Former popular Irving Mayor, Beth Van Duyne has departed her post at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s office in Fort Worth, Texas. She has announced on social media on August 5th that she plans to run for the United States Congress, district 24, which covers parts of Dallas, Tarrant and Denton counties.
Those of us who have been following Beth’s incredible career in the City of Irving, are very excited that she has decided to announce her candidacy for the United States Congress, District 24. A person of her outstanding principles is urgently needed in Washington, even though she will be missed here at home.
Beth, started her public service as far back as some ten years ago when she worked tirelessly for building a children’s park — to help her community’s children spend their vital energy in building strong bodies so that they could better shoulder the future demands that awaits them.
Next, she ran for City Council, and later served with distinction as mayor of Irving. And when the call came from President Trump’s administration, she, characteristically, offered her much-valued services.
Now, Texas and the nation need her in Washington, and once again she is willingly answers the call for service in the United States Congress where she can be a resonant voice for principled Conservatism that has made this country the standard bearer for democracy and freedom.
Our nation today is in dire need of firm leadership, courage, and responsibility for advancing bipartisan legislation, including bills, joint, concurrent and simple resolutions in Congress. In addition, to understand the political environment and the impact of decision making on diverse groups. Beth has these qualities and one inherent ability to fundamental leadership: courage. She also is very charismatic, enthusiastic, optimistic, and passionate about America. That’s the most important quality of all.
America is a nation and an ideal, birthed by a group of visionaries that gave it the Constitution to nurture it and protect it. What makes America, America the Beautiful, more than just a blessed land is our legacy, the Constitution. Sadly, the Constitution also makes for America the Vulnerable by enshrining freedom that enables the malevolent to subvert and destroy America from within. Beth Van Duyne is an avid supporter of the United State Constitution. In fact, during her tenure as a mayor, she proved that America has only one law and that is our Constitution. On her Facebook page, the mayor wrote:
“Sharia Law Court was NOT approved or enacted by the City of Irving. Recently, there have been rumors suggesting that the City of Irving has somehow condoned, approved or enacted the implementation of a Sharia Law Court in our City. Let me be clear, neither the City of Irving, our elected officials or city staff have anything to do with the decision of the mosque that has been identified as starting a Sharia Court.”
Freedom, in all its forms, is our greatest legacy, which this nation has bravely fought many wars on many fronts to preserve against the unceasing assaults of totalitarianism of all stripes.
I applaud Van Duyne tasking and courageous decision and offer her my full support in sending her to the United States Congress. I am certain that the wise patriotic Texans of District 24 will rise and stand behind her. Although we will miss her here at home, we feel that her service in Congress fully justifies her absence from the community.
In short, America and our party are at a turning point. The reign of the rigid old Republican establishment is coming to an end by a new generation of principled conservatives. Beth Van Duyne represents this class of Republicans, destined to restore the party that stands for the best hopes of all Americans.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Amil Imanihttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAmil Imani2019-08-23 19:28:142019-08-23 19:56:52Texas: Former Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne to Run for Congress
Federal arrests of non-citizens has increased exponentially over the past two decades, and account for the majority of all federal arrests, data released by the Justice Department revealed.
Non-citizens made up 64% of all federal arrests in 2018 despite making up 7% of the U.S. population, according to Justice Department data released Thursday and reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Between 1998 and 2018, federal arrests of non-citizens grew by 234%, while federal arrests of U.S. citizens climbed 10%.
While the numbers provide credence to President Donald Trump’s argument that illegal immigration results in increased crime, immigration experts also pointed out that migrant apprehensions make up a significant portion of current federal arrests.
“Experience has taught the immigration agencies and DOJ that this works to reduce recidivism — in other words, when illegal crossers face some more severe consequence than just being sent back home, they don’t keep doing it,” Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies told the Washington Examiner.
Trump made increased immigration enforcement a hallmark goal of his administration. His efforts at beefing up border security and providing additional funding to the Customs and Border Protection have yielded satisfactory results. Federal immigration apprehensions climbed more than 50,000 from 2017 to 2018, according to the Justice Department data.
Ninety-five percent of the increase in federal arrests over the past 20 years were, in fact, due to immigration offenses, the Justice Department data found. Non-citizens accounted for 28% of all federal fraud arrests, 25% of all federal property arrests, and 24% of all federal drug arrests. The Justice Department identified the top five crimes non-citizens were most likely be prosecuted for: illegal re-entry, drugs, fraud, alien smuggling and misuse of visas.
“Opponents of immigration enforcement are obsessed with trying to establish that illegal aliens and legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans, and so, as their narrative goes, local law enforcement agencies should not cooperate with ICE and should adopt sanctuary policies,” Vaughan continued in her statement. “This is first of all not true, but is off-point and a dangerous conclusion.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2019-08-23 08:00:182019-08-23 08:05:0464% Of Federal Arrests Were Of Non-Citizens In 2018, DOJ Finds
It sure looks like it, according to a press announcement on their investigative reporting from the Thomas More Law Center yesterday entitled,
TMLC Uncovers Tax-Payer Funded Islamic Propaganda Forced On Teachers
A SPECIAL INVESTIGATIVE REPORT
ANN ARBOR, MI – The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national nonprofit public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has uncovered evidence of a well-orchestrated Islamic propaganda campaign aimed at teachers in school systems throughout Michigan and several other states.
