senate confirmation of John Kerry will mean that every enemy power or group that despises the United States will have an ally at the head of this country’s foreign policy establishment.

Over 40 years ago, Kerry learned that treason will be rewarded by the political establishment of the left. If his political career is capped off with this honor, then American foreign policy will be in the hands of a man with no principle except contempt for the military and no guiding light but the efficacy of treason.

Read the rest – John Kerry: Unfit for duty

Tags: , ,
Posted in Communism, Progressives | 102 Comments »