Obama Appoints Grandson of a Terror Suspect as Gov’t Liaison to Muslims

/in , , , /by

Zaki Barzinji worked for ISNA, an organization named as a Muslim Brotherhood entity by the Justice Department. His grandfather was a MB terror suspect.

The Obama Administration has chosen the grandson of a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect as its new liaison to the Muslim-American community. The new official also led the youth section of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an identified Muslim Brotherhood entity that was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing trial.

The official, Zaki Barzinji, previously served as the deputy director of intergovernmental affairs for Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (more on that further down in this article), who is now under investigation for possible political corruption. Before that, Barzinji was the president of the Muslim Youth of North America, which describes itself as the youth wing of ISNA.

ISNA was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history, with the Justice Department specifically listing it as an entity of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s own documents list ISNA at the top of its list of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”

ISNA’s links to the Brotherhood and Hamas are laid out in bipartisan legislation titled the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act. The bill now has over 75 supporters in the House and Senate.

How did Zaki Barzinji rise through the ranks in ISNA and McAuliffe’s office to become the new associate director of public engagement for the White House?

He is the grandson of a prominent Islamist leader named Jamal Barzinji, who passed away last year.  Indeed, Jamal Barzinji was a founder and/or senior official in virtually every group identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front in America. He also frequently donated to political campaigns. He was nearly prosecuted, but the Obama Justice Department dropped the planned indictment.

Zaki accepted an award on his grandfather’s behalf in 2013 at the Hamas/Brotherhood-linked Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia, which the late Barzinji helped found. The mosque is most known for having Al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki as its imam in 2001 before he officially joined the terrorist group.

Jamal Barzinji was most involved with the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). The group’s office, Jamal Barzinji’s home and the offices of other organizations that Jamal Barzinji was affiliated with were raided in 2002 as part of a terrorism investigation. The affidavit said has being investigated because of evidence leading the U.S. government to “believe that [Jamal] Barzinji is not only closely associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (as evidenced by ties to [Sami] Al-Arian…), but also with Hamas.”

Jamal Barzinji’s group was so close to Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian that IIIT’s president considered his group and Al-Arian’s to be essentially one entity. The indictment of Al-Arian and his colleagues says that they “would and did seek to obtain support from influential individuals, in the United States under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights.”

Keep that quote and the investigation into McAuliffe’s political contributions in mind when you consider how Zaki Barzinji apparently rose to his new position with some help from his grandfather’s political connections.

In 2011, IIIT (again, the late Jamal Barzini’s organization) donated $10,000 to the New Dominion PAC, which has strong Democratic party ties in the state, particularly as a donor to current Senator (former Governor) Tim Kaine, who spoke at a New Dominion PAC event honoring Jamal Barzinji in 2011.

Barzinji’s grandson became the outreach coordinator for McAuliffe’s campaign for governor in April 2013, per his LinkedIn profile. The Barzini/IIIT-linked PAC raised $15,000 for McAuliffe’s campaign two years later on September 29, 2013.

Zaki Barzinji became McAuliffe’s special assistant for policy in January 2014 and was promoted to deputy director of intergovernmental affairs in July 2014. This month, he became the White House’s liaison to the Muslim-American community as its new associate director of public engagement. Quite a rapid rise for a 27-year old.

There are no Islamist-sounding quotes from Zaki Barzinji but important questions remain.

Is it really wise to have the grandson of a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect, who served as the head of the youth wing of an identified Muslim Brotherhood identity with Hamas links, as the White House’s liaison to the Muslim-American community?

What role did the political ties and donations of his Islamist grandfather and IIIT play in his remarkably fast rise through state politics and to the White House?

And what about his own work as president of the youth wing of ISNA, an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood?

ABOUT RYAN MAURO

Ryan Mauro is ClarionProject.org’s national security analyst, a fellow with Clarion Project and an adjunct professor of homeland security. Mauro is frequently interviewed on top-tier television and radio. Read more, contact or arrange a speaking engagement.

RELATED ARTICLES:

CAIR Official Stands By Memorial Day Criticism of US Troops

Would American College Students Donate to Hamas?

‘Motivated’ by Beheadings: Bronx Man Arrested

8 More Members of Congress Support Brotherhood Bill

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Zaki Barzinji. Photo: White House.

Why Morality is the Only Thing We Should Legislate

/in , , , , /by

“You can’t legislate morality!” is a common battle cry today. It’s thought to be a quintessentially American idea, even though the Founding Fathers never expressed such a sentiment. Nor did the early Americans who would unabashedly enforce a biblically based code of morality in their localities, both via social pressure and governmental laws, with transgressors sometimes spending time in stocks — or worse. No, our common battle cry is a modern idea, and one of modernism. It also betrays a fundamental, and dangerous, misunderstanding of law’s nature.

In reality, the only thing we should legislate is morality. The only other option is legislating whims or immorality.

One problem with addressing this issue, which I have done several times, is that many readers have a reason-clouding emotional reaction induced by the assumption that I’m advocating big government. So I’ll preface what follows by saying that even if we enact just one law — let’s say, prohibiting murder — we have legislated morality. The only people who could credibly say they wouldn’t legislate morality are those who wouldn’t legislate at all: anarchists.

I’ll start by putting this simply. Could you imagine a legislator saying, “This law doesn’t prevent something that’s wrong, but I’m going to impose it on you anyway”? What if he said, “This other law doesn’t mandate anything that is a good, but I’ll compel you to adhere to it simply because I feel like it”? Would you suppose his legislation had a sound basis? Or would you think that, unlike a prohibition against murder or theft, the imposition of something lacking a moral foundation (“rightness” or “wrongness”) was the very definition of tyranny?

Generally speaking, a law is by definition the imposition of a value (which can be positive, negative or neutral), and a just law is the imposition of a moral principle (good by definition). This is because a law — with the exception of laws for naming post offices and such (which don’t constrain us and which won’t be included henceforth when I speak of “laws”) — states that there is something you must or must not do, ostensibly because the action is a moral imperative, is morally wrong, or is a corollary thereof. If this is not the case, again, with what credibility do you legislate in the given area? There is no point imposing something that doesn’t prevent a wrong or mandate some good. This is why there will never be a powerful movement lobbying to criminalize strawberry ice cream or kumquats.

As an example, what is the possible justification for speed laws? Well, there is the idea that it’s wrong to endanger others or yourself, and, in the latter case, it could be based on the idea that it’s wrong to engage in reckless actions that could cause you to become a burden on society. Of course, some or all of these arguments may be valid or not, but the point is this: if a law is not underpinned by a valid moral principle, it is not a just law. Without morality, laws can be based on nothing but air.

One cause of the strong negative reaction (generally among libertarian-leaners) to the above is the word “morality” itself; as with “capitalism” in liberal circles, the term has taken on a negative connotation. Yet this is partially due to a narrow and incorrect view of what morality is. Use the word, and many imagine the Church Lady or a preacher breathing fire and brimstone; moreover, reflecting our libertine age’s spirit, people’s minds often automatically go to sex. “Stay out of the bedroom!” we hear, even though the only side legislating bedroom-related matters today is the Left (e.g., contraception mandate, forcing businesses to cater faux weddings). It’s almost as if, dare I say, some people are worried that others may ruin their fun.

Morality encompasses far more than sexual matters, however. Yet it is narrow in one way: it includes only correct principles of rightness. And, again, when these are not the stuff of laws, elements of wrongness will be.

Speaking of which, everyone advocating legislation seeks to impose a conception of morality or, as modernists are wont to put it, a “values” set. For example, the only justification for forcing bakers to service faux weddings is the (incorrect) notion that it’s “wrong” to deny such service. ObamaCare could only be justified based on the idea that providing medical care for those who can’t afford it is a moral imperative. And “transgender” bathroom laws would have to be based on the fancy that it’s wrong to disallow someone from using facilities associated with his “gender identity.”

A common argument I’ve heard in response to the above is “No, I don’t legislate morality; something should only be illegal if it harms another.” Other arguments are that we should merely prohibit “force” or protect “property rights.” Leaving alone the deep matter of what constitutes “harm,” these assertions are, with all due respect, dodges. Is it “wrong” to harm another, use unjust force against him or violate property rights? If not, why trouble over it?

People making the harm, force or property-rights argument are almost universally sincere, except with themselves, as it’s self-deception. It’s a way of preserving a mistaken ideological principle (“Don’t legislate morality”) by obscuring what it is you’re actually doing when making law. It’s also dangerous because it keeps things on a more superficial level. It’s a way relativistic moderns can avoid dealing with something they consider inconvenient, messy and divisive: determining “What is good?” But when you don’t work hard to settle what is good, you end up with what is bad.

Another reason many people are oblivious to the values/morality underpinning their conception of law is that many moral principles are now woven so seamlessly into our civilization’s fabric that we don’t recognize them as “morality.” Yet a moral does not cease to be a moral because it becomes a meme. Consider that while we take for granted that theft, murder and slavery should be governmentally prohibited, most pre-Christian pagans would have found such an idea foreign. Pillaging for a living, Viking-style, was common and accepted; might made right. And while you might not murder or enslave your fellow group members (one problem Athenians had with Spartans was that the latter enslaved other Greeks: the Helots), outsiders were fair game. In fact, if there had been such a thing as a libertarian Roman, he just might have said to Christians endeavoring to outlaw the brutality of the arena, “You can’t legislate morality!”