Concerned about a two-day mandatory teacher-training seminar on Islam conducted by a Muslim consultant hired by Michigan’s Novi Community Schools District, TMLC filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the workshop.
Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Law Center, commented on the results of their investigation, “We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers.”
Moreover, during the past five years the school district has presented no teacher-training seminars focusing on Christianity, Judaism or any other religion – only Islam.
The hired Muslim consultant was Huda Essa, a resident of the Dearborn area and of Arab descent.
She appeared before the Novi teachers in a hijab, the Muslim headscarf, billing herself as an expert in “cultural competency” and “culturally responsive teaching.”
Most disappointing was the fact that of the more than 400 teachers attending the workshop, not one teacher challenged Essa’s denigration of Christianity or attacks on America.
TMLC inspected dozens of internal school documents, including audio recordings of Essa’s presentation.
The information on Islam she provided to Novi teachers was riddled with falsehoods and errors of omission that were clearly meant to deceive.
[….]
And her message extends far beyond Novi.
Essa’s client list reveals she has been spreading her “trash America first” philosophy to colleges, universities, schools and professional educator associations throughout Michigan, California, Georgia, Texas, Florida and beyond. In Michigan alone her website lists nine school districts as clients – Oakland County Schools, Ann Arbor Schools, L’Anse Creuse Public Schools, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, Roseville Community Schools, Farmington Public Schools, Dearborn Public Schools, Birmingham Public Schools and Melvindale Public Schools.
[….]
Novi’s Islamic teacher-training is just the latest example of professional Islamic indoctrinators infiltrating U.S. public schools even as Christianity has been forced out of the classroom.
“This type of infiltration amounts to an Islamic Trojan horse within our public-school systems,” Thompson said. “No other religion gets this kind of special treatment in our schools.”
Looking for something to do, see if your school district has employed Muslim consultants to ‘train’ your teachers. Maybe the TMLC would like to hear about it.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Ann Corcoranhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAnn Corcoran2019-08-23 07:17:292019-08-23 07:33:42Are Your Tax Dollars Being Spent on Islamic Indoctrination in Schools?
David Carlin: We are witnessing a cultural revolution as atheists and liberals work to destroy Christianity and replace it with a God-less worldview.
In July, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created something called the “Commission on Unalienable Rights,” the purpose of which is to “provide the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters” along with “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
The chair of the commission is Mary Ann Glendon, one of America’s leading Catholic intellectuals. She is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. What’s more, she was Pompeo’s mentor when he was a student at Harvard Law School.
Many people on the political left have objected to the creation of this commission. The expression “natural law” makes them nervous, as does the fact that an out-and-out Catholic like Glendon is its chair.
I myself am very pleased, because I hope it may serve, at least in some small way, to check the astonishing proliferation of “fundamental human rights” that we have seen in the United States in recent decades. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized a right to abortion (Roe v. Wade), a right to homosexual sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas), and a right to same-sex “marriage” (Obergefell v. Hodges). In the future, if this trend continues, it will probably recognize a right to euthanasia. And God only knows what else.
Those on the political Left have figured out a way of enacting their agenda while bypassing the democratic process. You like X and you want it to be the law of the land. But you can’t get X through Congress or state legislatures. So you decide that X is a fundamental human right, a right that cannot be negated by popular majorities.
And then you go to the U.S. Supreme Court. And if you’re lucky the Court will have a majority of liberal justices on it, and they will agree with you. And since, according to the liberal view, all fundamental human rights are implicitly contained in the U.S. Constitution (they are alluded to in the Ninth Amendment), X now becomes a Constitutional right.
If you object that you cannot find X in the Constitution, despite having read that document very carefully, you will be told that we have a “living Constitution” and that only out-of-date right-wingers read the Constitution literally.
If you reply that Justice Antonin Scalia once said, “The Constitution says what it says, and it doesn’t say something else,” you will be told that while Scalia was a fine fellow (since he was a friend of the saintly Ruth Bader Ginsburg), he was nonetheless an out-of-date right-winger whose originalism was as worthwhile as Confederate money.
The Declaration of Independence not only had a list of natural rights (equality, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness). It also had an epistemology of moral knowledge. It held that the reality of these rights was self-evident.
Now if this is our standard (let’s call it the Jefferson standard), if we say that if X is to count as a fundamental human right, X will have to be self-evidently such, then our newer rights – the “rights” to abortion, to homosexual sodomy, to same-sex “marriage,” or to euthanasia – are not rights at all; for they are far, far from self-evident. If they were self-evident rights, there would be an almost universal consensus on them.
