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Horowitz: Turkish Islamic Leader Inaugurates Largest Mosque Complex in U.S.

April 4, 2016

Horowitz: Turkish Islamic Leader Inaugurates Largest Mosque Complex in U.S., Conservative Review, Daniel Horowitz, April 4, 2016

(At least Obama was displeased with Erdogan and did not attend. — DM)

Diyanet Center of America

Imagine FDR inviting Benito Mussolini to come to the United States in Middle of World War II to dedicate a massive Italian cultural center? Or how about inviting the Japanese emperor to the groundbreaking of a new Shinto shrine that was bankrolled by his country? Well, the reality of Turkey’s Islamist leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking at the opening of a massive Islamic center that he funded in a small Maryland town – while we are at war with Islamic fascism – dwarfs these historical hypotheticals in terms of absurdity and outrage.

In May 2013, Erdogan visited the site of the future Mosque in Lanham, Maryland along with Obama administration officials. After $110 million from the Turkish government, this massive Islamic center is now open and is the largest Islamic facility in the United States. The Turkish Islamic-fascist leader spoke there on Saturday to inaugurate the behemoth complex. During the feisty speech, Erdogan lectured Americans about tolerance towards Muslims, yet failed to acknowledge how he shuts down churches in his home country and fuels anti-Semitism.

While I haven’t seen any information on those who attended this ceremony, the head of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) was present at the 2013 groundbreaking. ICNA is an Islamic supremacist group that follows the teachings of Maulana Mawdudi and the Jamaat Al-Islami of Pakistan. Maulana has said that Jews will be exterminated in the end of days. The mother of Syed Farook, who lived with her son for months while he was making bombs in San Bernardino, was a member of ICNA. Syed’s wife, Tafsheen Malik, was radicalized in Pakistan by the network of Sharia-schools that followed those teachings as well.

Also in attendance in 2013 was Imam Mohamed Magid, the former head of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that was designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror trial by the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals. Even though Magid’s father is the Grand Mufti of Sudan responsible for the Christian genocide, he was appointed by Obama in 2011 to serve on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Countering Violent Extremism Working Group. No, you aren’t missing anything. There are Islamists who have been designated as Hamas agents that are given advisory positions in DHS, FBI, and the National Security Council.

Indeed, the Turkey/Muslim Brotherhood axis has come full circle right outside of our nation’s capital in a residential neighborhood.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, and particularly over the past year, our political leaders have been pulling their hair out and wringing their hands in pursuit of a solution to combating Islamic terror. We’ve spent 15 years refereeing Islamic civil wars overseas at a great fiscal and human cost to our nation. Yet, at the same time we have brought the enemy to our shores through suicidal immigration policies and have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic foreign governments to represent the entire Muslim community in America. We are at war with Islamic extremism, yet our political leaders have openly invited the Islamic extremists to come here and radicalize American Muslims.

Erdogan has been playing a double game of supporting ISIS for the past few years. And of course, he is one of the biggest supporters of Hamas in the Middle East. Then again, the Muslim Brotherhood is Hamas, yet they are in our government and control most of the mosques in this country.

Harking back to our original historical hypothetical analogy of allowing Mussolini or the Japanese emperor to inaugurate a cultural center during World War II, the reality we face today is much worse. For the most part, Japanese-Americans and Italian Americans were completely assimilated and patriotic at the time. What was going on in Japan and Italy had nothing to do with an entrenched religious ideology that spanned the globe and united all Japanese and Italians across the world to commit genocide or at least subvert their host countries. That is not the case today with Sharia-adherent Muslims living in the West and radicalized by terror groups and foreign entities with which we are at war.

That we would allow the Erdogan regime—which has become the Islamist leader of the Sunni jihad world the same way Iran leads the Shia Jihad—to fund and control a $110 million Islamic center right near our capitol while we are at war with this very ideology and these very individual Islamic extremists not only defies logic, it defies the innate desire for self-preservation.

Categories: Erdogan, Islam in America, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Mosques
Tags: Erdogan, Islam in America, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, mosques

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Deconstructing Nathan Lean’s “Islamophobia Industry”

April 4, 2016

Deconstructing Nathan Lean’s “Islamophobia Industry” Investigative Project on Terrorism, Andrew E. Harrod, April 4, 2016

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“Islamophobia…is sort of like the ocean. It is working, it is churning, it is ebbing, it is flowing, even when we are asleep. There are larger systems of power and structures of power in place,” warns Georgetown University researcher Nathan Lean. Such conspiracy-mongering typifies the thesis of his book, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, of an inherently innocuous Islam slandered by the American military-industrial complex and Zionist Jews.

Lean is a perfect fit for his employer, the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Amid ACMCU’s exclusion of opposing views, Lean rails against a vague “Islamophobia” as “discrimination against Muslims” but never defines what remains acceptable “[r]ational criticism of Islam or Muslims.”

Lean’s “Islamophobia” radar is especially sensitive when Muslims are the voices raising concern. He castigates former radical Maajid Nawaz, as a tool of bigoted neoconservatives. He has also called former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomanian “anti-Muslim hate enabler” and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali someone “dangerously close to advocating genocide.”

Lean’s oceanographic observations occurred during a discussion of Islam and American military conflicts Feb. 23 at Washington, D.C.’s Rumi Forum, an entity in the empire of the shadowy Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen. “Islamophobia has really long been connected to American foreign policy and America’s military engagement with Muslim enemies real or perceived,” he said. “America’s first military engagement as a newly formed republic was with a Muslim enemy,” the Barbary Pirates, and “narratives emerge from the Barbary Wars about Muslims and Islam…very similar to a lot of kinds of things we hear today.”

At both the Rumi Forum and a subsequent March 10 presentation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill, Lean elaborated on a “foreign enemy domestic, threat phenomenon.” At St. Marks he presented “Islamophobia” as “necessary to soften military intervention” in terms of gaining American public support, and stated that “since 1980 we’ve invaded, bombed or occupied 14 Muslim majority countries.” He thereby ignores Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams writing as diplomats in London in a March 28, 1786, letter (available in the National Archives) of a Barbary representative justifying piracy of American ships with jihad.

Lean’s presentation emphasized the “influence of fervently Zionist groups and individuals” in pushing Islamophobia, an accusation “very controversial and provocative in many quarters…really taboo.”

“Israel,” he said, “relies on Western Islamophobist pretenses” that “some lives are more important than others.” This serves in “leaving the occupying state’s colonization untouched” along with Israel’s “historical crimes committed against the Palestinians, such as ethnic cleansing, collective punishment and apartheid.”

Lean accused groups like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of portraying Muslims as “even subhuman,” saying it “uses its annual gab fest to stoke anti-Muslim narratives.” Lean’s discussion of the “Islamophobia”-funding Shillman Foundation prompted one St. Mark’s listener to note that the foundation’s founder,Robert Shillman, “is a huge donor to Northeastern University,” her alma mater. There Shillman Hall, with its Shillman statue, along with a Raytheon amphitheater, symbolizes “bombs and Zionist donors,” apparently for her two equivalent evils. The “pernicious feature” of such “Islamophobic Zionist, hateful donors” is “totally normalized on campus,” she said. Lean told her she was “right on the money.”

By contrast, Lean trivialized Islamic terrorism and other human rights violations as resulting from individual misdeeds, not theological doctrine, implying that all religious groups have equal problems with miscreants. “We can certainly talk about violent Muslims, no one should have a problem with that, because there are violent Muslims, there are violent Christians, there are violent Jews, there are others,” he said. Criticizing a government emphasis on Islamic extremists, he mentioned “white guys that look like me that come from the South that go into movie theaters with automatic weapons and blow away 40 people.”