There can be no such thing as a separation of morality and state. That is, unless we want to regress to man’s default, the immoral state.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

Do CEOs Make 335 Times More Than Average Workers? by Mark J. Perry

/in , , , , /by

Manufacturing Ammo for Class Warfare.

The AFL-CIO released its annual report on CEO pay last week (see details here and here), and has calculated a CEO-to-worker-pay ratio of 335-to-1 for 2015, based on the average total compensation package for S&P 500 CEOs of $12.4 million last year, and average annual pay of $36,875 for America’s 99 million rank-and-file workers.

Here are some observations on the AFL-CIO’s questionable methodology that is uses every year to calculate an inflated CEO-to-worker pay ratio (see this related CD post from last May), and an analysis of how a complete confiscation of CEO pay would affect average worker pay.

Dubious Math for Worker Pay

In its 2016 report, the AFL-CIO reports that the average nonsupervisory rank-and-file worker made $36,875 annually in 2015 based on “average nonsupervisory worker pay according to Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2015 data.”

No other details are provided, but the $36,875 annual average worker pay calculated by the AFL-CIO is apparently based on an hourly wage of $21.04 for the average nonsupervisory worker in 2015 (BLS data here), an average workweek of only 33.7 hours (BLS data here) for the average rank-and-file nonsupervisory worker, and an assumption of 52 weeks of work per year ($21.04 per hour x 33.7 hours per week x 52 weeks ≈ $36,875).

Here’s an important statistical issue: Every year the AFL-CIO does an apples-to-oranges comparison of: a) total CEO compensation for only 500 CEOs working full-time to b) the cash wages only for 99 million rank-and-file workers, who work less than 35 hours per week on average, and are therefore mostly part-time workers.

But you would never know that from the AFL-CIO’s website because the details of average worker pay are never really explained, and I guess nobody has ever bothered to check and find out that the AFL-CIO is using average annual worker pay for mostly part-time employees who only work 33.7 hours per week on average.

Questions: a) How would the AFL-CIO’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio change if we calculate average worker pay for full-time workers, b) how would the ratio change if we compare the average pay for a rank-and-file workers who work the same number of hours that a typical CEO works, e.g. 45, 50 or 60 hours per week, and c) how would the ratio change if we compare total compensation of both CEOs and rank-and-file workers working full-time?

 

The chart above summarizes how the CEO-to-worker pay ratio would change, here are the details:

a. Assuming a 40-hour workweek for a rank-and-file worker at an hourly wage $21.04 and average annual pay of $43,763, we would get a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 283-to-1.

b. Assuming a 45-hour workweek for rank-and-file workers at an hourly wage $21.04 (and 5 weekly hours of overtime at $31.56 an hour) and average annual pay of $51,969, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio would be 239-to-1.

c. Assuming a 50-hour workweek for rank-and-file workers at an hourly wage $21.04 (and 10 weekly hours of overtime at $31.56 an hour) and average annual pay of $60,174, we would get aCEO-to-worker pay ratio of 206-to-1.

d. Assuming a 60-hour workweek for rank-and-file workers at an hourly wage $21.04 (and 20 weekly hours of overtime at $31.56 an hour) and average annual pay of $76,585, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio would be 162-to-1 (or less than half of the AFL-CIO’s reported ratio of 335-to-1).

e. Assuming a 40-hour workweek for full-time rank-and-file workers at $21.04 an hour, and adding the monetary value of employer-provided benefits of $9.59 per hour (based on the 45.6% average that benefits represent as a share of hourly earnings according to the BLS), and total compensation of $63,719, we would get a CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 195-to-1.

If we further considered a 50 or 60 hour workweek and fringe benefits for rank-and-file workers for an even more accurate apples-to-apples comparison, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio starts approaching 100-to-1, which is a far cry from the AFL-CIO’s 335-to-1 ratio that will be generating sensationalized media coverage in the coming weeks.

Confiscation and Redistribution of CEO Pay

And what’s the whole point of the AFL-CIO’s annual reports on CEO-to-worker pay ratio? The sub-title of the AFL-CIO’s 2015 Executive Paywatch websitepretty much sums it up: “High paid CEOs and the low wage economy.” The AFL-CIO’s message seems to be that if CEOs weren’t being so generously over-compensated then the rank-and-file workers would be doing much better and making higher wages. For example, according to the AFL-CIO in 2014:

America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, a country where hard work and playing by the rules would provide working families a middle-class standard of living. But in recent decades, corporate CEOs have been taking a greater share of the economic pie while workers’ wages have stagnated.

The AFL-CIO has fallen here for the zero-sum, fixed pie fallacy, one of the most common economic mistakes that falsely assumes that one party can gain only at the expense of another. But let’s assume that there is a “fixed pie of wages” and do some confiscation and redistribution of CEO compensation to see how that would affect average rank-and-file worker pay.

Question: If the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies received $12.4 million on average last year, then as a group, those 500 CEOs received about $6.20 billion in total compensation in 2015. If the AFL-CIO could wave a magic wand and confiscate that entire amount and redistribute $6.20 billion to the current 99 million rank-and-file workers, what would each one get?

Answer: An annual increase in pay of about $63 for each rank-and-file worker before taxes, or about $1.20 more per week, or 3.5 cents per hour. In other words, complete confiscation and redistribution of S&P 500 CEO compensation would make almost no difference for the average rank-and-file worker.

Bottom Line

The AFL-CIO can only get a distorted and inflated CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 335-to-1 with an apples-to-oranges analysis that compares the total annual compensation of a small, select group of CEOs heading America’s largest multi-national corporations, who probably typically work 50-60 hours per week or more, to the average annual cash wages of part-time rank-and-file employees who work less 34 hours per week on average.

Once we make a more statistically valid apples-to-apples comparison, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio falls in half from the AFL-CIO’s 335-to-1 ratio to only 162-to-1 if we assume a 60-hour work week for the average worker (to be comparable to the workweek of an average CEO), and the ratio falls to less than 200-to-1 once we consider total compensation for both CEOs and full-time rank-and-file workers. Further, even if we could confiscate 100% of the compensation of all S&P 500 CEOs, the typical rank-and-file worker would probably get less than $1 per week in after-tax earnings. Big deal.

Just like last year, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio reported by the AFL-CIO gets my annual “Biggest Blindly Accepted Statistical Fairy Tale of the Year Award.” Well no, it’s actually a tie with the gender wage gap myth and the incessantly repeated “77 cents on the dollar” statistical falsehood. What’s disappointing is that much of the mainstream media seem to blindly accept both of these statistical falsehoods without ever challenging the “statistical legerdemain” that are used to produce and perpetuate these statistical myths.

One exception was this excellent article last year by IBD’s John Merline (“Do CEOs Make 300 Times What Workers Get? Not Even Close“) who concluded:

What’s not understandable is why the mainstream press keeps repeating the massively inflated 300-to-1 number without noting the statistical legerdemain that produced it.

This article is reprinted with the permission of the American Enterprise Institute.

COLUMN BY

Mark J. Perry

Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

RELATED ARTICLE: 10 Best Employee Compensation Management Software in 2021

Kindergartner Suspended for Princess Bubble Gun

/in , , , , /by

Early last week, school officials at Southeast Elementary in Brighton, Colo. suspended a 5-year-old kindergartner for bringing a “fake weapon” to school. Illustrating the fanatical manner in which school weapons policies are enforced throughout the country, the “weapon” in question was a battery-powered clear plastic gun that blows bubbles when the trigger is pulled. The item’s clear plastic construction may not have been enough for the administrators to distinguish it from an actual weapon, but if the zealots had been in less of a fervor to punish the young student they might have noticed the portrait of two Disney princesses on the toy.

In an interview with Denver’s KDVR, the young girl’s mother made clear that she was upset with how her daughter had been treated, telling a reporter, “If they had contacted me and said can you make sure this doesn’t happen again, we just want you to be aware, I think that would have been a more appropriate way to handle the situation. Could we have a warning? It blows bubbles.”

Princess Bubble Gun

Princess Bubble Gun

Despite attention from the local media, Southeast Elementary officials issued the following statement defending their actions:

While we hear and understand the parents of this student being concerned about this discipline in light of the student’s age and type of item, this suspension is consistent with our district policy as well as how Southeast has handled similar situations throughout this school year. This has involved similar situations where students have brought items such as Nerf guns to school and also received one-day suspensions. The bringing of weapons, real or facsimile, to our schools by students can not only create a potential safety concern but also cause a distraction for our students in the learning process. Our schools, particularly Southeast because of past instances with students bringing fake weapons to school, make a point of asking parents to be partners in making sure students are not bringing these items to school. This includes asking parents to check backpacks.

Note the word “facsimile.” The Southeast Elementary Student Code of Conduct cites a school district weapons policy that states:

Carrying, using, actively displaying or threatening with the use of a firearm facsimile that could reasonably be mistaken for an actual firearm on district property, when being transported in vehicles dispatched by the district or one of its schools, during a school sponsored or district-sponsored activity or event, and off school property when such conduct has a reasonable connection to school or any district curricular or non-curricular event without the authorization of the school or school district is prohibited. Students who violate this policy provision may be subject to disciplinary action including but not limited to suspension and/or expulsion.

