On the one hand, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has literally taken over a piece of public property near Wall Street in New York City by force of its protesters and with the tacit sanction of the city and its mayor, Michael Bloomberg. OWS has made itself not only a public nuisance, but an unsanitary and dangerous one.
OWS has attracted every collectivist, socialist, communist, environmental, and even anti-Semitic loon to its cause. It is a grab-bag of “movements,” ranging from the call for the “reform” of Wall Street (meaning its abolition) to the persecution of Jews. If you are “anti-establishment” and have a gripe against “the system” – whether you are a WalMart employee, an unemployed, a welfare recipient, a trust fund tyke, unsure of or unhappy with your gender, a pal of the Palestinians, an indebted career student, a Facebook socialist, a son or daughter of Woodstock, a public employee, an SEIU or UAW thug, an “artist,” “writer,” or “musician,” a fan of Farrakhan, a New or Old Black Panther, a Jew against Israel, a Muslim against Jews, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi, a Marxist, a Trotskyite, or something in between – OWS is the place to go and be.
The Sugar Land Tea Party reserved a conference room at the Hyatt Place Houston/Sugar Land Hotel to hear Pamela Geller, prominent anti-jihadist and anti-Sharia advocate, speak last week on the subject of the dangers of stealth Sharia and stealth jihad in the United States. The Hyatt abruptly, with little or no notice, cancelled the event, originally citing “security reasons.” The Sugar Land Tea Party rushed to find another venue for the event, a community center. What security reasons did the hotel name? “Complaints” by Muslims that Geller’s explanation of Sharia law constituted “hate speech.”
The Mainstream Media (MSM) has drooled over, cooed about, and coddled OWS, providing it with free publicity it could never afford to pay for itself and implicitly approving of its multitudinous aims. It is tantamount to inveighing against prostitution, but demonizing the “johns” and painting the prostitutes as “victims of the system.” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (aka Communist Public Brainwashing, “funded by viewers and taxpayers like you”) through its outlets of NPR and PBS is standing in the corner, treating OWS “neutrally” as though it were a volcanic eruption or an outbreak of salmonella, but not questioning the legitimacy of the protest.
All one hears from OWS, however, is “hate speech” directed against the rich, against corporations, against Jews, against capitalism, against freedom. This is “hate speech” approved by the MSM, while anyone who criticizes Islam, Sharia law, or anything remotely Arabic is branded an “Islamaphobe” or a “racist.”
Some protesters, apparently, are more equal than others. This is how things are done and said on America’s own Animal Farm, a leftist fantasy park that exists only in the minds of the MSM.
Had Geller a right to object to the Hyatt cancelling the venue of her talk? Did the Hyatt’s action constitute suppression of speech? Did it violate her right to speak?
Nominally, the Hyatt exercised its right to cancel the venue, because the hotel is private property. If someone or some organization uses another’s private property as a “soapbox” to promulgate specific views, it is with the tacit or express permission of the property owner. But Geller was not going to address her audience about the wisdom of buying gold stocks, life insurance, or new computer technology. Nothing as mundane as that. She was going to speak on the perils, inequities, and insidiousness of Sharia. This is an ideological subject, not a “practical” one. The Hyatt may have been indifferent to the subject. It is reflective of the “What? Me Worry?” attitude most American business executives exhibit when confronted with important moral and ideological issues.
That indifference ended when the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations mounted a telephone protest against the event, causing Hyatt to think twice and withdraw the venue. Hyatt executives then became “worried.” In concrete terms, the Hyatt did not violate Geller’s First Amendment rights. But seen in a broader context, Hyatt’s action contributed not only to the suppression of her freedom of speech by CAIR and its fellow Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-spawned organizations – dhimmis make such useful, facilitating proxies – but of its own, and in doing so advanced the agenda of Islamists to gut the First Amendment guarantee in order to protect itself from legitimate criticism and exposure.
Such is the stuff American businessmen are made of today. Can you imagine what would not have happened had the colonials who gathered on Lexington Green, upon only hearing the distant tramp and cadence drums of approaching British regulars, said among themselves: “Uh, do we really want to do this? I mean, they can bomb our homes, harass our customers, make life miserable for us if we stand here. They got us out-gunned anyway. What’s the point? We got crops to tend to. I’m out of here.”
OWS, on the other hand, not only does not face the kind of obstacle and censure that Geller, Robert Spencer, and other writers about Islamic jihad and Sharia, but has been given a free hand by the MSM and various municipal governments, and without recrimination, retribution, or rebuttal, to slander, libel, trash, and spit on all the hands that feed its yelping, chanting, non-producing, parasitical minions, and make their sorry lives possible – corporations, investors, innovators, taxpayers, and even government.
Is the hand of President Barack Obama to be seen in OWS and the Hyatt back-down? One cannot but help suspect that the answer is Yes. Here are some interesting threads:
Obama “sympathizes” with OWS. He is on “their side.” This is his kind of “community action.” It follows the prescribed methodology and tactics of Saul Alinsky Rule No. 13 to bring about “change” or “reform”: Identify, isolate, freeze and escalate.