If we were to use the Jefferson standard, only if almost every American agreed that X is a fundamental human right would the Supreme Court declare that X, despite not being mentioned in the Constitution, is one of those unenumerated rights alluded to in the Ninth Amendment.
But if we are not to use the Jefferson standard when deciding what is, and what is not, a fundamental human right, what standard are we to use? Apparently, nothing better than a majority vote of the Supreme Court. If five justices say that X is a fundamental right, X is a fundamental human right.
Now that’s just fine for many people on the political Left. For they can then multiply “fundamental human rights” and hope that their multiplications will be ratified by at least five “living Constitution” members of the Supreme Court. But for the rest of us, for people who like to think that we are living in a democratic republic that operates within the framework of a Constitution that was intended by its makers to be read literally, this potentially unlimited multiplication of fundamental rights is a disaster.
And for Christians too it’s a disaster – at least for old-fashioned Christians, who subscribe to the faith and morals of the early Church, e.g., orthodox Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. For the leftist list of fundamental human rights contains items that are quite incompatible with Christianity.
And so, when the Supreme Court declares that, for example, abortion, homosexual sodomy, same-sex “marriage,” and euthanasia are fundamental rights, it is by very clear implication also declaring that Christianity is the enemy of human rights.
We are, as I see things, in the middle of a great but slow-moving cultural revolution in the United States, as atheists and their near-atheist fellow-travelers (including religiously liberal Protestants and Catholics) attempt to destroy the traditional Christian ethic and worldview and replace it with a God-less ethic and worldview.
So far, the atheist coalition seems to be winning. Their advance, supported by the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, our leading universities, and the Democratic Party, looks unstoppable. And one of the great instruments of this advance is the idea that the leftist agenda can be enacted by the un-democratic “discovery” of more and more fundamental human rights.
Can the Glendon commission stop this advance? Probably not. But perhaps it can slow it down, giving Christians more time in which to rally their troops and fight back. In any case, the work of the commission, and the atheistic reaction to it, will be absolutely essential to watch.
“We believe this is one of the largest cases of its kind in U.S. history.” – US Attorney Nick Hanna
The FBI announced this week that over a dozen were under arrest in the U.S. and efforts were being made to find additional co-conspirators around the world in fraud schemes involving at least 32 victims.
Justice charges 80 in massive online fraud case linked to Nigerian defendants
The Department of Justice on Thursday unsealed a 252-count federal indictment charging 80 defendants, many of whom are Nigerian nationals, with conspiring to steal millions of dollars through online scams.
The indictment was unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California and was made public shortly afterauthorities arrested 14 of the defendants across the United States, with 11 of these defendants apprehended in the Los Angeles region.The majority of the defendants are outside the country, with many likely in Nigeria.
The defendants involved in the case were charged with attempting to defraud individuals of millions of dollars through the use of business email compromise (BEC) and online romance scams, in addition to other schemes meant to target the elderly.
The investigation is being led by the FBI, with each of the defendants charged with “conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to launder money, and aggravated identity theft,” according to Justice Department. Some defendants also face fraud and money laundering charges.
U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna described the scams used by the defendants during a press conference on Thursday, saying that “fraud networks now target individuals and businesses alike.”
“In the BEC scams, the fraudsters will often hack a company’s email system, impersonate company personnel, and direct payments to bank accounts that funnel money back to the fraudsters in Nigeria,” Hanna said. “In the romance scams, victims think they are developing a dating relationship, when in fact they are just being tricked into sending money to the fraudsters.”
Hanna added that “we believe this is one of the largest cases of its kind in U.S. history.”
Paul Delacourt, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said during the same press conference that losses involved in this case for victims total around $10 million. He said defendants attempted to obtain $40 million from victims.
There were at least 32 victims in the case, from the United States and other countries including Japan, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Ukraine, China, Mexico, Germany, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Delacourt said the case began in 2016 after one individual was victimized by the defendants. The two main defendants in the case are Nigerian citizens Valentine Iro and Chukwudi Christogunus Igbokwe.
And, don’t miss the Stars and Stripes story about how some of the crooks pretended to be US military personnel when they scammed hundreds of thousands from lonely women.
I know you are shaking your head and wondering who in their right mind would be so foolish to send money to a stranger they met on the internet. Well, as we have heard in previous posts on Nigerian romance scammers, these Nigerian creeps are skilled actors and preying on vulnerable and lonely people seems to come naturally to them.
Keep an eye on your elderly friends and family members and don’t let them fall for these despicable scams.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Ann Corcoranhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAnn Corcoran2019-08-23 06:51:122019-08-27 07:55:35Nigerians Arrested by FBI for Scamming Millions from Elderly and Vulnerable Women
The “sin” in question here is shirk, or the ascribing of partners unto Allah. The first verse quoted below spells this out for Muslims, so as to leave no doubt about the “unforgivability” of that sin.
“Verily, Allah does not forgive the ascribing of partners unto him (shirk), but for (sins) other than that he (can) forgive those whom he will, while he who has ascribed partners unto Allah has indeed contrived a tremendous sin” (Qur’an 4:45).
