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Posted tagged ‘Obama and Islam’
Cartoons of the Day
June 23, 2016Dr. Jasser takes part in a Hannity special report Jihad In America 06.17.2016
June 20, 2016Dr. Jasser takes part in a Hannity special report Jihad In America 06.17.2016 via YouTube, June 20, 2016
The blurb beneath the video states,
Dr. Jasser takes part in a Hannity special report Jihad in America discussing the recent Orlando massacre, Islamism, the Middle East and Muslim policies of both President Obama and the GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump as well as the importance of properly identifying the issue within Islam that cultivates some followers to become radicalized.
Visit the American Islamic Forum for Democracy at http://www.AIFDemocracy.org
Join the conversation on Twitter @AIFDemocracy @DrZuhdiJasser
Obama and the Moderate Muslims
June 17, 2016Obama and the Moderate Muslims, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, June 17, 2016
On Wednesday Goldberg wrote that in Obama’s view, discussing radical Islam is counterproductive because it harms the moderates who need to stand up to the radicals.
How can enforcing ignorance of a problem help you to solve it? How does refusing to call out the Islamic extremists that Islamic moderates like the Green revolutionaries and Sisi risk their lives to fight weaken them? How does empowering jihad apologists from CAIR and MPAC help moderate, anti-jihad American Muslims who currently have no voice in Obama’s White House?
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Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
As far as the White House is concerned, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s top reporter, is President Barack Obama’s unofficial mouthpiece.
This was one of the many things we learned from The New York Times in David Samuels’s profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.
In the course of explaining how Rhodes was able to sell Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that it cleared Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal while giving the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism more than a hundred billion dollars, Samuels reported that “handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic… helped retail the administration’s narrative.”
Given his White House-assigned role, Goldberg’s explanation of Obama’s refusal to discuss radical Islam is worthwhile reading. It reflects what Obama wants the public to believe about his position.
On Wednesday Goldberg wrote that in Obama’s view, discussing radical Islam is counterproductive because it harms the moderates who need to stand up to the radicals.
“Obama,” he wrote, “believes that [a] clash is taking place [not between Western and Muslim civilization but] within a single civilization, and that Americans are sometimes collateral damage in this fight between Muslim modernizers and Muslim fundamentalists.”
Pointing out that there are Muslim fundamentalists, Obama has argued to Goldberg, will only strengthen them against the modernizers.
Over the past week, prominent conservative commentators have agreed with Obama’s position.
Eli Lake from Bloomberg and Prof. John Yoo writing in National Review, among others, criticized presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for speaking openly radical Islam. Like Goldberg, they argued that Trump’s outspokenness alienates moderate Muslims.
But what moderate Muslims is Obama trying to help? Consider his treatment of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Sisi is without a doubt, the most outspoken and powerful advocate of a moderate reformation of Islam, and of Islamic rejection of jihad, alive today.
Sisi has staked his power and his life on his war to defeat the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State and jihadist Islam in general.
Sisi speaks openly about the danger of jihadist Islam. In his historic speech before the leading Sunni clerics at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University on January 1, 2015, Sisi challenged the clerics to reform Islam.
Among other things he said, “I address the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing…. It is inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic nation to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.
Impossible! “That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion,’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have held sacred over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world!…
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible! “I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move…because this Islamic nation is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands.”
Certainly since September 11, 2001, no Muslim leader has issues a clearer call for moderation in Islam than Sisi did in that speech. And he has continued to speak in the manner ever since.
No other Muslim leader of note has put everything on the line as Sisi has to defeat the forces of jihad both on the field and in the mosques.
Moreover, Sisi has put his anti-jihadist belief into action by expanding security cooperation between Egypt and Israel and by bringing the Gulf states into his undeclared alliance with the Jewish state.
He has also acted to end the demonization of Israel in the Egyptian media.
Obviously, supporting Sisi is a no-brainer for a leader who insists that his goal is to empower moderate Muslims. And yet, far from being Sisi’s greatest supporter, Obama opposes him.
Since Sisi led the Egyptian military in overthrowing the Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood regime as it was poised to transform Egypt into a jihadist terrorist state, Obama has worked to undermine him.
Obama has denied Sisi weapons critical to his fight with ISIS in Sinai. He has repeatedly and consistently chastised Sisi for human rights abuses against radical Islamists who, if permitted to return to power, would trounce the very notion of human rights while endangering the US’s key interests in Middle East.
Then there is Iran.
