“Jerusalem Jane” Kiel is a Danish Christian who moved to Israel five years ago to support Jews and Israel against the Islamic jihad of lies, death and destruction. She is a very brave woman who is threatened regularly by Muslims but she continues in her amazing work in Israel.
Please visit her Face Book page, Israel One Nation and make a donation to keep her standing for the truth!
Antonia Okafor, a young, single, black woman, recently discovered that’s she’s a racist, sexist, misogynist. How in the world did this happen? None other than Antonia Okafor explains.
This video is part of an exciting partnership between PragerU and Turning Point USA that will include videos with other young conservatives like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and more! Visit FreetoThink.org to learn more.
RELATED ARTICLE: AIA Author’s Night: Born Again Republican
TRANSCRIPT
I recently discovered something startling about myself. It turns out that I’m a racist, sexist, misogynist. This came as quite a shock to me. How did this happen? As a person of color, a single woman with a graduate degree who grew up poor in a home without a father, I had a clear political path to follow.
And I followed it.
I voted for Barack Obama…twice. After all, we share the same skin color. His father was from Africa. Mine was, too! What other reasons did I need?
I was inspired to see a black man rise to the highest office in the land. I believed his ascent would herald a new beginning, a new era of racial healing and harmony. We would finally have that frank discussion about race that everyone always talks about.
I was also inspired by his wife. I was thrilled to see such a strong, opinionated black woman take the national stage. But then something happened… actually, several somethings.
I realized there was a big contradiction in my own life. I considered myself a free-thinker, but I was thinking exactly what I was supposed to. I decided to start asking questions. I belonged to several campus feminist groups. I was even teaching feminism to inner-city girls. Part of that teaching involved making the case for abortion. These girls needed to know that they had the right to make decisions about their own bodies. Surely, I thought, that’s empowerment. But one day I asked myself: Isn’t it men who benefit most from consequence-free sex? Doesn’t that give them even more power over women? And, of course, abortion certainly doesn’t empower the women it prevents from ever being born.
When I began to ask my other feminist friends how they reconciled these issues, they just got angry. I was called anti-woman. Even by progressive men! “But I’m not anti-woman,” I thought. “I am a woman!” I just don’t want to be a weak one. I want to be strong – like Michelle.
At about the same time, while I was a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, the UT Austin Department of African Diaspora Studies released a statement in which they said, and I quote, “African Americans are disproportionately affected by the saturation of our society by firearms … We demand that firearms be banned in all spaces occupied by black people on our campus.”
Wait a second, I thought. Why would you want to ban firearms only in black areas? Doesn’t that mean that you either think black people are more dangerous than other people, or less worthy of protection? These questions did not endear me to my progressive friends. I was called a race traitor…even by white people. But I’m not anti-black. I am black. I just want to be safe – like Barack.
I realized I didn’t have a good answer; I only had more questions – like, why were blacks doing so poorly in cities that had been run by Democrats for decades? Was it racism and sexism that was holding people back, or was it something else?
The more questions I asked, the less popular I became. But here’s the funny thing: I started to feel better about myself. I decided that the very definition of empowerment required me to take responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim. Which meant I had to protect myself. So, I bought a gun. I started to advocate for gun rights. That cost me more friends. I joined the pro-life movement and walked in The March for Life. More friends…gone.
Then, I crossed the line. I voted Republican – the party that views me as an empowered individual, able to shape my own destiny; not as a member of a victim group.
And that’s how I became a racist, sexist, misogynist.
I’m Antonia Okafor for Prager University.
Did you know that the livelihood of 85 million Americans depends on the success of small businesses? So you’d think that the government would encourage the creation and preservation of small businesses. Instead, the federal government taxes small business owners at about 40% — not including additional state or local taxes. Watch this week’s video to find out the effect of that tax rate on small business owners, on job creation, and on the economy as a whole.
Our business and economics series is a collaborative project with Job Creators Network. To learn more about JCN, visit www.jobcreatorsnetwork.com.