Now, notice how, in the following four verses the Qur’an itself does exactly that:
“And when they appeal unto Allah and his messenger to judge between them (at judgement day), Lo! A fraction of them are averse:
But, if right had been with them, they would have come unto him (him here could mean either Allah or Muhammad) submissively.
Is there in their hearts a disease, or did they doubt, or do they fear that Allah and his messenger should wrong them (on judgement day)? Nay, those are the wrong doers.
Verily, that saying of those who believe when summoned before Allah and his messenger to judge between them is that they say “we heard, and we obeyed,” and those are the successful ones” (on the day of judgment) (Qur’an 24: 48-51).
Note that both 4:45, and the group of 24: 48-51, are “Medina” verses, meaning that the law of abrogation, whereby many “Mecca” verses are negated by “Medina” verses, can not be applied here. Muslims have no choice but to accept this glaring contradiction.
ANALYSIS:
The 48th verse of the 4th sura (chapter) clearly states that the sin of ascribing partners unto Allah is the worst of all possible sins, the only sin that Allah can not forgive. Yet, the 48th through the 51st verses of chapter 24 in the same Qur’an has Muhammad (the messengers) sitting side-by-side with Allah to judge the souls as they pass before that divine duo. In fact, it does appear that Muhammad has actual veto power over Allah’s decisions as judgement is passed on the souls.
The verses preceding this section in the 24th sura make it clear that the topic being discussed is the “Last Judgment Day.” This is confirmed by the tafaseer (explanations) by, ibn al-Khateeb (page 433), which has been officially approved by Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the “Vatican” equivalent for Sunni Islam. Al-Khateeb adds the comment that the reason that the messenger) Muhammd) will play this role at Judgement day is because “the messenger tells nothing but the truth.” But that still begs the question as to why God would even need Muhammad’s help in judging the souls. Does Muhammad know more about what’s in peoples’ hearts than does Allah?
This interpretation (this this is “Judgement Day” at the end of time is also confirmed by the more modern and al-Azhar approved translation by Muhammad Asad (p. 606), and is accepted by virtually all Islamic scholars from the Middle Ages to the present day.
These verses in the 24th sura, then make Muhammad at least equal to Allah and also a partner unto Allah (shirk) the greatest of all sins according to 4:48!
Islam thus negates itself as a religion, because it is the most outrageous of ideologies in terms of ascribing partners unto Allah.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Barry Webbhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngBarry Webb2019-08-22 18:52:292019-08-22 18:53:44How the Qur’an Commits Its Own Greatest Sin, Polytheism
There are a lot of lies, factual errors, misrepresentations, selective history and general nonsense in the New York Times’ 1619 project that are worthy of rejection.
“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”
It is worth rejecting that slavery should be placed “at the very center” of our history. Was it a large and terrible part? Yes. It caused misery culminating in a bloody Civil War and its legacy endured through Jim Crow. But at the very center? Not the religious freedom that brought the first Pilgrims in Massachusetts? Not the idea of an upside down government that dethroned the king and put the people on the top and the government subservient (“for the people and by the people”?) That was a first in history, while slavery was a universal part of world history on every continent and among every race — both enslaving and being enslaved.
On the cover the 1619 Project, overlaying on a full-page black and white picture of a very dark ocean, are these words:
“In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”
Picking 1619 is the worst of “journalistic” cherry-picking. There was no America until 1776. Before that, Florida and other South and Southwestern areas were variously Spanish colonies, or French colonies, and finally most were British colonies — all before the American Revolution created the new nation. Slavery ran most of its life in North America when we were all British subjects, or Spanish and French subjects.
This is crucial, because all of these nations — and all of the rest of the world — were practicing slavery at this time and had from time immemorial. Slavery was part of the Asian world, a large part of the Muslim world, practiced throughout Central and South America even before the first Conquistadors arrived, and importantly for our discussion, rampant through Africa by other Africans.
Most of the slaves transported to America were not captured by white slavers as depicted in the movie Roots. That happened, but the majority were simply bought from Africans who had enslaved nearby tribes they had conquered. It was a facet of Africa like it was the rest of the world, and to call it a uniquely American evil is factually wrong and dishonest. It was — and still is — a worldwide evil.
Slavery in the United States of America ran 87 years from 1776-1863. Or in President Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago…” Just a fact, something journalists used to care about.
A common lie told today by leftists, and it is repeated in the Time’s 1619 Project by several of the writers, is that the “white men” who created the Constitution, did not see black people as fully human and not worthy of rights. This is also factually wrong. The northern colonies were packed with abolitionists — white people — who argued that this was the moment to end the atrocity of slavery, at the outset of the new nation. But there were other white people in the southern colonies, slave holders, who would not agree to form a single country to fight for freedom from British rule if emancipation were included.
It’s possible that the majority of the framers preferred to free blacks and give them rights in the newly formed country. But freedom could not be won unless all the colonies were bound together against the greatest empire on earth at the time. So the painful compromise was made to win freedom from Britain. And then, within a few generations, a bloody Civil War was fought almost entirely by white people to free the slaves. (About 90 percent of Union troops were white.)
