We Are Paying Terrorists to Lecture Us?

File this under wasteful tax payer funding. In a budget crisis this is the kind of out-of-control spending that we need to cut out. Just like with our home budget, a watchful eye needs to review this type of waste in order to remain solvent.

Walid Shoebat travels around the US giving speeches to police departments, churches, and universities about terrorism. His qualifications? He says he was a terrorist for the PLO who helped firebomb a bank in Israel and spent time in an Israeli jail. This supposedly makes him an expert on terrorism.

First of all, the spending for this is coming out of the federally funded stimulus package that is supposed to go towards protecting us. Once you see where the flow of this money is going you too should be outraged.

Should we allow our tax dollars to fund future terrorist activities? Should we reward an admitted terrorist for his past activities against us? The fact that the American public can give money to this person through his speeches, books, and videos which have earned him more than half a million dollars in 2009 alone, some of it coming from state Homeland Security departments and other government sources, is beyond comprehension. This is indicative of how totally naïve we have become. Just as with the drug war, our tax dollars go towards efforts to keep drugs out of our country while we create the market that makes it profitable for the drug cartels to bring it in. Even at the stupendous losses to the cartels we read about when law enforcement captures drugs it remains profitable for the cartels to continue their operations.

Our tax dollars are being used to pay for our protection. And we are killing ourselves in spite of it.

Our police departments are funded by our tax dollars which pays this virulently anti-Islamic person. At a recent speech to police and sheriff’s deputies he tells them “All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them.” He encourages ethnic and racial profiling, which is illegal. He tells people to be leery of Muslim doctors, engineers, students, and mosques. Speakers like Shoebat have raised concerns from the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Home Security Committee about “vitriolic diatribes” being delivered by “self-appointed counterterrorism experts” like Shoebat at these seminars.

But the worst part is that Shoebat appears to be a complete fraud. There is no record of the firebombing he claims to have taken part in. The Israeli jail has no record of his incarceration. He refers to counter-terrorism reports that don’t exist. He makes stupid claims, like saying there were 17 terrorists on 9/11 when there were 19, and talks about the TSA preventing 9/11 even though the TSA wasn’t created until after the attacks.

And what do the American people do? Shrug their shoulders, run off to watch empty-headed, lame-assed television shows, celebrate how 'beautiful' some celebrity is and be good little consumers by buying one-time-use goods made in foreign countries and then throw it all away so we can run out and by more.

We are raising children who are wasteful, disrespectful, under-educated and uncaring about what our future holds or the plight of their fellow man. What kind of a future does this paint for us?

Our country is so totally screwed up that we will not get out of it with any kind of self-respect or dignity. Can we offer any hope that this will change? I'm looking for it but I don't see it.

This country is still worth fighting for but I don't see anyone alive today willing to leave their television sets, turn away from idolatry and materialism and get their hands dirty to try to change it.

If somebody has the answer, please stand up and help get this much needed and long overdue revolution started.