Lean rejects terms like “radical Islam,” saying it “reinforces the idea that there is something inherently violent about Islam.” Words like sharia have “been usurped by people that would want to advance some form of prejudice against Muslims,” he said. Similarly, he tells audiences that jihad primarily represents a “pious struggle to do good,” contrary to the all-too violent understanding of this term by former jihadists and the Palestinian Authority, to say nothing of Hamas or the Islamic State.

Lean similarly rejects the term “moderate Muslims” and asks “who decides what the good Muslims are…and what the bad Muslims are? What are their criteria?” That is ironic considering Lean’s attacks on Nawaz, Nomani and other Muslims who advocate for reform.

He has no problem dismissing Muslim physician Zuhdi Jasser as an “anti-Muslim activist” because he opposes Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood with their theocratic agenda. He even refused to answer Nomani’s question at the Rumi Forum and answered with insults when she challenged Lean’s personal attacks against those he believes unjustly attack Muslims.

Like Nomani, “there are an awful lot of people on the left side of the political spectrum that are very problematic when it comes to Islamophobia,” Lean said at St. Marks. “Bill Maher said a lot of things that I like, and I enjoy laughing at his show, but quite frankly I haven’t been able to watch it recently,” he said of the comedian’s questioning of Islamic doctrine. “He’s such a virulently anti-Muslim fellow.”

Yet now and then even Lean cannot ignore reality of legitimate doubts with respect to Islam. A questioner described her anxiety about seeing a Muslim woman on the D.C. Metro completely covered by a niqab except for her eyes. “I don’t think that you are prejudiced for having those feelings,” he responded. “We live in the society where we for the most part expect to interact with one another on a face to face level.”

Lean’s “Islamophobia” sophistry may please his radical friends but has little relation to a world with far more serious concerns about Islam than veil-impaired facial contact. “Islamophobia” hardly influenced, for example, America’s 1991 liberation of Kuwait, 1980s arming of Afghans against the Soviets, 1990s rescue of Balkan Muslims from Serbian genocide, and various 21^st century overthrows of dictatorship. Lean’s thesis also offers no explanation for “Islamophobia” in Europe, where countries have far less military involvement than the United States, including neutral countries like Switzerland, noted for its minaret ban. Lean’s alternative imputation of “Islamophobia” to Zionists raises old prejudicial stereotypes of often wealthy Jews conniving to suborn others, as seen in the 2007 book The Israel Lobby and Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist speeches.

Lean’s catch-all accusation of “Islamophobia” simply limits vital public debates over Islam in academia and beyond. Yet the Islamic State’s genocide against Christians, documented in a report released the very day of Lean’s St. Mark’s appearance, shows that jihadist threats are hardly a Jewish invention and appropriate for minimization.

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Following last month’s terror attacks in Brussels, Lean’s initial statement lamented anticipated media coverage. He said nothing about the attack or the terrorists’ motivation. Even as ISIS’ statement claimed credit for the attack made repeated references to God supposedly enabling it, the charlatan Lean remains preoccupied with “Islamophobia.”

Categories: Islamophobia
Tags: Islamophobia

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Massachusetts Islamism

April 4, 2016

Massachusetts Islamism, Gatestone Institute, Samuel Westrop, April 4, 2016

♦ The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) as genuine representatives of the Muslim community.

♦ Very few American Muslims believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. A 2011 Gallup poll revealed that around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

♦ It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. Many in them have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

♦ Counter-extremism work is best achieved by marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, and by working instead with the genuine moderates.

A number of Massachusetts Muslim groups, led by Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, are currently spearheading a campaign against the Obama administration’s program, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which has designated Boston as one of its pilot cities.

From the government’s perspective, Boston was an obvious choice. The city has a long, unfortunate history of producing internationally-recognized terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon; Aafia Siddiqui, whom FBI Director Robert S. Mueller describes as “an al-Qaeda operative and facilitator;” Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston, and named by the federal government as an Al Qaeda fundraiser, and Ahmad Abousamra, a key official within Islamic State, whose father is vice-president of the Muslim American Society’s Boston branch.

During the past decade, in fact, twelve congregants, supporters, officials and donors of the Islamic Society of Boston alone have been imprisoned, deported, killed or are on the run in connection with terrorism offenses.

Despite these alumnae, a number of extremist Islamic organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have claimed that the government’s attempt to combat radicalization “targets American Muslims” and “undermines our national ideals.”

Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, who is also a director of CAIR’s Massachusetts branch, has spoken at a number of anti-CVE rallies, condemning the government’s approach as “authoritarian” because it included “violent practices like surveillance and racial profiling.”

In response, Robert Trestan, the Massachusetts director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), points out that the CVE program “is relatively new in this country. It’s not fair to judge it yet and be overly critical.” He added: “Nothing I’ve seen or participated in has gone anywhere near proposing or suggesting anything close to surveillance, crossing the line of people’s civil rights or profiling.”

What, then, is the basis for this opposition?

Critics of Nadeem Mazen look with concern at his opposition to policing that protects Americans from terrorist attacks. In May, Mazen voted against the Cambridge Police Department budget. He argued that the funding for SWAT teams and the police’s participation in CVE programs only served to “alienate the Muslim community.” The Cambridge SWAT team, however, played a crucial part in the arrest of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev just hours after he and his brother murdered three spectators and injured hundreds at the Boston marathon.

Mazen has also taken part in protests against Boston police departments. Addressing a crowd of activists from a group named Restore the Fourth, Mazen claimed that police counter-terrorism units are part of a larger conspiracy to suppress free speech: “They are working very hard…in the background….but really, there’s never any need. … Some of the research is looking at free speech activists…like me. … It is that type of government operation, it’s that that is the best and the most evident hallmark of tyranny.”

Are Mazen and CAIR, then, simply free speech campaigners?

CAIR does not exactly have a reputation for liberal activism. It was founded in 1994 by three officials of the Islamic Association of Palestine, which, the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial would later determine, was a front for the terrorist group, Hamas. During the same trial, the prosecutors designated CAIR as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis concluded that, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR… with the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.”

One of CAIR’s original Islamic Association of Palestine founders, Nihad Awad, is today CAIR’s Executive Director. Awad peddles conspiracy theories that the U.S Congress is controlled by Israel, and has stated that U.S. foreign policy was propelled by Clinton administration officials of a particular “ethnic background.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) notes that CAIR has long expressed anti-Semitic and pro-terror rhetoric. The ADL adds that, “[CAIR’s] public statements cast Jews and Israelis as corrupt agents who control both foreign and domestic U.S. policy and are responsible for the persecution of Muslims in the U.S.”

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In November 2015, CAIR, which in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial was determined to be a front for the terrorist group Hamas, organized a “lobbying day” at the Massachusetts State House.

Not all of Massachusetts’s Muslim groups have opposed involvement in the CVE program. In February, the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which is partly run by the Muslim American Society, took part in the White House’s summit on Countering Violent Extremism.

The ISB’s Director, Yusufi Vali, however, would later criticize the CVE program on the grounds that by focusing on radicalization rather than violence, the authorities were unfairly targeting Muslim-Americans simply because of their faith.

Instead, Vali has urged, the government should deputize responsibility for combatting extremism to groups such as his. Boston is a pilot city for the CVE program, he claimed, because of the “strong relationship” between law enforcement and institutions such as the ISB. Only the ISB’s version of Islam, Vali proposed, can “appeal to young people” and “win in the marketplace of ideas.”