The Times ignores this and misrepresents world history, our history and the founders and framers, by saying all of the framers saw blacks as subhuman. The publication is intent on doing this because as modern leftists they have an almost instinctive antipathy toward America and the very idea of American greatness. But more relevant to the moment, they are doing this literally to help beat Donald Trump and Republicans in 2020.
It does not require any special analytical abilities to deduce this. Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet essentially says so.
A recording of a full Times staff meeting was leaked to Slate last week, which then published a transcript of it. Baquet held this staff meeting two weeks ago to explain a coming change in coverage after the collapse of the Trump-Russia narrative.
“Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”
Pulitzers are award by like-minded leftists. Only one type of story wins those. But despite two years and virtually unlimited legal and financial resources, Mueller failed to establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election. Which essentially means those years of reporting got it wrong. But Pulitzers.
Baquet went on, and this really pulls the veil back:
“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”
But Pulitzers — unless of course they were just political accolades by fellow travelers and not about actual journalism.
Baquet:
“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well…Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”
That is, a different angle of attack on President Trump, since Trump-Russia it turns out was never really a story. The real story the Times will not tell is how we got a two-year special counsel investigation of an event that did not happen. Baquet, not knowing this would become public of course, just puts it out there openly.
“I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?”
Divided by Trump. Amazing. Baquet said the Times must “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”
“It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
“Reframing” history is just a deceptive way of saying “rewrite” history. And there is no conceivable way this does not inflame racial tensions and make us more divided. And understand, most news outlets across the country take their cue on story importance and framing from the New York Times.
The first lines of the massive project let it all hang out.
“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true…”
No. Another premise to reject that just flat wrong. Blacks did indeed fight to earn their claim to them, as did whites. But the ideals were true and right — changing support for values does not in any way alter the moral standing of the values themselves. That would be self-evident to a non propagandist. Those ideas simply were imperfectly implemented, as mentioned above.
Our nation’s story actually is one of consistently moving closer to those ideals, striving through emancipation in the 19th century to the civil rights movement of the mid 20th century. Blacks have been fully equal to whites under the law in this country for 50 years.
But the Times will never tell that story.
Baquet told his staff that over the next two years, the Times will “teach” its readers to see race everywhere, to view every issue through race. Stories will strive to “reframe” each issue through the lens of race. The next two years just coincidentally happen to cover the entire presidential election cycle.
And that brings us to the final premise to reject: That the New York Times is a news organization. It is not. And it has not been for a long while. But it took its own mask off now. It is virtually self-described now as an anti-American, leftist, Democratic propaganda outlet — with some news stories sprinkled in.
No independent-minded person should think otherwise.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Rod Thomsonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRod Thomson2019-08-22 16:39:082019-08-24 07:39:20Rejecting Every Premise Of The New York Times 1619 Project
You may think that Islamists and neo-Nazis/white supremacists are complete opposites. After all, they’re willing to take physical violence against each other to the streets. Both use the threat of the other one as a recruiting tool to boost numbers.
But their bitter enmity is surface level. When we look at the views of Islamists and neo-Nazis/white supremacists — what we will call for simplicity, the Far Right — we start to see the similarities.
For groups that hate each other, Islamists and the Far Right tend to talk about a lot of the same things.
Here are just a few of the views they share:
They hate gay people
They hate democracy
They hate Jews
They think women should stay at home to bear and raise children
They support use of extreme violence against their enemies
They are both obsessed with group identity
They are both obsessed with masculinity and the concept of “honor”
These are not accidental similarities. And, in truth, they are not different movements doing different things: They are fundamentally the same idea, just expressed in different cultures.
Before the French Revolution, societies were governed by monarchies, who ruled in accordance with the principles of their particular religion.
They may have claimed Divine right, or simply ruled in the name of a particular faith. The state was considered an extension of the family, with the King or the Emperor’s family at the head of it. He had a right to rule, just as a man had the right to rule over his household.
There was no concept of sovereignty of the people or universal rights or any of those ideas. There was certainly no separation of religion and state.
If you are interested in how societies transitioned into the ones we have now, see Clarion Project’s series on the First Amendment.
Since the late 18th century, a series of revolutions, starting in America, Haiti and France, brought democracy to the world. With it, they brought the concept of civil rights, separation of religion and state, rights for women, an end to slavery and a host of other positive transformations.
Both the Far Right and Islamists seek to reverse those gains. The objective of any genuinely neo-Nazi program is to empower a strong and powerful leader to create a powerful authoritarian state.
This project, it is thought, will bring honor and victory to the community, instead of the liberalism and decadence of the modern secular world.
Its misogyny and its broader political program go hand-in-hand: The power of the male in the home mirrors the power of the state in general — and the power of the state brings honor of the people.
It is violent machismoism taken to its ultimate conclusion and extreme.
Both Islamists and the Far Right look to the Crusades for their example. Online images of knights, in particular the Knights Templar, are used by the Far Right; Islamists glorify Saladin, the Crusaders’ nemisis.