If Obama fears radical Islam, as Goldberg insists that he does, why did he turn his back on the Green Revolution in 2009? Why did he betray the millions of Iranians who rose up against their Islamist leaders in the hopes of installing a democratic order in Iran where women’s rights, and minority rights are respected? Why did he instead side with the radical, jihadist, terrorism-supporting, nuclear weapons-developing and -proliferating ayatollahs? And why has Obama striven to reach an accommodation with the Iranian regime despite its continued dedication to the destruction of the US? Goldberg’s claim that Obama is interested in empowering Muslim moderates in their fight against radicals doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Obama’s actual schemes for relating to – as opposed to acknowledging, fighting or defeating – the forces of jihad involve empowering those forces at the expense of the moderates who oppose them.
Yes, there are exceptions to this rule – like Obama’s belated assistance to the Kurds in Syria and Iraq. But that doesn’t mean that empowering Islamic jihadists at the expense of moderate Muslims is not Obama’s overarching strategy.
In the case of the Kurds, Obama only agreed to help them after spending years training Syrian opposition forces aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was only after nearly all of those forces cut contact with their American trainers and popped up in al-Qaida-aligned militias that Obama began actively supporting the Kurds.
Then there is his behavior toward American jihadists.
Almost every major jihadist attack on US soil since Obama took office has been carried out by US citizens. But Obama has not countered the threat they pose by embracing American Muslims who reject jihad.
To the contrary, Obama has spent the past seven- and-a-half years empowering radical Muslims and Islamic groups like the pro-Hamas terrorism apologists from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
This week The Daily Caller reported that MPAC President Salam al-Marayati, is serving as an adviser to the US Department of Homeland Security.
Marayati accused Israel of responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the US, and has called on Muslims not to cooperate with federal counter-terrorism probes. According to the report, Marayati has visited the White House 11 times since 2009.
The Daily Caller also reported that a Syrian immigrant to the US was hired to serve as a member of Obama’s task for on “violent extremism” last year.
Laila Alawa, who joined the task force the day she received US citizenship, referred to the September 11 attacks as an event that “changed the world for good.”
According to the Daily Caller, her task force called for the administration to avoid using the terms “jihad” and “Shari’a” in discussing terrorism – as if Obama needed the tip.
So far from helping Muslim moderates, Obama’s actual policy is to help radical Muslims. In stark opposition to his talking points to Goldberg, since he entered office, Obama has worked to empower radical Muslims in the US and throughout the Middle East at the expense of moderates. Indeed, it is hard to think of an anti-jihad Muslim leader in the US or in the Middle East whom Obama has supported.
The victims in Orlando, San Bernadino, Garland, Amarillo, Boston and beyond are proof that Obama’s actual policies are not making America safer. The rise of ISIS and Iran makes clear that his actual policies are making the world more dangerous.
Maybe if his actual policies were what he claims they are, things might be different today. Maybe White House support for anti-jihadist Muslims combined with a purge of all mention of jihad and related terms from the federal lexicon would be the winning policy. But on its face, it is hard to see how forbidding federal employees from discussing jihadists in relevant terms makes sense.
How can enforcing ignorance of a problem help you to solve it? How does refusing to call out the Islamic extremists that Islamic moderates like the Green revolutionaries and Sisi risk their lives to fight weaken them? How does empowering jihad apologists from CAIR and MPAC help moderate, anti-jihad American Muslims who currently have no voice in Obama’s White House? Eli Lake argued that it was by keeping mum on jihad that then-president George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus convinced Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq to join the US in fighting al-Qaida during the surge campaign in 2007-2008.
The same leaders now support ISIS.
A counter-argument to Lake’s is that Bush’s policy of playing down the jihadist doctrine of the likes of al-Qaida had nothing to do with the Sunni chieftains’ decision to side with the US forces.
Rather, they worked with the Americans first because the Americans paid them a lot of money to do so. And second, because they believed the Americans when they said that they would stay the course in Iraq.
They now side with ISIS because they don’t trust America, and would rather live under ISIS rule than under Iranian rule.
In other words, for them, the question wasn’t one of political niceties, but of financial gain and power assessments. And that remains the question that determines their actions today.
In the 15 years since September 11, first under Bush, and since 2009, to a more extreme degree under Obama, the US has refused to name the enemy that fights America with the expressed aim of destroying it.
Maybe, just maybe, this is one of the reasons that the Americans have also failed to truly help anti-jihadist – or moderate – Muslims. Maybe you can’t help one without calling out the other.
Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam
June 16, 2016Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, June 16, 2016
Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.
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It has been a while since President Barack Obama was so visibly angry on camera.
