“A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jan. 18, 2015) — On Sunday, The Daily Caller aired a video of new Charlie Hebdo Editor-in-Chief Gerard Biard criticizing major news outlets which chose to obscure the cover of the French satirical magazine’s latest issue for “blurring out democracy.”
In his remarks made to NBC’s Chuck Todd, Biard said that his newspaper’s ability to publish material of its choosing represents “freedom of religion, democracy, and secularism.” In an interview with Sky News, Biard said that a “secular society” is the only means of maintaining “democracy.”
Another employee at the French newspaper, Caroline Fourest, told MSNBC that it was “crazy” that news services in the United States would blur the Muhammad image.
Last Wednesday’s issue of Charlie Hebdo, commemorating the deaths of ten of its employees at the hands of Islamic terrorists, features a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Muhammad holding a sign which reads, “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), a slogan quickly adopted by millions following the January 7 attack which also killed two French policemen.
In the latest cartoon, above Muhammad’s head is a statement in French which translates to “All is forgiven.” At the top of the page, Charlie Hebdo states that “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right.”
Barack Obama condemned the attack on the newspaper as an affront on “freedom of expression.”
When the newest issue, the first since the terrorist attack, was available on newsstands, it quickly sold out in many locations or under-supplied relative to their requests for copies.
Charlie Hebdo had sustained Islamic attacks prior to January 7. In February 2007, a group of Muslims filed suit against the newspaper alleging that it insulted the religion of Islam after it published cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper.
Cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo in September 2012 following the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya which killed four Americans invoking the internet video “Innocence of Muslims” initiated the closing of French embassies “in twenty countries” as well as triggering increased security.
The publication’s office was also attacked in a firebombing in November 2011 by terrorists angry at a depiction of Muhammad in a way they viewed as disrespectful.
Hebdo’s editor-in-chief at the time, Stephane Charbonnier, was quoted as having said, “When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.” Charbonnier was one of the 12 killed on January 7.
MSNBC was one of several networks which blurred the cover image. Media which have blurred Charlie Hebdo cartoons in the past include The New York Daily News, the Associated Press, CNN, and The UK Telegraph.
Biard said he could not castigate news outlets “distributed in totalitarian regimes” for not publishing the cartoons.
Beginning in 2007, media censorship precluded the background of Barack Hussein Obama from scrutiny as he sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency against Hillary Clinton and other initial primary contenders. Despite reports that Bill Clinton asserted that Obama was not constitutionally eligible during the 2008 primaries and a report that Obama was “born in Indonesia” by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in late 2007, no questions were asked of Obama about his past.
His Illinois state senate and U.S. Senate voting records were obscured from view, and a print report from a 2006 Hawaii newspaper stating that he was born in Indonesia was quickly “corrected” to say that he was born in Hawaii without any proof.
In May 2012, Breitbart News discovered that Obama’s official biography had been changed in April 2007, two months after Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency, to say that he was “born in Hawaii” rather than “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii,” as it had stated since 1991.
In explanation, Obama’s literary agent claimed that the “born in Kenya” statement was the result of a “fact-checking error.” The mainstream media failed to televise Breitbart’s findings and the literary agent’s response.
Despite the discovery, Breitbart decisively stated that its staff believed that Obama was “born in Hawaii” and does not permit comments referring to Obama’s questionable eligibility.
Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires the president to be a “natural born Citizen.” Although not defined in the Constitution, some scholars believe that the term signifies “born in the country to U.S.-citizen parents.” Other sources report that “Consensus exists that anyone born on U.S. soil is a ‘natural born Citizen.’ One may also be a ‘natural born Citizen’ if, despite a birth on foreign soil, U.S. citizenship immediately passes from the person’s parents.”
In the 1875 case of Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court opined that it was “never doubted” that a “natural born Citizen” is a person born on U.S. soil whose parents were both citizens at the time of his or her birth. The court held that “At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”
Obama claims a father who was not a U.S. citizen, but rather, a citizen of Great Britain, and later upon its independence, Kenya, who attended American universities on a student visa and was eventually expelled from the country for misconduct on the Harvard University campus.
When citizens began questioning Obama’s constitutional eligibility in 2008, their congressmen issued template-like letters asserting that because he was born in Hawaii, he was considered a “natural born Citizen.” This writer’s congressman, Joseph Courtney, issued two letters in which he said that Obama “attested his birth in Hawaii” without proof and was therefore eligible for the presidency.
Any discussion of Obama’s eligibility under Article II has been squelched by major media, while the eligibility of Sen. Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada to a U.S.-citizen mother and Cuban-citizen-father, has been openly discussed.
In 2008, the subject of Sen. John McCain’s eligibility was a topic covered in both The New York Times and by constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley, but Obama’s eligibility was never raised. Turley was an Obama supporter but is now representing the Republican House of Representatives in a lawsuit challenging Obama’s unilateral changes to his health care law known as Obamacare, which overtook one-sixth of the U.S. economy under less than “transparent” conditions.
Since at least 2010, a left-leaning group of journalists, producers, academicians and others privately discussed ways to promote Obama and his agenda as well as the strategy to label anyone critical of Obama “racist.”
On April 27, 2011, the White House posted what it said was a scan of a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate held by the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH). However, within 24 hours of its posting, it was declared a forgery by graphics experts and writers familiar with graphics software.