The reason Islamists and the neo-Nazis both use rhetoric and symbolism from the Middle Ages and other pre-modern periods is that they see themselves in that context.
They view all of recent history as one giant mistake – a mistake that needs to be rectified through the point of a sword.
Perhaps this is why Vona Gábor, the head of the Hungarian Far-Right party Jobbik, praised Islam as a bulwark against globalization in 2018.
The connection of the Third Reich to Islamist extremism is well documented. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem personally met Hitler, and raised units of Muslim soldiers to fight for the Nazis. Muslim Brotherhood founder and leader Hassan al-Banna was so enamored of Hitler that he had Mein Kampftranslated into Arabic.
The Islamist/neo-Nazi position takes same attitude to the world, just reflected through different cultural lenses. Once this is understood, combating both positions at the same time becomes a whole lot simpler.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Clarion Projecthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngClarion Project2019-08-22 07:26:392019-08-22 07:36:23Islamists and Neo-Nazis Are Not Opposites – On the Contrary
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2019-08-22 07:01:302019-08-22 07:02:39VIDEO: Hong Kong — A Catholic Protest?
“Denying visit to duly elected members of Congress is not consistent with being an ally. And denying millions of people freedom of movement or expression or self determination is not consistent with being a democracy.”
The reason why the freedom of movement of any “Palestinian” is restricted is because of “Palestinian” genocidal incitement and celebration of the jihad murder of Israeli civilians. They had nothing to say about that.
“Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar denounce Israel’s travel restrictions during press conference,” by Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News, August 19, 2019:
Standing side by side on Monday, Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar forcefully denounced the controversial decision by the Israeli government to deny them entry into the country, casting the travel restrictions as part of a broader effort to suppress voices of dissent against the treatment of Palestinians in occupied and disputed territories.
“Netanyahu’s decision to deny us entry might be unprecedented for members of Congress,” Omar said during a press conference, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “But it is the policy of his government when it comes to Palestinians. This is the policy of his government when it comes to anyone who holds views that threaten the occupation.”
“The only way to preserve unjust policy is to suppress people’s freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of movement,” Omar added….
The Israeli government did offer to let Tlaib in on humanitarian grounds to visit her 90-year-old Palestinian grandmother on the condition that she did not promote a boycott of Israel. Tlaib initially agreed, but later rejected the offer, saying she would not make the visit under “oppressive conditions.”
Getting visibly emotional, Tlaib said she made the decision to not accept the conditional travel permit after consulting with her grandmother and other family members.
“Through tears, at three o’clock in the morning, we all decided as a family that I could not go until I was a free, American United States Congresswoman coming there, not only to see my grandmother but to talk to Palestinian and Israeli organizations that believed that my grandmother deserves human dignity as much as anyone else does,” she said….
Omar suggested the travel restrictions contradict longstanding beliefs by Republican and Democratic administrations that Israel is one of America’s most steadfast allies and the sole true democracy in the Middle East.
“Denying visit to duly elected members of Congress is not consistent with being an ally,” she said. “And denying millions of people freedom of movement or expression or self determination is not consistent with being a democracy.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2019-08-22 06:27:162019-08-22 06:52:07Reps. Tlaib, Omar claim Israel is neither an ally nor a democracy
Passenger attacks flight attendant on Transavia Airline Paris-Tunis flight after finishing his prayer that blocked the cockpit and bathrooms.
Plane was rerouted and delayed in Nice, France, where he resisted arrest, yelling “Allahu Akbar.”
The face of religious entitlement.
Somehow his peaceful religion of peace prayer didn’t leave him feeling kind and magnanimous toward the Infidels. That most learned of imams, Pope Francis, needs to find this man and explain to him how “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
“Narrated AbuSa’id al-Khudri: The Prophet (ﷺ) said: Nothing interrupt prayer, but repulse as much as you can anyone who passes in front of you, for he is just a devil.” (Sunan Abu Dawud 2.329.719)
On August 7, 2019, radio host Sara Carter interviewed former Miss Iraq, Sarah Idan, about the backlash, including death threats, that she faced after posting online a photograph with Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman, at the 2017 Miss Universe Pageant. Because of the backlash over this photo, Sarah Idan’s family was forced to flee Iraq.
During this interview, Idan described how she had been taught as a child that Americans and Israelis were “evil” and how this inculcation was reversed by her witnessing the virtuous behavior of American soldiers in Iraq.
Idan explained how she later served as an interpreter for the American military, risking her life and ostracizing from her community. She not only helped U.S. soldiers navigate the difficult terrain of the jihadi insurgency but inspired her own family to understand the importance of fighting against it.
Over time, Idan also gained a great respect for Israel, leading her to recently address the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 41st Session where she denounced the human rights violations of Hamas, the antisemitism taught in Islamic nations, and biased media that enables both.
During her interview, Idan stated that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “does not represent me as a Muslim and does not represent millions of Muslims in the Middle East…in Arab countries we call her the Muslim Brotherhood.” This statement precipitated an ongoing battle between Idan and Omar on Twitter which aptly illustrates the difference between these two American Muslim women.
