The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 93, No. 36, Ed. 1 Tuesday, February 19, 2013 Page: 4 of 8
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4 The Baytown Sun
Viewpoints
Tuesday
February 19, 2013
GENE
LYONS
In defense
of cats
Sitting on my front porch a while back, I was
watching two bald eagles perched on a cypress
limb overlooking the bayou while hummingbirds
swooped and buzzed around my ears — an everyday
event around here in summer. Struck by simulta-
neous sightings of the largest and smallest birds in
North America, I wondered if I was in danger of
becoming a Bird Nut.
I began compiling - a list of bird species com-
monly seen around our farm: bam
swallows, scissor-tail flycatchers,
bluebirds, Canada geese, mock-
ingbirds, several species of duck,
goldfinches, kingbirds, meadow-
larks, bobwhite quail, red-bel-
lied woodpeckers, killdeer, cattle
egrets, great blue herons, finches,
cardinals, robins, and several kinds
of sparrow. Two summers ago, a
roadrunner set up housekeeping in
our bam. Pelicans and snow geese
fly overhead in winter.
Anyway, I quit counting at 40 species. I’m confi-
dent that friends who are certifiable Bird Nuts could
do better.
And then there’s Albert, aka “The Orange Dog.”
Albert is a three-year-old tabby tomcat with a
quirky personality unlike any eat I've ever known.
Our neighbors rescued his pregnant mother from a
Walmart parking lot; Albert grew up on their front
porch, along with two dogs and a flock of free-range
chickens.
We brought him home at 12 weeks, roughly the
size of my fist. Confronted by Maggie, our intimi-
dating Great Pyrenees/Anatolian mix, Albert imme-
diately pounced on her head. Fortunately, she loved
it. Although the kitten objected loudly to being car-
ried around in Maggie’s mouth, the two became fast
friends.
Leery of anything with a motor, Albert appears to
fear no living thing. He spends large parts of his day
with the big dogs, who treat him as a pack member.
When I go outside, he follows me everywhere, es-
pecially to the bam. It’s quite a parade: three guard
dogs, one honorary Orange Dog, and me. He’s been
known to sit on cedar fence posts purring while Mt.
Nebo, the Tennessee walking horse, nibbles his fur.
Partly because I’ve never fed Albert anywhere ex-
cept inside the house, he nearly always comes run-
ning when I call, and stands up on his hind legs for
petting. Basically, that cat thinks l hung the moon.
Anyway, if you've been reading the socially re-
sponsible newspapers, maybe you can guess where
this is going. Because during the remainder of his
waking hours, it must be reported, lovable, oddball
Albert spends his time trying to kill things.
He’s gotten awfully good at it, too. As there aren’t
enough surviving mice in the bam to keep him busy,
the cat has taken to ranging farther afield — stalking
fencerows and lurking among the branches of a fall-
en tree. He chases sparrows full-tilt along bam raf-
ters 15 feet off the ground. Yesterday I watched him
slipping among sleeping cows, trying to ambush
gi ound-feeding birds. He tried the same stunt in the
chicken pen until the rooster ran him off.
To an increasing number of public scolds, this
makes Albert Public Enemy Number One. “That
Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think,” headlined
the New York Times recently. According to a study
from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
and the Fish and Wildlife Service, cats “kill a median
of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year.”
All this carnage supposedly makes “the domestic
cat... one of the single greatest human-linked threats
to wildlife in the nation.”
This brings out the lifestyle commissars in full j
force. “If you are not willing to keep your cat indoors
or leash it when it goes outdoors,'’ comments one in-
dignant feljow, “then you should be subject to massive
and escalating fines.”
Bulldoze whole counties; build eight-lane.express-
ways every which way; erect glass-sided buildings and
wind turbines everywhere; and then blame housecats
for declining songbjrd populations? Give me a break.
Indeed, it turns out that most of the damage is done
by colonies of feral cats - which everybody agrees
need to be controlled, although hardly anybody
agrees about how.
Reading further, we learn that indoor/outdoor cats
like Albert are responsible for only a fraction of this
“slaughter”- 11 percent of the mammals, for exam-
ple, are mostly grain-spoiling, disease-carrying ro-
dents which definitely need killing.