TRANSCRIPT
No matter where you come from, what your job is, or where you stand politically, you have to pay taxes. Uncle Sam needs taxpayer dollars to pay for things like schools, fire fighters, and the military.
There are all sorts of different taxes: income taxes, payroll taxes and sales taxes just to name a few. But individuals aren’t the only ones who pay taxes—businesses pay income taxes too.
Businesses that are set up as corporations pay taxes on their income at the US corporate tax rate of around 35 percent—one of the highest in the developed world. Countries like Ireland and Switzerland have corporate tax rates well under 25 percent, which can give companies based there a competitive advantage.
But there’s another taxed group that we’re forgetting…small businesses. There are 29 million of them in the US and they employ nearly 56 million people. That’s a total of 85 million people dependent on the success of small businesses!
Small businesses are most often set up as sole proprietorships, partnerships or another designation called an S-corp. But the money they make isn’t taxed at the corporate rate. The profits earned by these small businesses are “passed through” to the owner and counted as individual income on their personal tax return. That’s why you might hear small businesses referred to as “Pass-throughs.”
These entrepreneurs can pay tax rates as high as 40 percent not including additional state and local taxes, that means many American small businesses are being taxed at a higher rate than businesses anywhere in the world.
Why should you care? Because high taxes hurt small businesses ability to grow and expand, causing them to raise prices or even trim jobs to stay within their budget constraints.
Lowering taxes for small businesses or “pass-throughs” results in the growth of small businesses—allowing them to provide more jobs and boost the economy for everyone. After all two thirds of all new jobs come from small businesses and lowering taxes can have a big effect on the entire economy for all Americans.
So the next time you hear someone supporting an increase in tax rates on businesses, remember that very important group of small business owners and the 85 million people dependent on their success.
Why is the government so bad at health care? Why did Obamacare make health insurance costs go up, and access to medical services go down? The short answer, as six-term Congressman Bob McEwen explains, is that when bureaucrats and politicians spend other people’s money for services they won’t themselves consume, only bad things happen. Watch our new video to understand why.
Tomorrow, we’re releasing a very special feature-length video with Dennis. Click here to receive a text message when we post the video. You won’t want to miss this.
Morbid fascination is a strong motivator for me. Recently it’s brought me around to a renewed study of the first world war.
For me, the study of this war (and other terrible things in human history) is about far more than military maneuvers or victories or defeats. I want to understand how and why people behave the way they do. I want to know them so I can know myself, and I want to avoid making the mistakes and judgment calls that led to an early demise for so many of my ancestors.
For this “war to end all wars” that resulted in more than 17 million deaths and 20 million injuries, I particularly want to understand how people can bring themselves and their societies to such lows of death and destruction. I want to understand how they survived those lows, how they resisted those lows, and how they showed humanity in the face of them.
It seems I’ve found a (mostly) kindred spirit in Dan Carlin, host of the long-form award-winning podcast Hardcore History and creator of the recent six-part World War One series “A Blueprint for Armageddon.”
360 Degree View
In this series, Carlin helps to solve one of my main problems as a student of history: namely, that I don’t have any idea what it’s actually like to experience a society-reshaping war.
History textbooks rarely help us understand experiences, and most people only give lip service to “the horrors of war” as a result. Fortunately, Carlin has done his homework. Along with providing detailed commentary on the major geopolitical shifts which accompany this war, Carlin reflects on the vivid individual memories of its participants.
He makes extensive use of primary sources, including accounts from civilians, diplomats, generals, and the lowliest recruits – and later major players like Adolf Hitler, who came of age in this conflict. “Blueprint” draws on all the scholarship of early historical works like Tuchman’s The Guns of August with all of the drama with which someone like Winston Churchill viewed the war in his memoirs.
