Tag Archive for: Muslim

Toronto: Disabled man told that taxpayer-subsidized housing is for Muslims only

“Here you have a building for Muslims, and normally that would be discriminatory because other religions could not be accommodated there. But the Human Rights Code says if it’s a special-interests organization — religious, philanthropic, educational or social — they can discriminate in that way.”

Oh. Where is the taxpayer-funded housing for Christians only? For Jews only?

Ezra Levant weighs in on this travesty here. “Disabled man told subsidized housing is for Muslims only,” by Marco Chown Oved, Toronto Star, August 26, 2015 (thanks to Eli):

A young wheelchair user has been taken off the waiting list for a publicly subsidized apartment because he is not a member of the Muslim community that established the building — a practice that, while legal, raises concerns that accommodations for cultural and religious groups could be limiting access to affordable housing.

According to a letter that arrived at his mother’s house last week, Austin Lewis, 21, was removed from the waiting list at the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace building on Finch Ave. W in North York because he is not a member of their faith.

“It was mostly confusing, more than anything else,” he said. “Why would a government segregate its own building?”

The 16-storey building, which provides a range of services to its residents including a prayer room that accommodates 250, was actually approved in the 1990s as part of a provincial program to encourage non-profits and religious groups to build affordable housing, according to its property manager.

Lewis, who has used a wheelchair since a disease attacked his spinal cord when he was 8, says he applied to more than 100 accessible buildings in Toronto, Brampton and Peel Region, and there was no notice that any of them were restricted to a certain community.

“We had no idea. The letter came as a complete shock,” he said.

The city provides a $1.7-million subsidy for 94 rent-geared-to-income units under a five-year agreement, which began Jan. 1, that restricts tenants to “members of the Muslim Jama’at.”

“The City’s mandate policy allows social housing providers to restrict their housing to individuals belonging to an identifiable ethnic or religious group if specific conditions are met,” says a statement provided by city spokesperson John Gosgnach.

There are eight such buildings in Toronto, catering to Muslims, Macedonians, Germans and seniors who are Christian, Chinese, Greek, Hungarian or Lithuanian.

Karin Tahir, Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace’s property manager, said the building does not discriminate on race, colour or ethnicity. “Ahmadiyya is in 200 countries,” he said.

“We’re not bumping anyone off the list,” Tahir added. “The real issue is the 90,000-person waiting list for an affordable unit. Where is the new stock?”

It’s already hard enough to find affordable housing in the GTA, Lewis says, but when you’re in a wheelchair, your options are limited even further.

“It does seem incredibly odd. There is housing for people 50 and over, but there is no housing specifically for people in chairs,” he said.

His mother, Laura Whiteway, is incensed that her son could be turned away from a wheelchair-accessible building.

“They’re being given a licence to discriminate. It’s just wrong,” she said.

Lawyer Barry Swadron, who has extensive experience in disability law, says the Ontario Human Rights Code allows for this kind of discrimination.

“Here you have a building for Muslims, and normally that would be discriminatory because other religions could not be accommodated there.

“But the Human Rights Code says if it’s a special-interests organization — religious, philanthropic, educational or social — they can discriminate in that way,” he said. “It’s very unfortunate, but that’s how the law was written.”

While the intention was to create safe spaces for minority communities, this kind of permissible “positive discrimination” inevitably produces collateral damage, Swadron said….

No kidding, really?

RELATED ARTICLE: Muslim “Breaking of the Crosses” in Syracuse, NY as Catholic Church converted to mosque

Immigration: The Refugee Scam

Jeb Bush has called illegal migration “an act of love.” And all over the West we see nations being loved to death, with endless human waves from Third World countries washing ashore. The results were predictable and are now plain: balkanization, riots, ethnic and racial strife and no-go areas in European lands. Yet we’re told that accepting what are “refugees” is a humanitarian imperative. Yet no one, it seems, points out an obvious fact, something that really is the crux of the matter.

If a stranger in need happens by your area and you’re a charitable sort, you may take him in for a time, feed him and provide other basic necessities.

You don’t generally make him an official part of your family and empower him to help decide on finances, what products to buy, how your kids will be educated and what values will prevail within your home.

The point? At issue in the current “refugee crisis” is not charity and the humane treatment of refugees. This isn’t only because most of the migrants in question may not even be refugees.

It’s because the issue is granting uninvited guests citizenship.

People talk about the financial burden of accommodating Third World migrants, largely because money (as opposed to national integrity) is all a demoralized and denationalized people think to discuss and because finances are a politically correct subject. But a national family can recover from devastated finances. It can’t recover from a destroyed national family.