But the ideology underpinning the Islamic Society of Boston itself is cause for some concern. In 2008, the Muslim American Society (MAS), which runs the ISB’s Cultural Center, of which Vali is also a board member, was labelled by federal prosecutors “as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”

Religious leaders of the Muslim American Society have included Hafiz Masood, the brother of Pakistani terrorist Hafiz Saeed, who masterminded the 2008 Mumbai Massacre in which 164 people were murdered. While he was living in the Boston area, according to a Times of India report, Masood was raising money and trying to recruit people for his brother’s terrorist group. After being deported by the government for filing a fraudulent visa application, Masood has since become a spokesperson for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a branch of his brother’s terrorist group, Lashkar-i-Taiba.[1]

The ISB itself was founded by the Al Qaeda operative Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who was jailed in 2004 for participating in a Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. The ISB’s other trustees have included prominent Islamist operatives, including Yusuf Al Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood.

In October, an event hosted by the ISB featured a number of extremist preachers. One of them, Hussain Kamani has cited Quranic verse and commentary to warn Muslims, “do not resemble the Jews” and has advised parents to “beat” their children “if they do not [pray].” In a talk titled ‘Sex, Masturbation and Islam,’ Kamani explains that a Muslim man must only fulfil his sexual desires “with his spouse…[or] with a female slave that belongs to him.” Those who commit adultery or have sex outside of marriage, Kamani further declares, must be “stoned to death.”

If one looks to European experiences with counter-extremism programs, some of which have been in place for over a decade, Yusufi Vali and the ISB have good reasons to lobby against a focus on radicalization. In Britain, under Prime Minister David Cameron, the government has come to the realization that some of the Islamic groups entrusted with counter-extremism initiatives are, in fact, part of the problem.

In a speech delivered in Munich in 2011, Cameron stated:

“As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’, and they then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence. … Some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism. As others have observed, this is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement.”

Groups similar to the ISB and CAIR, the Conservative government reasons, represent the “non-violent extremists.” These are likely the first stop on the “conveyor belt” path to radicalization: a young is Muslim exposed to anti-Semitism, excuses for terrorism and claims of victimhood and gradually becomes open to committing violent acts.

This insight was not without foundation. The previous Labour government, under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, partnered with British Muslim groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Britain’s most prominent Muslim group — similar in ideology to CAIR and the ISB — to counteract extremist ideas in the Muslim community. In 2008, however, the Labour government severed all relations with the Muslim Council of Britain after it emerged that the group’s deputy secretary general, Daud Abdullah, had signed a declaration supporting attacks against Jewish communities and the British armed forces.

By seeking the partnership of groups such as the ISB, the Obama administration risks making the same mistakes of Britain’s last Labour government. And, in time, the U.S. government will arrive at the same realization as the British government — that non-violent extremists do not offer an alternative to violent extremism; in fact, they make the problem worse.

But all this invites the question: why do some Islamist groups oppose CVE programs while others join in? Although the ISB backed out of the Boston CVE initiative, the Islamic Council of New England (ICNE) remains a key partner. As with CAIR and the ISB, the ICNE is part of the “soft Islamist” network — groups that emerged from Muslim Brotherhood ideology and which have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

In 2002, the ICNE hosted a conference with the Muslim Brotherhood academic, Tariq Ramadan, and the British Salafist, Abdur Raheem Green, a former jihadist who warns Muslims of a Jewish “stench,” encourages the death penalty as a “suitable and effective” punishment for homosexuality and adultery, and has ruled that wife-beating “is allowed.”

The ICNE has announced its continued involvement in CVE programs because “rather than obsessing about the insidious erosion of our ‘civil rights’, Muslims should focus on the more immediate risk of being blind-sided by the overwhelming tsunami of Islamophobia.”

While CAIR protests against CVE, the ICNE believes it can work with counter-extremism programs to its advantage. The ISB lies somewhere in the middle. And yet all these Islamist groups are key partners, mostly founded and managed by the same network of Islamist operatives.

Has the CVE program really caused such discord?

Again, the European experience offers some answers. Daud Abdullah, the former deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, had his group work closely with the British government’s counter-extremism program, before later hosting an event with his other group, Middle East Monitor, which denounced the scheme as a “Cold War on British Muslims.” Similarly, the Cordoba Foundation, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood think tank, procured counter-extremism grants in 2008 only to run events condemning counter-extremism programs in 2009.

Non-violent extremists learn both to exploit and criticize counter-extremism initiatives to their benefit. By working in tandem, some Islamist voices accept government funds that legitimize them as leaders of the Muslim community and portray them as responsible Muslims concerned with extremism; while other Islamist groups oppose counter-extremism efforts in an effort to style themselves as civil rights champions and gain the support of libertarians on both the Left and Right.

The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake, if it is one, made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and ISB as genuine representatives of the Muslim community. Very few American Muslims, it seems, actually believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

As for the ISB, it operates under the aegis of the Muslim American Society, which claims to be a national group for American Muslims. A 2011 report produced by CAIR itself, however, demonstrates that a mere 3% of American mosques are affiliated with the Muslim American Society. 62% of mosques claimed that they were not affiliated with any organization.

It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. CAIR Massachusetts Director Nadeem Mazen has denounced counter-Islamist Muslim groups that “foist secular attitudes on Muslims” and promote ideas that “are being projected, imperialist-style on to our population.”

American Islam is diverse. No group can claim to represent either Massachusetts Muslims or American Muslims. Islamist bodies have imposed their leadership on American Muslims. As inherently political movements, they were best organized to style themselves as community leaders. When politicians in D.C ask to speak to the “Muslim community,” groups such as CAIR and the ISB step forward.

Counter-extremism work is best achieved, in fact, by the government marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, by working instead with the genuine moderates among American Muslims, and by recognizing the link between non-violent and violent extremism. European governments have finally understood this reality, but far too late. For the sake of moderate Muslims everywhere, let us hope American politicians are quicker on the uptake.

Categories: CAIR, Clash of civilizations, Islamic indoctrination, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Islamists vs Islam, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam
Tags: CAIR, Clash of civilizations, Islamic indoctrination, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Islamists vs Islam, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam

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Netanyahu’s dilemma: Détente with Turkey or recognition of Syrian Kurds

April 4, 2016

Netanyahu’s dilemma: Détente with Turkey or recognition of Syrian Kurds, DEBKAfile, April 4, 2016

obama_erdogan_best_friends_2012

They were once good friends

Last Friday, April 1, President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan had his first encounter with a group of American Jewish leaders, at his request. The full details of its contents were hard to sort out because the Turkish translator censored his master’s words with a heavy hand to make them more acceptable to his audience. But Erdogan’s bottom line, DEBKAfile’s New York sources report, was a request for help in explaining to the Obama administration in Washington and the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem why they must on no account extend support to the Syrian Kurdish PYD and its YPG militia or recognize their bid for a separate state in northern Syria.

The Turkish president did not spell out his response to this step, but indicated that a Turkish invasion to confront the Kurdish separatists was under serious consideration in Ankara. His meaning was clear: He would go to war against the Kurds, even if this meant flying in the face of President Barack Obama’s expectation that Turkey would fight the Islamic State.

Relations between the Turkish and US presidents have slipped back another notch in the last two weeks. When he visited Washington for the nuclear summit, Erdogan was pointedly not invited to the White House and his request for a tete a tete with Obama was ruled out. The US president even refused to join Erdogan in ceremonially honoring a new mosque built outside Washington with Turkish government funding.

At odds between them is not just the Kurdish question, but Erdogan’s furious opposition to Obama’s collaboration with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Syrian conflict, and the two presidents’ tacit accord to leave Bashar Assad in power indefinitely until a handover becomes manageable.