When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Obama lost his restrained cool composure for a few seconds. When discussing a few cases in which African-American men or teens were shot by police, he was also a bit enraged, noting that any of those boys could have been his son (as could of course the 6,000 or more African-American men and boys shot by other African-American men on the streets of American cities each year, who go unmentioned by the president except as a prop to support gun control).
Then came the Orlando slaughter of members of the LGBT community over the weekend, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump lost no time tying the attack to the Obama administration’s policy failures. This was simply too much for the president, whose tantrum suggested an inability to accept criticism (especially not from Trump) or admit failure.
Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.
Obama is fiercely protective of his legacy and actions, and seemingly unable to deal with being reminded about parts of his record that are nothing short of abject failures. Has Obama kept the American homeland safer than his predecessor? Has Obama’s withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan led to a more peaceful region? Has Obama contributed to the carnage in Syria, Iraq and Libya by his actions or inactions? Has Obama demonstrated weakness abroad and at home by failing even to identify that we face not just random terrorists, but killers tied to a radical strand of Islam, which has rapidly gained adherents all over the Muslim world the last half century, and whose members now control a significant number of Muslim majority countries, including our newest ally Iran? Are people really stupid enough to buy into an argument that the country will be safer and groups like Islamic State more easily defeated so long as Obama never says the words radical Islam? Is that the key recruiting tool that groups like Islamic State have been lacking so far, hence their failure to attract new holy warriors from the West or the Middle East?
Obama’s temper tantrum on Tuesday was much more about reacting to criticism of his record than Trump’s controversial call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to America. Part of the Obama attack on Trump was also of course a feature of a presidential campaign, in which Democrats now have their presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Full fire on Trump, whether or not he says something new, will be part of the daily news cycle for the next five months, highlighted by a liberal press corps worshipful and adoring of both Obama and Clinton. The press is behaving this year as if it is doing sacred work by preventing Trump from winning.
Trump’s address in New Hampshire on Monday occurred less than two days after the Orlando mass murder committed by an American-born Muslim, who shot people in the head at short range while simultaneously declaring his allegiance to Islamic State and talking to police during the siege. He was married to a Palestinian woman who helped him scout out targets and dropped him off at the club prior to the attack, but never considered alerting authorities, and who may be indicted as an accomplice for the slaughter. His father claims to be the president of Afghanistan and states that his son was angered when he saw two gay men kissing on a street in Miami. The father says his son’s actions were unnecessary, since God will deal with gays. Afghanistan, the birthplace of Mateen’s parents, is one of the many Muslim majority countries where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Among the family members, the father rates as the “moderate Muslim” — he is O.K. with dead gays, but did not personally kill them or facilitate their murder.
The facts above are all pretty well known, including that Mateen was on the FBI radar as a possible threat twice earlier. But these facts have been utterly ignored as part of the ferocious pushback from the Obama administration and the Left to explain what happened. This is a troublesome attack for the Left — a group of individuals, mostly Latino members of the LGBT community in Orlando, were gunned down by a Muslim. Muslims and gays are two core constituency groups for the Democratic Party, the party that invented identity politics and believes it can win campaigns now and in the future by stroking the various racial/religious/ethnic/nationality groups that lean their way.
The pushback has been designed as a misdirection strategy, to make this horrible attack about anything but radical Islam. The killer was gender-confused. He was a lone wolf. He was deranged. Christians hate gays too (Sally Kohn) and their rhetoric probably inspired the killer (the ACLU). All religions have violent members (Julia Ioffe). This could not have happened had there been stricter gun controls in place in Florida (everybody in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media). This was gun violence, no different than Sandy Hook or Columbine.
So far, the pushback seems to be working. Unlike the primary campaign, when Trump seemed to have the airwaves to himself (good for audience size and advertising rates), now his critics are getting plenty of time and exposure to blast him, with favorable comments by major media personalities always preceding or following the political attacks on him by Obama or Clinton. Trump noted yesterday that Obama seemed angrier at him than he ever has been at terrorists who killed Americans. That is undoubtedly true. After every prior attack before San Bernardino last December, the president could show up at the funeral ceremony, express his sympathies, call for all of us to love one another and heal, and bash the National Rifle Association and Republicans for resisting commonsense gun laws. San Bernardino upset the pattern: The killers were Muslims, and the victims were not a core Democratic constituency, but really a cross-sample of the community. Obama skipped an appearance after this attack.
