Super PAC Has Big Names Behind It

Film director JJ Abrams, the SEIU and AFL-CIO unions, and billionaire George Soros are all prominent donors to a super PAC run by David Brock, founder of the controversial Media Matters for America.

The super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century, just unveiled a new website this past Friday called VeepMistakes.com featuring more than 1,300 pages of purported opposition research and video clips on potential GOP vice presidential candidates.

KleinOnline recently reviewed American Bridge’s donor list. On it was JJ Abrams who gave $37,500 to Brock’s super PAC last June. Abrams is best known for creating the television series “Alias” and “Lost” and directing such movies as “Mission: Impossible III,” “Star Trek,” and “Super 8.” Abram is also a top Obama campaign donor.

Other American Bridge donors for the fiscal year of 2011 include the National Education Association, SEIU and AFL-CIO. Each gave $100,000. Soros donated $1 million to the super PAC.

Missouri Democrat Defends
Bizarre 9/11 Comments

During an interview on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” on New York’s WABC Radio, M.D. Alam, a Democrat activist running for Missouri secretary of state, defended his claim that 9/11 is a Jewish holiday and that few, if any, Jews were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (In fact, between 200 to 400 Jews, including five Israelis, died in the attacks.)

In the interview, Alam also defended “Loose Change,” a series of online videos arguing the 9/11 attacks were planned and conducted by elements within the U.S. government.

Alam is national chairman of the Democratic Party Asian American Caucus and is founder of Missouri’s Democratic Party Asian American Caucus. He was a manager in Missouri for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Alam has been the focus of news media attention after the Washington Free Beacon reported that he posted in an Internet forum titled, “Was 9/11 a conspiracy?” in 2009. In the forum, Alam asked, “Why 9/11 was a official holidy [sic] for all jewish [sic] people worked in the the [sic] WTC?” Alam went on to tout the “Loose Change” film, asking readers, “Who can tell me how many of the Jewish people died on the 9/11 tragedy?”

Earlier this week, Alam apologized for his remarks in a subsequent interview with the VIN News Jewish blog.

On this reporter’s radio program, though, Alam repeatedly defended his line of questioning about Jews and 9/11. “Do you understand that asking questions is nothing wrong?” Alam stated. “I can ask you something. It doesn’t mean that I am accusing you. Our job is to ask questions to both sides…”

Congressman In Trouble
For Madrassa Remarks

Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) has a history of associating with a radical Muslim group that was an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to raise money for Hamas. Carson is currently coming under fire for suggesting the U.S. needs to be “looking at” the madrassa model of education where the Koran serves as foundation.

The group in question, the Islamic Society of North America, was listed by the Muslim Brotherhood as a “like minded” organization that shares the goal of an Islamic nation.

Carson gave a speech in May to the convention of the Islamic Circle of North America. Clips from that speech have been playing on Fox News this week. During the address, Carson stressed the importance of the Koranic model of education found inside madrassas.

He stated: “America will never win the war against terrorism without help from the Muslim community. America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our madrassas, in our schools, where innovation is encouraged, where the foundation is the Koran.”

Continued Carson: “And that model that we are pushing in some of our schools meets the multiple needs of students. …I have found that we need an educational model that is current, that meets the needs of our students. America must understand that she needs Muslims.”

Editor’s note: For the first time, Aaron Klein is available for a limited U.S. speaking tour in August, September and October. Topics include the 2012 Presidential election and Israel. Shuls/organizations interested in having Klein speak should immediately contact Joshua at 215-380-3469 or Joshua@kleinonline.com.

Thousands Of Radicals Poised To Fight Assad

At least 5,000 global jihadists are positioned near Syria’s borders with Turkey and Lebanon attempting to infiltrate Syria to aid the opposition fighting Bashar Assad’s regime, a senior Syrian government official told to this column.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Syrian military hopes to entirely quell the opposition by the start of Ramadan on July 19. Russian advisers in Syria seem to have a more realistic timeline of September to beat back the opposition, the official noted.