What’s the expected life span of a house sparrow
anyway? Because here’s the thing: What I left off my
bird list are the predators. Not just bald eagles, which
mostly kill fish and turtles, but barred owls, red-tailed
hawks, red-shouldered hawks, and sharp-shinned
hawks. All of which hunt pretty much the same species
Albert does. There’s a noisy war among hawks, crows
and owls that goes on full-time out in the boondocks.
They kill each other’s young.
That’s not to mention several species of snake,
bobcats and coyotes. When the big dogs get put up
at night, Albert’s brought inside for his own protec-
tion. Because it wouldn’t do to have him try to jump
on a hungry coyote’s head.
Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a Na-
tional Magazine Award winner and co-author of
“The Hunting of the President ” (St. Martin s Press, |
2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@ya-
hoo.com.
IS CONGRESS RUNNING^
CPyRNIVAL CRUISE UNES
NOW?
Why aren’t feathers flying?
We all know what happens when
the fox guards the chicken coop -
| or do we?
This is not a rhetorical question.
Do we Americans understand what
happens when a wily predator is
custodian of defenseless clucks?
Our state of psychological disar-
mament makes us unable to recog-
nize even such an obvious threat. I
can’t think of another explanation
for why the country hasn’t melted
down the Capitol switchboard with
phone calls to U.S. senators be-
seeching them not to confirm John
Brennan as the next director of the
CIA.
What’s so scary about Brennan,
currently President Obama’s top
adviser for counterterrorism?
More than any other Obama ad-
ministration official, Brennan has
openly cultivated groups in this
country' that I describe, with good
reason, as being of the jihadist per-
suasion. Simultaneously, Brennan
misinforms or dissembles about
the nature of jihad itself. How can
such a man helm America’s pre-
mier intelligence institution, which,
at least ostensibly, is engaged in
thwarting jihad?
Consider Brennan’s interactions
with the Islamic Society of North
America (ISNA). Despite evidence
presented (and later upheld) in
federal court during the landmark
2008 Holy Land Foundation trial,
which established ISNA as a Mus-
lim Brotherhood organization and
financial supporter of the terrorist
organization Hamas (a wing of the
Muslim Brotherhood), Brennan
has continued to meet with ISNA
officials and participate in ISNA
events.
At ISNA’s annual conference in
2009, for example, Brennan de-
livered the keynote address. In
2010, Brennan spoke at a “town
hall” with ISNA president Ingrid
Mattson. As former FBI agent John
Guandolo wrote recently in a paper
he shared with me, Brennan con-
tinues to grant ISNA leaders access
to senior government officials and
support their appointments to key
intelligence positions. (Guandolo
and I are among the 19 co-authors
of “Shariah: The Threat to Ameri-
ca.”)
“The current president of ISNA,
Imam Mohamed Magid, sits on
the Homeland Security Advisory
Council, which reports directly to
(Homeland) Secretary (Janet) Na-
politano,” Guandolo writes. “With
the support of John Brennan, Imam
Magid works with the National Se-
curity Council, which has publicly
applauded this Hamas supporter.”
Guandolo was referring to praise
heaped on Magid in 2011 by
then-deputy national security advis-
er Denis McDonough. McDonough
is now Obama’s chief of staff.
If this all sounds surreal, wel-
come to our world. Here, the leader
DJANA
WEST
of a group that the
U.S. government
has designated a
conspirator to pro-
mote and finance
Islamic terrorism
is tapped to advise
the same govern-
ment on how' to
defuse Islamic ter-
rorism - or, rather,
what the govern-
ment prefers to call “extremism.”
The flip side to this affinity for
Muslim Brotherhood groups is hos-
tility toward officials who, dare to
unmask them. Last year, a reporter
asked Brennan to assess extreme-
ly alarming evidence of Muslim
Brotherhood penetration of the
U.S. government brought forward
by five House Republicans led by
Rep. Michele Bachmann - “the Na-
tional Security Five,” as Newt Gin-
grich would dub them. Brennan's
reaction was to dismiss the charges
and the elected representatives. “I
have no idea what it is that they
are making reference to,” Brennan
said, “and I'm not even going to try
to divine what it is that sometimes
comes out of Congress.”
