That’s a big topic, as Minnesota’s same-day registration scheme is notoriously subject to–in fact, invites–abuse. But a group called Minnesota Voters Alliance has brought to light another problem: substantial numbers of felons, among others, are illegally being allowed to vote, because Minnesota’s Secretary of State refuses to follow the law. Yesterday, lawsuits were commenced by three election judges:
Minnesota Secretary of State and county election managers are being sued by election judges who claim the 2016 Minnesota Election Judge Guide requires them to violate state election laws.
The lawsuits were filed today in Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis Counties by three election judges who are requesting an injunction relieving them from having to provide ballots to people who are listed as felons, people under guardianship and noncitizens.
***
State law establishes a detailed procedure to match felons, people under guardianship and noncitizens against the list of people who have registered to vote in the statewide voter registration system. In the case of a match, county auditors are required to change the voter status of any registered voters who are determined to be felons, under guardianship or noncitizens.
But according to instructions from the Secretary of State, election officials must allow felons, people under guardianship and noncitizens who are identified as such on the poll roster to vote anyway, so long as they take an oath claiming they are eligible to vote.
This is sheer lawlessness on the part of Governor Mark Dayton’s administration, and it is just one of a number of ways in which laws intended to promote ballot security are being violated or circumvented so that felons (who overwhelmingly vote Democratic), illegal aliens and others can cast ballots.
Voter fraud in Minnesota has already done great harm to the nation as a whole. Al Franken cast the decisive 60th vote for Obamacare after he took office in 2009, following a disputed election in which he defeated Republican Norm Coleman by 312 votes. It is almost certain that voter fraud provided Franken’s margin of victory–not fraud in absentee ballots, which were the subject of an extended recount, but fraud committed on election day when felons, non-citizens, and persons who had already voted elsewhere were allowed to cast ballots. We are living with the consequences today, as Obamacare unravels.
A Muslim stabbed ten non-Muslims in a Minnesota mall, and you know what that means as far as the mainstream media is concerned: Muslims are victims. Hamas-linked CAIR has been quick to claim victim status, whining about an anti-Muslim “backlash” that seldom, if ever, materializes after Islamic jihad attacks. And Minnesota’s governor is calling for “religious and racial tolerance,” which is always demanded of the victims and targets of jihad, never of its perpetrators.
And so we come to a particularly egregious example of this victimhood posturing from the Associated Press: “Minnesota Somalis recount racial tensions after mall attack.” We’re told that “the aftermath of Saturday’s attack at Crossroads Center Mall in St. Cloud also is testing longstanding efforts to improve strained relations between thousands of Somalis and other residents in the city. Several Somalis said they saw pickups driving through predominantly Somali neighborhoods the night after the attack, waving confederate flags and honking.”
Really? Did anyone report seeing these strange Confederate pickup trucks besides these “several” unnamed Somalis? Is Minnesota, the home of Keith Ellison and Al Franken, really full of racist, redneck, pickup-driving yahoos? Isn’t it a marvelous coincidence that these perfect central-casting racists just happen to confirm mainstream media myths about how opposition to jihad terror and the Muslim migrant inundation is nothing more or less than racism?
This kind of thing happens quite frequently. The New York Daily News reported that “a woman who told cops she was called a terrorist and slashed on her cheek in lower Manhattan on Thursday later admitted she made up the story, police said early Friday. The woman, who wore a headscarf, told authorities a blade-wielding wacko sliced open her face as she left a Manhattan cosmetology school, police sources said.”
And recently in Britain, the murder of a popular imam was spread far and wide as another “Islamophobic hate crime” – until his killer also was found to be a Muslim. The Mirror reported that the imam “was targeted because he had made efforts to turn youngsters away from radical Islam.”
According to The Detroit News, a Muslim woman, Saida Chatti, was “charged with making a false police report after she allegedly fabricated a plot to blow up Dearborn Fordson High School to retaliate against the November terrorist attacks in Paris….Police say Chatti called Dearborn investigators Nov. 19, six days after Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris.”
