'White Widow' 2.0? Paris gunman's girlfriend crossed into Syria according to reports

© Unknown

#France (corr photo) #Coulibaly called several ppl during hostage situation to ask them to attack other targets-AFP

The female accomplice of a gunman involved in the Paris killings is believed to have left France before the Friday attacks, and has crossed the Turkish border into Syria, Reuters reported, citing security sources.

After three armed attackers were killed in two police raids on Friday, authorities launched a massive search operation for the female accomplice identified as Hayat Boumeddiene, 26. The woman was said to be "armed and dangerous."

Boumeddiene is reportedly a partner of Amedy Coulibaly, who is believed to have shot a policewoman on Thursday before storming into a Parisian kosher market on Friday, where he shot four hostages. Coulibaly was killed in a police assault.

A source told Reuters that Boumeddiene left France last week and took a plane to Syria via Turkey.

"On January 2, a woman corresponding to her profile and presenting identity papers took a flight from Madrid to Istanbul," a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

She reportedly had a return ticket for January 9, but never took that flight. Boumeddiene was traveling with an unnamed man.

A senior Turkish security official revealed that France and Turkey are now cooperating in the search.

"After they informed us about her ... we identified her mobile phone signal on Jan 8," the source said. "We think she is in Syria at the moment but we do not have any evidence about that ... She is most probably not in Turkey," the source said, adding the last time her phone appeared online was Thursday.

An official photograph of Boumeddiene released by French police depicts a young-looking woman with long dark hair. Meanwhile, French media released other photos, showing her fully-veiled with a cross-bow. The caption of the picture states that the shot is from a training session.

According to various reports, Boumeddiene is one of seven children. Her mother died very young and her father struggled to support the family financially.

She is said to have allegedly lost her job as a cashier after she began to wear a niqab, following her conversion to Islam.

Le Monde reported that she got married to Coulibaly in a religious ceremony in 2009, which is not officially recognized by French civil authorities. According to the same report, the pair was questioned by police in 2010 and Coulibaly served time in jail for his involved in a failed attempt to help the author of a deadly 1995 attack on the Paris transport system escape from prison.

Police found out that Boumeddiene was also connected to the Cherif and Said Kouachi, the two gunmen behind the attack on Charlie Hebdo's headquarters in Paris on Wednesday, where 12 people were shot.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that Boumeddiene kept a close touch with Cherif Kouachi's wife. Around 500 phone calls have been uncovered between the two of them just in the last two years. Kouachi's wife is currently being questioned by police.

There have been conflicting reports as to Boumeddiene's involvement in the Paris attacks. Some media claimed that she was present at the shooting of a policewoman by Coulibaly on Thursday, others originally reported she was at the Paris kosher market with the gunman on Friday.

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Bully Alan Dershowitz protected serial child molester Jeffery Epstein from his under-age accusers

© Robin Platzer / Twin Images/LFI/Photoshot/Newscom

Alan Dershowitz and Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor at the Inaugural Champion of Jewish Values International Awards, honoring Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, 4 June 2013 in New York City.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz always felt children were fair game for Israeli missiles. Now the question is whether he thinks they are fair game for the sexual exploits of his powerful associates and himself.

Dershowitz and the UK's Prince Andrew were accused in a recent court filing of raping a teenage girl who was forced into sexual slavery by Dershowitz's close friend and client, billionaire hedge fund financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The court filing is part of an ongoing civil lawsuit by four of Epstein's victims accusing the federal government of violating the Crime Victims' Rights Act (CVRA) when it made a secret 2008 plea deal with Epstein without informing them.

Dershowitz played a key role in negotiating a secret provision in Epstein's plea deal that immunized "any potential co-conspirators" from federal prosecution. In other words, Dershowitz negotiated an agreement that (if the allegations against him are true) shields him from prosecution for participating in a child sex-trafficking ring.

Since there has been no trial to determine whether Dershowitz and Prince Andrew are liable for the allegations against them, which they categorically deny, they should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

That said, while the mainstream press revives its interest in Epstein and reproduces strongly worded denials from Dershowitz and representatives of Prince Andrew, it has overlooked the role of Epstein's social network in building up his influence and shielding him from accountability. Media coverage of Epstein has been particularly derelict in failing to note the pivotal role of Alan Dershowitz, Israel's most aggressive defender, in securing near impunity for a sexual predator and his accomplices by bullying, harassing, intimidating and smearing child victims of rape.

Unprecedented Impunity

At first glance, Epstein's story reads like a typical case of two-tiered justice in America, where the wealthy and powerful are rarely held accountable for their crimes. In many ways it was.

A deeper examination of the case suggests a cadre of sleazy operatives led by Alan Dershowitz deployed gangster-style intimidation tactics that averted a deeper probe that might have implicated enormously powerful individuals, including Dershowitz.

The federal government had mountains of evidence to put Epstein behind bars for decades for child sex-trafficking and serial molestation.