Through all of his extensive research and notes, we get a view of the war from 360 degrees, and it’s hardly necessary for Carlin to provide any additional color or opinion. What’s great is that he mostly doesn’t, except to wonder – like me – at how people lived through years of trench warfare, chemical attacks, near-certain death, and body-choked battlefields.
Most powerful is how Carlin’s series positions the war as the turning point of European culture and history. You get a very good picture of how developed societies change when they engage in major land warfare for the first time in a century. It’s surreal, a change from Napoleonic-era militaries to militaries built for mass destruction. No one is prepared for wars with machine guns, tanks, airplanes, and gas. As a result (and as Carlin shows) no one is prepared for Bolshevism, total war, the emergence of “the home front,” the bombing of civilians.
The death of liberal political philosophy and the birth of totalitarian and authoritarian 20th-century thought is a theme woven throughout the podcast series, but the listener is left to connect the dots and see everything which was lost to a generation in the Great War.
An Epic Narrative
“Blueprint for Armageddon” brings the history of this time period to life in a way that no book or movie could. It’s epic narrative storytelling at its best. The medium of audio (and the audio production is a delight) lets Carlin range all over the many fronts of this war and the many small sub-stories of this war without interruption and in perfect narrative harmony. Yet it never forgets that it is a narrative.
Carlin is refreshingly self-aware about his own odd fandom of military history, the ease with which deaths become mere statistics in hindsight, and the impossibility of grasping or relating the full story of an event like this.
If you share my same odd historical bent toward the morbid, and if you share a hope that we can avoid another world war in our lifetime, this series is both a valuable resource and a valuable call to action to learn.
You may not come away from this series as an enemy of war, but you will leave it far less naive about what goes into and what comes out of warfare between nations. And you’ll leave with dozens of memoirs and books to start you down the rabbit trail of research on this turning point in history.
You can download the series on your favorite podcasting app or watch the first part of the series below:
Reprinted from James Walpole.
James Walpole is a writer, startup marketer, intellectual explorer, and perpetual apprentice. He writes regularly at jameswalpole.com.
The Black Lives Matter movement began as a way to shed light on what they saw as the unjustified killings of black men by police officers. Millions of dollars from liberal organizations and billionaires like George Soros later, they’re attacking the NRA and taking on extreme leftist issues that have nothing to do with the original purpose of #BlackLivesMatter.
So Colion Noir asks them: What are you really fighting for?
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Join me as I talk with Israelis and tourists at one of Israel’s most beautiful beaches in Tel Aviv. We asked:
The answers will surprise some because much of what you will hear would be edited out by the liberal media in America.
Here at The United West we bring you the news of the day unfiltered.
EDITORS NOTE: Readers may help The United West continue bringing unique programming like this video by donating generously. Contact Tom@TheUnitedWest.org for more information.
On July 10, 2017 Tucker Carlson interviewed a woman who is a leader of something called the ‘Haymaker Collective’ where Leftists (Antifa!) have a gym project in Chicago where they are learning self defense to protect themselves from hate crimes and prepare for “war” with racists and xenophobes (in the Trump era).
Tucker has no problem with their desire for self-defense, but asks where is the evidence that it is the “rightwingers” they need to fear in CHICAGO!
His guest cites statistics from the Cato Institute and from the Southern Poverty Law Center as evidence that her people are under attack already.
But, what interested me most happened in the closing minutes of the segment. “Naila” cites the recent Virginia murder of the Muslim girl by an illegal alien as an example. When Tucker questions her about whether he was a ‘rightwinger’ she completely ignores him!
What happened to illegal alien murders Muslim case?
It reminded me to have a look and see if there is any update at all about that horrible murder case, but it seems to have completely disappeared from the news. Imagine if the alleged murderer had not been an illegal alien, but instead a white American boy! We would be seeing daily updates and not just in the US media. Instead, I see dead silence by the mainstream media.
Watch the whole 6+ minute interview here:
RELATED VIDEO: Learn how to fight with Haymaker Collective (Antifa, Unicorn Riot, Chicago, Nazis, not a parody) posted on YouTube by Mong Phu.