Americans feel less safe today than they did eight years ago. It is likely that Israeli-type security measures to guard public places will be far more prominent in years to come, especially given that there may be liability exposure for negligence if such places do not hire guards and attacks then occur.
But Israel’s lesson is more than just the need for security — it is that vigilance is a permanent feature of our modern, open societies. A few killers can do immense damage, and in America there is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem.
House GOP Leaders Set To Endorse Obama’s Failed Anti-JIhad Strategy
June 16, 2016House GOP Leaders Set To Endorse Obama’s Failed Anti-JIhad Strategy, Breitbart, Neil Munro, June 15, 2016
House GOP leaders are set to endorse President Barack Obama’s failed domestic anti-jihad strategy, according to Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert.
The GOP’s Obama endorsement is hidden in a new bill, titled the ‘‘Countering Terrorist Radicalization Act.” The showpiece bill’s title and language is undermined by numerous exceptions that allow the president to continue his failed “Countering Violent Extremism” strategy, Gohmert said.
The bill is a post-Orlando showpiece that actually entrenches Obama’s harmful policies, he said. “All this is doing is giving more and more credibility to this ridiculous term ‘CVE’ instead of describing the killers that were behind 9/11, the Boston bombings, the San Bernardino attack, the Orlando shooting, the bomber in Times Square… all these people who are trying to kill us in America,” he said.
“We’re doing the same thing as the president… we’re not identifying radical Islam” as the enemy which nurtures and motivates attackers, Gohmert. “There is going to be more and more killings of Americans … until we can train our people to recognize radical Islam,” he said.
Under the CVE strategy, Obama has blocked FBI investigators from examining the supposedly non-political and peaceful networks of mosques that actually nurture jihadi attitudes, while redirecting FBI attention to less dangerous non-Islamic groups, such as small-government militias. The strategy has also put FBI agents under the supervision of an oversight panel influenced by Muslim political activists, including an immigrant who reportedly welcomed the slaughter of 3,000 Americans in 2001 by her Muslim co-religionists.
Moreover, Obama’s tight restrictions on investigators have not earned the expected cooperation from Islamic groups. In fact, many self-segregating Islamic groups have rejected Obama’s proposal to allow local Imams to police their young men in exchange for sharing information about jihadi groups with the FBI.
The GOP endorsement bill is slated for a vote as early as Thursday, June 16.
Under a subtitle, “AMPLIFYING LOCAL EFFORTS TO ROOT OUT TERROR,” the bill simply authorizes extra training, the creation of a committee and establishes some conditional reporting requirements, according to the draft given to Breitbart. The bill does not reform Obama’s CVE strategy, training rules or investigative priorities.
The bill was drafted by staff working for Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who is the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Press aides at the committee declined to comment on the bill, or even if the committee plans to hold oversight hearing on Obama’s failed CVE strategy in the run-up to the 2016 election.
In March, McCaul endorsed Obama’s tacit alliance with U.S-based Islamic religious groups, many of which share overlapping umbrella networks that are exempt from normal FBI anti-terror monitoring.
“The effective thing is … effective outreach to the Muslim community, so you can pull the religious leaders really on to our team, if you will, to protect us from radicalization from within those communities,” he said March 27. “I think we can get good intelligence from the Muslim communities in our outreach efforts, in our working with the religious leaders in the communities in the United States,” he said.
In contrast, federal prosecutors do not offer political favors to let the Catholic priests run law-enforcement tasks in Latino neighborhoods, for example, keeping track of MS-13 and various drug-gangs.
In practice, much of that hoped-for intelligence about emerging jihadis has been blocked by determined opposition from Islamist advocates. For example, Linda Sarsour, a prominent Islamic advocate who is called a “Champion of Change” by Obama’s deputies, is a strong opponent of the information-exchange.
The government’s practice of providing funds to Muslim community partners in the fight against violent extremism has also raised concerns about the true goal of these partnerships. Are they being formed in order to gather intelligence and information about community members, or to actually engage in valuable community outreach about civil rights protections? CVE programs can foster mistrust between government entities and community members.
In December 2015, George Selim, then the director of the Office for Community Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, told NPR that Muslim communities are not identifying emerging jihadis.
The research and the statistics have all indicated that peers, people that are in close association with subjects that ultimately commit an act like this, see something that’s a little bit out of the norm, but they don’t necessarily report it. And so part of our goal is to create the type of partnerships in which peers know when and how to elevate those type of suspicions.
There’s growing evidence that wife of the Orlando jihadi knew of his pending attack, but did not warn Americans.
Gohmert is trying to reform the McCaul bill before the vote — but he’s skeptical the GOP leadership is willing to fight for an effective anti-jihad strategy.