Epstein procured and molested no fewer than forty underage girls, some from other continents and as young as twelve, in a trafficking ring that involved some of the most powerful people in America and around the world, including "numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders," according to the court filing.

While none of the power players are named, Epstein's private plane pilot, Larry Visoski, identified former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango and former US President Bill Clinton as regular passengers who likely witnessed Epstein with underage girls on his private planes.

In the end Epstein landed an unprecedented sweetheart deal that saw him plead guilty to solicitation of prostitution from minors while receiving blanket immunity for him and his co-conspirators from other federal charges. When all was said and done, Epstein served just thirteen of his eighteen-month prison sentence in the private wing of a Palm Beach Jail, where he was given a pass that allowed him to leave the prison grounds for up to sixteen hours per day for work.

Bullying rape victims

With the police investigation heating up in 2006, Epstein's team went on the offensive, bullying and harassing witnesses, victims and their families into silence.

Going far beyond the typical role of a lawyer, Dershowitz mobilized a pre-emptive smear campaign against the victims, mining their pages on the social network MySpace for comments relating to marijuana and alcohol use, which he printed out and compiled into dossiers for the police and state attorney's office in a salacious attempt to tarnish the credibility of Epstein's accusers.

Dershowitz hired private investigators to track and dig up dirt on at least one of the underage girls who accused Epstein of raping her. The girl, a high school student, reported that one of the private investigators had impersonated a police officer while asking her questions. In a letter from Dershowitz to the Palm Beach police chief, obtained by The Guardian , Dershowitz attached a copy of the girl's MySpace page, noting "her apparent fascination with marijuana," and expressed fears "that she, an accomplished drama student, might try to mislead [the private investigators] as successfully as she had misled others."

While Dershowitz schemed against Epstein's victims, witnesses and the victims' families complained of being followed, photographed, harassed, threatened and offered money in exchange for their refusal to cooperate with the police investigation.

Former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, who grew increasingly frustrated with the escalating campaign of intimidation by Epstein's lawyers, went on to testify that he was told by private investigators that Dershowitz ordered background checks on him and Detective Joe Recarey. Reiter added that he later discovered he and Recarey had been placed under surveillance but he was unable to determine who was behind it.

Dershowitz and Epstein censor an Israel critic

For those familiar with Dershowitz, his bullying tactics are not new. Indeed they bear a striking resemblance to the tactics he typically deploys against Palestinians and their supporters when defending Israeli criminality, most notably blaming and smearing the victim.

As a Harvard University emeritus professor of law and celebrity defense attorney, Dershowitz wields enormous power, which he frequently deploys against opponents of Israel's occupation. On at least one notable occasion, Dershowitz called on his friend, Epstein, to muzzle a prominent Israel critic.

In 2007, Martin Nowak, a mathematics and biology professor and director of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, rescinded a speaking invitation to award-winning evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers just hours before his event. Nowak said he was instructed to cancel the speech but would not say by whom - only that he had no choice but to comply. Trivers later learned that the order to cancel was delivered by Jeffrey Epstein, on whose donations the program relied for its continued existence. (Nowak had also relied on Epstein to secure his position at Harvard).

Epstein, it turned out, was acting on the request of his attorney Dershowitz.

Dershowitz was still furious at Trivers for writing a letter in which he condemned Israel's 2006 "butchery" of Lebanese civilians and called Dershowitz a "Nazi-like apologist" and "rancid defender of Israeli fascism" for rationalizing the killing. In the end, Dershowitz leveraged Epstein's financial influence to mete out revenge on Trivers.

Dershowitz knew about the girls

Long before the rape allegation against Dershowitz surfaced, there was overwhelming evidence to suggest he at least knew what Epstein was up to.

The two were very close friends. Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2003 (before the sex ring was exposed) Dershowitz boasted, "I'm on my 20th book.... The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey."

According to an Undisputed Statement of Fact filed by the victims' lawyers in April of 2011, "Epstein's housekeeper Alfredo Rodriguez testified that Dershowitz stayed at Epstein's house during the years when Epstein was assaulting minor females on a daily basis" and "Dershowitz was at Epstein's house at times when underage females where there being molested by Epstein."

(Rodriguez, who died recently from cancer, received a harsher punishment for trying to sell his former boss's journal than Epstein did for molesting children.)

When Epstein was asked during his deposition, "'Have you ever socialized with Alan Dershowitz in the presence of females under the age of 18?" he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer in order to avoid self-incrimination.

Epstein also pled the Fifth when asked the same question regarding celebrity property developer Donald Trump, illusionist David Copperfield, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and music industry magnate Tommy Mottola.

The pro-Israel billionaire that made Jeffrey Epstein

Although it remains a mystery just how Epstein acquired his wealth, his special relationship with billionaire Leslie "Les" Wexner, CEO and founder of the women's clothing chain Limited Brands Inc., played a pivotal role.