In my December 2015 column “The neo-Democrat Party: Devout followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed” I wrote:
Numerous writers and political pundits have written on President Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform America” when elected in 2008.
I believe what President Obama has truly done is fundamentally transformed the Democratic Party of JFK to the Democrat Party of BHO. I use the word Democrat because the Party of Obama is not Democratic, as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. The membership of the neo-Democrat Party are made up primarily of the devout followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed.
Those who oppose Obama and the neo-Democrat Party, including JFK Democrats, are subject to ridicule, rejection and bullying.
Extremism in the name of the collective is the over riding strategy of the neo-Democrat. Radicalism is the tactic. The more extreme the ideal, the more it is embraced. This leads to what some have labeled a form of political insanity. I call it political suicide. History teaches us that tyrants and tyranny ultimately lose the support of the masses. Why? Because the policies implemented harm the masses.
Trevor Loudon has released a new episode in the America Under Siege series titled “Soviet Islam.” Loudon writes:
“Soviet Islam” is the second episode in the five-part “America Under Siege” documentary web-series releasing over the course of 2017. Each episode profiles the influence of radical Marxists on various segments of American society.
The film uncovers the secret history of how the Soviet Union used Islamists and dictators in the Middle East to further its objectives and how Vladimir Putin’s Russia continues this strategy today, endangering Americans and all freedom-loving peoples.
After World War II, the Soviet Union used Muslim intelligence assets to subvert neighboring Muslim-majority nations. Putin’s Russia continues to infiltrate Islamic communities around the world, including Chechnya, Iran, Syria, and Palestine, and also at home in the United States, where Islamists and communists have joined in an unlikely alliance.
Please watch Trevor Loudon’s latest documentary “America Under Siege: Soviet Islam”:
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EDITORS NOTE: The film is narrated and written by conservative author Trevor Loudon, directed by Judd Saul, and produced by Cohesion Films in partnership with Dangerous Documentaries, a project of the Capital Research Center.
In 1965 Paul Harvey, an American radio broadcaster for the ABC Radio Networks and author who wrote Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor, did one of his “The Rest of the Story” broadcasts addressing what he would do if he were the devil. Harvey’s words have today become reality, the new-normal, the doctrine preached in our public schools and in the public square. His words were a warning, they are worth hearing over and over again.
Time to take back America. Time to make America great, again, by embracing God. As President Trump said in Warsaw, Poland, “‘Together, let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country and for God’.
Joe Donahue writes:
Dear American Citizen: Most would agree the reach of the Federal Government is simply too big, and has lacked true accountability by the press – Yet now the mainstream media (seemingly) is beginning to show signs of investigative journalism. And they should! Admittedly, the IRS has been targeting “Pro-America, Patriot, less Government, more God” non-profit groups. Using Paul Harvey’s words and images from our current culture, this video has a message that clearly speaks into the souls of American citizens.
America is not lazy. America is not apathetic. America is not complacent. Yes, some American’s are lazy, complacent and apathetic. Some choose laziness and complacency over hard work and creativity. Some stumble through this life completely dependent upon the government, faith based organizations, and the kindness of neighbors…and as American’s we support them, not because we have to – but because we want to. We want to help our fellow countryman. But their comes a point where a line must be drawn. There comes a time when we say, “We will go this far, but no further.” We cannot carry you forever. You must “want it” yourself. You must begin to walk…and run – on your own. And in time, you will see, that you must begin to help others as well.
And the hard workers? Yes, we dream. We work. We keep the country rolling. We give financially to our churches. We help our neighbors. We pay our taxes. Not out of any sense of shame or compulsion but because we WANT to…
Between the two Paul Harvey Videos I have made they have been viewed over 2,000,000 times. Not bad for a video I put together for our student ministry…but future America needs your help today in spreading the message of this video.