The Syrian plan is for Assad to remain in power and to hold an international conference with participation from Iran aimed at rebuilding Syria, the official said.

While Russia continues to arm Syria, countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been arming and financing the opposition, with the U.S. saying it is providing “non-lethal” aid, including communications assistance. Reports have claimed the U.S. is coordinating arms shipments to the rebel forces.

The claim of global jihadists attempting to infiltrate Syria is just the latest report of al Qaeda-linked groups fighting alongside the U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army.

It Wasn’t AIDS, Says Chief PA Official

Despite claims to the contrary, a confidential medical report released to the Palestinian Authority from the French hospital at which Yasir Arafat died did not list AIDS in the late PLO leader’s bloodstream, according to the PA’s chief negotiator.

“I’ve seen the French report. And it excluded AIDS. I can confirm that to you,” said the PA’s Saeb Erekat on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio. “I think people in this region jump to conclusions. The reasons [of death] are unknown to us,” he said.

The PA last week agreed to exhume Arafat’s body amid new allegations he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210.

Asked whether the French report listed any radioactive material associated with Arafat’s death, Erekat stated, “I reviewed the report of the French hospital at that time and it said that we had investigated everything possible. It wasn’t on it.”

Erekat said Arafat’s body could be unearthed within days. “President Arafat’s body can be exhumed the minute we declare the religious and the family procedures, which we are doing. Could be in the next few days.”

He went on to call for an “international investigation, a credible committee that could take the matter from A to Z. That’s very, very essential.”

Asked whether it’s possible Arafat’s close circle was involved in any alleged assassination, Erekat replied: “I think we need to know who gave the orders, who provided drugs, who were the elements to carry out the assassination if it’s an assassination.”

Landing On… Asteroids

What does President Obama have in common with former presidential candidate Ross Perot, director James Cameron, Google’s Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt?

All personalities are involved in attempts to land on asteroids in highly costly efforts that have experts conflicted about the possibilities of success and whether the ultimate benefits outweigh the expenses.

Cameron, Page, Schmidt and Perot are behind a private company, Planetary Resources, that is planning to not only land on an asteroid but mine it for resources. The company seeks to launch the first in a series of space telescopes into low-Earth orbit in an attempt to find asteroids to potentially mine for profit.

Their dreamy plan may be aided by Obama’s new directives to NASA. The president has reorganized the country’s space agency with the goal of landing on an asteroid.

His new directives were immediately slammed by famed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, who both told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing that Obama’s space plans would harm NASA.

One of Obama’s key advisers on the asteroid scheme was White House science adviser John Holdren. Landing on an asteroid, Holdren argued, and giving it a well-timed nudge “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and can avoid what they didn’t.”

FrontPageMag.com noted that Holdren has endorsed “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would control all the world’s resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the “de-development” of the West, control a World Army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits.

Republican Criticizes Opponent
For Ties To J Street, Occupy Movement

The Republican challenger to Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) attacked the congressman for his ties to the controversial J Street and for his purported links to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Stephen Labate is campaigning for Israel’s seat in New York’s 2nd district. The race could have national implications. Israel is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

J Street claims to be pro-Israel, yet it has faced mounting criticism for its policies and advocacy that many argue is harmful to the Jewish state.

Speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio, Labate noted that Steve Israel was an honorary member of the host committee for the J Street Gala Dinner in 2009.

After the news media reported on several politicians involved with the dinner, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand asked to be removed from the host committee list and Sen. Chuck Schumer dropped out of appearing at the event.

Declared Labate: “Steve Israel was the only representative from New York State who was on that list of supporters. So it is significant that even Chuck Schumer and Senator Gillibrand they, you know, they called and said, ‘Hey, look I don’t want to be a part of this.’ But Steve Israel did and he is a part of that organization.

“…In the case of J Street they even question whether or not Israel has a right to exist. So I question how Congressman Israel could even entertain being a part of that organization or Occupy Wall Street.”