I have pointed out again and again and again that the groups represented by virtually all illegal migrants and refugees — and 85 percent of legal immigrants since 1965 — vote for socialistic candidates between 70 to 90 percent of the time upon being naturalized. Related to this but also generally overlooked is that the people make the culture and government. Replace a Western people with Muslims or Mexicans and you no longer have Western civilization. You have Mexico Norte or Iran West.

Unfortunately, the granting of aid and the granting of citizenship have been so melded into one amorphous, superficially homogenous blob of bad policy that most people don’t even recognize they should be two distinct and separate issues — as they had been for most of history.

Of course, this serves the Left’s ends. The Refugee Crisis™ debate is framed as a battle between compassionate liberals responding to desperate pleas and coin-counting, callous, conservative reactionaries. But charitable motives animate the Left little, if at all. Liberals are notoriously tightfisted with (their own) charitable dollars; even more to the point, when a shipload of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution wanted safe haven in the US, leftist icon FDR turned it away. It’s one of those curious coincidences in history that the Left’s attitude toward refugees changed precisely when leftists discovered they could import voters who would empower them.

And does attaching something as a rider — citizenship — to charity aid the cause of charity? Are people more or less likely to offer charity to a person if the act begins and ends with charity, or if they must grant the individual some decision-making power in their home as well? That’s a package deal only a masochist could love.

So there’s an easy way to uncover liberals’ true motivations and whether they’re serious about charity for refugees. Make a simple offer: you’ll give bona fide refugees safe haven, and you’ll do your best to ensure they’re treated well. But there’s no citizenship. Ever. And they’ll be expected to eventually return to their homelands. See if the leftists bite…anything but your extended hand.

But liberals have already tipped their hand. Andrew Neather, a former adviser to ex-British prime minister Tony Blair, admitted in 2009 that one of the goals of the mass immigration authored by his Labour Party was “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Barack Obama said in February he was “pretty optimistic” that because immigration was making the US “more of a hodgepodge of folks,” conservatism would be drowned out. Even more incredibly, there was this report, which tells us that “Obama’s amnesty plan is to use illegal aliens as ‘seedlings’…[who will] ‘navigate, not assimilate,’ as they ‘take over the host,’ create a ‘country within a country’ and start ‘pushing the citizens into the shadows,’” as I wrote in March. And a refugee scam is part of this: in order to get around immigration law and maximize Third World migration into the US, the Obama administration is categorizing as many people as possible as “refugees.”

This brings us to a contradiction here. On the one hand, liberals sometimes point out that despite doom-and-gloom prognostication, we live in the most “peaceful era in human history.” And they cite statistics backing up the assertion. On the other, they claim we must suddenly accommodate endless troves of “refugees” fleeing persecution. Question: if the world is unprecedentedly peaceful, why now do we have a supposedly worse refugee crisis than in more warlike times?

There’s another contradiction. We’re told that prosperous countries have a moral responsibility to the world’s poorer nations. So why then are wealthy Asian Tigers never asked to absorb any “refugees”? Japan, in fact, has virtually no immigration whatsoever despite having an extremely low birthrate and shrinking population. Moreover, since many refugees are Muslim, why aren’t Saudi Arabia, Qatar, The United Arab Emirates and the other oil-rich Arab nations taking them in? Wouldn’t it seem a natural fit? (Then they could stop importing the Filipinos and others they use for domestic help.) Maybe they know something we don’t.

In a sense, most of the world could be said to comprise would-be economic refugees. After all, how many people in Asia, Africa and Latin America wouldn’t want to emigrate to the West and enjoy the welfare state? And how many should, and can, the West absorb? One billion? Two billion? Three billion?

There undoubtedly are people in this world facing serious persecution. As to this, the West in general and the Obama administration in particular have done nothing to aid, for instance, the Christians being slaughtered in Muslim lands. But the bottom line is that the “refugees” are coming to the West simply because the West is nicer than where they come from. And they will keep coming until they’ve turned the West into where they’ve come from — unless we change course.

There’s much talk today about anchor babies, but that’s only part of our obsession with granting citizenship to foreigners. Workers should be expected to work and go home. Guests should be expected to visit and go home. For whether or not you believe charity begins at home, for certain is that conflating it with family status is robbing us of our home.

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

I am proud to be a ‘crazy’ woman that opposes the Iran deal by Rachel Avraham

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Iran executed body parts of prisoner Photo Credit: Shabnam Assadollahi

Obama referred to the people that oppose his Iran deal as “the crazies.” However, some of the most innovative and thoughtful people throughout human history were considered crazy in their times but there was never an instance where it was good to appease terrorism like Obama does.