Idan exemplified that difference when she tweeted a response to Omar stating: “When you @IlhanMN come to my State, My City, My zip code right here in CA & accept an award from CAIR [the Council on American Islamic Relations], a Muslim brotherhood affiliated organization, IT IS my business!” She added, “First was the Middle East, then Europe & now the USA. I fled from the same ideology you’re trying to export here.”
Why would Sarah Idan want people to know that Omar doesn’t “represent” her? Why would she call out Omar for fundraising for CAIR? And, what exactly is the ideology that she fled?
On a subsequent media interview on i24 News, Idan described what she fled as “the ideology of trying to push Islam to make it the ruling system in the country.”
Of the Muslim Brotherhood, Idan stated, “…they’re jihadis, and they have this ideology that they want to control the world.”
Perhaps Idan is aware of the overwhelming evidence pointing toward CAIR’s activities as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and the designated terrorist organization Hamas.
Still, though, what about Ilhan Omar would lead the former Miss Iraq to have such a strong disdain for her behavior? Here are just a few examples:
“When I grew up in Iraq I always felt alone and felt misunderstood and I couldn’t talk about many issues but here you have freedom…,” Idan said on her interview with Sara Carter.
The question now is whether other Muslims in America will join Idan in pointing out the worrisome anti-Semitic and anti-American behavior of Omar, or will they will remain silent and leave Idan with the same loneliness she faced in Iraq? Will they side with Omar, CAIR, and others who she says possess “the ideology of trying to push Islam to make it the ruling system in the country?”
The answer will have implications for more than just the former Miss Iraq.
About Tommy Waller
Tommy Waller serves as Vice President, Special Projects at the Center for Security Policy. Tommy manages the Secure the Grid Coalition – a group of policymakers, defense professionals, and activists working diligently to secure America’s most critical infrastructure – the U.S. Electric Grid. Prior to joining the Center, Tommy served in the U.S. Marine Corps as an Infantry and Recon Officer with combat service overseas in numerous theaters. His full bio can be found here. View all posts by Tommy Waller →
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Center For Security Policyhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCenter For Security Policy2019-08-21 17:08:332019-08-22 07:46:42Are Other American Muslims As Concerned about Rep. Ilhan Omar as the Former Miss Iraq?
I recently preached a sermon on the subject of stealing in our church’s series on the Ten Commandments. And one of the points I made is that socialism is a form of theft.
I mentioned the slogan going around during the 1960s—“property is theft.”
But the Bible says, “Thou shalt not steal.” Implied in that commandment is the sanctity of private property—I’m not allowed to simply take it because someone else owns it. And the Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, unless thou art the government.”
Socialism is a form of governmental theft. The government has no money of its own. It simply forcibly takes from Citizen A and gives to Citizen B. But, of course, the one who benefits the most from this socialistic scheme is Citizen C, the government bureaucrat who administers the welfare state.
Some of the wealthiest counties in the entire nation are the bedroom communities in the greater Washington, D. C. area, where government workers live, who administer all the many wealth transfer programs for our country.
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on Paul’s vote.
The Bible teaches us to help the needy. That is all voluntary. That is the church’s job. When the government gets involved in the “charity business,” it is not only wasteful, it undermines the family, human dignity, and self-reliance.
It’s one thing to have a safety net for those who may fall through the cracks. It’s another thing to grow the size of the federal government and our national debt more and more with never-ending spending until one day, the whole thing explodes.
Meanwhile, we have leading Democrat presidential candidates who want to add more and more to our federal government spending. According to a Fox News poll, Elizabeth Warren is up to 20 percent as of August 16, and Bernie Sanders up to 10 percent. That represents a lot of Americans apparently buying into a socialist-type message.
Senator Warren may chafe at one using the term “socialist” to describe her policies. But big government is big government by any other name. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: Big government, small liberty.
One of Elizabeth Warren’s big promises is to forgive student loans. It’s tragic that so many young people have become so loaded with college debt. But these student loans are freely assumed debts. Why should everyone else be forced to pay for them?
What’s ironic about it is that many of these costly degrees really don’t confer much value in terms of gainful employment.
It reminds me of the joke about two women, who hadn’t seen each other in a while, had an encounter at the supermarket. One woman asked the other about her three children. One son had become a poet and had just received his master’s degree in literature. The daughter just graduated from college with a degree in modern art. But the third son? She sheepishly shared, “Well, you know Freddy. Freddy is still Freddy. He wouldn’t go to college—he became a plumber instead. By the way, if it weren’t for him, we’d all be starving.”
Virginia Prodan, an international human rights attorney, grew up under Communist Romania. She strives to warn Americans to never go down the socialist path. She came to the U.S. during the Reagan years, essentially as a political refugee. She wrote a book about her miraculous escape from an assassination attempt in her book, Saving My Assassin. I have interviewed her on the radio a few times.