Please share, post, embed, re-post, email and get this message into the hands of Americans. This is not about an election. This is about fighting for the Heart of America…Freedom. You would be surprised who may watch this video and begin to reject complacency and dependency upon the government…together we can slowly rise to rebuild America.
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Passions are high in the national health care debate. Some supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have taken to asserting that hundreds of thousands of “people will die” if it is repealed or significantly altered. These claims do not withstand scrutiny, and those who wish their policy arguments to be taken seriously would be well advised to avoid them.
These sensational claims rest on fallacious reasoning, which I’ll describe later in this piece. But first let’s acknowledge that neither I, you, nor anyone else has any idea how many Americans will live or die under alternative federal health care policies. It’s an inherently fruitless exercise to attempt to quantify these effects. However, if one seriously wished to attempt it, one would not do so via the methods now being employed to promulgate the “people will die” claim.
The claims are based on extolling a single effect of the ACA: increasing health insurance coverage, which is said to reduce mortality. Of course, the ACA didn’t magically produce its coverage increase out of thin air. To finance it, the law included several features that likely have countervailing effects on mortality.
Below is a partial list of such effects, provided with the caveat that it would be just as silly to charge the ACA with killing people as it is to attribute deaths to its possible repeal:
But even a balanced attempt to weigh the ACA’s net effects on longevity would be inherently problematic under the methods currently being employed to estimate them.
The widely-circulated figures for deaths supposedly caused by replacing the ACA are extrapolated from a study of the Massachusetts health reform experience. That study found that post-reform (2007-10) mortality rates in Massachusetts improved relative to pre-reform (2001-05) mortality rates more than was the case in other US counties after controlling for demographic and economic conditions.
The study is credible, interesting, and suggestive, but does not offer any generalizable proofs of the effects of national health policy on longevity. To the contrary, the authors state that “Massachusetts results may not generalize to other states.”
The study merely shows that longevity improved within Massachusetts after health legislation, more than can be accounted for by economic and demographic trends. This indeed might plausibly have happened because of Massachusetts’s particular health reforms but as the authors acknowledge, it could also have arisen from any of countless factors specific to Massachusetts.
Indeed, a similar study of Oregon’s experience with Medicaid expansion “did not detect clinical improvements other than depression reduction.” In any case, the Massachusetts study only tells us what didn’t cause its longevity improvement; it cannot definitively explain what did.
But the biggest problem with the “people will die” claim is that it rests on a fundamental logical fallacy. It is related to the familiar “Fallacy of Composition,” which any discerning interlocutor will call you on if you commit it. An oft-cited example of the fallacy is that just because a standing spectator can see a baseball game better than the patrons seated near him, this doesn’t imply that everyone will see better if they all stand up.
The application of the fallacy to health insurance is straightforward. One cannot leap solely from the observation that “having health insurance. . . results in better health” to the conclusion that “the more we expand health insurance, the healthier we all will be.”
Health insurance reduces the out-of-pocket costs individuals face when they buy health services. Expanded insurance coverage increases health service consumption which, considered by itself, should improve health. But it also increases cost growth, an effect widely recognized in health expenditure forecasting. People with insurance feel this cost growth through rising premiums, but the cost inflation is felt especially keenly by the uninsured, who must pay more whenever they buy health services (or receive less care for what they pay).The observation that the insured are relatively healthier doesn’t by itself imply that expanding coverage will save lives.
Thus, even if health insurance did absolutely nothing to improve national health outcomes, we’d still expect the insured to be healthier than the uninsured. Thus, the observation that the insured are relatively healthier doesn’t by itself imply that expanding coverage will save lives.
There are countless potential examples of the fallacy in operation. For example, consider the current tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). Those who receive health insurance through their employer enjoy an advantage in these benefits’ exemption from taxation. This tax preference steers additional health benefits to these individuals. However, this does not mean improved health for the nation as a whole. To the contrary, the ESI tax preference is widely recognized as a driver of health market inefficiency, reducing the value of health services relative to dollars spent.
