Tag Archive for: Cleveland

Basheer Jones Hates America. He Wants to Be Mayor of Cleveland.

My latest in PJ Media:

Basheer Jones is a Cleveland city councilman and a candidate for mayor of Cleveland in the upcoming September 14 primary election. He is also unusually forthright, even for a twenty-first-century Democratic politician, about his contempt for the land in which he seeks elected office.

Jones is a devout, observant Muslim, and already, according to CleveScene, his “personal religious beliefs and organizational ties have become linked with his campaign. Jones made a number of questionable campaign expenditures in 2020 to international Muslim organizations and figures, including expenses likely related to his December travels in Egypt and the sponsorship of a Muslim orphanage there and a Quranic school in Senegal.”

What’s more, “a recent controversial video shows Jones saying, women are not our leaders.’” Jones, like Muslim spokesmen all over the Western world when confronted with statements that are politically inconvenient, insists that his words were “taken out of context.”

But that is not remotely the worst of it. On Sunday, the RAIR Foundation published an exposé on Jones that contained audio of Jones speaking on January 3, 2016, and making fun of Muslim immigrants who were thankful to be in the United States, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Before 9/11,” Jones asserts, “our people, our brothers and sisters from the immigrant communities, like, ‘America is a great place. Oh, it’s the land of the free, home of the brave.’ You’d see the imams, big imams, on the stage, singin’, you know.” Here the crowd starts to laugh softly; Jones chuckles a bit along with them and continues: “‘I pledge allegiance to the flag,’ you know, ‘this is the greatest place in the world.’ And we were tellin’ you, ‘Ah, no it’s not. Ah, we know about this place. This place, we know, we know that guy, somethin’ about him.’ And then 9/11 hit. Everybody started comin’ to us. ‘Brothers, please, come, come march with us, stand –’ Brother, we been tellin’ you, that they’ll change on you just like that, man.”’

Jones was apparently referring to American authorities supposedly turning on Muslim communities after 9/11 and subjecting them to “Islamophobic” counter-terror measures. In any case, his contempt for the grateful immigrants, and I-told-you-so implication that he had somehow been vindicated after 9/11, when America proved to be not so great a place after all, ought to have raised eyebrows among those who backed Jones for Cleveland City Council and are now supporting his mayoral ambitions.

There is no indication, however, that anyone was concerned in the slightest with their candidate’s anti-Americanism. We are, after all, talking about the Democratic Party. This is the party that stood by and did nothing when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Kabul) tweeted: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Democratic convention more about Fantasyland than America

If you had just arrived from Mars to observe the Republican and Democratic conventions, one after the other, you undoubtedly would conclude that they were talking about two different countries.

One America recognizes real threats from foreign jihadi fighters who seek to eradicate our existence and to replace our freedoms with Islamic sharia law. It believes that economic revival — through tax reform, trade reform, and enforcing our borders and immigration laws – holds the key to future prosperity.

The other America believes we face no real foreign threats, the economy is doing great, and that our biggest challenge comes from crop failures, rising seas, and monster storms caused by — you guessed it, climate change.

It wasn’t by chance that the Democrats made no mention of ISIS on the first day of the convention and scarcely mentioned it on the next two days.

Terrorism and Islamist ideology that seek to replace our democratic republic with a “superior” law written by Allah are a distraction from the real mission of Democrats in Philadelphia. As former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley put it: “to hell with Trump’s American nightmare.”

In his first year in office, President Obama directed the Central Intelligence Agency to divert significant assets from the war against real threats from terrorists and enemy nations to the hypothetic dangers of “climate change.”

The Defense Department was ordered to follow suit, and under Obama’s direction, launched massive building programs at American naval bases to shelter them from rising seas.

President Obama squandered billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in pursuit of an ideological agenda.

This past May, the CIA quietly shuttered its climate change initiative, since it was unable to find data to sustain the Left’s faith in its new religion that man-made climate change would destroy the earth, or significant portions of it.

Cyclical changes in our climate have always occurred and have had dramatic impacts in the past, long before the carbon emissions the Left blames for today’s droughts and tsunamis.

Hollywood actress Signourey Weaver, hair on fire, introduced a “scare-me” video by James Cameron and claimed that farmers in Kansas were losing their crops today because of climate change.

I understand that Ms. Weaver is too young to have lived through the Dust Bowl — so am I. But I would hope she isn’t too dumb to have read about it and to have understood that these things have happened before, and will happen again.

Government’s role, in such circumstances, is to extend a helping hand of solidarity to individuals who lose their livelihoods to disasters they had no way of foreseeing. Its role is not to preemptively cripple the nation with fantasy-driven regulations and shut down entire sectors of the economy.

Incapable of a sustained conversation about national security, we’re left with Sen. Harry Reid suggesting that the Director of National Intelligence should “fake” national security briefings to Donald Trump. Why? Because Trump suggested that perhaps the Russians might be able to find the 33,000 emails Hillary Clinton admitted she deleted from the private server even President Obama warned her not to use.

In Senator Reid’s mind, entrusting Mrs. Clinton with our national security secrets is just fine, even though FBI Director James Comey acknowledged she had been “extremely careless” by transmitting highly-classified intelligence information on her personal email server. Let’s not forget that the FBI still hasn’t found more than 2,000 classified emails Mrs. Clinton deleted.

Bill Clinton thought he had found a “trump” card that would earn his wife a place in the pantheon of national security heroes.

“She launched a team — and this is really important today — she launched a team to fight back against terrorists — online — and built a new global counterterrorism effort,” he said.

Think about that for a moment. In the words of her own husband, Mrs. Clinton’s main achievement in the war against the terrorists attacking us was to hire a few social media analysts whose advice she didn’t consult and in fact ignored when they informed her the Benghazi attacks had nothing to do with a YouTube video insulting Mohammad.

I’ve got news for the Clintons: our intelligence community has been focusing on social media for years. The biggest growth industry among the Beltway bandits is foreign language experts who can mine Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for evidence of jihadi connections.

That’s great, but it isn’t enough.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta went overboard in his support for Mrs. Clinton, claiming that, if elected, she would take office as someone who “has the trust of our troops who know she will always have their back.”

Four men died in Benghazi because Mrs. Clinton didn’t have their backs. Instead of rushing to the rescue, she spent hours in meetings trying to keep Panetta from sending reinforcements to their rescue.

But that’s the other America. The America of facts.

The differences of our two Americas are many. One America lionizes the mothers of young black men killed by the police – often after they had committed assaults of one sort or another. The other celebrates as heroes police officers gunned down by snipers seeking vengeance.

One America believes that women, illegal immigrants, invalids, minorities, and people with kaleidoscope glasses constitute grievance classes who deserve special treatment. The other believes that all Americans deserve equal treatment under the law and equal opportunity under our system.

As a life-long investigative reporter, I remain committed to the facts. But I recognize that the contest in November will be determined not by facts, but by faith, and by how many believers on each side come to the polls. That is the new reality of the two Americas of 2016.

A Video Message from Phyllis Schlafly

Phyllis Schlafly gives an update on the status and upcoming events of Eagle Forum. Among other things Schlafly speaks about the upcoming GOP convention, her new book and Republican “king makers.”

Schlafly quotes former Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who at the 1953 Republican National Convention, took to the floor and accused the king makers of leading the Republicans “down the road to defeat.” Dirksen received mixed boos and cheers rang out from the delegates.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Don’t take us down the path to defeat again by Mitchell Hadley

The 2 Million Voters Who Will Elect the Next President