Facsimile typically connotes an exact copy, however, the policy does broaden the definition to allow for punishment if a student brings an item that “could reasonably be mistaken for a firearm.” It is hard to imagine how any reasonable person could mistake a clear, Disney-branded bubble toy for an actual firearm. But, here lies the problem, this kindergartner was clearly not interacting with reasonable individuals. Worse, the school’s response reveals that this type of unreasonable behavior is standard procedure for the school’s administrators.

Incidents like this are why NRA has supported legislation in some states to protect children and parents from the abuse of weapons policies by overzealous school officials. In Florida, NRA helped enact the “Right to be a Kid” Act, also known as the “Pop Tart” bill – referring to a well-publicized incident where a student was disciplined for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a firearm. This law targets some of the worst abuses, by making clear that “Simulating a firearm or weapon while playing or wearing clothing or accessories that depict a firearm or weapon or express an opinion regarding a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is not grounds for disciplinary action or referral to the criminal justice or juvenile justice system.”

Given an apparent pattern of weapons policy abuse by Southeast Elementary school administrators, Colorado lawmakers would be wise to better define how school officials deal with innocuous toys and other harmless items and behavior. Such harmful encounters with school officials can have a lasting negative effect on students. As the mother in this this case explained to a reporter, “What bugs me is this is going to be something they can refer to if we have any issues in the future which I don’t foresee, but it’s always going to be lingering there in her school file.”

Katie Couric is an Anti-Gun Fraud and Hypocrite

/in , , , /by

Google-search “Katie Couric, gun control, edited” and you’ll see what we’re talking about. Actually, you’ll see what most news organizations are talking about.

Fox News: Katie Couric slammed for ‘deceptive’ documentary about gun rights

Washington Post: Audiotape: Katie Couric documentary falsely depicts gun supporters as “idiots”

New York Times: Audio of Katie Couric Interview Shows Editing Slant in Gun Documentary, Site Claims

Reason: Katie Couric Anti-Gun Doc Deceptively Edited to Suggest Gun Rights Activists Don’t Have Answers

The Blaze: Katie Couric Documentary Accused of Deceptively Editing Gun Rights Activists—Here’s the Evidence

Washington Free Beacon: Audio Shows Katie Couric Documentary Deceptively Edited Interview with Pro-Gun Activists

Daily Caller: Katie Couric Edited Gun Documentary to Silence Pro-Gun Opinions

The articles’ titles pretty much tell the story, but the details go something like this: Couric has produced a documentary promoting gun control. Lest there be any confusion on that point, the documentary’s website says that its partners include Everytown, Moms Demand Action, the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and other anti-gun groups. And it urges people to “Reject the NRA” and to contact lawmakers, urging them to support background check legislation and other gun control efforts.

In the documentary, Couric interviews members of a local, Virginia-based pro-Second Amendment group. She asks them why they don’t support “universal” background check legislation. What is shown on camera thereafter is the interviewees sitting speechless for a full nine seconds, after which time the video cuts away, as if they never figured out an answer and the cameraman gave up and turned the camera off. The implication? Couric had proven once and for all that gun control opponents are incapable of producing a single argument against gun control.

But an audio-only tape of the interview, available here, proves that several of those being interviewed answered Couric immediately and at considerable length. Couric’s team simply deleted their answers, and inserted the “speechless” video footage in their place.

The articles linked above make clear that Couric and her director, Stephanie Soechtig, set out not to “document” anything, but to persuade viewers to adopt their anti-gun views. All of this reminds us that Couric is the same political activist that she has always been, first as a “journalist” that would bend the truth to propagandize audiences, and now as a “filmmaker” that will do the same.

According to CNN, Couric says she is “very proud of the film.” Her hubris notwithstanding, it remains to be seen if Couric’s legacy is forever tainted – as it should be – from her attempt to mislead the American public into believing a false narrative on gun control.

Arms for Adversarial Nations but Not Us

/in , , /by

President Obama Barack Hussein Obama has wiped out a multi decade ban on selling arms to Vietnam.  Part of his reasoning for lifting the ban has been his effort to place Vietnam at the center of his crappy foreign policy legacy.  Mr. Obama announced that he has vowed to leave behind the troubled history between the former war adversaries and embrace a new era with increasingly prosperous nation.

Of course as is his custom with all brutal dictator nations, Muslim terrorists and others, Obama steered clear of correct condemnation of what observers see as Vietnam’s horrendous treatment of those who may disagree with government cruelties.  Instead, the president praised Vietnam’s meager progress on rights in the one party state.  Some rights activists have declared that his decision to lift the embargo destroyed the best United States leverage for pushing Vietnam toward correcting her abusive ways.

Believe it or not, Obama had another motivation to lift the arms embargo against Vietnam.  The president’s move to allow Vietnam to arm herself is the latest in his usually meager efforts to counter China’s growing influence in Asia and elsewhere.   Obama’s mission to strengthen ties with a Chinese neighbor was most assuredly eyed with suspicion in Beijing.  The leaders in China have consistently bristled against U.S. engagement in the region and have boldly warned against taking sides in the heated territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

I find the Chinese demand rather rich, considering the fact they are fully engaged in activities at numerous locations within the Western Hemisphere.  China controls the Panama Canal.  China is buying up so much real estate in Vancouver, British Columbia that overall real estate prices are through the roof.  Chinese submarines are consistently plying the waters, just off the western coast of the United States.  China has also displaced the U.S. as the primary naval presence in the Fiji island area.  Oftentimes it is gleefully stated by U.S. detractors that America lost the Vietnam conflict.

However, 57,000 American soldiers lost their lives in that epic battle, while over two million Vietnam fighters and others lost their lives at the hands of American military might.  In fact I will venture to say that on the battle field, the U.S. was cleaning Vietnam’s clock rather severely.  That is until, dumb, or unscrupulous American government officials agreed to join Hanoi negotiators at the Paris peace talks, where the U.S. was convinced to place our military at a disadvantage through horrendous rules of engagement that basically stopped our military from fighting to win.

I find it ironic that Barack Hussein Obama is lifting the arms embargo against Vietnam so she can defend herself.  Yet at the same time he thinks “We the People” of the United States are going to sit by and allow him to disarm our own military and abolish the second amendment. Oops, He’s already dismantled America’s military prowess.

How Obama can say with a straight face that his little limp wristed plan to allow Vietnam to arm up can be a deterrent to China is not only stupid, but potentially dangerous for the United States.  Obama’s systematic dismantling of the U.S. military has rendered the American military threat to our enemies, including China to be non-existent.

Obama is on a mad man 24/7 mission to continue disarming the U.S. military and to usurp the Second Amendment that recognizes our right of self-protection.  Let us pretend for the time it takes you to read this that Vietnamese government officials actually like America and the two nations are now buddy buddy.  Actually, so what because thanks but no thanks because if China decided to start a military battle with America, our military (thanks but no thanks) to Obama is in no shape to take on a massive Chinese challenge.

Our once vaunted Air Force is so decimated due to the cutback efforts of the imam in the White House.  Now to keep aircraft in the skies, mechanics have been forced to scavenge parts from jets that are on display in museums.  That is so third world and so far below the legacy of our great republic.  It cannot be denied, that President Obama poses a clear and present danger to both America and world stability.  He is more interested in arming a communist nation than seeing to it that our republic’s number one and technically only ally in the Middle East, Israel is armed and safe from bigoted daily Muslim missile attacks.

The White House occupier wants to take your guns if you have any or prevent you from purchasing weapons you may need for protection from street cretins or government tyranny.   But he has no problem seeing to it that communist dictators can rearm.  I guess he prefers armed communist regimes over a polite society of legally armed sovereign Americans.

Please refer to 2nd Chronicles 7:14 in your Bible act accordingly.  It will go a long way toward rescuing and restoring America the beautiful to greatness.  God Bless America and may America Bless God.

Democratic Congressman Admits the Islamic State is ‘Islamic’

/in , , , /by

Over at PJ Media, I discuss some recent strange remarks from Rep. Brad Sherman:

It’s absolutely unprecedented: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) has become the first notable member of the Democratic Party to depart from the Obama administration’s official line and admit the obvious. Sherman has admitted that the Islamic State — ISIS, or ISIL, as Barack Obama insists on calling it — is in fact Islamic, and that its appeal among Muslims is rooted in its claims to be the quintessential expression of Islam.

Sherman did not say this directly, of course. But his quote nails it — the implication is clear, rational, and unmistakable. Said Sherman:

We have a State Department with people who think that you can show the evil of al-Baghdadi if you can show him personally executing a defenseless Yazidi.We need people who understand that if you can just get a picture of him eating a ham sandwich, that would undermine ISIS and its recruiting ability.

The State Department persists in working under the assumption that the people who are candidates to join the Islamic State will be turned off by its brutality. This is based on the further assumption that the potential ISIS recruits share the values and perspectives of contemporary non-Muslim Westerners.

State Department wonks can’t seem to conceive of the notion that anyone might nothold those values. Worse, they are bound as a matter of policy not to consider Islam in evaluating Islamic State recruitment. They cannot consider the possibility that a young man who reads that his god wants him to kill or subjugate unbelievers (cf. Qur’an 2:191, 4:89, 9:5, 9:29, etc. for starters) might be attracted rather than repelled by the sight of the caliph “personally executing a defenseless Yazidi.”

Sherman is not correct about his next assertion, however. Would a photo of al-Baghdadi eating a ham sandwich really undermine the Islamic State?