Epstein bragged about having several unnamed billionaire clients at the height of his success, however, Wexner was his only publicly known patron, leading to speculation that Wexner, who bought Epstein a lavish eight-story Manhattan mansion for $13 million, was bankrolling him.

Wexner, who became a client and mentor of Epstein's in the late 1980s, facilitated Epstein's entrance into elite American circles, as a 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein reveals:

Since Leslie Wexner appeared in his life - Epstein has said this was in 1986; others say it was in 1989, at the earliest - he has gradually, in a way that has not generally made headlines, come to be accepted by the Establishment. He's a member of various commissions and councils: he is on the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Sciences and the Institute of International Education.

His current fan club extends to [Bear Stearns CEO James] Cayne, Henry Rosovsky, the former dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Larry Summers, Harvard's current president.

Wexner and Epstein were so close that Epstein told Vanity Fair "it's like we have one brain between two of us: each has a side."

Wexner also shares Epstein's love for Israel with generous financial support through his philanthropic arm, The Wexner Foundation, which Epstein once managed.

According to Vanity Fair:

Wexner trusts Epstein so completely that he has assigned him the power of fiduciary over all of his private trusts and foundations, says a source close to Wexner. In 1992, Epstein even persuaded Wexner to put him on the board of the Wexner Foundation in place of Wexner's ailing mother. Bella Wexner recovered and demanded to be reinstated. Epstein has said they settled by splitting the foundation in two.

The Wexner Foundation is deeply involved in Israel advocacy mostly through its Israel Fellowship Program, which brings ten Israeli public officials to Harvard for a fully funded Master's degree program in public administration at the Kennedy School of Government.

With the participation of The Wexner Foundation, Republican pollster and rightwing propaganda consultant Frank Luntz produced the "Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communications Priorities 2003," a "road map" for linking the US' so-called war on terror in Iraq to Israel's war on Palestinians.

The foundation also funds a number of pro-Israel organizations, including Birthright Israel , a sectarian indoctrination program that sends young American Jews on a free ten-day trip to Israel to lure them into immigrating to bolster a Jewish majority and participate in the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians.

Wexner himself is a key supporter and sits on the board of governors of Hillel International, the national network of campus organizations devoted to policing criticism of Israel and attacking the increasingly popular boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement under the guise of "enriching the lives of Jewish students." In 2008, Hillel awarded its annual Renaissance Award to Wexner for giving "critical support and counsel to Hillel."

Though Wexner has reportedly replaced Epstein with a new money manager, he will always be the mentor who made Epstein the man he is today.

Fleeing to Israel

As the police investigation into Epstein's underage sex trafficking ring intensified in 2006, Epstein reportedly told friends that the child molestation allegations were an anti-Semitic conspiracy, echoing a tactic commonly deployed by people like Dershowitz against critics of Israel.

It was no surprise, then, when celebrity publicist and Epstein confidante Peggy Siegal told Philip Weiss that Epstein's two largest philanthropic causes were science and Israel.

Prior to taking a plea deal in 2008, it was rumored that Epstein was considering emigrating to Israel to avoid facing trial in Florida.

Israel's openly discriminatory Law of Return - which affords citizenship rights to those Israel defines as Jews from anywhere in the world, while actively blocking indigenous Palestinians from returning to the lands from which they were expelled - has long served as an asset for criminals who qualify.

After the 1985 assassination of Palestinian American civil rights leader Alex Odeh allegedly by members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a group the FBI has defined as "terrorist," the suspects fled to the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied West Bank, where they have remained in hiding.

Days after murdering, burning and dismembering a classmate in Maryland in 1997, Samuel Sheinbein, with help from his parents, emigrated to Israel to evade prosecution.

But in a supremely ironic twist, Epstein, the mega rich pro-Israel patron, decided he would rather face prosecution and possible jail time than live in a fortified Sparta-like state. In the end, it was a good bet: Epstein got off lightly.

Dershowitz himself has tried to rally support by claiming that he's been targeted by his accusers because he's Jewish and an advocate for Israel, a tactic that has generated strong pushback from at least one ardent supporter of Israel.

The Times of Israel plans to honor Dershowitz with its "Advocate for Israel Award" at a ritzy gala next month. Dershowitz will be recognized alongside Shimon Peres, professional American basketball player Omri Casspi, supermodel Bar Refaeli and billionaire owner of the New England Patriots Robert Kraft, to name just a few.

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Frame-up 101: Planted ID card exposes Paris false flag

© AFP Photo / Martin Bureau

A general view shows firefighters, police officers and forensics gathered in front of the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo would never have been caught had they not made one fatal mistake: They conveniently left an ID card in their abandoned getaway car.

Since when did criminals leave their identification cards in abandoned getaway cars?

An ordinary citizen, taking no precautions, might accidentally leave a wallet or purse in their parked car. I have driven automobiles approximately 50,000 times in my life, and I think my wallet might have slipped out of my pocket and fallen into the crack between the driver's seat and the door...once.

