Jack Abramoff book turns D.C. upside-down
Nov. 3, 2011: Jack Abramoff’s autobiographical bombshell “Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist” wasn’t even at the bookstores yet, but it caused a firestorm on Capitol Hill and among Washington’s powerful lobbying community.
Most Washington power players thought Abramoff was gone and buried in a federal prison, and didn’t even realize he was released – let alone that he was penning what is clearly the most devastating attack on special interest power in decades.
Days before its Nov. 7, 2011, official release, scores of lobbying shops scoured the town to obtain one of the few copies in circulation to prepare their spin and damage control.
From the reaction on Capitol Hill, Abramoff was the new public enemy No. 1. He not only outed powerful senators and congressmen, and revealed previously unknown inside information, but he set forth a reform plan that would rock the fraternal inside-the-Beltway culture.
Palestinian kids raised for war
Nov. 3, 2000: A year before the Western world woke up to the reality of suicide bombers with the 9/11 attacks on America, WND exposed the training of Palestinian children in the ways of jihad, with Palestinian television featuring macabre “Sesame Street”-type TV shows teaching toddlers to sing jihad songs about murdering Jews.
In one song on the “Children’s Club,” very young children were shown singing songs about wanting to become “suicide warriors” and to take up “a machine gun” to direct “violence, anger, anger, anger” against Israelis.
During the show, which features children aged 4-10, one young boy sang, “When I wander into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber.” Afterward, other children stood to call for “Jihad! Holy war to the end against the Zionist enemy.”
“It’s very scary – it’s a state-run educational system that teaches its children to be martyrs,” said Meyrav Wurmser, Ph.D., an expert in Middle East politics. “Children are taught to idealize death, to view it as a positive. In many cases, they are told that death is not death at all, but rather the beginning of a new life.”
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