On Feb. 7, on his return for a Latin American tour, the Turkish president warned Obama that he must choose between Ankara and the Kurds, whom he called “terrorists.” By last week, the US president’s choice was clear. It was the Kurds.

ObamaErdogan480_Koteret

When Erdogan arrived home from Washington last week, he discovered that the roughly four million Syrian Kurds dwelling in three enclaves touching on the Turkish border had taken important steps to advance their goal for self-rule: They were drafting a plan for establishing a “Federal Democratic System” in their three enclaves – Hassakeh-Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin – and had announced the amalgamation of their respective militias under the heading the “Syrian Democratic Forces”.

Cold-shouldered in Washington as well as Moscow (since Turkish jets shot down a Russian fighter last November), Erdogan found himself let down by the Jewish leaders whom he tried to woo. They refused to support him or his policy on the Kurdish question for three reasons:

1. Ankara had for years consistently promoted the radical Palestinian Hamas organization. To this, Erdogan replied by denying he had backed Hamas only acted to improve the lives of the Gaza population. And, anyway, he said he had reacyed understandings with Israel on this issue..

2. His hostility towards Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi. Erdogan’s response to this was a diatribe slamming the Egyptian ruler.

3. No clear reply had been forthcoming from Jerusalem by that time on Israel’s relations with Turkey or its policy towards the Kurds, despite the Turkish leader’s positive presentation of mended fences.

The current state of the relationship is laid out by DEBKAfile’s sources:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is caught on the horns of multiple dilemmas: While reluctant to respond to Ankara’s suit for warm relations with a leader who is shunned by Obama and Putin alike, Turkey is nonetheless offering to be Israel’s best client for its offshore gas.

Israel’s friendship with the Kurdish people goes back many years. The rise of an independent or autonomous state in Syria and its potential link-up with the semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq would create an important new state of 40 million people in the heart of the Middle East.

Israel has no wish to make enemies of its longstanding friends by disowning them in favor of Turkey.

Already, Israel’s evolving ties with the Syrian Kurds have given Israel’s strategic position in Syria a new positive spin, upgrading it versus the Assad regime in Damascus and its Hizballah and Iranian allies, who are avowed enemies of the Jewish state. Those ties offer Israel its first foothold in northern Syria.

And finally, Erdogan is not the only opponent of Kurdish separatism; so too are important Sunni Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. By promoting the Kurds, Israel risks jeopardizing its rapidly developing ties with those governments.

Categories: Erdogan, Foreign policy, Israel, Kurds, Netanyahu, Obama - Middle East, Obama and Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sisi
Tags: Erdogan, Foreign Policy, Israel, Kurds, Netanyahu, Obama and Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sisi

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Panama Papers: Mainstream Media Focuses on ‘Putin Link’, Leak Group Funded By Pro-Open Borders George Soros

April 4, 2016

Panama Papers: Mainstream Media Focuses on ‘Putin Link’, Leak Group Funded By Pro-Open Borders George Soros

by Raheem Kassam and Lee Stranahan

4 Apr 2016

Source: Panama Papers: Mainstream Media Focuses on ‘Putin Link’, Leak Group Funded By Pro-Open Borders George Soros – Breitbart

Despite the high profile figures directly implicated in the Panama Papers leak – the largest financial leak in history – the mainstream media has been leading on the tenuous links to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Indeed the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has facilitated the leak, leads with a picture of Mr. Putin on its website with the headline: “Offshore network tied to Putin”.

But the Putin links, as the media has to keep repeating for legal reasons, are not in fact linked to the Russian premier, but rather to some people they claim are in his “inner circle”.

Instead, the global figures directly implicated, including the Argentinian President, Iceland’s Prime Minister, the King of Saudi Arabia – alongside a host of other Western-allied Gulf figures, the President of Ukraine and others are being somewhat insulated by the media narrative.

The leak comes just days before a Netherlands vote on the EU association agreement with Ukraine – a referendum that is effectively about the Dutch people siding with either Vladimir Putin or the EU-backed network (including the leak-named president) of Ukraine. But the focus appears to be locked on Mr. Putin for the time being.

Questions must be asked of the tactics of the ICIJ, and indeed, their backers.

The organisation, which describes itself as “a global network of more than 190 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories” lists as some of its recent financial funders:

Adessium Foundation

Funds big green, as well as financial industry lobbyists, often in partnership with the George Soros-backed Open Society initiatives or foundations. The group also supports the EUObserver website, which dedicates itself to non-biased European Union reporting, though receives 64 per cent of its funding from predominantly pro-EU foundations.

Open Society Foundations

Chaired by Hungarian-American billionaire and Hillary Clinton donor George Soros, the Open Society Foundations back hundreds of pro open borders, mass immigration groups across the European Union, United Kingdom, and United States of America. Mr. Soros is a known rival of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and has recently written about how Mr. Putin is a “greater threat” to the West than Islamic State.

The Sigrid Rausing Trust

The Sigrid Rausing Trust, similarly to the Open Society Foundations, backs open borders and pro mass migration groups across the United Kingdom, and funds anti-Israel groups in the Middle East. The organisation funds “No Borders” in Ukraine, “Reprieve” in the UK – which defends Guantanamo Bay detainees, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the radical left group “Southall Black Sisters” in Britain.

Graeme Wood

An Australian billionaire who has bankrolled anti coal projects in his home country, as well as supporting the Guardian website – which critics have highlighted the hypocrisy of for their own offshore tax set up. Mr. Wood was responsible for Australia’s “biggest ever political donation of $1.6 million in 2010 to the Greens” and funded the failed Global Mail news website.

The Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is one of the largest funders on the political left, giving out over $560 million just in 2013. The Ford Foundation has funded everything from Sesame Street to the radical TV show Democracy Now.

In addition to finding literally dozens of far left groups with agendas ranging from environmentalism to abortion, the Ford Foundation is one of the premier funders of the open borders movement, beginning with its 1968 grant to create the group MALDEF, or the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, as helping to creat the group National Council of La Raza. MALDEF and La Raza have become to the most influential groups in the US open borders movement. The Ford foundation is also been a significant funder for the ACLU and the National Lawyers guild, both key legal players in the fight for open borders.

Additionally, the Ford Foundation laid the intellectual groundwork for the modern open borders movement and its multiculturalist agenda with a series of grants in the 60s and 70s that created Women’s Studies and Black Studies programs at major universities across America. In a 1992 conference that Ford sponsored called “Cultural Diversity Enhancement” the closing speaker was Eve Grossman, a Princeton dean, who made the agenda very clear: “If we want to change the world, we have to change the students.”

Pew Charitable Trust

Like like The Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust is a major funder of a wide range of left-wing groups with focuses on arts and culture, environmental issues as well as public research opinion polling through the Pew Research group. In 2014 alone, Pew gave out over $110 million in grants.

A quick look at the Pew Charitable Trust’s website includes a number of helpful articles if you’re an illegal alien and you’d like to drive, such as the recent pop quiz Do You Know the Facts About Driver’s Licenses for Unauthorized Immigrants? and Alternative Driver’s Licenses for Unauthorized Immigrants.

David and Lucile Packard Foundation

Another heavy hitter in the world of left-wing grant writing, the Packard Foundation gave out nearly $300 million in 2013 along.

Aside from funding institutional left groups like Human Rights Watch, The Center for Reproductive Rights, And the Environmental Working Group, Packard is also funded open borders groups such as National Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Law Center, and the ACLU.