What are the odds that skilled terrorists who have just carried out an ultra-professional special-forces style attack will accidentally leave their ID card in the abandoned getaway car? Answer: Effectively zero.

So why are police reporting an event that cannot have happened?

Assuming that French police really did find "terror suspect" Said Kouachi's ID card in an abandoned getaway car, that ID card must have been planted by someone wishing to incriminate Kouachi. Even the legendary French idiot detective, Inspector Clouseau, could not fail to make this thunderingly obvious inference.

The discovery of Kouachi's ID does not implicate him; it exonerates him. It shows that he is an innocent patsy who is being framed by the real perpetrators of the attack.

Police and intelligence agencies routinely plant evidence to support false narratives, convict innocent people, and exonerate themselves. American police who kill unarmed citizens often plant a gun on the corpses to support their claims of having killed in self-defense. Such throw-down guns, which the police call "ham sandwiches," are kept in police locker rooms and carried in police cars in case they are needed.

Likewise, throw-down ID cards and other "incriminating" documents are routinely used by the military, intelligence, and special forces professionals who orchestrate false flag operations. Consider the ludicrously-obvious planted evidence used in the mother of all false-flag operations: the September 11th, 2001 inside job.

Intelligence agents planted not just one, but two "magic suitcases" designed to incriminate Mohamed Atta, the innocent patsy framed for the crimes of September 11th. According to Der Spiegel's book Inside 9/11: What Really Happened, the first Atta suitcase was handed to German police by a self-described "good Samaritan burglar." The so-called burglar claimed to have stolen Atta's suitcase during the course of a burglary and discovered terrorism-related information in it. As an honorable citizen, this kind-hearted burglar felt compelled by his conscience to deliver the suitcase to the authorities.

According to , the German police, not being fools, knew that the self-styled burglar was not really a burglar at all, but an intelligence agent planting fake evidence against Atta. quotes German police as saying: "The only question is, which intelligence agency was he working for?" ("CIA and Mossad," answered former German Intelligence Minister Andreas Von Bülow in his book The CIA and September 11th.)

Despite its absurd origins, this suitcase full of fabricated documents provides virtually the only purported evidence supporting the official story of Atta's supposed terrorism-related activities in Germany. Aside from the good Samaritan burglar's suitcase, it seems that the original Egyptian Atta - the one in Germany - was a gentle, shy, sensitive, soft-spoken architecture student with no connections to terrorism of any kind. Yet the "Atta" who made a spectacle of himself in Florida before 9/11, staging memorable public scenes while all but wearing an "I am an al-Qaeda terrorist" sign around his neck, was a coarse, obscene, violent loudmouthed braggart who dated strippers, disemboweled kittens, and spoke fluent Hebrew.

The Hebrew-speaking Atta's second and better-known "magic suitcase" was the one he allegedly checked in on his early morning flight from Portland, Maine to Boston on September 11th, 2001. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the suitcase was miraculously preserved and delivered to the authorities when it somehow failed to make the transfer from Atta's Portland-to-Boston commuter flight onto Flight 11, which Atta supposedly piloted into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Had the suitcase been transferred as it should have been, we are told, it would have been destroyed in a fireball at the World Trade Center.

This magic suitcase provided the only evidence allowing authorities to identify the alleged 19 hijackers within 24 hours of the event. (None of the 9/11 passenger lists contained any Arab names; no airline employees remember having ticketed or boarded any of the alleged hijackers; and none of the hundreds of security cameras at Boston's Logan Airport, Washington D.C.'s Dulles Airport, or Newark Airport took a single authenticated frame of any of the 19 Arabs blamed for 9/11.)

This suitcase not only contained a list of the 19 patsies, but also Atta's supposed last will and testament. (Why would a suicide hijacker check his will onto a doomed plane?) Britain's dean of Middle East journalism Robert Fisk has ridiculed Atta's alleged will, pointing out that it begins with a botched bismillah: "In the name of God, myself, and my family..." No Muslim would ever write such a thing. As Fisk suggests, the document purporting to be Atta's will must have been forged by an incompetent intelligence agent. The suitcase was obviously planted.

And that is not just Robert Fisk's opinion. Seymour Hersh, the dean of American investigative journalism, quotes a senior US intelligence source as saying, with regard to Atta's magic suitcase: "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately - for the FBI to chase."

Atta's two magic suitcases are not the only examples of clumsily-planted 9/11 evidence. Another is the "magic passport" of alleged 9/11 hijacker Satam al-Suqami. That passport, looking as pristine as the "magic bullet" of the JFK assassination, was allegedly discovered by an anonymous individual, with no chain of custody, near the two flat spots of smoking ground where two 110-story towers somehow exploded into very fine dust.

But Atta's magic suitcases, the magic passport, beside the most pathetically-planted 9/11 item of them all: The "Fatty Bin Laden confession video" supposedly discovered in December 2001 by an anonymous US soldier in Jalalabad, and delivered with no chain of possession to be brandished by the Bush Administration as supposed proof of Bin Laden's guilt.