And similarly in Britain, a Muslim woman was “fined for lying to police about being attacked for wearing a hijab. The 18-year-old student, known only as Miss Choudhury, said she was violently shoved from behind and punched in the face by a man in Birmingham city centre 10 days after the atrocities in the French capital on November 13.”
And so now Somali Muslims are living in fear of Minnesota Confederates? Pull my other leg. Meanwhile, AP isn’t finished with its tall tales. It says: “It’s still unclear what led 20-year-old Dahir Adan to stab several people with what appeared to be a kitchen knife before he was confronted and killed by an off-duty police officer.” No, it isn’t. According to an initial report, as he stabbed people, Adan was making “references to Allah,” and he asked at least one of his potential victims whether or not he was Muslim — which recalled jihad attacks in Kenya, Somalia, Mali, and Bangladesh where victims were quizzed about religion and Muslims were set free.
In any case, AP wants you to know that Muslims in Minnesota are afraid. It wants you to stop being a racist, bigoted Islamophobe who dares to get angry about jihad stabbings.
Meanwhile, what about the non-Muslims who are living in fear after Adan’s attack, and the New York and New Jersey jihad bombs, and Fort Hood and Boston and Garland and Chattanooga and Paris and Brussels and San Bernardino and Orlando and Nice and all the rest? They aren’t worthy of write-ups from the Associated Press.
The Obama administration gave Somali Muslims behind-the-scenes tours at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport — the nation’s 17th busiest in terms of passenger traffic — after the group “complained to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson about feeling harassed and profiled.” Johnson has been consistently failing in his department, which is a key part of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts; and engages our worst enemies in a well-practiced strategy of stealth jihadists of a victimology subterfuge.
“The special security tours not offered to any other group” followed round-table dialogue meetings with local Somali leaders to get their feedback for “modifications to practices that would allow for operations to be more culturally sensitive.”
Culturally sensitive? At the expense of public safety? Here’s a little background about the Somalian community in Minnesota:
“The FBI and Congress have launched probes into the radicalization of the Somali American community in Minnesota. Al Shabaab recruits young men in local mosques and ships them off to train and fight in Somalia. Last fall the area’s largest newspaper published a story confirming that Minnesota leads the nation in the number of people who have left or sought to leave the country to fight with terrorists aligned with ISIL or ISIS.”
The round-table events and airport tours were organized by Abdirizak Farah, whose salary jumped from $89,033 to $130,453 in five years.
“DHS Gives Somali Muslims Special Airport Security Tours after Harassment, Profiling Complaints”, Judicial Watch, August 2, 2016:
The Obama administration gave Somali Muslims behind-the-scenes tours at a major U.S. airport after the group complained to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson about feeling harassed and profiled, government records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal. The special security tours not offered to any other group occurred at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) roundtable meetings with local Somali leaders to obtain feedback for “modifications to practices that would allow for operations to be more culturally sensitive.”
On at least two occasions—December 18, 2014 and February 18, 2015—federal authorities granted the unprecedented excursions of the facility’s sterile and secure areas, according to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) records obtained by Judicial Watch. The DHS agency that conducted the expeditions, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), provided the Muslim participants with “an in-depth, on-site tour and discussion of CBP’s airport, including both inbound and outbound passenger processing,” the TSA files state. Besides multiple roundtable meetings between CBP and Somali community leaders including imams, the records show that a luncheon and “cultural exchange and educational brief” also took place between December 2014 and February 2015 so that attendees could ask about the agency’s “specific practices” at the airport.