Labate continued: “Currently on the Democratic Congressional Committee website, which is Steve Israel’s website, there’s a petition for 100,000 signatures in support of Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street is by far one of the most anti-Semitic organizations out there.”

Hilary Clinton’s Chief Of Staff
Tied To Egyptian President’s Wife

Saleha Mahmood Abedin, the mother of Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, reportedly served in the women’s division of the Muslim Brotherhood alongside the wife of Egypt’s new president, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi.

This journalist previously revealed that Abedin represented the Muslim World League, a Muslim charity known to have spawned terror groups, including one declared by the U.S. government to be an official al-Qaeda front.

This journalist also previously reported that Clinton spoke at Abedin’s Saudi women’s college, where she was introduced by Abedin alongside the Islamic activist’s daughter, Huma, who serves as Clinton’s chief of staff. At the speech, Clinton praised Saleha’s “pioneering work.” Huma Abedin is also the mother-in-law of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).

Now, author Walid Shoebat has brought more information to light, reporting that while Saleha Abedin acted as one of 63 leaders of the Muslim Sisterhood, the de facto female version of the Muslim Brotherhood, she served alongside Najla Ali Mahmoud, the wife of Mohammed Mursi. Both were members of the Sisterhood’s Guidance Bureau.

Obama Aide Boasts Of Leniency
For Crack Cocaine Offenders

President Obama’s top aide, Valerie Jarrett, reportedly boasted to the black community that the administration sharply reduced the penalties for possession of crack cocaine.

Jarrett made the remarks at a meeting of black journalists and columnists this past weekend at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in New Orleans. Mainstream media outlets covering the event did not report on her crack cocaine comments.

The Root, a website owned by the Washington Post aimed at the black community, reprinted a blog report by the Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince on Jarrett’s appearance at the convention. Prince reported that at the meeting Jarrett outlined “what she considered the Obama administration’s successes.”

Continued Prince: “Among them funding for historically black colleges and universities; health care reform, which she said will disproportionately help African Americans; and reducing disparities between penalties for possession of crack and for powdered cocaine.”

DeWayne Wickham, a writer for USA Today, reported on the event for the Coshocton Tribune. He wrote Jarrett touted the sentence reduction for crack cocaine disparity as a way to build a broad Obama reelection coalition, including African Americans.

Even though the Washington Post-owned Root website reposted Prince’s blog mentioning Jarrett’s comments, the Post’s own article on the event did not touch on the subject. That article was entitled, “Obama Has ‘Genuine Love for Black Community,’ Senior Adviser Says.”

Koch Supports Bloomberg’s Food Bans

In a contentious interview on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” former New York Mayor Ed Koch expressed support for suggestions by some members of the city’s Board of Health to ban large tubs of popcorn and big cups of milk-containing beverages.

Those proposed bans were reportedly discussed during a meeting earlier this month of NYC’s 11-member health board at which Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed embargo on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces was approved.

The former mayor said he strongly backed Bloomberg’s soda ban. “I also supported his proposal which he offered to the state legislature earlier to tax the beverages that exceed that amount [of 16 ounces],” Koch added.

This radio host challenged Koch: “Where does it end? I mean, why not ban people from crossing the streets because it can be dangerous. Why not ban the sun because of the UV rays. I mean, we can learn a lot from the ladies of Afghanistan. Why not have everybody in New York City walk around in a full burqa because the sun can harm them? … If it starts with the banning of food, it’s a slippery slope to becoming a nanny state.”

Koch retorted: “Well, I don’t agree with you with all of that. That relates to regulation. If you have over-regulation, it’s wrong. If you have under-regulation, it’s wrong and the question is to get a balance.”

On the Middle East, Koch said he was involved in making Obama more pro-Israel. “I think Israel is in great danger, [and] I thought the president was not giving [the issue] enough attention,” Koch stated. “He’s changed. And I believe I had something to do with the change.”