Professor Bruce Lawrence, a respected expert on Bin Laden, has categorically stated of this video: "It's bogus!" Lawrence adds that his many acquaintances in the US intelligence community's Bin Laden units know that the video is bogus - but are afraid to say so in public, because they are afraid of the implications of Bin Laden's innocence.

These and other examples show that the intelligence agents who orchestrate false-flag terror spectacles often do not even bother to disguise the blatantly-fabricated nature of the planted evidence used to implicate patsies.

So we should not be terribly surprised when the French police tell us - with a straight face - that a highly professional fleeing terrorist would leave his ID card in an abandoned getaway car.

New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune

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Je suis Charlie: Or, "I'm a racist pervert too!"

© Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke this principle, as has been happening over the last 48 hours in response to the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

Usually, defending free speech rights is much more of a lonely task. For instance, the day before the Paris murders, I wrote an article about multiple cases where Muslims are being prosecuted and even imprisoned by western governments for their online political speech - assaults that have provoked relatively little protest, including from those free speech champions who have been so vocal this week.

I've previously covered cases where Muslims were imprisoned for many years in the U.S. for things like translating and posting "extremist" videos to the internet, writing scholarly articles in defense of Palestinian groups and expressing harsh criticism of Israel, and even including a Hezbollah channel in a cable package. That's all well beyond the numerous cases of jobs being lost or careers destroyed for expressing criticism of Israel or (much more dangerously and rarely) Judaism. I'm hoping this week's celebration of free speech values will generate widespread opposition to all of these long-standing and growing infringements of core political rights in the west, not just some.

Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week's defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show "solidarity" with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. "The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack," announced Slate's editor Jacob Weisberg, "is to escalate blasphemous satire."

Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens (left). Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with degrading imagery (above, right), and instead contained a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population .

But no matter. Their cartoons were noble and should be celebrated - not just on free speech grounds but for their content. In a column entitled "The Blasphemy We Need," The New York Times' Ross Douthat argued that "the right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order" and "that kind of blasphemy [that provokes violence] is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it's the kind that clearly serves a free society's greater good." New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait actually proclaimed that "one cannot defend the right [to blaspheme] without defending the practice." Vox's Matt Yglesias had a much more nuanced view but nonetheless concluded that "to blaspheme the Prophet transforms the publication of these cartoons from a pointless act to a courageous and even necessary one, while the observation that the world would do well without such provocations becomes a form of appeasement."

To comport with this new principle for how one shows solidarity with free speech rights and a vibrant free press, we're publishing some blasphemous and otherwise offensive cartoons about religion and their adherents:

And here are some not-remotely-blasphemous-or-bigoted yet very pointed and relevant cartoons by the brilliantly provocative Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff (reprinted with permission):

Is it time for me to be celebrated for my brave and noble defense of free speech rights? Have I struck a potent blow for political liberty and demonstrated solidarity with free journalism by publishing blasphemous cartoons? If, as Salman Rushdie said, it's vital that all religions be subjected to "fearless disrespect," have I done my part to uphold western values?

When I first began to see these demands to publish these anti-Muslim cartoons, the cynic in me thought perhaps this was really just about sanctioning some types of offensive speech against some religions and their adherents, while shielding more favored groups. In particular, the west has spent years bombing, invading and occupying Muslim countries and killing, torturing and lawlessly imprisoning innocent Muslims, and anti-Muslim speech has been a vital driver in sustaining support for those policies.

So it's the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content. Defending free speech is always easy when you like the content of the ideas being targeted, or aren't part of (or actively dislike) the group being maligned.

Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in "solidarity" with their free speech rights. In fact, Douthat, Chait and Yglesias all took pains to expressly note that they were only calling for publication of such offensive ideas in the limited case where violence is threatened or perpetrated in response (by which they meant in practice, so far as I can tell: anti-Islam speech). Douthat even used italics to emphasize how limited his defense of blasphemy was: "that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended."

One should acknowledge a valid point contained within the Douthat/Chait/Yglesias argument: when media outlets refrain from publishing material out of fear (rather than a desire to avoid publishing gratuitously offensive material), as several of the west's leading outlets admitted doing with these cartoons, that is genuinely troubling, an actual threat to a free press. But there are all kinds of pernicious taboos in the west that result in self-censorship or compelled suppression of political ideas, from prosecution and imprisonment to career destruction: why is violence by Muslims the most menacing one? (I'm not here talking about the question of whether media outlets should publish the cartoons because they're newsworthy; my focus is on the demand they be published positively, with approval, as "solidarity").

When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least. Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim commentary (and cartoons) are a dime a dozen in western media outlets; the taboo that is at least as strong, if not more so, are anti-Jewish images and words. Why aren't Douthat, Chait, Yglesias and their like-minded free speech crusaders calling for publication of anti-Semitic material in solidarity, or as a means of standing up to this repression? Yes, it's true that outlets like The New York Times will in rare instances publish such depictions, but only to document hateful bigotry and condemn it - not to publish it in "solidarity" or because it deserves a serious and respectful airing.