Sherman’s reasoning appears to be that such a violation would classify al-Baghdadi as not worthy to be the emir al-momineen, the leader of the believers. Sherman is to be commended for saying analysts dealing with the Islamic State should study Islam — a refreshing departure from the prevailing denial and willful ignorance — but he also reveals that he doesn’t know much about Islamic jurisprudence himself.

One hadith depicts Muhammad saying:

You should listen to and obey your Imam (Muslim ruler) even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin.” (Bukhari 9.93.7142)

Muhammad is attempting to give what he thinks is an outlandish example in order to make his point that Muslims should obey the ruler even in extreme circumstances. Those circumstances include even if the ruler is sinful.

Another hadith depicts Muhammad saying:

There will be leaders who will not be led by my guidance and who will not adopt my ways. There will be among them men who will have the hearts of devils in the bodies of human beings. … You will listen to Amir and carry out his orders; even if your back is flogged and your wealth is snatched, you should listen and obey.

Is there ever a circumstance in which Muslims should not obey the ruler? Yes — only when he commands something sinful.

In another hadith, Muhammad says:

It is obligatory upon a Muslim that he should listen (to the ruler appointed over him) and obey him whether he likes it or not, except that he is ordered to do a sinful thing. If he is ordered to do a sinful act, a Muslim should neither listen to him nor should he obey his orders.

If al-Baghdadi was seen eating a ham sandwich? That wouldn’t do the trick.

But if al-Baghdadi was seen forcing another Muslim to eat a ham sandwich, that just might.

In his comments, Sherman also remarked:

We need State Department people to [have] an understanding of Islamic jurisprudence. That’s not the kind of knowledge that you can get at Princeton. Woodrow Wilson did a great job. He did not memorize the Koran.

What he means by dragging Woodrow Wilson into this is unclear, but Sherman is spot-on in declaring the obvious: if State Department analysts hope to have any chance of defeating the Islamic State and other jihad groups, then — at a minimum — a good knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence should be a prerequisite for the job.

Of course, no one at State is going to heed Sherman’s advice….

Read the rest here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Archbishop of Cologne: Worried about Islamic terror? Remember that Christianity cost people’s lives in the past

Muslim cleric: “Islam was spread by the sword…Allah’s true religion should be spread by the sword”

Nora Patterson former Democrat and Planned Parenthood Board Member running for Florida Senate

/in , , , , , /by
nora patterson at opening of pp facility in sarasota

Nora Patterson (sixth from the left) at ribbon cutting of largest Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Florida, located in the City of Sarasota.

Career politician Nora Patterson has filed to run for the Florida Senate in District 23. Patterson will be running against Florida State Representatives Ray Pilon and Greg Steube and former Florida State Representative Doug Holder in the Republican primary in Sarasota County, Florida.

Patterson is a long time supporter and former President of the Board of Directors of the largest Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Florida, located in Rosemary District, a minority area in North Sarasota County.

In 1998, when running for the Sarasota City Commission, Rod Thompson from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that Patterson “has served as president of the board of directors for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Florida” … and she is “very much a supporter of Planned Parenthood.”

john and nora patterson

John and Nora Patterson at the March 2013 Planned Parenthood annual dinner. Source: Gulfshore Media, LLC.

In June, 2006 Patterson, with her husband John who is a partner with Shutt & Bowen, LLP law firm, attended a Planned Parenthood fundraiser. Sarasota Magazine reported on the Ruby Gala and wrote:

At the Ruby gala, big names were everywhere: Cornelia Matson in regal purple, Lee Peterson, Nancy Reinheimer, Betty Schoenbaum, Anita Holec, Caren Lobo, Flori Roberts,Leila Gompertz-too many to name. And husbands galore! Many politicos-Mayor Mary Ann Servian, former Mayor Mollie Cardamone, Commissioner Ken Shelin, School Board members John Lewis and Carol Todd, County Commissioner Nora Patterson and Betty Castor. Alex Sink, and other candidates for office were also there.

In 2007 Sarasota County voted for an $8 million bond to help fund a new Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

While a Sarasota County Commissioner Patterson was the only one to vote to continue using county taxes to fund Planned Parenthood. Steven Ertlet from LifeNews.com in 2008 reported:

Sarasota County in Florida has cut the money it sends to a local Planned Parenthood abortion business. Officials, citing poor economic conditions and the need to better balance the city budget, removed the second $12,500 of the original $25,000 allocated for Planned Parenthood family planning programs.

[ … ]

Nora Patterson was the only member of the commission to vote to retain the Planned Parenthood funding. The county gave the abortion center a $30,000 grant in 2007 and $28,000 in 2006.

Zac Anderson from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports, “Patterson is viewed as a moderate on a number of issues. She is a former Democrat who supports abortion rights ‘up to a certain point in the pregnancy’ and once served as president of the board of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Florida, although she noted her board stint was before the local affiliate performed abortions.” [Emphasis added]

Patterson’s efforts to distance herself from Planned Parenthood is misrepresenting the fact that she has consistently supported abortions, and the funding thereof, using Sarasota tax dollars ever since she left as President of Southwest Florida Planned Parenthood.

Stephanie Armour from the Wall Street Journal reports:

Three Planned Parenthood Federation of America clinics in Florida were ordered to stop performing second-trimester abortions after an investigation found they didn’t have the proper licenses, the state Agency for Health Care Administration said Wednesday.

The investigation also found one clinic that wasn’t keeping proper logs relating to fetal remains, according to the agency. The state may take additional actions, including administrative sanctions, against the clinics.

“Licenses are in place to protect the patient from unscrupulous operators and the state of Florida will ensure every facility is held accountable for its actions,” the agency said in a news release.

[ … ]

Florida Gov. Rick Scott last month ordered an investigation of Planned Parenthood clinics in the state following an antiabortion group’s release of undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the procurement of fetal tissue for research following abortions.

Perhaps Sarasota County voters should judge Nora Patterson on the company she keeps? That company being Planned Parenthood, and the industrial complex that makes a profit off of baby body parts.

Nora Patterson has been a loyal soldier in the war against the innocent and unborn.

RELATED ARTICLES:

4 Ways the Senate Could End Taxpayer Funding of Planned Parenthood

What the New York Times Didn’t Tell You About the Planned Parenthood Video Analysis

Black Pastors Demand Smithsonian Remove Planned Parenthood Founder’s Bust

‘Planned Parenthood Is Flailing’: Bobby Jindal Fights Back After Louisiana Sued for Terminating Medicaid Contract

The Feminist War on Family Science

Syrians instead of Americans are receiving life-changing scholarships

/in , , , /by

According to at least 60 colleges around the country who are involved in tagging Syrians to receive the millions of dollars in free education and boarding, it was pressure from the students that made them do it.

When one thinks of most college students these days, you don’t envision many with a grasp on world affairs, rather what comes to mind are the “people on the street” interviews which reveal this group to have a lack of understanding of simple things like, “Who is our vice-president, or What war did we fight for our independence?”

But, supposedly graduate students, student governments, and regular run-of-the-mill students are reported to have pushed for the colleges and universities to give scholarships to Syrian refugees. I’m not buying that.

What makes more sense is the involvement of a non-profit group called the IIE Syria Consortium for Higher Education in Crisis who is pushing a campaign called the “No Lost Generation.”

According to their website the Syrian project was started in 2012 at the Clinton Global Initiative. Its original partners are,

“Institute for International Education (IIE), Jusoor, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and the U.S. Department of State joined by the Global Platform for Syrian Students, Kaplan Test Prep International, and the University of California, Davis.”

It goes on further,

“The Consortium provides emergency support to Syrian university students and professors, as they will be so urgently needed to help rebuild Syria.”

It is highly unlikely these students will return to their country of Syria after receiving post-graduate, masters and doctorate degrees from our most prestigious universities. Instead they will inhabit the few high-paying jobs that are available in Obama’s economy and will have essentially killed the aspirations of some other truly deserving American who has studied all of his/her life in order to attempt to live the ever dwindling American dream.

According to Elizabeth Graddy who is the vice provost of academic and faculty affairs at The University of Southern California,

“A university with the stature and profile of USC must ensure that students and scholars of all backgrounds are afforded the opportunity to be part of a culture of academic excellence,”

She continued,

“Our participation in the IIE Syria Consortium speaks to our commitment to the public good and to our status as a global university by assisting those whose educations have been hindered by turmoil and warfare.”

Since when do American Universities carry the responsibility to educate students “globally”? I wonder if the parents of the American USC students even consider the fact they fork out the big bucks for their children to go to this school, only to turn around and have it award scholarships to non-Americans who will take careers right out from under their kids in the future.

I guess this kind of multicultural, open-borders talk isn’t surprising coming from someone in a leading academic role of one of our higher institutions for learning, but is there any possibility these schools could actually help Americans achieve their dreams?

Not all colleges are bending to the pressure from their students. According to The Spokesman Review,

“At least one college, though, questions whether it’s legal to earmark financial aid for Syrian students. The University of Colorado Boulder rejected a petition asking to create scholarships for Syrian students, saying it would violate a federal law banning discrimination based on national origin. The school says it already offers other financial aid to help international students, including Syrians.”

The article goes on further to explain how the colleges who are offering the scholarships are being more lax on their English language requirements and are moving from a standardized test to an online interview, often allowing the foreign student to scan copies of their transcripts when the original can’t be found.

This seems to expedite the means of getting the Syrian student onto American soil, and sounds very much like our Department of Homeland Security’s vetting system, a simple interview.