“There are plenty of representatives who are concerned about this, but the Speaker [Rep. Paul Ryan] and the Majority Leader [Rep. Kevin McCarthy] control what comes to the floor for a vote. and they have no intentions of bringing a bill that says we’ll stop radical Islamists,” he said.
Anti-jihad groups are urging voters to protest the planned bill. “Congress is about to help President Obama whitewash his approach to Counterterrorism to hide any mention or focus on Islamists or their Jihad against the free world,” said Jim Hanson, an executive vice president at the Center for Security Policy. “The Countering Violent Extremism Bill ignores the very Islamic nature of the Sharia ideology that motivates our enemies to slaughter innocents from Paris to Orlando,” he added.
The problems in Obama’s CVE strategy, said Gohmert, include the tight curbs on FBI investigations and training, the gag order to prevent any discussion of Islamic ideas — such as ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia’ or ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ — an intrusive oversight panel staffed by Islamic advocates, the legal shield for Islamic networks and political groups, and an eagerness to direct stigma and investigations against non-Islamic groups, such as “right wing militias,” plus its failure to win cooperation from self-segregating Islamic political groups.
For example, the gag-order means “the FBI is not allowed to learn or discuss or look for the things that radical islamics read, or the type of activities they’re doing when they going through radicalization,” Gohmert said.
In contrast, GOP 2016 candidate Donald Trump has called for more oversight over the Islamic networks. “We have to maybe check, respectfully, the mosques and we have to check other places because this is a problem that, if we don’t solve it, it’s going to eat our country alive,” he said during his June 15 campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.
Obama’s CVE strategy also created an advisory group of outsiders who have much influence over FBI investigations.
The committee has pushed for a FBI focus on non-Islamic groups, and just before the Orlando massacre, presented a report to top DHS officials asking for a gag-order that would prevent officials from studying, debating or even recognizing jihadi ideas. Officials should “reject religiously-charged terminology and problematic positioning by using plain meaning American English,” said the report, which also urged officials to use “American English instead of religious, legal and cultural terms like ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia,’ ‘takfir’ or ‘umma,” according to the The Daily Caller.
That’s the equivalent of President Franklin Roosevelt and his generals and their soldiers waging war against National Socialist Germany without mentioning “Blitzkrieg,” “U-boat,” “Fuhrer,” “Lebensraum,” “Panzer,” “Stuka,” or “Untermensch” or “Flak,” “Panzerfaust” or “SS.”
Committee co-chair Farah Pandith was born in the Muslim-vs.-Hindu battleground of Kashmir. For decades, that area has suffered from Muslim attacks, and many non-Arab Muslims consider that war to be as important as the Arab fight to destroy the Jewish state.
In 2012, co-chair Adnan Kifayat threatened this reporter with criminal charges for asking George Selim about the White House’s many quiet contacts with the Council on American Islamic Relations. “That was wrong… it is really bad form … You’re putting a career at risk by asking [questions] without telling him… you cannot ambush people and expect them to actually cooperate,” Kifayat told this reporter.
The CAIR group is so closely entwined with Islamists and with jihadis that court documents and news reports show that at least five of its people — either board members, employees or former employees — have been jailed or repatriated for various financial and terror-related offenses. Critics show that CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Texas-based criminal effort to deliver $12 million to the Jew-hating HAMAS jihad group, and that CAIR was founded with $490,000 from HAMAS.
Another member, Mohamed Elibiary, quit in 2014 after he tweeted that the Islamic empire, dubbed the “caliphate,” will return.
Obama’s deputies have recently appointed a young Muslim activist from Syria to the panel, Laila Alawa. She wears a hijab in observance to Islam, has tweeted a message supporting the 9/11 atrocity by her fellow Muslims, and tweeted a series of hateful messages about jihad opponents, according to a new report in The Daily Caller.
The new GOP bill eliminates any GOP oversight or leverage over Obama’s counter-productive CVE strategy by adding numerous loopholes in the weak GOP bill, Gohmert said. For example, the bill says;
COORDINATION.—The Secretary of Homeland Security shall, where appropriate, coordinate the efforts described in subsection (a) with the heads of other Federal departments and agencies, as appropriate, and, to the extent practicable, engage nongovernmental and international partners in the identification and use of testimonials described in such subsection.
But the phrase “to the extent practicable” really means “only if you want to … if it is not too much trouble,” Gohmert said. The phrase “where appropriate” really means “if you feel like you want to,” he said.