With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo "were equal opportunity offenders." Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever ) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews. Parody, free speech and secular atheism are the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the primary goal and the outcome . And this messaging - this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech - just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo - the "equal opportunity" offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like "equal opportunity" offending?

Nor is it the case that threatening violence in response to offensive ideas is the exclusive province of extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam. Terrence McNally's 1998 play "Corpus Christi," depicting Jesus as gay, was repeatedly cancelled by theaters due to bomb threats. Larry Flynt was paralyzed by an evangelical white supremacist who objected to Hustler's pornographic depiction of inter-racial couples. The Dixie Chicks were deluged with death threats and needed massive security after they publicly criticized George Bush for the Iraq War, which finally forced them to apologize out of fear. Violence spurred by Jewish and Christian fanaticism is legion, from abortion doctors being murdered to gay bars being bombed to a 45-year-old brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza due in part to the religious belief (common in both the U.S. and Israel) that God decreed they shall own all the land. And that's all independent of the systematic state violence in the west sustained, at least in part, by religious sectarianism.

The New York Times' David Brooks today claims that anti-Christian bias is so widespread in America - which has never elected a non-Christian president - that "the University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality." He forgot to mention that the very same university just terminated its tenure contract with Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he posted during the Israeli attack on Gaza that the university judged to be excessively vituperative of Jewish leaders, and that the journalist Chris Hedges was just disinvited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania for the Thought Crime of drawing similarities between Israel and ISIS.

That is a real taboo - a repressed idea - as powerful and absolute as any in the United States, so much so that Brooks won't even acknowledge its existence. It's certainly more of a taboo in the U.S. than criticizing Muslims and Islam, criticism which is so frequently heard in mainstream circles - including the U.S. Congress - that one barely notices it any more.

This underscores the key point: there are all sorts of ways ideas and viewpoints are suppressed in the west. When those demanding publication of these anti-Islam cartoons start demanding the affirmative publication of those ideas as well, I'll believe the sincerity of their very selective application of free speech principles. One can defend free speech without having to publish, let alone embrace, the offensive ideas being targeted. But if that's not the case, let's have equal application of this new principle.

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New Claim: Dinosaur Farts May Have Caused Prehistoric Global Warming

Sauropod dinosaurs that roamed the planet 150 million years ago may have released more methane gas into the atmosphere than all modern sources combined. Although methane does not stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, it is 20 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2. “A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” Dr. Wilkinson told The Telegraph.

The researchers compared sauropods to the modern dairy and beef industry. “Global methane emissions from medium-sized sauropods that weighed about 20 tonnes would have amounted to around 472 million tonnes per year,” the study concluded. That amount is roughly equivalent to the 500 million tonnes of methane released into the atmosphere today. Prior to the industrial revolution, before beef production exploded, natural methane emissions only added up to 181 million tonnes per year.

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Government officials all over America are cracking down on preppers

Why would the government want to punish people that are just trying to work hard, become more self-sufficient and take care of their families?

There are approximately 3 million preppers in the United States today, and often they appear to be singled out for punishment by bureaucratic control freaks that are horrified at the thought that there are families out there that actually want to try to become less dependent on the system.

So if you use alternative methods to heat your home, or if you are not connected to the utility grid, or if you collect rainwater on your property, or if you believe that parents should have the ultimate say when it comes to health decisions for their children, you could become a target for overzealous government enforcers.

Once upon a time, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, but now we are being transformed into a socialist police state where control freak bureaucrats use millions of laws, rules and regulations to crack down on anyone that dares to think for themselves.

For example, people have been burning wood to heat their homes since this country began. And this is still very common in rural areas. But the Obama administration does not like this at all. The Obama bureaucrats at the EPA fear that our little wood stoves may be contributing to "global warming", so they have outlawed the production and sale of 80 percent of the wood stoves that are currently in use. The following comes from a recent article...

It seems that even wood isn't green or renewable enough anymore. The EPA has recently banned the production and sale of 80 percent of America's current wood-burning stoves, the oldest heating method known to mankind and mainstay of rural homes and many of our nation's poorest residents. The agency's stringent one-size-fits-all rules apply equally to heavily air-polluted cities and far cleaner plus typically colder off-grid wilderness areas such as large regions of Alaska and the American West.

While EPA's most recent regulations aren't altogether new, their impacts will nonetheless be severe. Whereas restrictions had previously banned wood-burning stoves that didn't limit fine airborne particulate emissions to 15 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the change will impose a maximum 12 microgram limit. To put this amount in context, EPA estimates that secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed car can expose a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter.

Most wood stoves that warm cabin and home residents from coast-to-coast can't meet that standard. Older stoves that don't cannot be traded in for updated types, but instead must be rendered inoperable, destroyed, or recycled as scrap metal.

Does that make you angry?

It should.

There are other preppers that try to use very "clean" methods to power their homes, but that is still not good enough for some government control freaks.