If its one thing Obama has definitely done in his tenure, it would be making sure Americans are the last in line. This includes our veterans, tax-paying citizens, our needy and impoverished, and now college students. Maybe the parents who are funding these institutions should start demanding things of their own and start putting pressure on the academic leaders to supply Americans with opportunities first.

States Sue Obama over Transgender Bathroom Mandate by Ben Johnson

/in , , , , /by

AUSTIN, Texas (LifeSiteNews) – Eleven states will sue the Obama administration over a controversial federal guidance requiring public schools and universities to allow transgender students to use the restrooms, showers, and overnight accommodations of the opposite biological sex.

The states filing the lawsuit include Texas, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The lawsuit accuses the Obama administration of turning “educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the multistate legal action during a press conference this afternoon.

The Obama administration’s guidance requires schools to give anyone who identifies as transgender access to hotel rooms or dorm rooms, locker rooms, and restroom facilities used by the opposite sex. The Obama administration says this is necessary for transgender people – who account for 0.3 percent of the U.S. population – to feel “safe,” but opponents say it exposes women to the advances of sexual predators who will use the law for their own ends.

Schools that fail to comply could be deemed guilty of violating Title IX, a 1972 law written to prevent discrimination against biological women. Nothing in that law refers to transgender status or gender identity.

Although the Obama administration’s guidance does not have the force of law, it holds the implicit threat of withholding billions of dollars in federal education funding from needy schools if it is not implemented.

“In President Obama’s final drive to fundamentally transform America, he has pushed aside the concerns of parents and schools, the privacy and safety of students, and ignored the boundaries of his constitutional power,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “We commend Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and these 10 other states for resisting the president’s locker room and bathroom decree that sacrifices the privacy and safety of children.”

Many of the plaintiffs cited legal and constitutional protections that constrain the federal government from setting local school policy.

“School policies should be determined by individual states, educators and parents – not dictated by a presidential decree,” said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in a statement.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery saw it as another example of the president legislating by executive fiat. “Our office has consistently opposed efforts like this to take away states’ rights and exclude the people’s representatives from making these decisions, or at a minimum being able to engage in a notice and comment period under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA),” he said.

Read more.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Is America bored with protecting its girls and women?

Putting the brakes on ‘fundamental transformation’

When will public opinion turn against the Left’s efforts to force ‘transgender rights’ on Americans?

Glenn Beck: Fooled by Facebook?

/in , , /by

In the wake of reports that Facebook censors conservative voices, media figure Glenn Beck met with company chairman Mark Zuckerberg and emerged from the meeting, as he put it, “convinced that Facebook is behaving appropriately and trying to do the right thing.” Nothing to see here, move along. Unfortunately, this is nonsense.

Beck admits in his article on this subject, “I am not an expert on data or AI or algorithms.” Neither am I. But the Facebook censorship in the news isn’t about artificial intelligence but human intelligence — and its biases. In fact, the focus on technology could be (I’m not implying this is the case with Beck) an effort at Machiavellian misdirection: “Watch what the machine is doing, watch the machine, so you don’t see the man behind the curtain.”

I’ll get right to the point. Fraudbook employs a group of young journalists, known as “news curators,” who are empowered to manage the algorithmic results and “refine” what qualifies for the site’s “Trending Topics” section. As company vice president of search Tom Stocky put it, the curators “audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources.”

So already evident is a Fraudbook deception: the Trending Topics section is supposed to reflect “popularity,” not politically correctness. Who decides what constitute “real world events”? What is a “junk” topic and who defines such? Should “duplicate topics” be disregarded if that duplication reflects trends and popularity? Why should “insufficient sources” disqualify a story, given that great breakthroughs — in science and news — often begin with one person’s endeavors? (When the story becomes well known, or “popular,” other journalists investigate the matter and separate fact from fiction; this can’t happen if it’s suppressed in the first place.) And while no one wants hoaxes promoted, we could even wonder how often incredible but true stories are labeled hoaxes by credulous or biased curators.

And who are these people empowered to decide who is an unreal-world, junky, topic-duplicating, insufficiently-sourced, possible hoaxer? Gizmodo.com, which broke the recent Fraudbook story, tells us they are “a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the ‘trending’ module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site.”  LOL, c’mon, Glenn, are you gonna let these people spit down your back and tell you it’s rainin’? While tech workers are notoriously liberal, as the statistics here show, journalism majors from “Ivy League or private East Coast universities” make them look like William F. Buckley2. Fact: giving people the power to “refine” news is synonymous with human bias entering the equation.

And you cannot give young, hardcore liberal journalists from “elite” schools that power without a strong liberal bias entering the equation.

Of course, the nature of biases is that people generally aren’t aware, at least not fully, of their biases. Just consider a Guardian defense of Fraudbook. The news organ interviewed an ex-Fraudbook curator who challenged Gizmodo’s report and related, writes the paper, “that newsworthiness was determined by how often a story appeared on a list of trusted news outlets including this publication [the Guardian], the New York Times and the BBC.” Are you getting this, Glenn?

That the ex-employee and Guardian consider this exculpatory of Fraudbook tells the tale: they’re so oblivious to their own biases they consider left-wing, mainstream-media news sources “unbiased” arbiters of newsworthiness. Obviously, if you use leftist entities to “refine” your algorithmic results, you’ll get Al Gore-rhythmic results.

So as Gizmodo put it, “In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation.” Without a doubt. Liberal journalists censoring the news? Check. Institutional guidelines elevating supposed real-world events and disqualifying supposed junk? Check. Reliance upon other left-wing sources to determine real-world quality, junkiness and newsworthiness, creating a liberal echo chamber? Check. Fraudbook’s trending team couldn’t be more like a traditional newsroom if it tried.

So while a selling point of big social media is that it’s a democratic arena in which “the people” determine what’s seen and heard, it’s instead more like professional wrestling circa 1980: certainly fake but still claiming authenticity. Of course, Fraudbook has a right (at least under our system, as opposed to the statist one Zuckerberg is working to visit upon us) to adopt whatever policies it wishes. But how about some truth in advertising? Don’t claim to be presenting merely what’s “popular.”

Beck should also note that Fraudbook has been caught censoring news time and again. As the Gatestone Institute wrote in February, “It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.” Even more damning, at a UN development summit in New York in September, Zuckerberg met with German chancellor Angela Merkel. “As they sat down,” continued Gatestone, “Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.”

And I’m sure Merkel would describe Zuckerberg as someone who was “humble, open, and listened intently,” which, by the way, are the precise words Beck used to describe the Fraudbook figures (including Zuck) he met with. Zuck told Merkel what she wanted to hear, which happened to be the truth; and Zuck told Beck what he wanted to hear, which happened to not be. Zuck is concerned about making money and Fraudbook’s stock price, you see.

Having said this, I doubt Zuck is fully aware of the news curators’ shenanigans. Again, people, liberals especially, are often blithely unaware of emotionally satisfying biases woven into organizations. Stories of Fraudbook censorship of conservatives are legion, however. And while it involves not censorship but an effort at undermining, I have one myself.

Aside from my syndicated pieces, I write exclusive news/commentary articles for The New American (TNA), which has both a website and hard-copy magazine. And as many sites do, TNA has Fraudbook’s “Like” button at the top of every article; it indicates how many Fraudbook users read, liked the piece and chose to click the button. Well, for more than a year and ending only about a year ago, I and members of TNA’s staff noticed a strange and consistent phenomenon: likes would accumulate on a piece and then “poof!” they’d disappear with the counter having been dialed back to zero. This happened consistently across all TNA articles; in one case, one of my pieces had 30,000 likes before they were sent to the gulag.

One might consider this a glitch, but I never observed the phenomenon at any liberal/mainstream-media site. And why does it matter? Because likes are a good metric for not just popularity but also level of readership, and people are influenced by what’s popular. Make an article’s content appear unread and unpopular and people are more likely to dismiss it as a fringe view.

I always assumed, and this accords with Gizmodo’s findings, that the like-button manipulation was the work of one or two rogue (and petty) employees — who were operating in a liberal organization that would turn a blind eye to such shenanigans. Yet Beck’s thoughts are different. In a further glowing endorsement of Fraudbook, he was quoted in a May 19 Time piece as saying about his meeting with the company’s representatives, “I thought it was great. I thought they were sincere. And as I was leaving, I thought: ‘What company has done that with conservatives?’ Especially a media company.” That’s what he thought, alright. And here’s what I think: that Facebook has two faces, and one of them is seen only by big names that Zuck et al. can use for photo-ops and public-relations purposes.

And that’s likely what happened with you, Mr. Beck. You found Zuck and Company cordial — they just find you useful.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

What Does ‘Keep It in the Ground’ Really Mean?

/in , , , /by

In 2010, Molly Eagen gave herself a challenge: For 100 days the Minneapolis resident would try to live without oil.

Eagen, an architecture student at the time, took the challenge to understand “peak oil,” the flawed idea propagated in the early part of this century that the world would soon run out of oil. (The shale revolution later shot that theory to pieces.) “I knew the issues,” she told Minnesota Monthly. “But it wasn’t real to me.”

Eagen bought and grew locally-grown food, walked or biked everywhere, and limited herself to only the daily amount of water and electricity she could hypothetically collect from the sky (even though oil is rarely used to generate electricity in modern-day America). As part of her research, she expanded on this EIA diagram on U.S. petroleum flow and added where it goes in our daily lives. It detailed how vital petroleum is to productive, comfortable, safe and healthy lifestyles in terms of transportation, food, water, health and energy.