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Tags: George Soros, Panama Papers

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Migrant Violence Breaks Out at Austria-Italy Border

April 4, 2016

WATCH: Violence Breaks Out at Austria-Italy Border Over New Immigration Controls

by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D

.4 Apr 2016

Source: Migrant Violence Breaks Out at Austria-Italy Border

Demonstrations by pro-migrant social centers at the Austrian Brenner border with Italy tuned violent Sunday, with protesters hurling stones and flares at the Austrian police, injuring five officers, according to reports.

Some 700 protesters from Italy, Austria and Germany spent the day on Sunday at the Brenner Pass, publicly criticizing Austria’s plans to deploy soldiers at the Brenner border to deal with rising numbers of migrants trying to get to northern Europe.

The demonstrators gathered in front of the Italian train station near the crossing and from there marched across the border into Austria. A number of the protesters wore life jackets to call to mind the migrants who have drowned trying to cross the sea into Europe.

Austrian riot police numbered approximately 100 officers, aided by a helicopter, and the Red Cross was present with seven ambulances as well.

brenner pass

Pro-migrant advocates sprayed graffiti over EU signs at the border post (via AP)

Austrian Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil announced Saturday that not only would Vienna tighten border controls, but that it would also enforce them with a military presence.

“As the EU’s external borders are not yet effectively protected, Austria will soon ramp up strict border controls. That means massive border controls at the Brenner (Pass), and with soldiers,” Doskozil said.

The number of migrants entering Germany from Austria fell sharply in March to below 5,000, the result of the closing of the “Balkan route” into northern Europe, but observers fear that desperate migrants will now focus on the central Mediterranean route up through Italy.

“We expect strong use to be made of the central Mediterranean route in the coming weeks,” said Doskozil. “When the weather gets better, these numbers will increase strongly.”

Protesters took to Twitter using the hashtag #Brenner to illustrate their point:

Günther Platter, the governor of Tyrol, criticized the protesters’ use of violence against the police.

“Violence must be rejected in every way and it is not tolerable for the protesters to have attacked the police, who were committed to ensuring the peaceful outcome of the event,” he said.

None of us wanted checkpoints set up at Brenner, Platter said, but if European states are not able to secure external borders, Austria is forced to establish controls at its borders.

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Tags: Austria, Border controls, Brenner Pass, Europe Migrant Crisis, Immigration, Italy

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600 Israeli companies, 850 shareholders listed in Panama data leak

April 4, 2016

600 Israeli companies, 850 shareholders listed in Panama data leak 11.5 million documents from Panamanian law firm reveal offshore companies of heads of state, celebrities, businessmen

By Times of Israel staff and Agencies April 4, 2016, 6:41 am

Source: 600 Israeli companies, 850 shareholders listed in Panama data leak | The Times of Israel

A marquee of the Arango Orillac Building lists the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama City, Sunday, April 3, 2016. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)

Some 600 Israeli companies and 850 Israeli shareholders are listed in the 11.5 million documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm detailing offshore dealings.

The trove was published Sunday after a year-long investigation into the material.

According to the probe by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and other media, including Haaretz, the leaked data from Mossack Fonseca, from 1975 to the end of last year, provides what the ICIJ described as a “never-before-seen view inside the offshore world.”

The documents, from 214,000 entities, detail the offshore holdings of a dozen current and former world leaders, as well as businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

Names figuring in the leak included the president of Ukraine, the king of Saudi Arabia and the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the ICIJ statement said.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin’s name is not mentioned in the documents, his close associates “secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies,” the ICIJ said.

Among the Israeli names found in the leaked documents are that of top attorney Dov Weisglass, former bureau chief of the late prime minister Ariel Sharon, Jacob Engel, a businessman active in the African mining industry, and Idan Ofer, a member of one of Israel’s wealthiest families, according to Haaretz.

The appearance of their names does not necessarily imply wrongdoing, only that they are linked to offshore companies mentioned in the documents.

Weisglass’s name appears as a sole owner of one of four companies set up by his business partner Assaf Halkin. The company, Talaville Global, was registered in the British Virgin Islands in May 2012, according to Haaretz, and seven months later, all of its shares were mortgaged against a loan from a Vienna bank.

Weisglass and Halkin told Haaretz that the company “was registered for the purpose of receiving a loan from the bank in order to invest in European properties. The bank would only allow a loan to a corporation… [the] “company activity is reported to the tax authorities in Israel. The required tax on the said activity is paid in Israel.”

Bank Leumi’s branch in Jersey in the Channel Islands, which provides a tax shelter to its customers, is also mentioned in the leak. It includes correspondence between the bank and the Panamanian law firm.

In October, Bank Leumi announced that it was closing the branch. This came after the bank, Israel’s second largest, paid $400 million in a settlement reached in December 2014 over an investigation into tax evasion schemes that involved American clients. The bank paid the US Department of Justice and the State of New York $270 million and $130 million respectively.

Last year, three former Bank Leumi executives were forced to repay the company a total of 5.1 million shekels (approximately $1.3 million) in the wake of the scandal.

According to Haaretz, the documents also show that Bank Hapoalim used the Panamanian law firm to manage activity for various trust funds until 2011.

Others mentioned in the leaks include Mohammad Mustafa, a senior financial official and confidant of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who used offshore accounts to funnel money from Arab states to the Palestinians, according to the documents.

The trove of documents were reviewed by a team of more than 370 reporters from over 70 countries, according to the ICIJ.

The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which first received the data more than a year ago, said it was confident the material was genuine.

The Munich-based daily was offered the data through an encrypted channel by an anonymous source who requested no monetary compensation and asked only for unspecified security measures, said Bastian Obermayer, a reporter for the paper.

Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela issued a statement saying his government would cooperate “vigorously” with any judicial investigation arising from the leak of the law firm’s documents. He said that the revelations shouldn’t detract from his government’s “zero tolerance” for any illicit activities in Panama’s finance industry.

“These findings show how deeply ingrained harmful practices and criminality are in the offshore world,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the US-based University of California, Berkeley, cited by the consortium.

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Record of Daily Arab Violence Challenging IDF Figures Showing Intifada Waning

April 4, 2016

By: JNi.Media Published: April 4th, 2016

Source: The Jewish Press » » Record of Daily Arab Violence Challenging IDF Figures Showing Intifada Waning

Source: IDF

Despite the fact that the wave of terror begun last September continues, figures provided by the IDF spokesperson’s office point to a significant decline in violence in Judea and Samaria in March. According to the IDF figures — which are vastly different from other records in that they count only events that were severe enough to attract major Israeli media attention, and thus help distort the daily reality of the intifada — there have been 168 attacks in Judea and Samaria between September 2015 and March 2016, most of which were recorded last October. The lowest figure since September was recorded in March — 10 attacks.

The IDF reports the most significant decline in ramming by car: while between October and December there were 24 ramming attacks, since January there have been only four such attacks on record. As to stabbing attacks: October saw 27 stabbings, November 15, December 12, January and February 11 each, and in March the figure was down to 5. Live fire attacks were down from 13 in October to 3 in March.

In October there were 442 stone throwing events, compared with 234 in February and 165 in March. October marked 88 Molotov cocktails, compared with 20 in March.

And, to a nation obsessed by the killing of a wounded terrorist on the ground, here is the IDF’s overall account of casualties: from October 1 to March 31 medical treatment was given to 430 Arabs, out of whom 91 died and 30 were critically injured. At the same period 470 IDF soldiers were treated: 424 with light injuries, 26 moderate, 13 critical and 7 soldiers lost their lives.