For example, one prepper down in south Florida that had gone "off the grid" was recently ordered by a court to connect back to the grid or face eviction from his home. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Guiles Hendrik...

Think you are still free to make choices in your life? Do you think the government will allow you to live independent of their utility monopolies? If you think so, try opting for renewable non-grid tied power and utilize environmentally friendly composting toilets and your own self-sufficient water supply. Today, those life choices could land you in jail if you live in South Florida. Take the case of Robin Speronis.

Robin Speronis has lived off the grid, independent of the city's water and electric system. A Florida court ruled this off-the-grid living illegal last week and has given Robin until March to connect her home to a municipal water line or face possible eviction. Further, officials in the city of Cape Coral have justified this by deeming Robin's home "unsanitary," citing the International Property Maintenance Code. First of all, since when did we begin to locally recognize "international codes?" Where in the US Constitution does it provide for international jurisdiction over local codes? Ironically, this "international" code mandates that homes be connected to an electricity grid and a running water source, even though most of the world lives without reliable electricity and municipal water and sewer. Further, the code is outdated and obsolete because it was written without consideration to both old and new technologies that relegate the need for grid tied power and municipal water as unnecessary and expensive; especially, in locations where it simply isn't feasible to have grid tied utilities. Nonetheless, Speronis' home does in fact have power and water through far cheaper and more environmentally friendly means - solar panels and rainwater, but that reality is ignored by the local government.

Incredibly, most Americans still seem to believe that we live in a "free country". But we don't. Our lives are very tightly constrained by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations, and more are being added every single day.

Even some of our most basic fundamental rights have been seriously eroded. One of these is the right to make basic health decisions for our own children. In New York state, children that have not received all of the designated vaccines can now be banned from attending public school, and this requirement was recently upheld by a federal appeals court...

New York state's requirement that children be vaccinated before attending public school does not violate their constitutional rights, a federal appeals court in Manhattan said on Wednesday.

In affirming the requirement's constitutionality, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld a previous ruling by a federal judge that students exempted from the requirement for religious reasons can be barred from school when another child has a disease preventable by a vaccine.

The decision was the latest to go against three parents from New York City who say their religious rights were violated when their children were kept out of school as a result of the immunization policies. The parents' lawyer, Patricia Finn, said her clients planned to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So what are we free to do without government interference these days?

Not much.

In fact, in some states we can't even sit on our own land and collect the rain as it falls from the sky for our own personal use.

If you do this in the state of Oregon, for example, you could go to prison...

Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore.

"I'm sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty," Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.

Several people held signs that showed support for Harrington as he was taken inside the jail.

And of course these are just a few examples. Almost every single day there are more stories in the news about government bureaucrats cracking down on preppers. They almost seem to relish the opportunity to go after the "non-conformists".

But the good news is that the number of Americans that are seeking to become less dependent on the system just continues to grow.

So what about you?

Are you a prepper?

My friend Daisy Luther recently wrote a piece entitled "45 MORE Signs That You Might Be One of Those Crazy Preppers." The following are some of the most interesting "signs" from her list...

• You spend your days off digging an underground bunker in your backyard.


• Your family doesn't dare take something from the food stockpile without marking it off the list.


• Your kids know how to don a gas mask in 30 seconds.


• Everyone in your survival group carries the same firearm so that ammo is standardized.


• Your family is no longer surprised when you announce, "Hey, we're going to learn how to make (insert anything here)!"


• You have long since accepted the idea that if you're not on someone's list, you're probably not doing it right.


• You don't just rotate food, you rotate ammo.


• Moving to a new house is no longer "moving", but "strategic relocation".


• Your kids think it's a fun game to see who can find the most potential weapons in a room.


• Your EDC includes a knife, firearm w/extra mag, flashlight, mylar blanket, Chapstick, and an ounce of silver - and that's just for when you're walking the dog.


• One criterion for your new winter coat is that it fits over your body armor.

America was built by people that loved their families, worked hard and were self-sufficient.

Now our government is specifically targeting those kinds of people.

What in the world is happening to us?

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The Paris shootings and the farce of Western free speech

Speaking outside Elysée Palace in the aftermath of this week's terror killings in France, former President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the violence as "an attack on civilization." Coiffured, sun-tanned and nattily dressed, Sarkozy's solemn words made him appear like the embodiment of civility.

That's a quaint turn in etiquette by a politician who is mired in allegations of sleaze and corruption, as well as war crimes.

Sarkozy wasn't too concerned about "civilization" when he and his British allies launched the NATO bombing campaign of Libya in March 2011 in stark violation of a UN mandate. That seven-month onslaught led to the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi - from whom Sarkozy had gladly received hush-hush political donations in the past, before stabbing him in the back.