The roundtable events and airport tours were organized by Abdirizak Farah, who is identified in the records as a policy advisor in the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). Farah joined DHS in 2010 with an annual salary of $89,033 and by 2015 his yearly pay increased to $130,453, according to a government database. The TSA’s “Somali liaison officer” in Minneapolis, Andrew Rhoades, told Judicial Watch that the special airport tours were organized for Somali Muslims after they complained to Johnson that they felt “harassed and profiled” by CBP at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. The DHS secretary had “a sympathetic ear to that,” Rhoades said, adding that no other group has been granted such airport access by DHS. “Now, I will say we’ve never done that, or we don’t do that, to let’s say the Hmong community living here in Minneapolis, uh, the Christian community, the Catholic community, the Irish… whatever you want to call it. This has been the only one,” Rhoades said.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is the nation’s 17th busiest in terms of passenger traffic, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It gets more than 35 million passengers annually and nearly 200,000 metric tons of freight. The region has a large Somali Muslim community and Somalia is a terrorist nation that’s largely controlled by the extremist group Al Shabaab. In June three Somali-American pals from Minneapolis were convicted by a federal jury of conspiring to commit murder in Syria on behalf of the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to provide material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization. Six of their buddies pleaded guilty and one was charged in absentia, presumed dead in Syria. Back in 2013 a mainstream news outlet reported that the Al Qaeda affiliate that terrorized a Kenyan shopping center and murdered scores of innocent people included Somalis from Minnesota. Among them was 22-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Isse of St. Paul and 24-year-old Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid of Minneapolis.
The FBI and Congress have launched probes into the radicalization of the Somali American community in Minnesota. Al Shabaab recruits young men in local mosques and ships them off to train and fight in Somalia. Last fall the area’s largest newspaper published a story confirming that Minnesota leads the nation in the number of people who have left or sought to leave the country to fight with terrorists aligned with ISIL or ISIS….
This is the third mosque post this week (see here and here). The theme is the same. Muslims bamboozle (i.e., lie to – taqiyya), or collude with, city councils to gain special privileges for mosques, then wreak havoc. We’ve been referring to it for years as the “Zoning Jihad” and have a growing category of examples (see here). A growing trend is converting churches to mosques. In the case below a Lutheran high school became a mega-mosque complex.
A radical mosque known for breeding terrorists has been granted special privileges by the city of Bloomington, Minnesota, which allows its members to take over a public park and treat it as their own, to the exclusion of other residents, according to complaints filed by a citizens group.
The Friends of Smith Park started a petition drive and took its case to the Bloomington City Council with a formal complaint Monday night.
At issue is the Dar al-Farooq mosque, which WND has previously reported has a record of turning Somali refugees into jihadists for ISIS and other terror groups.
At least half a dozen known Somali terrorists have attended Dar al-Farooq in recent years including Adnan Farah, 20, and his brother Mohamed, 22, who pleaded guilty in April to providing material support to ISIS. The mosque is headed by Waleed Idris al-Meneesey, who preaches hatred of Jews straight from the Quran and the hadiths.
Now it has come to light that city officials in Bloomington have given al-Meneesy and his Sharia-compliant followers special privileges that violate its conditional-use permit, or CUP, and that are not offered to any other religious group, said attorney and retired Lt. Col. Larry Frost. By doing so, Frost said the city has exposed itself to potential lawsuits from churches and synagogues in the area that have not been afforded the same rights.
“According to your police officers, you’ve privileged Dal al-Farooq worshipers above all other religions. You’ve made Smith Park a Dar al-Farooq-only zone after the park is already closed, excluding citizens of all other faiths and those of no faith,” said Frost, who represents Friends of Smith Park.
The council members sat mum during Frost’s comments.
The list of abuses and alleged violations by Dar al Farooq, which was allowed to build in a residential area, is long. They range from dumping asbestos in the trash to having three to five times the occupancy allowed by its conditional-use permit, making excess noise, shining car lights and producing overflow parking at all hours of the night during the month of Ramadan – and to a lesser extent every weekend. The mosque members take over the adjacent public park and force out residents of nearby neighborhoods, often staying in the park well after the posted closing time of 11 p.m.
Neighbors have been told by mosque workers to get out of Smith Park “because the park belongs to [the Muslims],” said one local woman.
Another local resident, Matilda Zumba, who lives in a neighborhood near the mosque, approached the city council Monday night with an interpreter. She said she has two small children who are always playing outside.