The IDF optimistic report is challenged by daily reports from the field conducted by the website Hakol Hayehudi, which documents every attack, down to every stone throwing Arab mob, a list they dubbed “The Silenced Intifada.” According to their list, just on Sunday this week, these attacks were recorded:

Arabs rioted in the village of Tira

Arabs threw stones near the Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv

Arabs rioted in the Samaria village of Qabatiya

Arabs firebombed vehicles at Bani Naim junction on Mount Hebron

Arabs threw three Molotov cocktails at an IDF force in Umm Salmona near Efrat

Arabs threw a firebomb near Ateret

Arabs threw a firebomb near Alei Zahav

Arabs threw stones near Rachel’s tomb

Arabs threw stones near Tekoa

Arabs threw stones and hurled Molotov cocktails in Issawiya

Arabs threw stones in Shuqba

Arabs threw stones at Al-Ram

Arabs threw stones near P’sagot

Arabs threw stones at cars near Halhul

A Terrorist was arrested on his way to carry out an attack in the Beit El area

Arabs hurled stones at vehicles near Al Khader

An Arab attempted a stabbing attack at the Tapuach intersection and was arrested

An Arab woman stabbed and lightly injured a Jewish woman in Rosh Ha’ayin

Arabs again hurled stones at vehicles near Al Khader

Arabs hurled stones at vehicles in Huwwara. The vehicle was damaged.

Imagine, these reports were recorded on Sunday, March 3, alone. They present a completely different picture, one of persistent lawlessness resembling some third world countries in the midst of a civil war — which this intifada, like the two that preceded it, is.

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Charity backing anti-Israel rallies has state cash pulled

April 4, 2016

Charity backing anti-Israel rallies has state cash pulled

By Andrew Gilligan, London Editor

Source: Charity backing anti-Israel rallies has state cash pulled

The government has ceased funding a British charity which sponsored events accused of promoting hatred and violence against Jews.

The Department for International Development (Dfid) said that it no longer supported War on Want, which helped pay for “Israeli Apartheid Week” in February this year.

The statement comes as the Telegraph obtained undercover recordings of events where anti-Semitism, demands for the destruction of Israel or naked support for terror were expressed by academics and others at meetings in some of Britain’s most prestigious universities.

One speaker, Max Blumenthal, the son of a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, praised a massacre by Hamas as sending an “incredible message” and said that taking up arms should be “normal” for Palestinians. He compared Israel to the terrorist group Isil, describing it as “the Jewish State of Israel and the Levant, Jsil”.

At another rally – sponsored by War on Want – a speaker said that British government policy was created by “Zionist and neo-con lobbies”.

A second speaker at the same event spoke of a “rumour” that Israelis were harvesting dead Palestinians’ organs.

The meeting, at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), was the London launch of Israeli Apartheid Week, held across UK university campuses to “raise awareness about Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial project” and demand boycotts of Israel. They were secretly recorded and passed to the Telegraph.

War on Want, whose logo appears on publicity materials for Israeli Apartheid Week and the meeting, has received £260,000 in funding from Dfid over the last two years.

The subsidy is doubly embarrassing because the Government has recently banned local authorities and other public bodies from implementing boycotts of Israel.

A Dfid spokesman said last night that it has ceased funding of War on Want, apart from a small project with a distinct branch of the charity in Northern Ireland.

Dfid sources said the UK “deplored incitement on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.

War on Want spent more than £1,000 to bring Sahar Francis, a Palestinian lawyer, to the UK for the London event.

Ms Francis, the head of the Addameer prisoners’ rights group, spoke of a “rumour” that Israelis were stealing organs from Palestinian victims of the violence.

“The eyes were looking in a very strange way and this is why the families suspected [Israel] are stealing their [organs],” she said.

“But we cannot confirm, because [in] most cases it was not ending up with [an] autopsy.”

War on Want also paid for the accommodation of another speaker, Steven Salaita, an academic who used the event to attack Israel’s “tenuous colonial existence” and defend violence, saying: “If we are going to reduce a project of ethnic cleansing, illegal settlement and military occupation to the minuscule chance that a soldier or a settler will be harmed by an act of resistance by the natives, then we forfeit all right to be taken seriously.”

It was a decision by Oxford University Labour Club to endorse Israeli Apartheid Week which triggered the row about anti-Semitism within Labour.

The club’s co-chairman, Alex Chalmers, resigned, saying that a “large proportion of Oxford University Labour Club and the student Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”

He condemned Israeli Apartheid Week as “a movement with a history of targeting and harassing Jewish students and inviting anti-Semitic speakers to campuses”.

However, it can be revealed that a previous Israeli Apartheid Week event, in Leicester last year, was attended by Mohammed Dawood, a serving Labour councillor in the east Midlands city.

Cllr Dawood, a former assistant mayor of Leicester with responsibility for housing and social care, recently tweeted a film showing the burning of the “Zionist entity flag”, the Israeli flag.

On social media, Cllr Dawood has described Israelis as “colonisers”, said that artists who go to Israel are “like [those] performing in Sun City [the resort in the South African bantustan] under Apartheid” and retweeted a statement that Israeli troops are “Zionist terrorists”.

A spokesman for the organisation Jewish Human Rights Watch called on Labour to expel Cllr Dawood.

Many Israeli Apartheid Week speakers seek to destroy the whole of Israel, not just remove it from the occupied territories. At SOAS, Rafeef Ziadah, the event chairman, said that Israeli Apartheid Week “definitively breaks with the Oslo [peace process] paradigm that framed issues in terms of two equal sides”, instead “framing Israel for what it is, a settler-colonial state”.

She described Israel, which was created in 1948, as “ ’48 Palestine” and said that the campaign “very importantly spoke about the entirety of the Palestinian people, not just segments of the Palestinian people”.

Dr Ziadah is a staff member at SOAS whose post is funded by the Government’s Economic and Social Research Council.

Another speaker at the event was Malia Bouattia, a hardline executive member of the National Union of Students known for supporting extremist groups such as Cage, the human rights organisation.

Ms Bouattia said the government’s anti-extremism policy, Prevent, was fuelled by “all manner of Zionist and neo-con lobbies”.

Another meeting, in the London School of Economics on March 5, was addressed by Max Blumenthal, a writer who is also the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a past adviser to former President Bill Clinton and now likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Describing the Palestinian enclave of Gaza as a penitentiary, Mr Blumenthal said: “There’s often prison revolts which take place everywhere, because people are normal. People are normal in the Gaza Strip, and so they take up arms.”

He praised a 2014 massacre carried out by “commandos” of Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, against Nahal Oz, a kibbutz and army base near the Gaza border, saying it was a way for Palestinians to “recover their dignity” and “pop Israel’s security bubble”.

“With GoPro cameras attached to their helmets, [they] burst into the Israeli base and kill every soldier they encounter in hand-to-hand combat,” said Mr Blumenthal.

“The message it sent to young Palestinians in the West Bank, in Jerusalem and abroad, was incredible … You see your people in commando uniforms, bursting into a military base and showing up the occupier.” In fact Nahal Oz is within Israel proper and is not occupied territory.

He also claimed that the creation of the Palestinian Authority was “the greatest achievement of the Israeli occupation”, since it had created an “apartheid fantasy” of a subjugated Palestinian state that even the South African government could never achieve.

John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want said: “Standing up for the rights of Palestinians fits squarely with our work as a registered charity, and the Charity Commission has consistently confirmed this. For decades, Palestinians have faced systematic discrimination and abuse at the hands of the Israeli government.”

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Two Clashes of Civilizations

April 4, 2016

Two Clashes of Civilizations, Dan Miller’s Blog, April 3, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

One clash involves those who would make America more corrupt, more violent, more drug addicted and poorer. The other involves those who would make Islam dominant, bringing us Sharia law along with the violence and social unrest now seen in Europe.