The illegal French-led NATO blitzkrieg on Libya subverted a constitutional government and resulted in the ongoing destruction of one of Africa's most economically developed countries. Libya has been sacked to become a failed state, over-run by extremist Takfiri militia and tribal warlords, whose warped ideology is shared by the ISIS terror network destroying Syria and Iraq. The same ideology includes the armed adherents who struck this week in Paris, killing more than a dozen people.

© Unknown

NATO's free speech in Libya

So Sarkozy's concern for attacks on civilization is well qualified - although you won't hear it put quite that way in the thought-control Western media. The very extremist forces he helped to unleash from the illegal overthrow of the Libyan state have now killed his own people right in the capital of his republic.

One of the presumed touchstones of Western civilization that was allegedly defiled this week is "free speech" and "freedom of expression." Sarkozy was joined by other Western political figures, from US President Barack Obama, to British Premier David Cameron, in condemning the murderous assault on the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in terms of a war on "our values."

The magazine had previously incensed millions of Muslims worldwide by its publication of images profaning Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). That is believed to have provided the motive for the gunmen who, while fleeing the scene in Paris, shouted: "The prophet has been avenged."

French President Francois Hollande declared the slain journalists and cartoonists as "heroes" who died for the lofty principle of freedom of speech.

But like other presumed Western values, such as human rights, freedom of speech is a much over-rated principle - over-rated by the Western governments and institutions like the corporate-controlled media, who invoke it as a ideological badge of honor that distinguishes them and makes them superior to others.

In practice, however, such Western values are no more than chimera. They are empty slogans whose mere espousal and conceited, disingenuous profession is for propaganda purposes.

What human rights or respect for rule of law did Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama adhere to when they oversaw the destruction of Libya? Or in the ongoing covert destruction of Syria and Iraq (despite belated Western claims of liquidating the terror network that they spawned in the first place for regime change in Syria.)

Insofar that Western governments support free speech, it is more often for expedient political advantage. It is not a universal ethic, as claimed. And, laughably, they are telling barefaced lies to claim otherwise, as they continually do.

A French satirical publication may have been allowed to denigrate Islam, but it would never be allowed to condemn Zionism and all its provable criminality. It is doubtful the magazine in question would print cartoons of Sarkozy, Obama or Cameron with explosives tied to their heads or dropping bombs on Libya. Even though the latter is not satire; it actually reflects the reality of criminal actions and events.

So, Western "free speech" is really just freedom for the powers-that-be to demean and demonize whomever the West requires for furthering its political interests. When free speech legitimately attacks Western interests, exposes hypocrisy and fraudulence, then it stops being a "universal principle." Censorship is then the ironclad order.

And this isn't free speech?

French comedian Dieudonné, for example, has been banned from public performances by the French government owing to his farcical arm gesture, known as the "Quenelle." The gesture can be interpreted in many ways, from a vulgar personal insult, to a derisory slur on the ruling class. The French authorities claim that the sign is "anti-Semitic" and a reverse Nazi salute. Dieudonné denies this and instead says the gesture is "anti-Zionist" and "anti-establishment."

The comedian has been banned from travelling to Britain by the London authorities, also as a result of his political parodies. His friend and professional footballer, Nicolas Anelka, was last year banned from playing soccer games in England and fined over $100,000 for signaling the Quenelle after scoring a goal.

Almost a year before the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine this week in Paris, French President Francois Hollande gave notice that there would be zero-tolerance of Dieudonné or anyone else who practiced the Quenelle. "We will act... we will fight against the sarcasm of those who purport to be humorists but who are actually professional anti-Semites," said Hollande.

But hold on a moment. That's just what the French ruling class deems to be the meaning of Dieudonné's Quenelle. On the basis of their prejudice, the artist and anyone who displays the gesture in public is subject to prosecution. That's not just censorship; it is state persecution for having an opinion.

Evidently, it's acceptable to insult Islam, according to Western select use of free speech because it suits political agendas of demonizing Muslim countries so that they can be attacked with Western warplanes or covert terrorist proxies. But it is not acceptable to satirize Zionism or Western ruling classes.

And here is another revealing touchstone. Why is Press TV banned from British terrestrial and satellite television broadcasting? Why is the Iran-based channel banned across Europe and North America? Where is Western free speech in that case? What is the problem?

Press TV is not tolerated. It is banished. Because the truth of Western state terrorism, as practiced by the likes of Sarkozy, Hollande, Obama and Cameron is too much to bear for how it might enlighten and empower public opinion. The truth of Western-sponsored state terrorism as practiced by the genocidal Israeli regime is too much to bear for public discourse; any criticism is shoved down the memory hole under the spurious pretext of "anti-Semitism." The fact that Western leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes is too much to bear. All such views, no matter how intellectually rigorous, morally scrupulous and legally substantiated, must be censored, and those who articulate them must be hounded into isolation.

Western free speech is nothing but a cynical charade by those in power to maintain their unlawful positions of power.

A satirical magazine championed by Western war criminals for its "free speech" to dehumanize Muslims is hailed as "heroic?" While an informative, serious news channel like Press TV is banned. Now that is farcical cartoon.

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