Mainstream media outlets rapidly accepted the online image as authentic and appeared to blame those doubting that Obama was born in the United States on “Republicans,” who actually have distanced themselves from the matter. While the media televised the unscheduled press conference Obama gave on the day of the image’s release, it did not publicize the several experts who came forward to denounce it as a poor forgery.
In September 2011, at the request of Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a criminal investigation was launched into the birth certificate image posted at whitehouse.gov resulting from approximately 250 constituents’ concerns of voter disenfranchisement in the upcoming 2012 presidential election. Within 72 hours, the posse, led by former detective Mike Zullo, found that the image could not have originated with a real, paper document.
The image lacks the imprint of a raised seal and has been noted to have many clues leading to the conclusion that it was created on a computer “with the intent to deceive.”
Despite the findings of the Cold Case Posse as announced on March 1, 2012 during a formal press conference, comments submitted to mainstream outlets online on the topic consistently do not pass through moderation with very rare exceptions.
On March 1, 2012, Zullo revealed that he is in possession of affidavits from journalists who stated that they were threatened with their jobs, careers or “FCC investigations” should they choose to pursue the “eligibility” issue pertaining to Barack Obama.
While the mainstream media reported Arpaio and Zullo’s announced discoveries, it did not televise them. Author and commentator Diana West told radio host Andrea Shea King last week that her columns addressing the subject of the forgeries were routinely rejected by The Washington Examiner.
Both CBS’s Bob Schieffer and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly defended the authenticity of Obama’s purported “short-form” birth certificate, which first appeared in 2008 at The Daily KOS website but was later claimed to have been released by then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
Then-CNN commentator Lou Dobbs, who had called for Obama to release his detailed birth certificate in 2009, later received a bullet to his New Jersey home which nearly hit his wife. Daily KOS readers then pressured Dobbs’s employer to fire him. Dobbs eventually left CNN and now works for the Fox Business Network.
In 2009, O’Reilly claimed to have sent a team of investigators to Hawaii which purportedly found that the short-form “Certification of Live Birth” was authentic and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii but has never revealed footage or evidence of such an investigation.
Gibbs is now an NBC and MSNBC commentator. His successor as press secretary, Jay Carney, is married to ABC News producer Claire Shipman.
Carney had been working for left-leaning TIME Magazine when he met Shipman in Russia while she was reporting for CNN. Their kitchen is noted to display Soviet-era propaganda posters.
The Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime.
Those who have continued to seek the truth about Obama’s past have had their email accounts breached, websites hacked, telephones tapped, and received death threats. Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS News, reports having been “stonewalled” and her computers breached, tampered with, and sabotaged in her new book of the same title.
Within the last few months, Zullo stated that the posse now knows the identity of the forger. However, through censorship, the media continues its silence on what appear to be multiple federal felonies involving the creation of fraudulent documentation of the person considered to be “the leader of the free world.”
In 2009, former Obama campaign communications director Anita Dunn told a group of reporters that she and her staff had “controlled the media” to cast Obama in a favorable light. With numerous connections to employees, some in high-level positions, at major media, Obama has enjoyed virtually no criticism of his handling of the Benghazi attack; the IRS targeting scandal in which certain groups were flagged for their tax-exempt applications; the Justice Department’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen and collection of phone records of AP reporters; and the multiple millions he has spent on family vacations as Americans struggle in a still-sluggish economy.
Since taking office, the Obama regime has held closed-door sessions with select media without such outlets as Fox News or alternative media present. According to Politico on September 15, 2014:
While the White House press corps continue their fight for greater access to Obama, select groups of journalists and columnist are regularly invited to private meetings with the president, usually ahead of big speeches. In may, Obama held a ninety-minute lunch with journalists ahead of a speech at West Point that focused on removing troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.
The goal of such meetings, past participants have told POLITICO, is to help shape the journalists’ thinking and to ensure that his points of view will be represented in the media, if not directly attributed to him.
A January 2013 ABC News report titled “Obama’s Vacations by the Numbers” discusses the number of rounds of golf Obama played while vacationing in Hawaii over Christmas and the number of times “the Obamas ventured out for dinner with friends.” Government watchdog organization Judicial Watch has provided an accounting of the cost to taxpayers of the Obamas’ vacations and other trips which in some cases total eight figures individually.
On August 29 of last year, members of the White House press corps expressed frustration that they were not provided regular “access to the ‘transparency’ president,” referencing Obama’s promise early in his regime to operate “the most transparent administration in history.”
Members of Congress are reportedly intimidated to speak out about the forgeries for fear of media ridicule and “black backlash.”
Former CIA agents have reportedly analyzed the long-form birth certificate and agreed that it is a forgery, but the FBI has taken no steps to expose it. Rather, the FBI has been accused of “covering up” the crimes.
Information contained in Obama’s 2008 campaign website, “FighttheSmears.com,” has been removed, including in internet archives such as the Wayback Machine.
In the totalitarian regime of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth scrubbed and revised information nightly so that only the version Big Brother desired remained available to the public.
The First Amendment to the Bill of Rights invoking a free press and freedom of speech was intended to maintain the republic which the Founders created in 1789.
“A Republic, if you can keep it.” — Benjamin Franklin
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This story was updated on January 19, 2015 at 9:00 a.m.