“I’m very afraid because there is a lot of traffic and a lot of speeding and the people of Dar al-Farooq don’t respect our speed limits and the safety of our children,” Zumba told the council. “I’m also now afraid to take our children to the park because there are many people there who do not respect the rights of our own children to play there.
“A lot of times the other children don’t want to work together to share with our children. Sometimes their parents are there and they may shout at them but they don’t do anything, they just continue to let their children interfere. The park is very important to the Spanish community especially and we met there a lot, but now we don’t because we don’t feel safe.”
Mosque attendees have flooded the neighborhood with offsite parking, blocked driveways and walked through neighbors’ yards without permission. The city has told neighbors if they park in joint-use parking, the neighbors have to “hurry to the sidewalk” and get out of the parking lot so it would be available for the mosque.
Last week one supporter of the neighborhood group witnessed mosque abusers using joint-parking areas to practice driving at 1:30 a.m. – by using city garbage cans as obstacles. When the witness came to film the event, three young mosque members confronted him, one demanding to know what he was doing and telling him he could not film the offending car or its license. Later, a police officer told the witness that “only mosque members can use the parking lots after normal park hours” – in other words, the public space is reserved for use by one particular religion after it’s closed to the public.
The city took more than three years and 67 drafts to complete the conditional-use permit with the mosque. Built into that contract is a requirement that the city use a laborious five-phase, six-month enforcement process to correct any Dar al-Farooq violations.
“Clearly that’s a non-enforcement clause,” Frost said. “The city has to give this amazing provision to every new church applicant, and I would argue, every current CUP holder can demand the same. Why? Because you are privileging Dar al-Farooq above other religions.
“One of your own council members said ‘I feel like we’re punishing applicants that came after Dar al Farook,’ because you required them to do things that Dar al-Farooq is not required to do.”
The city council granted a conditional-use permit to Dar al Farooq enabling the mosque to operate in a residential neighborhood, then failed to enforce either the CUP or the joint-use agreement allowing the mosque to use Smith Park.
As a result, the neighbors of Smith Park have been reduced to second-class status, unable to use and enjoy a public park adjacent to their neighborhood.
Mosque actions violating the CUP and JUA were not stopped because the city attorney insisted that the federal Religious Land-use and Incarcerated Persons Act, commonly called RLUIPA, did not allow the city to enforce the CUP/JUA, effectively making the neighborhood around Dar al Farooq a zoning-free area. The city attorney also told council members that enforcement of the CUP could result in lawsuits against council members in their private capacities. Both legal ideas are flatly false, said Frost.
“Your own city attorney, former attorney, told you that you had to do that, but you made a grave legal and moral error when you signed a CUP and then didn’t enforce it, because that’s not what RLUPA says,” Frost told the council on Monday night.
RLUIPA is a federal statute that requires local governments to issue permits for houses of worship equally when it comes to construction projects.
“But once you have the CUP you’re no longer in the permitting phase – it is not a legal permitting issue,” Frost said. “Despite what your previous city attorney said, you can enforce the CUP and you must.”
Friends of Smith Park are asking only that all city council resolutions concerning Dar al Farooq be enforced, including retroactive enforcement where legal and appropriate – exactly as would be the case for all other religious institutions with a conditional-use permit.
We are all painfully familiar with the journalistic genre portraying the suffering of favored groups. That would be groups favored by the journalists. The satirical headline that captures the genre gives us the New York Times’s take on the apocalypse: “World ends, women & minorities hardest hit.”
Credit is due to someone for the shaft of light cast by that parody headline. NewsBusters credits comedian Mort Sahl, still going strong at age 89. I saw Sahl perform many times including once in June 1968 at the hungry i in San Francisco just before it closed. I loved him; it sounds like something he would say.