He added, “I think Obama has done a terrific job in the last six months in support of Israel. And I want to praise him and I want to reelect him.”

Did The New Party Start It All?

Is the socialist-oriented New Party the missing link at the center of the now infamous 1995 meeting that was said to have launched President Obama’s political career in Weatherman founder Bill Ayers’s living room?

It was at that meeting that New Party member Alice Palmer announced she wanted Obama as her successor as state senator since she was stepping down to run for Congress.

This column has discovered that in the July 1996 edition of the New Party’s newsletter, the New Party News, the controversial party announced that “the Illinois New Party capped off a month-long house party drive in Chicago.” Further review of New Party literature from 1995 and 1996 finds that so-called house parties were regularly utilized by the New Party to introduce candidates to leading party activists as well as to raise money and recruit new members.

It is known that single-payer activist Quentin Young, who advised Obama on healthcare when the politician was a state senator, was present at the parlor meeting at the Ayers’s residence. Young was listed by the New Party as an early party founder and builder.

“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’s house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” Young has been quoted as saying. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”

Chicago-based blogger Maria Warren was also present. She wrote that she remembered watching Obama give a “standard, innocuous little talk” in Ayers’s home. “They were launching him,” Warren wrote, “introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

It would make sense that the New Party sponsored the get-together for Palmer’s announcement. Palmer was the New Party’s signed candidate for office. The New Party, which had partnered closely with ACORN, was mobilizing support for Palmer among its constituents and the larger Chicago progressive community.

New Party founder and Marxist activist Carl Davidson recalled screening Palmer and signing her up to the party. Wrote Davidson:

“In the next two elections in the city … the New Party has taken a slightly different approach. It organized a citywide candidates forum and invited a number of progressive candidates. Of those responding, two were of special interest, Alice Palmer and Willie Delgado …Both Palmer and Delgado attended the [New Party] forum and were thoroughly questioned by 70 or so New Party members. At the close, both publicly signed a ‘contract’ with the New Party… Two weeks later, the New Party formally endorsed them and is now mobilizing support.”

Major Egyptian Party Behind Monday’s Attack?

Israeli intelligence has information that elements of the Al-Nour Party, an Islamic extremist group that controls the second largest bloc in Egypt’s parliament, called for Monday’s deadly terrorist attack that killed an Israeli civilian in the country’s south, this column has learned.

An Israeli security source said there is further information about planned attacks against tourist sites in the Sinai as well as within Israel if the Egyptian military follows through with a threat to dissolve the parliament.

The source said Monday’s terror attack in Israel was coordinated by Jihadiya Salafiya, the military branch associated with Al-Nour, along with jihadist elements in the Sinai. The source said the attack was also meant as a protest against the Egyptian military’s threat to dismantle the Islamist-controlled parliament.

Far Left Party Activist Advocated Bankrupting ‘The System’

Frances Fox Piven, co-architect of a strategy to overload the U.S. welfare system to precipitate a transformative economic crisis, was an early builder of the socialist-leaning New Party.

The now-defunct controversial third party is coming under increased scrutiny as new information indicates that President Obama was once a New Party member.

The New Party sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda.

In 2008, Obama’s campaign denied the politician was ever a member even though the New Party’s own literature listed Obama as a member.

Last week, researcher and author Stanley Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, found Obama’s signed “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

A July 20, 1992 article in The Nation magazine by New Party founder Joel Rogers, meanwhile, lays out the case for the establishment of the party and lists several of the group’s early founders and activists. In that article, entitled, “Out with the Old Politics, in with the New Party,” Rogers cites Piven as an early activist in the formation of the New Party, which he describes as a “social democratic” party.

Piven, together with her late husband, activist and fellow Columbia professor Richard Cloward, outlined the Cloward-Piven strategy, which called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system. The duo’s stated goal was to agitate a financial crisis that would collapse the U.S economy and see its replacement with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.”