Politico recently reported that U.S. President Barack Obama recently called everyone who opposes the Iran deal “the crazies.” In Obama’s world view, you are either with him when it comes to appeasing the terrorist regime in Iran or you are insane. In the past, Obama has compared opponents of the deal to Iranian hard-liners, which prompted many Republicans to ask whether he would include in that category Democrats who oppose the deal such as the respectable incoming Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer.

As a duel Israeli-American citizen, I want to tell Obama that I wear the badge of being viewed as crazy by him with a badge of honor. All great and innovative people were initially viewed as crazy. When Moses approached Pharaoh and asked to free the Jewish people from slavery before G-d performed the miracle of the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh and his entire court related to Moses as a ridiculous crazy magician. When Judah Maccabee decided to liberate the Land of Israel from the Seleucid Empire, I am sure the average Joe in the ancient world viewed him as nuts for standing up against such a mighty empire with such meager forces at his disposal. When Theodore Herzl spoke about the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel, many people including numerous Jews did not think that it had a chance of actually happening. Former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was viewed by many to be nuts for declaring the existence of the Jewish state on lands where Jews were a minority and faced an onslaught of five invading Arab armies on the outside with meager forces at his disposal. In the end, he is viewed by historians to be one of the greatest leaders in Jewish history.

In world history, Galileo was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church’s Inquisition for making new discoveries on his special telescope. He was viewed by them to be a heretic and a nut as his ideas opposed their theology. In the end, everyone knows who Galileo was and no one knows the names of these inquisitors. Many of the contemporaries of Leonardo Da Vinci probably considered him crazy for thinking that one day that there would be flying machines but now, airplanes are a common part of our world.

When former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our times” following the deal he signed with Adolph Hitler that surrendered the Sudetenland to a horrendous fate in the hopes that by feeding the Nazi crocodile the big countries of Western Europe would be spared, Winston Churchill knew better but many people were skeptical of him and did not agree with him on this issue. Now, everyone knows Churchill was right and Chamberlain has been written down into history as a horrible world leader. Many people claim that Muslims aren’t capable of having democratic regimes that respect human rights but Mohammed Mosaddegh succeeded to create such a regime in Iran until 1953, when the American and British intelligence foolishly overthrew his regime in favor of the Shah just so they could have a better oil deal. Iran has never been a democracy since. This proves that Muslim countries can be democratic one day and Iran is not condemned to always be under the totalitarian rule of the mullahs.

Therefore, I think it is much better to be among these crazies than to go down in history as an appeaser of terrorist regimes like Obama has. This Iran deal won’t create “peace in our times.” Even if it solves the nuclear issue, which it likely won’t as the IAEA does not have the resources to inspect Iran properly and the system in place has too many loopholes, the Iranian issue is much greater than Iran’s nuclear program and this deal does not address those other critical issues. Therefore, it will only lead to more wars, more terrorism, and more grave human rights abuses but if the world had listened to Netanyahu, maybe a better deal could have been reached that would have prevented this. Now with the sanctions in the process of disappearing, that hope has vanished and only Israeli intervention can possibly stop the Iranian threat now.

The Iranian government is a regime that rapes virgins before they are executed from cranes; amputates body parts; declares homosexuals, Bahais, and the State of Israel don’t have a right to exist; and brutally represses both women and minorities. This is a regime that is behind massive terrorism in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and other places throughout the world. This is a regime responsible for terror attacks against Israelis and Jews abroad in addition to murdering Iranian dissidents who left that are too politically active. It is a totalitarian regime in every sense of the word and it will remain a threat to world peace as any successful deal, which this one isn’t, must also end human rights abuses within Iran and ensure that Iran is no longer a threat to other countries. Any deal short of that is not worth it, especially if it involves the removal of sanctions. It is better to be among the crazies who identified evil when it is front of them and sought to stand against it even if the rest of the world seeks to follow the path of Neville Chamberlain in the hopes that the Iranian crocodile will eat them last than to appease Iranian terrorism and to have that be my legacy. And it appears that there are Iranians who agree with me.

In response to these developments, prominent Iranian Canadian human rights activist Shabnam Assadollahi had the following to state: “According to US President Barack Obama, anyone who doesn’t believe in his lies and his weak foreign policy is crazy. Obama has failed because he acts like a dictator who keeps threatening the US Congress by vetoing anything against his wishes. He lacks dignity and shows no respect to his established allies especially Canada since Canada has been leading in opposing the bad Iran deal. But Obama prefers to build friendships with those regimes that violate their own citizen’s rights, showing no respect for religious and ethnic minorities. When you have allies, you are meant to be in alliance with them, not calling them crazies.”