Minnesota’s Somali community has given rise to a subgenre of the form that has become a Tines specialty. With respect to the terrorism trial that just concluded with a raft of guilty verdicts against three “Minnesota men” charged with seeking to join ISIS, the Los Angeles Times’s Matt Pearce parachuted in for a few days on the Prince beat at the opening of the trial and promptly delivered “I was just another reporter sent to cover radicalization in Minneapolis. Then 2 local Somalis took me on a tour.”
The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner visited the trial for the first week (which included just three days of testimony). Hauslohner contributed to the subgenre in “Terror dragnet sweeps up Somali-American’s sons: ‘Now everything is broken.’” Hauslohner’s article should be an embarrassment to the Post. It is pathetic. (Has Hauslohner broken it to Post readers that the son on trial was found guilty? I don’t think so.)
With their “Somalis hardest hit” stories, Pearce and Hauslohner got a jump on the Star Tribune this time around. On Friday as the jury deliberated the Star Tribune published “ISIL case triggers fear in a community.” Not in the community that is hated by the terrorist wannabes, of course, but rather in the community that decries the efforts of law enforcement to protect us from them.
I don’t think any New York Times reporter was around for even a single day of the trial. Healy and Furber would therefore have missed the scene of Judge Davis throwing community organizer Burhan Mohumed out of the courthouse for multiple violations of the protocol he enforced during the trial. Healy and Furber work a bit of the subgenre into their article on the verdicts by inserting a quote from Mohumed:
The verdict was not much of a surprise to Burhan Mohumed, 26, a friend of the defendants who had been banned from the courthouse by the judge. He called the process “purely political.”
“I left a little hope that they wouldn’t be convicted on a conspiracy to murder charge,” he said. “I didn’t think they had enough evidence to convict them on that. I think that was an overreach.”
Now this is almost funny. Having been expelled from the courthouse for a key part of the trial, Mohumed missed a lot of the evidence. He is a friend of the terrorist wannabes. He lacks any obvious qualification to opine on the the sufficiency of the evidence to support the guilty verdicts against his friends, yet the Times finds his comment worthy of a platform in the newspaper of record.
Here is a thought foreign to the subgenre under discussion. The evidence at trial and the articles above show that Minnesota has proved a welcoming host to a huge immigrant community with ambivalent feelings at best about those of us who have generously supported it with our tax dollars. How about going to one of us for a quote about our feelings?
Well, I went to the trial yesterday and a fight broke out. Waiting in the hallway to enter the courtroom at the appointed hour, The hallway was thick with those of us waiting to be admitted to the courtroom. I stood directly behind a young Somali lady wearing a hijab. As she started pushing and shoving, she repeatedly dropped the F-bomb at maximum volume within shouting distance of the jury. And here I thought I’d seen it all.
The fight, as it turns out, was between the mother of Abdirizak Warsame and her daughter, Warsame’s sister. As Warsame was about to resume testifying against the three defendants under a cooperation agreement with the prosecution, daughter took went after mother. The conflict represented their divided loyalties in the case. The Star Tribune’s Stephen Montemayor picks up on the trial’s undercard here. Warsame’s sister put up a better fight in the hall than Warsame did on the stand.
Warsame was the third and weakest of three key witnesses called by the government. He completed his testimony yesterday. The government seems to me to be ending its case on a low note. That’s generally not how you’re supposed to do it.
Without going into details, it seemed to me that defense counsel Bruce Nestor turned Warsame to use on behalf of his client, Abdirahman Daud. I may be missing something, but I’m not sure whether, on balance, Warsame was more helpful to the government or to the defense.
Warsame made me reflect on my understanding of the case against the “Minnesota men.” In a sense, they are products of the vacuous America of 2016. They have been Americanized in that sense. These young men had boundless opportunities of a conventional sort before them, yet they chose to squander them. They are talented and resourceful, yet they represent a great threat. They are seriously misguided young men. What happened?
Warsame is a graduate of the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy in Inver Grove Heights. With a little help from the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the school has now been shuttered. I wore out a keyboard writing about the school before it closed. For years the school operated, illegally in my opinion, as a publicly funded Islamic charter school.