“Shakespeare has the appropriate phrase— much ado about nothing,” he added.
“We all know most Muslims are not terrorists,” said Gohmert. “At the same time, it is ridiculous to not recognize there are radical islamists who are in America, who want to bring this country down and who think they go to paradise if they kill Americans.”
Muslim DHS Advisor Called Israel A ‘Suspect’ In September 11 Attacks
June 16, 2016Muslim DHS Advisor Called Israel A ‘Suspect’ In September 11 Attacks, Daily Caller, Peter Hasson, June 16, 2016
A current adviser to the Department of Homeland Security is a Muslim leader who has accused America of doing Israel’s “dirty work,” named Israel as a “suspect” in the September 11 terror attacks and has been criticized as an apologist for terrorists.
Salam Al-Marayati is the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He currently serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Committee’s (HSAC) Foreign Fighter Task Force, as well as the HSAC Subcommittee on Faith Based Security and Communications. (Note: this is not the Muslim DHS advisor The Daily Caller wrote about on Monday.)
In 2001, Al-Marayati suggested that Israel — not Islamic extremists — was ultimately behind the September 11 terror attacks.
“If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies,” he said.
In 2013, Judicial Watch noted that Al-Marayati told attendees at a 2005 conference for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) that “Counter-terrorism and counter-violence should be defined by us. We should define how an effective counter-terrorism policy should be pursued in this country. So, number one, we reject any effort, notion, suggestion that Muslims should start spying on one another.”
In 2012, in a debate on RT, Al-Marayati accused the United States of doing Israel’s “dirty work” for them.
“The other point here, which is very important historically, the United States has done a lot of dirty work that has served the interests of Israel,” he said. “It destroyed Iraq. It supported the destruction and crippling of Egypt. It has crippled the Gulf.”
In 2015, the Obama administration was sharply criticized for inviting Al-Marayati to a three-day summit on fighting extremism — a fact the White House initially tried to conceal from reporters.
Investor’s Business Daily took an editorial stand against the invite, arguing that: “Al-Marayati has a long record of defending terrorists and justifying violence against non-Muslims — an easy one for the White House to vet for extremism.”
According to White House visitor records, Al-Marayati has visited the White House 11 times since 2009.
The IBD editors went on to note that “In a 1999 PBS interview, moreover, he called Hezbollah terrorist attacks ‘legitimate resistance,’ doubling down on his months-earlier claim that Hezbollah’s 1983 suicide bombing of more than 240 Marines in Lebanon was not terrorism but a ‘military operation — exactly the kind of attack that Americans might have lauded had it been directed against Washington’s enemies.’”
Kyle Shideler, the director of the Center for Security Policy’s Threat Information Office, told The Daily Caller that “Al-Marayati’s association with the HSAC underlines what an unfortunate farce the entire [Combatting Violent Extremism] program is. Al-Marayati’s only notable counter-terrorism contribution is having suggested Israel be included as a suspect on 9/11.”
“His very organization, MPAC has historically co-sponsored events in support of the very kinds of extremists he’s been appointed to help oppose, which is no surprise given that the organizations roots lay with men who literally studied at the foot of Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan Al-Banna,” Shideler said.
“As long as the Obama Administration is more concerned with keeping groups like Al-Marayati’s happy with them instead of investigating actually terrorism, we will never have a sane counter-terror policy.”
The Daily Caller previously reported on Monday that a current sitting member on the HSAC Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism, Laila Alawa, is a 25-year-old immigrant of Syrian heritage who said that the 9/11 attacks “changed the world for good” and has consistently disparaged America, free speech, and white people on social media.
The Department of Homeland Security has not replied to multiple requests for comment regarding Alawa and Al-Marayati’s advising roles.
Muslim Privilege Killed 49 People in Orlando
June 16, 2016Muslim Privilege Killed 49 People in Orlando, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 16, 2016
The deadliest mass shooting in American history happened because of Islamophobia.
Islamophobia killed 49 people in Orlando. It didn’t kill 49 Muslims. Instead it allowed Omar Mateen, a Muslim terrorist, to kill 49 people in the name of his Islamic ideology and the Islamic State.
Omar, like so many other Muslim killers, could have been stopped. He talked about killing people when he worked at G4S Security, a Federal contractor that provided services to the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. But, according to one of the co-workers he stalked, a former police officer, his employers refused to do anything about it because he was a Muslim.
The FBI conducted an investigation of Omar Mateen. They put him on a watch list and sent informants. They interviewed him and concluded that his claims of Al Qaeda ties and terrorist threats were reactions to “being marginalized because of his Muslim faith.” Omar told the agents that he said those things because “his co-workers were discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.”