Illegal immigration from South of the Border

Is she right or wrong?

Corruption in the United States mainly (but not exclusively) enriches the political class. In the Latin Amerian countries my wife and I explored during our seven years of sailing in the Caribbean, we saw corruption in most countries. However, rather than being mainly at the top, it was accepted and relied upon by all levels of society. Venezuela under Chavez was the worst. The more illegal immigrants from Latin America who enter America, the more corruption we will have at all levels.

Our southern border is not a sieve; it is wide open to all who can get to it, with no significant efforts to restrict entry or to deport the many who get across illegally.

Perhaps that’s among the reasons why the U.S. Border Patrol agents’ union broke with its policy of endorsing no presidential candidate to support Donald Trump.

“We need a person in the White House who doesn’t fear the media, who doesn’t embrace political correctness, who doesn’t need the money, who is familiar with success, who won’t bow to foreign dictators, who is pro-military and values law enforcement, and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations. Donald Trump is such a man,” the union said.

Trump had scheduled a tour of the border with agents from a local chapter of the union, but that tour was canceled due to pressure from the group’s national headquarters. Yet the endorsement, which Trump’s campaign touted Wednesday, came from the national union.

The results of our open border are felt well beyond border states. In St. Louis, Missouri for example, a substantial spike in violent crime has been traced to cheap heroin and Mexican cartels. Ditto Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

“The gangs have to have a lot of customers because the heroin is so cheap,” said Gary Tuggle, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief in Philadelphia, who observed the same phenomenon while overseeing the agency’s Baltimore office. ”What we are seeing is these crews becoming more violent as they look to expand their turf.”

To attract customers, the cartels — usually through a local surrogate — instruct gangs to sell the drug at prices as low as $5 for each button (about one-tenth of a gram of powdered heroin, which could last a novice user an entire day). At times, the gangs distribute free samples, according to agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Drugs are one part of the illegal immigration problem, but far from the only part. On March 16th, an article by Victor Davis Hanson was posted at PJ Media. It was titled The Weirdness of Illegal Immigration. Hanson’s basic thesis is that illegal immigration begets disregard for the law and hence additional lawlessness.

[C]ontemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.

. . . .

An indigent Oaxacan immigrant is reminded more often by his host that his poverty is not the result of his own wild gamble to leave his home and enter illegally an entirely foreign universe, but due to the racism, nativism, and xenophobia of his clueless host—pathologies that can be ameliorated by plenty of advocates whose own careers are predicated on open borders and slow if any assimilation.

Yesterday, I saw this story of a walkout from a local high school, five miles away: Among the many racialized complaints was a strange one that that were not enough Latino school board members (that might apparently ensure interpreters at board meeting). “We feel oppressed and underrepresented. When we try to speak up, they don’t listen,” said student Monica Velazquez. “When the majority of the school board is white and male, I don’t see us being represented. And [Laton High School] is just a small piece of that problem.” In our world of victimology, being oppressed and underrepresented are quirky assertions (e.g., ethnic chauvinism mean that coveted spots must reflect ethnic percentages of the population, while ethnic disproportion in unmentionable activities is left unsaid).

Where does all this lead? I suggest we open our eyes and watch it in progress. Mass flight either out of state, or to coastal enclaves, where liberalism and abstract progressive utopianism can be indulged safety without worries over the concrete ramifications that follow from one’s own idealism. If deeds trump words, then the real racists or exclusionists are those in the mostly affluent coastal enclaves who suddenly want no part of the California that they have helped to create.

The final tragedy? If the border were to be closed, if immigration laws were enforced, if there were some reduction in legal immigration, if entry were to be meritocratic, if we reverted to the melting-pot ideal of assimilation, if we cut –studies courses and jettisoned therapy and ideology for hard science, math, and English language, in just two decades one’s particular ancestry would become irrelevant — the image of Oaxaca would be analogous to having a grandfather from Palermo or cousin from the Azores. In other words, things would work out fine.

Please read the entire article. It’s one of VDH’s best.

Sanctuary cities? An article titled Terrorism, Enclaves and Sanctuary Cities compares sanctuary cities to “no-go zones”in Europe.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

. . . .

Not unlike the “No Go Zones” of European countries, these communities in the Unites States also tend to shield foreign nationals who may be fugitives from justice both inside the United States and in other countries. Terrorists and their supporters are able to go about their daily lives- undetected by law enforcement agencies.

Implementation of sanctuary policies in such cities greatly exacerbates the threats posed to national security and public safety- turning those cities into magnets that attract still more radicals and fugitives and terrorists who need to “fly under the radar.”

Any community that provides safe haven for illegal aliens willfully endangers the lives of it residents.

Even as concerns about increased threats of terror attacks are the topic of a succession of Congressional hearings, so-called “Sanctuary Cities” continue to flourish- with the tacit approval of the administration even though they are clearly operating in violation of federal law.

Islamic immigration, legal and illegal

Europe

Much of Europe has been overrun with Islamic “immigrants” and “refugees.” In consequence, Sweden, Germany and other nations are faring poorly. It is virtually impossible to determine who they are (use of forged passports and other identity documents is rampant), where they come from or whether they are seeking refuge from violence in their home countries or ways to bring it to Europe on behalf of Allah “the all merciful.” Perhaps national suicide is a “merciful” way to go. Unfortunately, few in Europe’s political class acknowledge the nature of the predicament their constituents face.

Despite the series of horrific attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in the name of their religion, Europe is not taking the appropriate steps to suppress the phenomenon. Very few mosques in which clerics preach for war against the infidels have been closed down; public order has not been restored to the lawless suburbs in large cities; there is no real oversight of textbooks used in Muslim schools and mosques; very few radical imams have been deported; no significant countermeasures have been taken against Muslims expressing extremist views; and the burka ban has not been implemented.

These are just several of the signs pointing to Europe’s lack of comprehension that some of the Muslims living among them want the continent to fall under Muslim sovereignty, whether by way of the Islamic State approach of violent jihad or by the Muslim Brotherhood approach of population growth and Islamic preaching.

There are many excuses: Misconceptions that violent Muslims are that way simply because they are poor and unloved, a misperceived need to expand the workforce by importing those unwilling and/or unable to participate in that workforce are parts of the problem. So is Europe’s “original sin” of colonialism, for which all of Europe must atone. Another is a fear that if they are not appeased Muslims will become more violent.

Rooting out militant Islam will require taking police action in Muslim-controlled areas. We have already seen the humiliating footage of police officers fleeing under a hail of rocks and Molotov cocktails, hurled at them by crowds of incensed Muslims. Another contributing factor is the dependency of political leaders, primarily from the Left, on the Muslim vote (French President Francois Hollande owes his election victory to the Muslims).

Turkish Muslims living in Germany are on the move. Are they “refugees” (from where) or economic “immigrants” just seeking a better life?

Turkish Muslims living in Germany threaten Germany Shouting “With Allah’s (and Merkel’s?) help, we shall conquer you,” Turkish Muslims take to the streets of Germany, carrying Turkish flags and using the ‘Grey Wolves’ salute, the Turkish equivalent of a National Socialist (NAZI) salute. Just think, Angela Merkel has just signed an agreement to allow Turkish Muslims into Germany without having to get a visa.

Don’t they seem grateful for their new opportunities to prosper? Oh well. Swedish women and girls gotta “love” them, like it or not.

Some “ordinary” Europeans are getting fed with up mass immigration and support anti-immigrant politicians. The left objects.