From TIZA Warsame proceeded to Heritage Academy, a mostly Somali high school in Minneapolis. This year the Minneapolis school district moved to retake control of Heritage from its board.
After high school Warsame attended a local community college and worked for several employers. Indeed, he worked for two on the tarmac at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport while he was pursuing his interest in ISIS.
Islam filled the life of Warsame and his friends. It filled the vacuum now served up by American culture to immigrants. The “Minnesota men” could have succumbed to drugs or alcohol in a pattern that has devastated the lives of so many American families. In this case, however, they fell prey to Islam. It was Islam that intoxicated them.
Judge Davis himself took up this point with Warsame yesterday. “You understood that if you committed jihad you would die,” the judge said. “What attracted you to that?”
“The reward you would get and the fact that this life is temporary,” Warsame said. “If you were to go sacrifice yourself and go fight in jihad, the reward would be bigger. You’d save your family and save yourself.”
In addition to the Twin Cities, Somali Muslim immigrants to Minnesota have settled in rural areas such as St. Cloud, Mankato and Willmar. Concern about the continuing waves of immigration from Somalia in particular is not confined to the Twin Cities. Thus Matt McKinney’s Star Tribune contribution to stifling discussion of the related issues in “Anti-Muslim speaking circuit runs through rural Minnesota.”
McKinney’s piece is pitiful. It presents all related concerns as manifestations of “Islamophobia.” It calls on Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, to render his opinion as an impartial expert. McKinney quotes Hussein: “A lot of these fears are coming from that type of general fear of the ‘other,’ and not real knowledge of Islam.”
I would say “a lot of these fears are coming from” Somali Minnesotans’ support for foreign terrorist organizations waging jihad. The support is manifested in the charges brought against the “Minnesota men” seeking to join ISIS in 2014 and 2015. Somali community sentiment is itself apparently supportive of the “Minnesota men” if not the cause. Rather than investigate the possibly rational causes of the “fears,” McKinney simply presents the concerns as evidence of bigotry.
McKinney revisits the Dorsey & Whitney conference on “Islamophobia” in Minnesota last week. He recites that those in attendance included former Vice President Walter Mondale and members of the legal community, including U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger. McKinney quotes Luger in classic form, saying that, left unchecked, “Islamaphobia is going to destroy the social fabric of the state.” Shut up, he explained.
McKinney does not know that CAIR itself is part of the problem. CAIR, however, is an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network, and it aims to silence critics of Islamic supremacism via useful idiots such as McKinney. Andrew McCarthy devoted a particularly useful chapter of The Grand Jihad to CAIR. NR has posted an adapted excerpt of it here.
The Muslim Brotherhood — they’re Islamic, right? Hamas — Islamic, right? It’s a shame McKinney didn’t even try to get a straight answer from the local CAIR leader. He might have learned somethings from the exercise.
(But, but only an Islamophobe would object to this. –DM)
The Minneapolis-based Islamic University of Minnesota (IUM) has an extremism problem.
It is run by a man who used a recent sermon to invoke a Hadith commonly espoused by Muslim terrorists to kill Jews for causing “corruption in the land.” Waleed Idris al-Meneesey also has written that Muslims should place sharia law above “man-made” law.
During a November sermon, al-Meneesy referred to the Hadith, a saying from Islam’s prophet Muhammad, describing how Jews had been punished by God repeatedly for “corruption.”
“When the Children of Israel returned to cause corruption in the time of our Prophet Muhammad,” al-Meneesy said in a translation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “and they disbelieved him, God destroyed him at his hand. In any case, God Almighty has promised them destruction whenever they cause corruption.”
History will repeat itself, he said.
“The Prophet related that in the Last Days his Umma [people] would fight the Jews, the Muslims East of the Jordan River, and they [the Jews] west of [the Jordan River] … Even trees and stones will say: O Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, kill him, except for Gharqad trees, the trees of the Jews. Because of this they plant many of them…”
Jerusalem “remained in the hands of the Muslims until it fell into the hands of the Jews in 1387 AH [1967 AD], and has been a prisoner in their hands for 34 years [sic], but the victory of God is coming inevitably.”