Sustainable living in a “post-oil world”: Molly Eagen at TEDxUMN Salon 2011

Now, take the idea of oil deprivation and expand it to all fossil fuels: oil plus natural gas and coal.

This far-out notion is going mainstream in the environmental movement. Declaring that we should “keep it in the ground,” activists have gone from opposing oil pipelines like Keystone XL and outlawing fracking to pushing for an end to all fossil fuel use – with little thought about the ramifications.

Imagine living without fossil fuels–waking up in the pre-dawn morning and squinting in the dark as you stumble to the bathroom for something to ease a throbbing headache, only to be disappointed when you open the medicine cabinet.

Little artificial light, no aspirin, and little clean water to wash it down. These are three of the untold comforts of modern life that we would lose if we gave up fossil fuels.

The “keep it in the ground” chorus has been growing.

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and founder of 350.org, is one of the main promoters, declaring, “We have to keep 80 percent of the fossil-fuel reserves that we know about underground.” He wrote in The Nation: “Fossil fuels are the problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.”

Throw in the big environmental groups. Greenpeace is calling for a “revolution against fossil fuels,” and the Sierra Club—with its Beyond Oil, Beyond Natural Gas, and Beyond Coal campaigns–has been pushing this far-fetched idea since at least 2014. Maybe they should call their campaigns “Beyond Progress.”

The message has driven followers of these groups to take action. Federal offshore energy lease auctions are usually mundane events, but in March, protestors unsuccessfully tried to shout one down in New Orleans. In 2015, “kayaktivists” took to Puget Sound to protest Arctic Ocean energy development. Ironically without oil, the flotilla of kayaks—made from petrochemicals and transported on the rooftops of gasoline-burning vehicles—wouldn’t have existed.

The cry has hit the universities with coordinated student movements calling for universities to divest their endowments of fossil fuel company stocks.

Rarely known for their intellectual heft, celebrities and presidential candidates haven’t been able to resist the siren song of a catchy slogan. The Guardian convinced actors to read poems for the newspaper’s anti-fossil fuel campaign. On the campaign trail, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gone so far as calling for banning hydraulic fracturing and stopping all future coal, oil, and natural gas development on federal lands. He has even co-sponsored legislation titled the “Keep It in the Ground Act.”

In Washington, D.C., after years of taking credit for increases in oil and natural gas development, President Barack Obama has embraced the cause and their language.  When he vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline he declared, “We’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.”

The president is certainly willing to do his part by having his administration advance all sorts of anti-fossil fuel policies.

There is EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other anti-coal regulations as well as proposed unnecessary regulations on methane. The Interior Department issued a moratorium on coal leases on federal lands, pushed more offshore energy regulations, pushed tough oil and natural gas development regulations on federal lands, blocked energy development off the Atlantic Coast, and has made it nearly impossible to explore for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean. And these anti-energy measures are just the tip of the iceberg.

Apartment windows' lights going on and off.

What Does “Keep It in the Ground” Look Like?

What would it mean to “keep it in the ground?” What would life be like if we took McKibben’s declaration seriously and went farther than Molly Eagan’s experiment by giving up oil, natural gas and coal?

There are a few things that would happen. We’d need a lot more candles (made from tallow or animal fat and not petroleum like most are) lying around the house.

MORE FROM ENERGY

These 10 Power Plants Produce the Most Electricity in America
The Next President ― and the Internet’s Third Wave

STEVE CASE

According to the Energy Information Administration, coal and natural gas generate two-thirds of our electricity. Renewables—wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and hydroelectric—collectively produce only 13%. Replacing fossil fuel electric generation capacity with renewables would cost $2.5 trillion, according to energy expert Vaclav Smil. But reliability is priceless, so even this does not capture the true cost of such a transition. If solar and wind were forced to fill in the gap, these resources are intermittent and therefore less reliable, so we would have daily power outages when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.

We would be walking or biking a lot, since there would hardly be any gasoline to use, and not enough corn ethanol to make up the difference. Perhaps we would see the return of horse and carriages, but then we’d have a different type of pollution problem.

But what about electric cars? With two-thirds of electricity generation gone, it’d be hard to power those cars, and as you see later on, green technology wouldn’t exist without fossil fuels.

But it’s more than obvious things like electricity and transportation fuels. Fossil fuels are deeply integrated into modern everyday life. “The U.S. and all prosperous countries are utterly dependent on fossil fuels every moment of the day,” Texas Public Policy Institute Senior Fellow Kathleen Hartnett White told me in an e-mail interview. “The food, services, and goods this fossil-fueled energy systems now daily delivers would be unimaginable to our ancestors one hundred years ago.”

Abandoning fossil fuels would be like going into a time machine. Here’s a sketch of how things would be less comfortable and less healthy. Let’s start with a case study across the Atlantic.

Europe as an Energy Disaster Story

In the wake of the 2011 tsunami that struck Japan and led to the Fukishima nuclear power plant meltdown, Germany moved to shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022. At the same time, it has also pushed for renewable wind and solar to replace coal power—the energiewende.

Germany’s goal is boosting renewable power to 45% of generating capacity by 2025. Between 2003 and 2015, Germany increased wind and solar generation by 148.5 terawatt-hours. Both coal-generation and natural gas generation fell by around 10%.

But the energiewende has a dark side–literally.

Energy costs have gone through the roof, making German industry less competitive globally. The German newspaper Handelsblatt didn’t pull any punches in describing the harm done in an article titled “How to Kill an Industry.”

Losers include laid-off workers in these industries, but also millions of ordinary consumers. Their utility bills have skyrocketed, largely driven by subsidies for eco-friendly fuels. As much as the transition creates new jobs building wind turbines, farming biofuels or installing solar panels on rooftops, the changes are cutting a deep swathe through other parts of the economy. Germany’s “green” revolution has a dark shadow.

Workers in Germany are feeling a similar fate to U.S. workers who have been hurt by attacks on coal-fired generation:

Thousands of workers have already been let go, disproportionately hitting communities in Germany‘s rust belt that are already struggling with blight. RWE has cut 7,000 jobs since 2011. At E.ON, the work force has shrunk by a third, a loss of over 25,000 jobs.

Manufacturing has been so disrupted that German manufacturer Siemens moved its natural gas turbine business to North Carolina.  It is similarly unsurprising that more and more “German” cars are now being built in America.

(Ironically, cheap, abundant natural gas produced in the United States has drawn investment from German companies like BASF.)

Crossing the North Sea, the United Kingdom is seeing its own energy catastrophe as a result of running away from reliable fossil fuels.

The U.K.’s steel industry, already hard hit by declines in world steel demand and falling prices, has also been hit by high energy costs. It too is facing factory shutdowns and massive job losses.

The U.K. is legally bound to generate 15% of its energy demand from renewable sources by 2020. But it hasadditional mandates that require electricity producers to supply a portion of the electricity from renewable sources as well as price-hiking renewable energy subsidies.

This has resulted in the U.K. having the highest industrial electricity prices in the European Union, according to the Energy Intensive Users Group. Electricity accounts for 20% to 40% of steel production costs, according to the World Steel Association. Put these together with slumping global steel prices and the U.K. is facing a crisis of shuttered steel mills that threatens massive jobs losses and could upend communities.

In both Germany and the U.K., these pains only come from a fractional decrease in fossil fuel use. Imagine the human and economic costs from keeping all fossil fuels in the ground?

The Poor Will Bear the Brunt

Abandoning fossil fuels disproportionately hurts the poor. According to an American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity analysis of federal data, households in the U.S. making less than $30,000 annually spend 23% of their after-tax income on energy. Households making more than $50,000 annually spend only 9% of their after-tax income on energy–primarily electricity and gasoline.

Eliminating fossil fuels amounts to a massive regressive tax, as reduced electricity and gasoline supply results in price spikes that hurt the poor the most.

Again, Europe shows us this bleak future.

Robert Bryce, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, looked at energy markets after the European Union (EU) launched its first cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions in 2005.

From 2005 to 2015, Spain “more than doubled its production of electricity from wind” and increased solar production from 5.3 gigawatts to 13.7 terawatts (a 5000% increase!). Meanwhile, Spain’s residential electricity prices rose by 111% from 2005 to “more than twice the average residential price in the United States.” Industrial rates rose 84%.

While renewable generation skyrocketed, abandoning cheap and plentiful fossil fuels meant higher energy costs for Europeans.

Spain’s residential electricity prices rose by 111% from 2005 to 2014, France’s rose 42%, Germany’s rose 78%, and the U.K.’s rose 133%. Overall, the EU’s rose by 63%.

Germany’s situation led the magazine Der Spiegel to editorialize that “electricity is becoming a luxury good in Germany” and lament:

Germany’s aggressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power has come with a hefty pricetag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor.

“Perhaps one million homes in Germany now can no longer afford electric service at rates that are two-three times higher than average U.S. electric rates. Similar impacts occur in England where the incidence of ‘winter deaths’ has significantly risen,” explained Kathleen Hartnett White of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

States like New York, California and Oregon think the EU’s energy policies are great. But the Manhattan Institute’s Bryce told The Daily Caller, “If they are concerned about poor and low-income constituents, they should be rethinking those mandates.”