“You are not the people, you are the past,” was the message to German critics of mass immigration on Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF’s NEO MAGAZIN ROYALE television programme.

The message was delivered in a video featuring a multi-ethnic crowd of disabled, gay and transgender people, as well as a Muslim woman wearing a face veil and a man wearing traditional Saudi headgear, all telling a crowd of Germans that they are “not Germany”.

The video opens with a crowd of angry-looking white Germans hitting against the windows of a bus to intimidate a frightened Arab child and his father, a policeman dragging the child out and hurling him to the ground. Led by the German comedian and television presenter’Jan Böhmermann, brightly dressed people rise from graves, forming a crowd to combat the beige-clad Germans who are wielding Donald Trump placards and signs reading “Refugees not welcome.”

Condemning the German crowd as “authoritarian nationalist dorks” and telling them “you are not the people, you are the past,” Böhmermann cautions that “true Germans are coming for you, you’d better run fast.”

Warning the beige-clad Germans that “10 million bicycle helmets are in sight” Böhmermann describes the lifestyle of “true Germans” to be one of cycling, recycling and eating kebab and muesli. In what is perhaps a jab at protests from senior members of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union against pork being “quietly removed from menus” of public canteens, Böhmermann also declares that the “true Germans” eat vegan sausages.

Obama’s America

A relatively small, but significant, number of Muslims now live in America.

In 2005, more people from Islamic countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than there had been in any other year in the previous two decades.^[13]^[14] In 2009, more than 115,000 Muslims became legal residents of the United States.^[15]

That’s just those who are legally present. Those present illegally? The powers-that-be haven’t a clue as to who they are, where they are, how they got here, where they came from or what they want. We experienced the gifts bestowed upon us by some legally present in Obama’s America during the Boston marathon as well as in Fort Hood, San Bernardino and elsewhere.

Obama has already brought in more than 76,000 “Syrian refugees.” More seem to be on the way.

President Barack Obama has been quietly pushing new plans to bring thousands of additional Syrian refugees into the country, despite the concerns of state and county officials and the outrages committed by welfare-dependent migrants in Europe.

Obama’s special assistant to the president for immigration policy, Felicia Escobar, recently announced plans to increase America’s intake of migrants, according to the Washington Examiner.

“We want to make sure that we can increase our numbers of refugees that are able to settle here,” Escobar said. “The need globally is so, so, so massive right now, given all the displacement and conflict around the world, but we also know that we have to do it in a way that’s smart.”

Federal law already allows the administration to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees a year, but many states and local county administrations have complained that once the Obama administration places refugees among them, few resources are available to deal with them.

The influx is very unpopular, according to polls. Also, nearly all immigrants from the Middle East are dependent on welfare. Some migrant and some second-generation Muslim Americans also embrace jihad.

During his March 2016 visit to a mosque, Obama praised Muslims living in America.

In rebuke to politicians like Donald Trump, Obama presented Islam as an essential part of the nation’s heritage, going back to Muslim slaves brought to the British colonies and running through Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom up to Fazlur Rahman Khan, who designed two of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. And he spoke emotionally about mail he received from Muslim American children and parents who felt persecuted and unsafe.

“We’re one American family. And when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second-class or targeted, it tears at the very fabric of our nation,” he said.

. . . .

On Wednesday he responded to critics—especially Republican contenders to replace him in the White House—who complain that he won’t label Islamic terrorism as such, saying demands to label by religion only play into extremist propaganda.

“I often hear it said that we need moral clarity in this fight. And the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, ‘These are all Islamic terrorists,’ then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently,” he said. “Let’s have some moral clarity: Groups like ISIS are desperate for legitimacy…. We must never give them that legitimacy. They’re not defending Islam. They’re not defending Muslims.”

Implicitly responding to tiresome calls for the “moderate Muslims” to speak out against terrorism, Obama said that they are speaking—but not enough people are listening. He vowed to work to amplify their voices. [Emphasis added.|

There are, in fact, Muslims who want to reform Islam; Obama pays them scant attention. Instead, He consorts with CAIR and it’s co-conspirators to keep Islam just the way it is. Here’s a video of some reform-minded Muslims. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, produced and directed it as well as others in the Honor Diaries series.

And here’s a video of some who think Islam is just fine the way it is.

As I noted here,

Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.

In Heretic, Hirsi Ali argued,

There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. We must demand that Muslim citizens abjure sharia practices and punishments that conflict with fundamental human rights and Western legal codes. Moreover, under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the seventh century. [Emphasis added.]

Yet there are Islamic enclaves in America where Sharia is practiced. According to The Clarion Project, there are at least twenty-two.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani militant group that has rebranded itself as Muslims of the Americas, says it has 22 “Islamic villages” in the U.S. Its “Islamberg” headquarters in New York is the most well-known.

The Clarion Project identified one village in Texas in 2014 and the group mentioned others, including one in Alaska during a frivolous lawsuit it filed against a prominent critic.

Fuqra’s 1994 book, Target Islam: Exposing the Malicious Conspiracy of the Zionists Against the World of Islam and Prominent Muslim Leaders,explains that its establishment of “villages” in the U.S. since 1980 is part of a jihad against a Satanic-Jewish-Communist conspiracy that puppeteers the U.S. government.

They have a cultish devotion to their extremist leader in Pakistan, Sheikh Gilani, who they believe is in constant contact with Allah and the Prophet Mohammed and a miracle worker chosen by Allah to lead Islam to victory.

. . . .

“The Jammatul Fuqra has been able to establish justice according to Islamic Law, not only in the United States, but wherever Muslims are living under un-Islamic laws. According to the Holy Q’uran, a Muslim is not allowed to follow laws other than the law of the Holy Qu’ran…This so-called ‘freedom’ is actually enslavement by the kufaar [non-Muslims] and Shaitan [Satan]…”

It continues:

“On these sites where Islamic Law is enforced as much as possible, anyone who commits a crime against the Law of Allah is punished according to Ta’azerat….Here you see one person receiving twenty lashes in one [Sharia] court in South America. He was found guilty of violating the honor of a Muslim lady, a crime for which he received a hard punishment with patience and faith.”

The article says that the hudud punishments, such as execution and severing of hands and feet, cannot be enforced in kuffar (infidel) lands like the U.S. Notice that this isn’t a stand against sharia‘s brutal hudud punishments; just that they aren’t implementable at this time.

With freedoms of speech and religion lacking in Islamic countries, America could become the birthplace of Islamic reform. With Obama in office? Not a chance.

Conclusions

People from some foreign cultures have integrated and become productive American citizens. Many who have come illegally have not and live on welfare payments and other government subsidies. Since the current administration welcomes them and seeks more, we get (some) cheap labor, plentiful cheap heroin and substantial welfare costs. We also get drug gang-related violence, lawlessness metastasizing into areas beyond immigration itself and corruption.

Our Islamic “refugees” and “immigrants” bring us some similar and some different bounties, just a bit less thus far. They bring us the gift of jihad and Sharia law while enjoying welfare-based lives and complaining that anyone who complains is racist and “Islamophobic.”

There is little that any of us, individually, can do to halt or even slow the Haspanification and Islamification of America. We need to vote for leaders who will undertake — seriously and not merely with pleasing slogans — the legislative and legitimate executive steps needed for that purpose.

Categories: 2016 elections, Corruption, Donald Trump, Europe, Freedom of speech, Human rights, Illegal immigration, Islam and honor, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Obama and Islam, Obama's America
Tags: Corruption, Donald Trump, Europe, freedom of speech, human rights, Illegal immigration, Islam and honor, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Obama and Islam, Obama's America

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