Al-Meneesy, the IUM’s president and chancellor, also serves as an imam at a Bloomington, Minn. mosque where at least five young men left the United States to fight with terrorist groups al-Shabaab and ISIS.
IUM opened in 2007, claiming 160 students registered for classes, which cost $150 each. Current enrollment figures could not be found. IUM’s website describes programs ranging from two year associates degrees to full doctorates. A bachelor’s program helps students “acquire all essential Islamic knowledge.” The Ph.D. program costs $3,000, including thesis review, and is structured “along the lines of Universities in the Middle East and Africa.”
The university’s website cites recognition by Holy Quran University in the Sudan,founded in 1990 by the regime of Sudanese war criminal and President Omar al-Bashir. Holy Quran University’s leaders signed a 2002 declaration saying it was forbidden for Muslims to buy American and Israeli goods.
IUM also professes to serve as the official representative of Sunni Islam’s most important institution – Al-Azhar University, which has grown increasingly radical – in the U.S. and Canada. Al-Azhar officials have refused to condemn the Islamic State (ISIS) as apostates and heretics. According to Egypt’s Youm 7, IUM’s curriculum, offered to American students, endorses many practices used by ISIS. These include: “[K]illing a Muslim who does not pray, one who leaves Islam, prisoners and infidels within Islam [those who do not have a clearly specified creed or sect]. [It also allows] gouging their eyes and chopping off their hands and feet, as well as banning the construction of churches and discriminating between Muslims and Ahl al-Kitab [Christians and Jews], and insulting them at times.”
Al-Meneesy’s extremism goes further back than his anti-Semitic sermon. In 2007, he authored a paper for the Assembly of Muslim Jurists Association of America (AMJA), where he sits on the fatwa committee. Muslims should refrain from participating in non-Islamic courts that do not follow Islamic shariah law, particularly those in the West guided by “man-made” law, al-Meneesey wrote.
“The authority to legislate rests with Allah alone,” al-Meneesey wrote.
Anyone who uses law other than shariah, such as civil law, is a “corrupt tyrant,” the paper said. Judging by something other than shariah equals disbelief in Allah, injustice and sinfulness, he wrote.
Muslims should be forbidden from serving as judges in non-Muslim countries, except if they are able to rule “according to the judgments of Allah,” al-Meneesey wrote. Muslims who adhere to secular law and refuse to follow the shariah are infidels. Classical interpretations of the shariah say that apostates should be killed.
In 2008, the AMJA issued a declaration telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement “in countries which do not rule by Allah’s dictates.” That includes the FBI. The declaration invoked many of the same arguments as al-Meneesey’s 2007 paper.
It does not appear that al-Meneesy has addressed these cases publicly.
His radical views are not aberrations at IUM.
Instructor Sheikh Jamel Ben Ameur refused to denounce ISIS in the fall of 2014 amid stories about its brutality because news reports were “confusing” and “complicated,” the website MinnPostreported.
“We don’t need to accuse people of something we don’t know about. We don’t have to jump into judgment,” Ben Ameur told about 100 congregants at his Masjid al-Tawba in Eden Prairie, Minn.
Ben Ameur disputed the authenticity of the ISIS propaganda videos showing the beheadings of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, suggesting he didn’t know whether ISIS was responsible or not.
Another IUM instructor, Hasan Ali Mohamud, offered condolences after Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004.
Writing under the name Sheikh Xasan Jaamici on the Minneapolis Somali community news website SomaliTalk, Mohamud said that Yassin had achieved martyrdom and that the “Hamas mujahideen” were fighting for the liberation of the Al-Aqsa mosque from Israeli control. His Facebook page suggests that Jaamici is his middle name.