And they believed him.
Poor Omar wasn’t a potential terrorist. He was just a victim of Islamophobia.
Omar got away with homophobic comments that would have gotten Americans fired because he was Muslim. He weathered an “extensive” FBI investigation because he was Muslim.
Anyone who says that there is no such thing as Muslim Privilege ought to look at Omar Mateen.
There is a direct line between Omar’s Muslim privilege and the Pulse massacre. Omar Mateen’s Muslim privilege protected him from consequences. While the media studiously paints the image of a beleaguered population of American Muslims suffering the stigma of constant suspicion, Omar’s Muslim background actually served as a shield and excused behavior that would have been unacceptable for anyone else. Omar Mateen’s Muslim privilege shielded him until he was actually murdering non-Muslims.
And Omar’s case is not unique. The Fort Hood killer, Nidal Hasan, handed out business cards announcing that he was a Jihadist. He delivered a presentation justifying suicide bombings, but no action was taken. Like Omar, the FBI was aware of Hasan. It knew that he was talking to Al Qaeda bigwig Anwar Al-Awlaki, yet nothing was done. Instead of worrying about his future victims, the FBI was concerned that investigating him and interviewing him would “harm Hasan’s career”.
One of his classmates later said that the military authorities, “Don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody’s religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.”
Would the FBI have been as sensitive if Nidal Hasan had been named Frank Wright? No more than Omar Mateen would have kept his security job if his name had been Joe Johnson.
It’s an increasingly familiar story.
The neighbors of San Bernardino killers Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik noticed that something strange was going on, but they were afraid of profiling Muslims. If they had done the right thing, the 14 victims of the two Muslim killers would still be alive. If the FBI had done the right thing with Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood victims would still be alive and whole. If the FBI had done the right thing with Omar Mateen, his 49 victims would still be alive and those he wounded would still be whole.
We have some basic choices to make. We can empathize with Muslims or with their victims.
We cannot however do both.
After 9/11, Muslims somehow became the biggest victim group in America. And even if you contend that most Muslims are not responsible for the actions of Islamic fundamentalist groups, even if you believe that most Muslims are being wrongly blamed for the actions of a smaller group of radicals, the pernicious myth of Muslim victimhood has become a distorting force that protects terrorists.
Muslim victimhood has elevated Islamist groups such as CAIR to the front row of political discourse alongside legitimate civil rights organizations, despite their terror links and history of obstructing law enforcement efforts to fight Islamic terrorism, while mainstreaming their Islamist agendas.
Muslim victimhood has silenced the victims of Muslim terrorism. Every Muslim terror attack is swiftly diverted to the inevitable “backlash” narrative in which the media turns away from the bodies in the latest terror attack to bring us the stories of the real Muslim victims who fear being blamed for it.
This obscene act of media distraction silences the victims of Muslim terrorism and rewards the enablers and accomplices of Muslim terrorism instead. It is every bit as terrible as claiming that the real victims of a serial killer are his family members who are being blamed for not turning him in, instead of the people he killed and the loved ones they left behind.
Muslim victimhood protects Muslim terrorists like Omar Mateen. It shields them from scrutiny. It invents excuses for them. While Omar made his preparations, while the FBI investigation of him was botched, the media leaped nimbly from a thousand petty claims of Muslim victimhood. And the worst of them may have been Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim woman who claimed she was discriminated against when a flight attendant poured her soda in a cup instead of being given a can. This insane nonsense received days of media coverage. That’s more airtime than any American victim of Islamic terrorism has received.
The media will wait as short a period as it can and turn away from Orlando to some manufactured viral media claim of Muslim discrimination that will be unbearably petty. Meanwhile the next Omar Mateen will be plotting his next act of terror.
It’s time to tell the truth.
Islamic terrorism is caused by Muslim privilege. These acts of violence are motivated by racism and supremacism in Islam. Allahu Akbar, the Islamic battle cry often associated with acts of terror and ethnic cleansing since its origin in Mohammed’s persecution of the Jews, is a statement of Muslim superiority to non-Muslims.
Muslim terrorism is not the groan of an oppressed minority. Its roots run back to racist and supremacist Islamic societies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt where non-Muslims have few if any civil rights. Muslims are a global majority. Islamic terrorism is their way of imposing their religious system on everyone.
Standing in solidarity with Muslims after Orlando makes as much sense as standing in solidarity with Klansmen after the Charleston massacre. No one should be standing in solidarity with hate groups.