An even simpler example: the government could easily add to the wealth of ten individuals by sending them each a million-dollar check. It is a non-sequitur to infer from this that the national wealth would be increased by the government’s sending a million-dollar check to every American.
In short, the “people will die” argument is premised on an easily-recognized logical fallacy. Don’t use it if you want to convince others to adopt your health care policy views. If you do, the only thing certain to die will be your credibility.
Reprinted from Economics 21.
Editor’s Note: Check out this hilarious video, parodying the “people will die” argument.
Charles Blahous is a senior research fellow for the Mercatus Center, a research fellow for the Hoover Institution, a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare, and a contributor to e21.
My latest over at the Geller Report:
Linda Sarsour said it at the convention of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) over the July 4 weekend. She denounced the Trump administration, saying: “Why, sisters and brothers, why are we so unprepared? Why are we so afraid of this administration and the potential chaos that they will ensue on our community?” Invoking Muhammad, she said: “A word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader, that is the best form of jihad.” She added: “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”
She also went on to say:
“Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our communities. It is not to assimilate and to please any other people in authority…Our top priority, even higher than all those priorities, is to please Allah, and only Allah.”
Sarsour’s words were highly charged, and have understandably caused a controversy. Sarsour herself claimed that the widely-circulated clip of her calling for jihad against Trump was misleadingly edited: “Right wing tries to demonize my leadership. Editing videos is their favorite pasttime” — and she tweeted a link to her full speech. In another Tweet, she claimed the mantle of Martin Luther King: “My work is CRYSTAL CLEAR as an activist rooted in Kingian non-violence. This is y my teams r effective cause we r powerful w/o violence.” And in keeping with the tried-and-tested practice of Islamic supremacists all over the West, she claimed victim status: “Stay focused and pray for the protection of those on the front lines of the movements for justice. We are under threat.”
Meanwhile, the Leftist media, ever ready to circle the wagons and rally around one of their own, no matter how egregious the offense committed, is pulling out all the stops to defend Sarsour and heap contempt on the racist, right-wing yahoos who dare to think that her words constitute an incitement to violence against President Trump.
“Women’s March Organizer Linda Sarsour Spoke of ‘Jihad.’ But She Wasn’t Talking About Violence,” Time Magazine reassures us. The Wrap tells us about “3 Things Conservatives Got Very Wrong About Linda Sarsour’s Speech.” The Huffington Post affected a gloat: “Linda Sarsour Said ‘Jihad’ In A Speech And Conservatives Freaked Out.” Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed tweeted a transcript of Sarsour’s remarks, with the comment: “Hey you people scare-sharing Linda Sarsour’s speech, read this transcription, which I just made because you all are trash misquoting her.”
CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill tweeted: “The people disagreeing with @lsarsour clearly don’t understand what Jihad means.” The Huffington Post likewise said that those who were concerned about Sarsour’s words were ignorant fools:
The word “jihad” has long been misused and misunderstood by both Muslim extremists and people seeking to spread hatred against Muslims. But for the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, “jihad” is a word that literally means “to struggle.” It’s a concept within Islam that represents a commitment to serve God, and to be good to yourself and your neighbors. It can be personal, like struggling to get through a rough workday, or overarching, like striving to seek justice for all people.
As Sarsour recounted in her speech, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have described the best form of jihad as “a word of truth in front of a tyrant, ruler or leader.”
Likewise The Wrap:
Many non-Muslims mistakenly believe the word “jihad” means “holy war,” when in fact, it means “struggle” or “striving,” according to the Islamic Supreme Council of America. “It can refer to internal as well as external efforts to be a good Muslims or believer, as well as working to inform people about the faith of Islam,” the Council said. “Jihad is not a violent concept. [It] is not a declaration of war against other religions.” Also, “The concept of jihad has been hijacked by many political and religious groups over the ages in a bid to justify various forms of violence … Scholars say this misuse of jihad contradicts Islam.”