She told me, “Socialism is the government starting to lie to you about free things, and you believe them…then the government establishes socialism. It gains power and transforms into a communist [state].”
If you disagree with the government under such a scheme, she notes, they will “kill you and take your property.” In other words, socialism is the gateway to communism.
When I asked her about why socialism was so popular today among young people in America, she responded, “They have been deceived by the same lies my parents and relatives had been deceived by, so many years ago—lies that led Romania to be transformed from a free country to a repressive, socialist government.”
Prodan notes that, “Few Americans know, even those who are dream about socialism, that the socialist leader, Vladimir Lenin, declared that ‘Liberty is so precious that it must be carefully rationed to ordinary people.’ Ordinary people are you and me.”
How many times must humanity, including parts of America, go down the socialist path before we realize the emperor has no clothes? The government has no money trees. We should listen to survivors of socialism and communism, like Virginia Prodan, rather than politicians who are essentially trying to buy votes with taxpayers’ money.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jerry Newcombe, D. Min.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Newcombe, D. Min.2019-08-21 15:58:392019-08-21 16:00:57Socialism Is Theft—Why Are Candidates Espousing It?
Notwithstanding AIPAC’s discomfort over the Omar-Tlaib case, there is more than a hint of hypocrisy in its joining the general assault on Israel.
The brouhaha over the ruckus that erupted last Thursday between the Netanyahu government and the two radical, anti-Israeli Congresswomen, Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), refuses to subside.
It continues to generate headlines even after almost a week since Israel reversed its original decision to allow them to visit the country—invoking a 2017 law that permits the government to bar entry to foreign citizens, who support anti-Israel boycotts. Coincidentally—or not—this dramatic change of heart took place soon after President Trump posted a somewhat caustic tweet, deriding Israel’s previous position to permit their arrival.
Thus, on Monday (8.19.2019), the two held a well-choreographed and emotive press conference , unsurprisingly well-covered in the international media, in which they lambasted Israel for its heavy-handed “oppression” of the Palestinians and its “undemocratic” prohibition of their planned trip. Likewise, they urged other US law-makers to visit Israel to discover for themselves the “iniquitous realities” that, according to them, prevail here.
Israel’s perceived capitulation to Trumpian pressure sparked wall-to-wall condemnation from the Democratic Party—even from long-standing Israel supporters. A good number of pundits warned that the barring of the Democratic Congresswomen could herald the end of the era of bipartisan support for Israel, and expressed concern over what might await it in a post-Trump era—or at least, a post-Republican era.
Clearly, the requested visit by two of Israel most vehement detractors created an extremely awkward situation for the Netanyahu government. Equally clearly, the government’s clumsy vacillation in dealing with the problem was anything but flawless, and created a number of irksome questions marks as to its conduct—for itself and for its advocates in the public arena.
However, despite any misgiving one may have over the government’s handling of the “hot potato” left at its doorstep, the Omar-Tlaib episode—and the intensity of the reactions to it—raise several troubling issues.
Bipartisanship: At what price?
The first of these is the question of the price that Israel is called upon to preserve bi-partisan support for it. After all, no-one can assume that the two fiercely anti-Israel Congresswomen would not exploit their stay in Israel to inflict the maximum possible damage on it—irrespective of any “inconvenient facts” they might have happened to encounter on it.
Accordingly, if Israel is required to forsake important national interests in order to appease a party, in which some of its most prominent members are viscerally opposed to the Jewish state, one might very well question the value—even, the very point—of preserving such bi-partisanship. Indeed, at some point, bi-partisanship may well cease to be an invaluable asset and become a burdensome liability instead!
In this regard, perhaps the most telling—and most surprising—censure came from the prestigious and powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, which, as a rule, has consistently backed the decisions of the Israeli government—virtually without exception. Accordingly, public reproach from an organization so closely identified with pro-Israel advocacy is, without doubt, extraordinarily significant. Of course, for AIPAC, the issue of bi-partisanship is an almost sacred value, the very “holy grail” of its political influence. Indeed, it attributes—with considerable justification—much of its political stature and sway to its ability to harness such bi-partisan support for Israel. It is thus, clearly understandable that it will react negatively to any development that appears to threaten that ability.
AIPAC’s hypocrisy?
However, not withstanding AIPAC’s discomfort in the Omar-Tlaib case, there is more than a hint of hypocrisy in its joining the general assault on Israel.
After all, it would be difficult—even impossible—to imagine that the AIPAC leadership would extend an invitation to either Omar or to Tlaib to address its annual convention, and to provide them an opportunity to publicly berate Israel and blacken its name with baseless accusations.
Accordingly, the trenchant question that this raises is the following: If AIPAC would not permit access to Omar and Tlaib to allow them a platform to denigrate Israel, why would it find fault with Israel for not permitting them access to a very similar platform?
This, then, is the question, which should be directed at the AIPAC leadership—and which they should be called on to address.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Martin Shermanhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Martin Sherman2019-08-21 09:29:262019-08-21 16:50:41The Omar-Tlaib affair: Tough questions for AIPAC