Omar wasn’t radicalized by the “internet”. He got his ideas from Islamic clerics who got their ideas from Islam. He was “radicalized” by the holiest texts of Islam. Just like every other Muslim terrorist. His actions weren’t “senseless” or “nihilistic”, he was acting out the Muslim privilege of a bigoted ideology.
Even in this country, the majority of hate crimes are not directed at Muslims. Instead Muslims have disproportionately contributed to persecuting various minority groups. Orlando is only the latest example of this trend. In Europe, Jews are fleeing Sweden and France because of Muslim persecution. In Germany, gay refugees have to be housed separately from Muslim migrants. So do Christian refugees.
This isn’t the behavior of victims. These are the actions of oppressors.
Muslims are not part of the coalition of the oppressed, but of the oppressors. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can deal stop Islamic terrorism and protect the victims of Muslim terrorists.
Muslim privilege killed 49 people in Orlando. How many people will it kill next week or next month? How many will it kill in the next decade or the next century?
The Muslim genocide of non-Muslims is already happening in Syria and Iraq. Islam has a long genocidal history. And if we continue to confuse the oppressors and the oppressed, the next genocide we fail to stop may be our own.
Making America unsafe
June 15, 2016Making America unsafe, Israel Hayom, Judith Bergman, June 15, 2016
When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.
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There is a deep and unacknowledged irony to the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, has opined in the days since the terror attack in Orlando that how you term things makes no difference.
“What exactly would using this label [‘radical Islam’] accomplish? … Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction,” Obama said on Tuesday in response to the heavy criticism poured on him after he, once more, refused to use the term in connection with the mass shooting. Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, perhaps frustrated that no one in the U.S. administration, nor the Democratic presidential candidate, will give it credit for it.
Positing that calling something or someone a particular name makes no difference is the very epitome of hypocritical dissembling, especially coming from the person at the very top of the Democratic echelons.
These are the same people who for decades fought to entrench political correctness into American society, making it impossible to call certain things by their rightful names without facing a barrage of vilification and personal smears. The American Left has fought ceaselessly to shape language according to its ideas and has succeeded so tremendously that Americans are now afraid to report suspicious activity out of fear of coming across as “Islamophobic.” This has already cost lives. Before the attack, the security company that Omar Mateen worked for was afraid of reporting him, despite his suspicious behavior, exactly because it feared being castigated as “Islamophobic.”
The U.S. has much to learn from Israel in this regard. Israel is so efficient at fighting terrorism precisely because it cannot afford the luxury of integrating political correctness into its security doctrines. The very idea is preposterous. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Obama has done.
Five years ago, Obama erased all references to Islam in the educational materials used to train the American law enforcement and national security communities. In 2011, U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that the Obama administration was recalling all its training materials to eliminate references to Islam that some Muslim groups had claimed were offensive.
In 2013, The Washington Times also reported that countless experts on Islamic terrorism had been banned from speaking to any U.S. government counterterrorism conferences, including those of the FBI and CIA. Government agencies were instead ordered to invite Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
If it is only a matter of labels, then why has Obama endangered American lives by deliberately blindsiding law enforcement and national security communities on the nature of Islamic terrorism? How are they supposed to grapple with the urgent issue of jihad if they are prohibited from learning about the nature of jihad?
When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.
These are all relevant questions that the mainstream media has consistently refused to ask the administration — instead, dangerously dismissing them as conspiracy theories. The price is now being paid by innocent Americans, from a Christmas party in San Bernardino to a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Words matter tremendously, and you cannot fight an enemy that you are forbidden to name. Imagine Churchill telling the British that there was “no magic” in calling out the Nazi ideology and prohibiting his intelligence community from studying Nazi Germany’s strategy and tactics.
Hillary Clinton, feeling the backlash after publishing identical statements to those of Obama, has now opportunistically declared that she is ready to say those “magical words.”
But this is meaningless pandering, especially when you know she was part of the administration that purged training materials of all things Islam.
“In my perspective, it matters what we do, not what we say,” Clinton said. “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’m happy to say either, but that’s not the point.”
The administration pretends there is no Islamist threat. This is what it has firmly projected to its law enforcement and intelligence communities, and Clinton is of course fully aware of the intricate details of this fact. Stating that it matters “what we do” then becomes an empty and even dangerous statement, because it deludes Americans into believing that there is a solid and credible intelligence effort underway to prevent future Islamist terror attacks in the United States, when this cannot logically be the case given that the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are not allowed to study jihad or Islamic extremism.
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