Arabs Beware: Selling Land To Jews Is Dangerous

At least 16 Palestinians are currently in Palestinian Authority prisons for selling property to Jews, this reporter has learned. Nine of the 16 face possible capital punishment for their direct involvement in the land sales, according to PA sources.

The sources said that of the 16 Palestinians incarcerated, seven are employees of the PA, including its security forces. Most of those in prison are housed in PA jails in Hebron, Jericho and Ramallah. The land sales to Jews include four deals in the region of Hebron, three in Jerusalem and one in the West Bank city of Beit El.

The PA sources said that the Palestinian government recently formed a unit with a $2.7 million yearly budget to investigate property sales to Jews as well as Jewish communities, outposts, and military bases that may be sitting on Arab-owned land. The unit works with nongovernmental organizations, including European-funded NGOs.

The number of Palestinians imprisoned for land sales to Jews is much larger than previous reported. In April, the news media reported that the PA sentenced to death former PA intelligence officer Muhammad Abu Shahala for a real estate transaction in the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. Under the framework of the PAs legal system, selling land to Jews is considered a capital offense.

Syria Gearing Up For Crackdown?

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is preparing a major offensive in the coming days against the opposition targeting his regime, an informed Syrian government source confirmed.

The source said Assad was warned by Russia that if the coming counterinsurgency targeting the opposition is not successful in the next 4-6 weeks, Syria should be prepared for a war. The source did not say whether the possibility of war referred to Russia’s expectation of international intervention in Syria.

When we convened here on May 25, the topic of discussion was the media’s renewed ardor for Barack Obama now that the president appears to be facing a tough reelection challenge.

The matter of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was cited as a prime example of the skewed coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. When journalists were finally forced to acknowledge Wright’s existence after months of hoping he’d somehow disappear, their sympathy for Obama – and even Wright himself– was all too clear. Just two brief examples:

Washington Post writer Sally Quinn lamented to PBS’s Charlie Rose, “To see his [Jeremiah Wright’s] career completely destroyed by three 20-second sound bites, all of the work he has done, his entire legacy gone down the drain, has been absolutely devastating to me – to him, sorry…. We are still a racist country…. I think that so many white people who had never been inside a black church were absolutely shocked by the tone and language that they heard [from Wright]…. I think it brought out a lot of latent racism.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, prefacing a story about Wright’s anti-American sermons, complained that “We’re running it [videos snippets of Wright’s speeches] because – like it or not, legitimate or not – it has become an issue…. All this seems to have nothing to do with actual issues that the country is facing, which these candidates should be talking about and we probably should be talking about.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your allegedly objective media at work.

The issue of Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Obama is being given new life by Edward Klein in his recently released book The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House.

(The generally dismissive reception accorded Klein’s book by the mainstream media is indicative of the protective cover Obama enjoys from the nation’s chattering class. Klein, after all, is a veteran journalist whose resume includes service as foreign editor of Newsweek, back when Newsweek was a serious publication, and editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine. The Monitor is pleased to note that notwithstanding some less than laudatory reviews, the book is number one on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.)

Klein points out that for many years Obama would begin speeches to black audiences by saying, “I bring you greetings from my pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.”

Klein also writes that “Until Obama married Michelle Robinson in 1991, when he was thirty years old, his most significant adult relationship was with Jeremiah Wright. His connection to Wright ran long and deep, and went back further than has been generally reported. It started well before Obama joined Wright’s congregation…where the pastor’s sermons on Black Liberation theology encouraged a victimization mentality among his black parishioners.”

Wright, Klein writes, “became far more than a religious and spiritual guide to Obama; he was his substitute father, life coach, and political inspiration wrapped in one package. At each step of Obama’s career, Wright was there with practical advice and counsel…. It would be no exaggeration to say that Jeremiah Wright…prepared him to run for president.”

When Rolling Stone magazine in 2007 published a detailed account of Wright’s radicalism, the media ignored the story for more than a year. As Klein puts it, “One could only imagine how these journalists would have behaved if the shoe had been on the other foot and…President George W. Bush had sat for twenty years in a white-supremacist church and listened to anti-black rants.”