His reaction is much the same
when it comes to what is called,
in military parlance, the “enemy
threat doctrine.” Take jihad. We
must not “describe our enemy as
‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists,”’ Brennan
said in 2010, “because jihad is a
holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of
Islam, meaning to purify oneself or
one’s community.”
This notion of “jihad” as self-
help is often disseminated by dupes
in ignorance. It is deception, or
“taqiyya," however, when voiced by
those who know better. Nonviolent
jihad barely shows up in the Qu-
ran. (Sorbonne Ph.D. linguist Tina
Magaard came up with only one
appearance of spiritual struggle in
her detailed textual analysis of the
Quran - as opposed to 50 referenc-
es that invoke violent aggression.)
Meanwhile, the first definition of
“jihad” in the authoritative Sunni
law book “Reliance of the Traveller”
reads: “Jihad means to war against
non-Muslims.”
If intelligence expert Brennan
knows this, he doesn’t like to talk
about it. When he was pressed in
2010by amemberofthe Washington
Times editorial page for an example
of armed jihad in history, Brennan
packed up his papers and abruptly
left the meeting. T recently watched
a video of the meeting, which is on
YouTube, and his behavior is very
strange.
So are his ideas about Islam and
jihad. “Al-Qaida has perverted Is-
lam and has corrupted the concept of
Islam,” Brennan declared in a 2010
press conference, thereby obscuring
the clear Quranic imperatives on
waging jihad that drove Umar Fa-
rouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called
underwear bomber, to try to bring
down a passenger plane over Detroit
on Christmas Day 2009. Why does
Brennan, a counterterrorism expert,
say such things?
Guandolo offers two possible rea-
sons: I) Brennan is “functionally in-
capable of reasonable ... thought on
this matter,” or 2) he is “intentionally
misleading U.S. government leaders
on al-Qaida’s stated objectives and
how they marry up to the require-
ments of Shariah (Islamic law ),’’
Either reason disqualifies John
Brennan to be CIA director. Still,
not one single senator has raised this
crucial matter during confirmation
hearings.
There is something else. Guando-
lo has gone public with an allega-
tion that Brennan, while CIA station
chief in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.
converted to Islam. I his allegation is
based on anonymous sources with-
in the government who, Guandolo
says, “have direct knowledge" of the
conversion.
Given Guandolo’s own counter-
terrorism expertise as an FBI sub-
ject-expert in Islam and professional
observer of the Muslim Brotherhood,
his charges carry heft. Detractors try
to undermine them by resurrecting
an inappropriate sexual relationship
Guandolo had as an FBI agent with
an FBI informant during a high-pro-
file corruption investigation. This
might be relevant if, for example.
Guandolo were running for office as
a traditional values candidate. He is,
however, trying to get information
he discovered using his skills as an
investigator into the public square
forevaluation.
He’s halfway there - that is, the
story has entered the pubic square
via talk radio, the blogosphere and
the news media, including WND.
com, MSNBC, TheBla/e. The At-
lantic, U.S. News & World Report,
the Daily Mail and Al Arabiya. Will
it be evaluated? It should, for what
Guandolo believes it tells us about
Brennan.
“Why has (Brent'an) kept this
piece of information secret?” Guan-
dolo writes. “The reason appears
to be self-evident ... Mr. Brennan’s
conversion to Islam was the culmi-
nation of a hostile campaign by a for-
eign intelligence service... Someone
who has been recruited by a foreign
government has necessarily demon-
strated he is susceptible to easy
manipulation by others and should
certainly not lead one of America’s
intelligence-agencies,”
Case closed, I’d say. But what
about the chicken coop?
Diana West is the author oj
“The Death of the Grown-up: How
Americas Arrested Development
Is Bringing Down Western Civili-
zation," and blogs at dianawest.
net. She can be contacted via di-
anawest@verizon.net. Follow her
on Twitter @diana_west_.
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Yanelli, Adam. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 93, No. 36, Ed. 1 Tuesday, February 19, 2013, newspaper, February 19, 2013; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1066334/m1/4/: accessed July 2, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.