In her speech, Sarsour quoted a passage in the Quran where the Prophet Muhammad explains that the best form of jihad or struggle is “a word of truth in front of a tyrant rule or leader …” Sarsour followed with, “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts that from us as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers…” She then cited “fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”
Though she did make a not-so-subtle reference to President Trump and his constituents, Sarsour in no way incited violence against them. In using the word “jihad,” she merely encouraged her audience to stand up to discrimination.
Yes, in Islam jihad is a spiritual struggle. The Shafi’i legal manual (the Shafi’is are a school of Islamic jurisprudence) ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), which has been certified by al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, as conforming to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,” devotes one paragraph to jihad as spiritual struggle. Then it spends seven pages on jihad as warfare. It makes it quite clear that jihad is warfare against non-Muslims:
Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word ‘mujahada’, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad,
“We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”
The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus is such Koranic verses as:
(1) “Fighting is prescribed for you” (Koran 2:216);
(2) “Slay them wherever you find them” (Koran 4:89);
(3) “Fight the idolators utterly” (Koran 9:36);and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:
“I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah.”
and the hadith reported by Muslim,
“To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.’”
What’s more, if jihad is simply a word spoken against a tyrant, then why is there an entire chapter of the Qur’an entitled “Booty” or “The Spoils of War” (al-Anfal). What spoils ensue from a word of truth spoken in front of a tyrant ruler or leader? If jihad is simply a word of truth spoken in front of a tyrant, how is a Muslim supposed to make Jews and Christians “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29)? If jihad is simply a a word of truth spoken in front of a tyrant, why have thousands upon thousands of Muslims worldwide joined violent jihad groups? Why are there any violent jihad groups at all? Why is this misunderstanding of jihad so widespread?
Now: does the centrality in Islamic law of jihad as warfare against unbelievers mean that Sarsour was inciting violence against Trump? Not directly. But Linda Sarsour isn’t stupid. Nor is she unaware of what Muslims are doing in the name of jihad around the world today. When she says, “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad,” she herself may mean a non-violent standing up, but she has to know that when other Muslims who know the real meaning of jihad in Islam hear that, they will hear it as a call to violence. She must know that when she says that “our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our communities” and that “our top priority, even higher than all those priorities, is to please Allah, and only Allah,” that some Muslims will think of how pleased Allah is with the deaths of unbelievers, since he has guaranteed Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for him (Qur’an 9:111).
All the damage control of the Leftist media, heaping contempt upon conservatives for being so stupid as to think that jihad involves violence, is simply more of the denial and willful ignorance regarding jihad that the political and media elites constantly force upon us. The truth they refuse to realize, and smear us as “Islamophobes” for realizing, is that Muslims worldwide who commit violence against unbelievers regard that violence as a form of jihad, and know that the Qur’an and Sunnah teach warfare against unbelievers.
Linda Sarsour no doubt knows this as well, and as such, knew just how incendiary her words really were. And if a Muslim decides to wage jihad, in its Qur’anic and traditional sense, against President Trump, she should be held legally responsible for this incitement.
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In the video below, Judicial Watch Senior Attorney and Director of Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project Robert Popper provides you with keen insight into the Trump administration’s voting commission and clears-up some of the misinformation circulating in the news.
ABOUT ROBERT POPPER
Robert Popper joined Judicial Watch in September 2013 as a senior attorney and as director of Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project. Prior to joining Judicial Watch, Mr. Popper worked for eight years, five as deputy chief of the Voting Section, in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, in which capacity he garnered numerous professional awards. Before that, Mr. Popper worked as a private attorney in New York City for 17 years, where his practice extended to a wide range of legal matters, including voting rights. Mr. Popper served as counsel in a successful constitutional challenge alleging racial segregation in the design of New York’s congressional districts, and successfully defended the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Popper is a published author on the topic of voting rights law. He developed a legal standard relating to gerrymandering that is widely cited by experts and was adopted by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. He has testified before the Missouri Senate Redistricting Committee and the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee; and he has spoken about voting rights to a conference of U.S. Attorneys at the National Advocacy Center, to state officials, and to countless local community representatives. Mr. Popper is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern University Law School. He is admitted to practice in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Full Transcript:
“Trump’s Election Integrity Commission has asked states for their voter rolls in order to collect data on voter registration practices. This has been variously reported in the media and in extreme cases, it has been reported as a threat.