ABC News investigative correspondent Brian Ross finally broke the media silence in March 2008 when he broadcast videotapes of Wright ranting from the pulpit. He told Klein he “was surprised that no one else had picked up on the Jeremiah Wright story and pursued the videotapes.”

And – pay attention here – Ross added that “not everybody at ABC News was thrilled that I ran with the story. People who liked Obama were not happy with me. In fact, my story ran on ‘Good Morning America’ but was never picked up by ‘World News Tonight.’ ”

Can anyone imagine a more devastating indictment of a news organization?

Despite Denials, Obama Likely
Was Member Of Far-Leftist Party

Has Barack Obama been caught in a lie that could become a major issue in the upcoming election?

During the 2008 presidential election cycle, Obama’s campaign categorically denied that the politician was ever a member of the New Party, which sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda.

The denial came in the wake of reports of Obama’s participation with the party, including one by this reporter on evidence that Obama was listed as a member of the socialist New Party in the group’s own literature. This reporter also conducted an exclusive interview with Marxist activist Carl Davidson, a founder of the New Party, who recounted Obama’s participation with the party.

Now researcher and author Stanley Kurtz, writing at the National Review Online, reports on documentation from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society that “definitively establishes” that Obama was a member of the New Party. Kurtz reports that Obama also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party and its politics while in office.

In 2008, Obama’s Fight the Smears campaign website conceded the New Party did support Obama in 1996 but denied that Obama ever joined it.

The New Party, established in 1992, took advantage of what was known as electoral “fusion,” which enabled candidates to run on two tickets simultaneously, attracting voters from both parties. But the New Party went defunct in 1998, one year after fusion was halted by the Supreme Court.

Obama’s 2008 political campaign may not be alone in making possibly misleading statements about the politician’s alleged membership in the New Party. The now defunct New Party’s founder, University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers, is currently denying that his organization ever had any members, thus making it impossible for Obama to have been an official member.

However, this reporter found scores of reports from the 1990s describing thousands of members of the New Party. Also, the New Party’s own newsletters lists members.

Al Qaeda-Affiliated Fighters Caught En Route To Syria

Jordan for the first time publicly stated that its security officials arrested two jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda on their way to Syria to fight against President Bashar Assad.

Last month, this column reported that there is a growing collaboration between the U.S.-supported Syrian opposition and al Qaeda as well as evidence that the opposition is sending weapons to jihadists in Iraq, according to an Egyptian security official.

Syria recently told the United Nations and the U.S. that it was a group affiliated with al Qaeda, armed by Turkey, that slaughtered more than 100 civilians in their homes in Houla two weeks ago, according to informed Middle Eastern security officials. The international community has been pinning the blame for the Houla massacre on forces acting under the direction of Assad’s regime.

The information that al Qaeda is aiding the opposition is significant. Multiple reports have claimed the U.S. is helping to coordinate massive weapons shipments to the opposition. The Obama administration has denied these reports, stating that the U.S. is only sending non-lethal aid to the opposition.

In the latest development, Jordan this week confirmed that its police arrested two jihadists attempting to infiltrate the Syrian border to fight alongside the Syrian opposition. A security official from the Jordanian government told the Associated Press that the two Jordanians belong to a small extremist militant organization called the Salafi Movement. Authorities say the group numbers 800 activists, including many who fought alongside al Qaeda in Iraq.

Thirty Years Since Zachary Baumel’s Disappearance

As Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime faces a well-armed insurgency, this past Monday marked the 30th anniversary of the purported capture by Assad’s forces of a Brooklyn-born Israeli soldier.

Zachary Baumel was seized in Lebanon in 1982; in the past few years, information has surfaced that Baumel may still be alive and in Syria.