The Material Basis for Our Society

“This is the Petrochemical Age,” Michael Wilson, Chief Scientist of the California Department of Industrial Relations, told The Associated Press in 2010. “It’s the material basis of our society essentially.”

Not only do fossil fuels offer us energy, countless products would not exist without oil and natural gas being converted into other chemical compounds. Here are a few examples.

Fossil Fuels and Farming

Beyond the agricultural use of fossil fuels to power tractors and farm machinery, natural gas is an important feedstock for fertilizer.

Plants love nitrogen. Using the Haber-Bosch process, hydrogen from natural gas is combined with nitrogen to produce ammonia that’s a key component of fertilizers. Slate’s Jonathan Mingle writes that a National Geoscience paper concluded that without ammonia-based fertilizers, the world “could sustain only 3.5 billion people.” Fossil fuels keep us from starving.

One Word: Plastics

Mr. McGuire in The Graduate was right: “There’s a great future in plastics.” Plastics are part of daily life. They’re in your kitchen cabinet, your garage, on your office desk. If you have a credit card or carry a mobile phone, plastics are with you constantly.

Without fossil fuels—specifically natural gas—you wouldn’t have plastics.

Ethane is separated from natural gas liquids and converted into ethylene at a “cracker.” This ethylene then becomes polyethylene resin which is used for everything from chairs to computer keyboards to smart phones to plastic wrap.

What makes plastics useful is they are light and strong, and with innovation we’ve seen impressive improvements. Take carbon fiber. It makes cars, planes, prosthetics, and other products lighter and stronger. But carbon fiber comes from plastic. Giving up fossil fuels breaks this innovation chain: No natural gas; no plastic; no carbon fiber; no improved products.

Pharmaceuticals

Because oil and natural gas are made of an assortment of organic materials, they can be converted into feedstock chemicals that are the basis for an assortment of drugs and health care products:

  • Aspirin
  • Anesthetics
  • Antihistamines
  • Cortisone
  • Antiseptics

Hard to ‘Go Green’ Without Fossil Fuels

The loss of products derived from fossil fuels really becomes apparent with “green” products.

Carbon fiber is five-times stronger than steel but half its weight, as well as flexible and strong. Carbon fiber along with plastics go into constructing wind turbines and solar panels.

Then there are electric cars like the ones made by Tesla. Plastic and carbon fiber parts go into each car—from the dashboard to the electric battery. And let’s not get into the need for fossil fuels to generate the electricity to power the car.

Where to Stop?

“From what energy source could we make steel, aluminum and other basic metals?” asked Hartnett White, the former chairman and commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.  “From what energy source could we produce the feedstocks and products for synthetic material for which hydrocarbons are the raw material?”

Asphalt, synthetic rubber for tires, soap, dyes, nylon, artificial joints, and insulation in your home’s walls – the list of products derived from fossil fuels goes on and on.

Back to Molly Eagen and her oil fast. At a TEDx talk, she described her daily pattern from her “self-inflicted experiment”:

I just finished up an eight-mile bicycle commute after having a typical breakfast of oatmeal and maple sugar and taking a chilly one-gallon bucket shower.

Along with spending “countless hours in the kitchen cooking foods from scratch, local ingredients that I could find in bulk,” Eagen noted that she closely monitored her water use, because in the developed world fossil fuels are used to cheaply transport and clean water. It’s a reminder that not that long ago, dirty water transported deadly diseases. According to Wired, “Cholera outbreaks in London and Newcastle in 1853 killed more than 10,000 people.”

Today, sewage treatment plants packed with plastic pipes, water filters (made from coal), and chemicals derived from oil and natural gas, and pumps powered by fossil fuels make waterborne outbreaks nearly unknown in the developed world.

Here’s where we encounter some irony. Although scarce, fossil fuels have given us abundance never before seen by humanity. Dense with energy, fossil fuels keep us warm, keep us fed, make us healthier, and keep us entertained.

Water treatment plants packed with pipes, water filters, and chemicals from fossil fuels make waterborne diseases nearly unknown.

The debate about energy shouldn’t be about where it comes from. That puts the focus wrongly on inanimate piles of stuff. The debate must be on how energy can be safely provided so that every man, woman, and child can live vibrant, fruitful, and meaningful lives.

“Keep it in the ground” wouldn’t be some green, pollution-free utopia. Instead, it would mean billions of people trapped in the cold, malnourished, sick, and living shorter, more-miserable lives.

Who wants to turn back the clock? I wouldn’t, and I doubt fossil fuel opponents would either when you really ask them.

Whether people realize it or not, this unworkable and harmful dogma would turn back the clock, force humanity to regress, and take it down an unlit path.

Government covering up Muslims infected with Tuberculosis are Migrating to America

/in , , , , , /by

tb alertFour cases of active TB reported in refugees in Indiana, here.

I was about to quit posting for the day and try to answer some emails when I spotted yet another story about TB on the rise in America and it is pretty clear that the rise is a result of the increase in the immigrant population.

In 2013 there were 100 multi-drug resistant cases of TB in the US. How many today? 80% of those were people who were born elsewhere.

Tuberculosis2-worldmap4

We have reported on the work of reporter Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart on the subject (here and here), and now here is a story at World Net Daily by Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vilet you should read. She says:

Yet there is another serious threat [in addition to terrorism—ed] to Americans not being adequately disclosed to the public by government agencies and most media outlets: the invisible invaders traveling with humans that carry bacterial, viral and fungal diseases rare or eradicated in the United States.

[….]

In 2014 I wrote three separate nationally released articles on the risks of these disease issues to alert Americans of the new threats. That same year, the Centers for Disease Control warned its own workers to expect a rise in tuberculosis and other infectious diseases in the refugees and detention centers for illegals.

But CDC, charged with protecting Americans from spread of serious disease, did not make this information public. Thus, the American public was unaware of the disease danger lurking in their communities and schools.

Continue reading here.

They will always tell you when you are over the target!

This growing story, about health risks involved with refugees permitted entry to the US even when they carry diseases or parasites, scares the you-know-what out of the leaders of the refugee industry.

In just a couple of hours (local time), there will be a protest of a TV station in Fargo, ND by refugees and their advocates claiming the station and one reporter are stoking “fears about refugees by unfairly labeling them a public health risk.”

They want the TV station to apologize.

The story, here, quotes a medical professional assuring readers that all refugees are screened for TB before entering the US!  LOL! they may be screened, but they aren’t rejected if they are positive!

We have written often over the years about the risks and costs of refugees with TB and other diseases (and mental health problems) admitted to the US. Visit our health issues category here for much much more.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Another TB shocker from Breitbart: over 200 active TB cases in Arizona began as latent TB

TB controversy continues as refugees and their advocates protest TV station in Fargo, ND

Four cases of active TB reported in refugees in Indiana!

Catholic Charities eyeing Arkansas for new resettlement site

Utica, NY: Give refugees summer jobs or pay for it later

It’s getting testy in Tennessee over states’ rights lawsuit on refugee program

Speaker Ryan complicit in Syrian migrant surge to America

/in , , , , /by

Maybe my choice of the word “complicit” is being too easy on him!

Obama and Ryan 2

Pals! And, what was that beard all about?

Writer George Rasley at Conservative HQ puts the blame on Ryan for not halting the program in that now infamous Omnibus funding bill late last year when he had the chance.  Rasley also explains in ‘Paul Ryan’s Hijra‘ that Ryan knew all along what he was doing to make it look like the Republican House was on our side when he knew full well, the Senate would do the job for him!

Nice to see the word “Hijra” getting more attention these days.

Be sure to see Richard Falknor, here at Blue Ridge Forum admonishing national security leaders, but really every one of us, to learn the ten words (first published at Gates of Vienna) that many in our woefully uneducated national security apparatus don’t even know! Go there and see if you know all ten! (Hijra is third on the list)

Back to Ryan’s Hijra where Rasley reports on the revelation yesterday (headlined at Drudge) that the Syrian refugee surge is now full steam ahead (hat tip: Cathy):

…on Monday the State Department admitted 225 Syrian Muslim “refugees”, setting a single-day record, and on Tuesday a further 80 were admitted.  [This is why you are seeing so much activity by the feds/contractors trying to find new resettlement sites—ed]

cover to my book

As our friend Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times put it, “the spike is stunning, with more people accepted Monday alone than in the entire months of January or February.”

As Dinen noted, Obama has promised to accept 10,000 refugees from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. As of Tuesday evening, the administration had approved 2,540 — an average of about 10 applications a day.

Less than 1 percent of these “refugees” are Christians, whose oppression is well documented, according to Dinen 97 percent are Sunni Muslims, the same Sunni Muslim who form the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

But, it isn’t just Obama we should blame!

In a rational world this dangerous piece of Obama’s plan to fundamentally transform America by importing jihad into our country would be stopped cold by a Republican majority in Congress.

But this is not a rational world, this is a world run by the personal whim of arrogant Washington insiders, chief among them being Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Ryan has made increasing Muslim immigration to America his special project and has steadfastly fought any attempts by conservatives to slow or stop what a large majority of American believe is an existential threat to constitutional liberty.

Ryan, as many conservatives demanded, could have included a defund in the must-pass Omnibus that would have effectively ended or temporarily halted the program.

You need to go to Conservative HQ and see how Ryan manipulated the vote to make it look like the Republican House cared about you and your security.

See all of our posts on the Syrian surge by clicking here.