Jews will face Muhammad’s wrath. Muslims who adhere to civil law over Islamic sharia are infidels. These are ideas supported by Waleed Idris al-Meneesey, who is responsible for a “university” teaching Muslims about their faith. Where will Islamic University of Minnesota students get a more modern and accepting education?
Minnesota’s Somali community presents a stark challenge to Americans concerned about terrorism. The community is Muslim, large, and protected by an extreme form of ideological conformity that runs from the governor down and permeates the media. In this month’s story on the indicted ISIS wannabe and local ringleader, reporters Dan Browning and Mary Lynn Smith add this editorial observation:
Minnesota is believed to have produced more would-be foreign fighters than any other state, but it also has a Muslim community that’s exceptionally engaged with efforts to counter extremism. Word that another Twin Cities Somali-American was being charged spread quickly Wednesday night in Minneapolis.
“This is deju vu all over again,” said community leader Sadik Warfa. “The safety of this country is a concern for all of us. … We’re hoping this case is the last, and we can all move forward where these kind of things don’t happen.”
But Warfa said he wants to know why Warsame is being charged now: “Did the government get new evidence?”
So far as I can tell, Warfa’s support for law enforcement is invisible. Warfa’s comments to the Star Tribune certainly express no such support, though reporters Browning and Smith seem not to notice. Maybe they need another reporter or two to lend a hand.
“This sort of thing takes our eyes off the big picture,” said Warfa. “The big picture is really that first of all the 1.7 billion people of Islam cannot be on trial on the actions of a few and we feel like our community, we have been sometimes, really, there is a lot of fear-mongering going on and a lot of, I think, that is backlash we would always be very concerned.”
On a day when GOP candidate Donald Trump called for banning all Muslim immigrants, Warfa praised President Barak Obama’s speech to the nation Sunday night.
“We, as Muslim-American community, are very proud of our President last night,” said Warfa. “The speech he gave to American people when he addressed, because he spoke and said what needed to be said and that is, first of all, we do not want to divide us as Americans. We do not want our neighbors to have suspicion on their fellow Muslim-Americans. I think that is what the terrorists want. They want to divide us.”
Warfa insisted that the real issue is gun violence and the availability of assault weapons.
And here Warfa serves as translator for the mother of one of the indicted ISIS wannabes charged in Minnesota this past April. She protests that he is innocent: “He has not committed any crime,” she said through Warfa. “Why does he have to take a [plea] deal?” She also protests the conditions of his confinement as unduly harsh:
Fadumo Hussein’s son, 20-year-old Guled Omar, is being held in the Ramsey County Jail.
The five co-defendants are scheduled to stand trial on terror charges in February.
Hussein says this is especially difficult for her family because of the loss of Guled’s older brother, Ahmed Ali Omar.
Ahmed Ali Omar has been a fugitive since 2009 and has been charged with fighting for al-Shabaab in Somalia.
Hussein is a single mother of 13 children. Through translator Sadik Warfa, she spoke out Monday against what she says is the harsh treatment of Guled in the Ramsey County Jail.
“He is suffering greatly at this moment,” she said through the interpreter.
Guled Omar’s attorney has written two letters to federal Judge Michael Davis, complaining that his client is the only one of the five defendants being held in solitary confinement and “is not allowed access to television or reading materials.”
“The only thing she can assume is that they are putting him under pressure so he can take the plea deal,” Warfa said.
What a family. The mother is at best a tool. The older brother is absent, probably fighting the jihad with al Shabaab in Somalia. The younger brother sought to augment the ranks of ISIS in Syria with fellow “Minnesotans” and join in himself. And mom has 11 more at home. But we are to suppress rude thoughts and stifle critical comments lest we be found guilty of “Islamophobia” and invited by the governor to move to another state.
While the Somali community’s support for law enforcement is questionable at best, its support for community members charged with supporting terrorist organizations is highly visible. Yet the Star Tribune goes out of its way in a news story on this month’s charges against the former airport employee who recruited here for ISIS to state as a fact that “Muslim community that’s exceptionally engaged with efforts to counter extremism.”
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