Baumel, a dual American-Israeli citizen, was taken along with two Israeli members of his tank crew, Yehuda Katz and Tzvi Feldman, during the Lebanon War. All three were photographed in Damascus on the day of their capture, and several eyewitnesses, including a Time magazine reporter, said they watched a parade in which the tank and crew were led through a major street in Damascus and flaunted to cheering crowds. The ceremony was the last occasion the soldiers were seen publicly.

What Maureen Dowd Doesn’t Write

In her New York Times column this past weekend, Maureen Dowd quotes Barack Obama’s boss at his 1980s community organizing job in Chicago, one Jerry Kellman. Dowd, however, failed to note that in his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama disguised Kellman’s name by using a so-called composite character, a fictional “Marty Kaufman,” to depict his former boss.

Obama may have masked Kellman’s name because, it turns out, Kellman is an Alinskyite who may have been the person who introduced Obama to Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers.

The title of Dowd’s column, “Dreaming of a Superhero,” channeled the namesake of Obama’s book. In it, Dowd quotes Kellman’s observation of Obama: “He was not unwilling to take risks, but was just this strange combination of someone who would have to weigh everything to death and then take a dramatic risk at the end.”

Kellman was the chief of the Developing Communities Project, or DCP, an institutionally based community organization on Chicago’s South Side. He brought in Obama in 1985 to serve as the DCP’s director and a lead organizer. It was Obama’s first job in Chicago.

In Obama’s own autobiography, he writes of his first job in Chicago as a community organizer and claims the name of his boss at DCP was “Marty Kaufman.” Kaufman doesn’t exist. The DCP chief at the time was Kellman, who was reportedly trained by Saul Alinsky himself.

While Obama was at the DCP, in 1988, he was brought in to the coalition of an education project founded by Ayers’s father. Bill Ayers himself was the coalition contact at the time. Obama’s DCP position was instrumental in his joining the Ayers’s education coalition, the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools.

Who Is Behind P.S. 368’s Mandatory Arabic Program?

A flurry of news media reports last week highlighted a Harlem public elementary school that will become the first in New York to require students to study Arabic.

Entirely unreported is that the organization that co-created and funded the Arabic language program for the New York school, this column has found, maintains close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood while the group’s founder also started the Al Jazeera television network.

The Qatar Foundation International, or QFI, a nonprofit group financed by the government of Qatar, gave Harlem’s Hamilton Heights, a K-5 public school, a $250,000 grant to support the Arabic program for three years. The school’s Arabic language program was reportedly developed by QFI and the Global Language Project.

QFI, based in Washington DC, is the U.S. branch of the Qatar Foundation, founded in 1995 by Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani. Thani is still the group’s vice-chairman. Thani also launched Al Jazeera in 1996 and served as the television network’s chairman.

The Qatar foundation is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. This past January, it launched the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics under the guidance of Tariq Ramadan, who serves as the center’s director. Ramadan is the grandson of the notorious founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna. Ramadan was banned from the U.S. until 2010 when the Obama administration issued him a visa to give a lecture at a New York school.

The Qatar Foundation named several institutions after Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Many regard Qaradawi as the de facto spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The foundation instituted the Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi Scholarships and in 2009 established a research center named the Qaradawi Center for Islamic Moderation and Renewal.

Qaradawi has personally attended scores of Qatar Foundation events, including conferences at which he served as a keynote speaker. Qaradawi achieved star status because of his regular sermons and interviews on Al Jazeera.

Two weeks ago, Qaradawi was in the news after he told Egyptian Muslims it was their religious duty to vote for one of three Islamic candidates in the country’s presidential election, describing them as the “best for Egypt” because they will “apply the Islamic Shariah and achieve justice.”

The Investigative Project on Terrorism documents that Qardaqi openly permitted the killing of American troops in Iraq and praised the “heroic deeds” from “Hamas, Jihad, Al-Aqsa Brigades, and others.

Jackie Mason Slams Obama

Comedian Jackie Mason ripped President Obama’s reported remarks that he “probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it.”