What people need to understand is that this is a very ordinary request. Judicial Watch routinely asks states for their voter registration rolls. And we get them. States like North Carolina, New Jersey, and Florida provide them for free, and other states require a fee of anywhere from a hundred to a thousand dollars.
Private marketing groups get ahold of these voter registrations all the time; they’re for sale, they’re exchanged. The idea that the Trump administration is doing something outrageous is nonsense. What they’re doing is gathering data on voter registration that we’ve needed for years.”
Budweiser has released an Independence Day ad honoring our veterans. The ad features Adam Driver, a veteran, who is now an actor playing the role of Kylo Ren in Star Wars Episodes 7 and 8.
Budweiser’s YouTube channel says this about their ad:
This summer, we’ve been honoring those who protect our freedom to dream. So we delivered a life-changing scholarship to a family who has sacrificed for their country and for each other with the help of Folds of Honor and Adam Driver. #ThisBudsForYou
Since 2011, we’ve awarded scholarships to more than 2,000 families of fallen or injured veterans through our partnership with Folds of Honor. And earlier this year, we honored another group of veterans with a surprise befitting their service: https://youtu.be/yzMSzLkOkJA
Breitbart reported that Budweiser has released a new ad in which “Star Wars” actor Adam Driver, a veteran himself, surprises a veteran by delivering a scholarship to his daughter in person.
U.S. Army veteran John Williams sustained a debilitating injury while training for Operation Desert Storm. Like him, Driver was also injured shortly before he was deployed, putting an end to his military career. That’s likely why Budweiser chose Driver to surprise Williams by showing up at his home to give his daughter, Hayley Grace Williams, a scholarship to nursing school.
Here is the Budweiser ad:
How long before someone gets hurt?
The group has incited against and disrupted Jewish speakers on campus since 2010.
In February 2010, eleven UCI students, including SJP UCI members, disrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech. These students, dubbed the “Irvine 11,” were arrested and prosecuted.
On May 18, 2016, SJP UCI members disrupted a pro-Israel film screening. SJP UCI student leader, Celine Qussiny led a crowd of fifty who tried to force their way into the venue. They called for “Intifada” (violent uprising) and to “Fight the police.” Pro-Israel attendees were escorted out by police, for their own protection.
The university administration put SJP UCI on probation, effective until March 2017.
When the probation period expired, Celine Qussiny and SJP UCI were back. On May 10, 2017, they stormed a pro-Israel panel discussion event, with Qussiny leading a crowd in various chants including, “When people are occupied, resistance is justified!”
Again, attendees needed a police escort out of the venue.
The next day, Celine Qussiny bragged how SJP UCI had gone “to disrupt the event” in order “to let them (the panelists) know that we refuse to allow the normalization of their presence here.”
She admitted that SJP UCI knew full-well that “the administration told us not to disrupt, that we have to be civil.”
It’s hard to understate the seriousness of this. But it gets worse.
Our 2017 Report on the University of California, Irvine unearthed the shocking discovery that a number of protesters from the May 10th incident were members of the UCI student government.
When student senators join disruptions that flout university rules and jeopardize student safety, is it not time to say enough is enough?
Contact UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman at chancellor@uci.edu and tell him that you have had enough of SJP UCI disrupting Jewish life on UCI’s campus. SJP should be banned from the UCI campus and the student government members who participated in their disruptions, impeached.
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