And, finally for new readers, check out my book of last year ‘Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America.‘  I hadn’t been to Amazon for months and was surprised to see that there are 94 customer reviews.  Some day I’ll pull out some of the meanest comments (I bet they never even read the book!).

RELATED ARTICLES:

Spartanburg, SC Christians have run out of “vulnerable” Americans in need of help!

Congolese refugees are going to Ogden, UT, volunteers needed, but whites should not apply

Chipotle Mexican Grill ‘partners’ with refugee contractor IRC

Think about Utica, NY before you jump on the “welcoming refugees” bandwagon

Gitmo Detainees Coming to US? Not So Fast

University of South Florida: ‘Jihad U’

/in , , , /by

The Canary Mission reports:

In part 2 of our report on the University of South Florida (USF), we provide more damning examples of incendiary activities of radical students and graduates.

In addition, we give a run-down of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) USF’s nefarious 2013 BDS Resolution. We end with links to the remaining USF students making campus unsafe for pro-Israel and Jewish students.

The USF Media Group Spreading Hate

Peace House Productions is an ironically-named brainchild of 2014 USF graduate and SJP member Ahmad Saadaldin. Their  videos demonize Israel and make anti-Semitic references to a “Jewish Lobby.” They claim Jews are obsessed with money and use bribery to pass bills through congress.

On February 2, 2016 — after Florida became the fifth American state to pass a resolution condemning the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel BDS movement — Peace House produced avideo featuring SJP USF member Mahmoud Ali-Mohamed portraying the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The video — a spoof on MTV Cribs —  portrays the AIPAC actor walking around the Florida Legislature as if it were his own house. He is depicted presenting a bill and then bribing Senator Joe Negron to get it passed. The AIPAC actor holds a check for Negron with the amount “whatever you need” after which he states that “when you got money you can do whatever you want.”

The video ends with the AIPAC actor stating “I know there are a lot of problems in this state…but all your Floridians should be worried about is me, and what I want, and that’s your money.” He then “opportunistically” dresses up as a beggar in order to dishonestly solicit funds.

Another video features University of Tampa student Taylor Valentine and Ali-Mohamed, again playing AIPAC — dressed in a suit patterned with dollar signs. The AIPAC actor holds up his middle finger to the first amendment and states, “We have money, just tell us how much you need.” AIPAC is then portrayed paying off senators to pass an anti-boycott bill. Towards the end of the video, the actor says “It is not about doing what is right, it is about taking what you can when you can.”

Radical Sister and Brother Pair

Recent USF graduate sibling pair of Danya and Homam Zituni are members of numerous anti-American and anti-Israel groups including SJP, BDS, CAIR, MSA, Students for a Democratic Society and Stop FBI Repression.

In a January 2015 radio interview with WMNF.org, the Zitunis called to “keep the FBI out of mosques.” Danya had previously organized a call-in day against the FBI, to discuss “state repression” and the “persecution” of the “Arab and Muslim Americans in the United States.”

On March 17, 2015 Danya posted her intention to engage in “…good ole radical islamism/communism with my comrades.”

In a May 23, 2015 post she slammed both the US and Israel stating, “The only thing Zionists say which I absolutely cannot disagree with is ‘If you hate Israel, then you hate the United States!’”

On July 3, 2015 she participated in the burning of multiple American flags, which she called“…the largest symbol of White supremacist national oppression and imperialism.”

On social media, Homam Zituni goes by the alias “George Nasser.” He was self-described on his Twitter page (before shutting it down) as a “Marxist-Leninist. Proletarian Feminist. Aspiring revolutionary.”

He is an avid supporter of terrorist-murderer Rasmea Odeh — posting numerous times on Facebook and Twitter in praise of her. On January 27, 2015, Zituni called to prepare for an “Emergency Response to demand ‪#Justice4Rasmea” calling her a “Palestinian Hero.”

The Billboard and the BDS Campaign

In January 2013, SJP USF launched a divestment campaign, featuring an insidious and highly misleading cartoon video. The video misinformed students that USF invests in companies that make fighter jets and rockets that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) “uses against civilians in the Gaza strip.” In the video, bombs labeled “made 2 kill” are dropped on the Gaza strip, with the resulting explosions exclaiming “kaboom” and “kill!”

The campaign eventually generated a 2014 petition that SJP USF claimed reached over 10,000 student signatures.

On May 5, 2014, SJP USF was given the opportunity to present their petition to the CEO and Foundation Board Chair of USF. Following the presentation, the USF Investment Committee issued a resounding rejection of the petition. Lara Wade-Martinez, the Director of Media Relations at USF added that the matter would not be taken up again or voted on at future meetings.

SJP USF considered the Foundation’s rejection as equivalent to “silencing”. In January 2015 they purchased a large billboard near the Tampa campus. The billboard featured a person’s face with tape over the lips and demanded that the university end investment “in Israeli Apartheid.”

On January 14 2015, Zaid Dabus, the SJP USF spokesperson was interviewed by WMNF news regarding the billboard. He stated that it was a response to a meeting with the USF Foundation which “went terribly.” Dabus claimed “they killed the bill within less than 15 minutes…they [SJP] get absolutely shut out in less than 15 minutes by a group of super rich foundation members.” Dabus then falsely claimed the Palestinians are targeted based on race, “just like in South Africa.”

When the interviewer questioned the claim, asking “Palestinians can vote and be members of Knesset, and you still call it apartheid?” Dubas answered: “First and foremost I’m not an expert on the politics of that, I don’t live there, I’m not from there, I’ve haven’t come from there, I’ve never experienced that”, but that “there’s no way they have equal rights” because “people on the inside” say  “they are not allowed on the same bus.”

Other USF Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic Activity

  • On February 14, 2015, SJP USF posted a link from their Facebook to an article, stating entirely fabricated claim that “Israeli authorities usually open the floodgates to their dams in the direction of the Gaza Strip – without prior notice – in order to discharge the enormous quantities of water that had accumulated due to the heavy rains in the region.” The story was debunked by Al Jazeera. There are no dams in Southern Israel — it’s a desert.
  • In November 2014, SJP USF member Khadra Ali-Mohamed organized a campaignto condemn the National Basketball Association (NBA) for bringing an Israeli basketball club to play two pre-season games in New York. The campaign claimed the NBA would be honoring “war criminals” if they played.
  • Following the August 2014 Gaza war ceasefire, SJP USF member Omar Erchidaccused Israel on his personal blog of “systematic and indiscriminate killing.” He also likened Hamas terrorists to “freedom fighters” and praised their decision to remain armed. Erchid labeled supporters of Israel’s defensive actions in Gaza “genocide apologists” and falsely claimed that Hamas was “Firing homemade rockets into areas where there is almost no chance of casualties.”
Danya Zituni, sister of Homam Zituni (below), is a graduate of SJP USF. She is involved in a number of anti-Israel/anti-American groups. Zituni has participated in the burning of multiple American flags, expressed her desire for the collapse of the global financial system, announced on Facebook “My heroes have always killed colonizers” and supports a number of terrorists including Assata Shakur whom she calls a “sister & comrade”. [more…]
Homam Zituni, brother of Danya Zituni (above), graduated USF in 2014 where he was active in SJP, MSA and BDS. In 2013 he interned at CAIR. Zituni has referred to convicted terrorist-murderer Odeh Rasmea a “Palestinian Hero”. He describes himself on his Twitter page as a “Marxist-Leninist. Proletarian Feminist. Aspiring revolutionary.” [more…]
Yasmeen Yousef  was the president of SJP USF and has since graduated. She considers Israel a “terrorist state.” She led SJP in a divestment campaign and participated in a BDS protest to blockade a port in Tampa and prevent the unloading of Israeli goods. [more…]
Zaid Dabus was interim President for SJP USF in 2015. He lied in an interview on WMNF News saying Palestinians are targeted based on race, “just like in South Africa” and that “they are not allowed on the same bus.” [more…]
Hannan Danon is responsible for SJP USF’s hate-ridden, inaccurate social media. One such example is the ironic and hypocritical attack directed at Canary Mission — for exposing students supporting terrorist-bomber Rasmea Odeh (below). [more…]
Mahmoud Ali-Mohamed: Is a member of SJP and MSA at USF. Ali-Mohamed stars in blatantly anti-Semitic YouTube videos smearing the “Jewish Lobby”. He makes viewers believe AIPAC runs the government through bribes. If that wasn’t scary enough, Ali-Mohamed is also a Student Government Senator at USF. [more…]

canary missionABOUT THE CANARY MISSION:

The Canary Mission database was created in order to document people and groups that are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel and the Jewish people, particularly on college campuses in North America.

Canary Mission is run by students and concerned citizens motivated by a desire to combat the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses. The purpose of the website is to expose those who promote lies and attacks on Israel and the Jewish people. We pursue our mission by presenting the actions and records of individuals and organizations at the vanguard of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. By shining a light on hate group members and their activities, the public will become better informed about those involved in hate movements in their communities.

Canary Mission believes that we all have the right to know if an individual has been affiliated with movements that seek the destruction of Israel, routinely engage in anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions, and promote hatred of Jews.

Canary Mission provides freely available material gathered from publicly available sources. We have organized this information in a concise and easily searchable format for the easy access of the general public and anyone interested in tracking hate movements on college campuses.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why Are ‘Peace-Activists’ at U South Florida Rallying for a Convicted Terrorist-Murderer?