"I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel," he said Thursday. "People are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."
This is Alinsky-lingo dressed in the pinafore of political verisimilitude.
“The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Obama tells ABC News.. “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren’t rewarded.”)
Obama tried to equate the anti-big-government sentiments and civil behavior of the Tea Party rallies and town halls with Occupy Wall Street. It is his version of the Bronx Cheer:
The president also compares the protesters to the Tea Party. “In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party," Obama says. "Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.”
Frankly, the government isn’t separated enough from Americans. There is hardly a realm of action in which the government does not set the terms or make life more expensive and complicated. Americans who value their freedom do not want their government looking out for them, except to protect their individual rights. They want to be left alone, not nurtured, regulated, and throttled from cradle to grave.
It is the rabble of OWS who wish to be wards of the government. Read their signs. Listen to their chants. Observe their behavior.
So, even if the Democratic National Committee actually has had no hand in the fomenting and growth of OWS, a sanction from the highest office in the land is culpability enough.
It should not be surprising that Islamist supremacists wish to share the stage with socialist supremacists. In too many photos of OWS in New York and of “occupations” in cities around the country can be seen men wearing Yasser Arafat-inspired keffiyah around their necks. These photos predated news of an Islamic sanction of OWS. Their presence among the rabble also comports with OWS signs that call for the end of the “occupation” of Gaza. Do we detect a smidgen of double-standards here, concerning “occupations”? Yes, but don’t tax an OWS protester with it. These people wouldn’t know a double standard if it bit them in their butts.
It is only a matter of time that we will see photos of neo-Nazis marching, chanting, singing, sign-waving, harassing, defecating, urinating, shoulder-to-shoulder with Islamist supremacists, flaunting their neo-Nazi swastika banners. Think that’s impossible? Think again. Rocky Suhayda, head of the American Nazi Party, assured his members it was okay to join OWS, even though there are “non-whites” taking part in OWS:
In a message posted Thursday on its official website, organization head Rocky Suhayda said members of the “pro-white” movement should join and support the Occupy demonstrators because they share a common enemy: The “Judeo-capitalist banksters.”
Suhayda said though many “racialists” are concerned about the demonstrations because the “many protesters are non-white and/or ‘communists,’” that shouldn’t matter because they are all against the same “evil, corrupted, degenerate capitalist elitists.”
“… Even Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP had to vote with open communists on some issues to achieve their goals. WE need to utilize and support every movement of dissent against this evil American empire, regardless of which end of the political spectrum it originates from.”
Most people do not know that Hitler also stooped to dealing with those “racially degenerate” Arabs (who were as bad as or worse than those Jewish-led communists!) when it came to eradicating Jews. He had a close relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and planned with him a Mideast version of the Holocaust.
Now, the Hyatt Hotel chain is owned or controlled by Penny Pritzker. Geller mentions her in her article about Hyatt’s dhimmitude. Pritzker is another billionaire on the Obama bus. She was his national campaign finance manager in 2008. She oversaw the Superior Bank subprime mortgage scandal. She was recruited to donate money to Obama’s campaigns. She is still active for Obama, serving on a committee to raise (more) money for his 2012 reelection campaign.
President Obama's close relationship with Warren Buffett goes back to his Illinois Senate run; now the billionaire investor is helping Obama not only on the tax fairness front, but in fund-raising for his 2012 re-election bid. Buffett hits Chicago Oct. 27 for a $35,800-per person dinner and reception.
The host committee includes Obama's major Chicago based finance team: Jim Crown, Vicki & Bruce Heyman, Mellody Hobson Steve Koch, Penny Pritzker, John Rogers Jr., David Scherer.
Who are all those people? Rich people. But the kind of “1%” rich people OWS studiously neglects to excoriate or curse. But, don’t bother pointing out the contradiction to the protesters. Contradictions are beyond their grasp, excised from their minds by “reformist” educators in public schools and in the universities.
My betting is that Pritzker ordered the Houston Hyatt executives to scratch Geller’s event. Word got to her, she was appalled (“I won’t allow hate speech to be spewed on my properties!”), or was warned, or was advised, and out went the order.
Occupy Wall Street is an in-plain-sight, transparent vortex of every collectivist and totalitarian cause and movement that ever befouled American soil and that ever assaulted American liberties. “Soaking the rich,” ending property rights, collectivizing or nationalizing all property, can only lead to across-the-board censorship, the end of freedom of speech, and the scuttling of the First Amendment. There would be no private property left on which to advocate or oppose anything. Pamela Geller insists on exercising her freedom of speech. Occupy Wall Street and all its enablers, supporters, allies, and financiers insist on ending it.
That is “Polarization” with a capital P. Anyone with an ounce of self-respect and who values his life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, should be for it. After all, there is no “coming together,” no reconciliation, no “common ground” possible with OWS or Sharia law. They are both the mortal enemies of America.