“The regime Obama is appeasing and shaking hands with has been holding four American citizens as hostages in jail for years,” Assadollahi stressed. Additionally, Iran recently executed six prisoners, among them Kurdish dissident Behrouz Alkhani: “They beat the family in front of the prison. The poor guy was only 30.” Despite Amnesty International and the international human rights community calling not to execute Alkhani, Iran not only executed him but refused to hand over his body to his family: “They gave the other five prisoners bodies over but they did not give his to the family and told them to go to court tomorrow. And Obama is calling us the crazies. I wonder if Obama’s daughters were in the hands of the Mullah’s regime would he still call me crazy. It seems that Obama’s cozying up with the Mullah’s regime of Iran has prompted him to ignore the fact that the true crazies are those Iranians who burn US flags in the streets of Tehran shouting ‘Death to America!’ Obama, I am proud to be called crazy by you who have appeased and empowered the inhumane, murderous, evil, terrorist Islamist regime of Iran.”

In conclusion, I want to state that I don’t know what the best way to proceed is! On the one hand, with Iran purchasing all of these new weapons, Israel cannot really afford to wait to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities as the existential threat will only grow greater the longer we wait. By the time a Republican could potentially be elected, it will be much harder to attack Iran than today and if that Republican is Donald Trump, it might not be much of an improvement for he said he would uphold the Iran deal despite its flaws. But on the other end of the coin, Obama will create major problems for Israel or anyone else who stands in the way of his deal as he views us as the “crazies” and can’t tolerate a different vision that goes against appeasement of terrorism, much less Israel acting upon that worldview. Israel will face terrible diplomatic ostracism that will also adversely affect the American Jewish community if Israel attacks Iran under Obama’s watch. The recent drama with the Palestinians at the UN will look like a joke in comparison to the actions that Obama could take against Israel for attacking Iran. Israel’s leaders have difficult decisions to make these days.

EDITORS NOTE: This op-ed column by Rachel Avraham originally appeared on the JerusalemOnline.com website. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.

Al Jazeera: Stop saying the word “migrant” and call them all “refugees”

Invasion of Europe news….

We’ve seen this coming for some time—the word-police are out in force and want to be sure you stop using certain words to describe the “invasion” of Europe.

By the way, “invasion” is one of those words you are NOT to use, which is precisely why we won’t stop using it!

According to Al Jazeera, any “migrant” on the move even for economic reasons or for nefarious reasons is to be called a “refugee.”

We are seeing it right here in America as the illegal alien kids are rushing (LOL! swarming!) the U.S. southern border and the Obama Administration and the resettlement contractors refer to them as “refugees” or “asylum seekers.”

Here is the Washington Post telling us about Al Jazeera:

Reading a British tabloid newspaper in 2015, you might wonder if Europe was again at risk of being conquered by the Mongol Empire. The continent is under “siege,” the papers report, facing an “invasion” from a “horde.” Parts of Europe have become like a “war zone,” they say, as“marauding” foreigners “swarm” the borders. The reality, of course, is that there is no army at the gates. The migrants that cause Europe such angst aren’t arriving in warships. Instead, most arrive in a human trafficker’s dinghy, if they arrive at all.

It’s not hard to see that using sort of language could have a dangerous impact on the discourse surrounding migrants. “Words that convey an exaggerated sense of threat can fuel anti-immigration sentiment and a climate of intolerance and xenophobia,” Alexander Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University, told WorldViews recently. Critically analyzing the derogatory words used to describe migrants is clearly prudent, but some want to go even further: Last week, Al Jazeera English broke with other major news organizations to announce that it was ditching the word “migrant.”

“The umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean,” Barry Malone, the online editor of Al Jazeera English, explained in a blog post. “It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.” Instead, Malone wrote, his news organization would use the term “refugee” to describe those crossing the Mediterranean. “Migrant is a word that strips suffering people of voice,” Malone concluded. “Substituting refugee for it is – in the smallest way – an attempt to give some back.”

For more and for embedded links go here.

By the way, the word “refugee” holds an even greater meaning when one understands that in much of the first world it entitles those so designated to be given welfare goodies of all sorts.

I kind of like some of those words in the first paragraph, words like “swarm!” I’ll have to remember that one for future use.

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Iranian official: “Israel should be annihilated”

“We reject the existence of any Israeli on this earth.” More genocide dreams from our new pals in the Islamic Republic of Iran. “‘Israel should be annihilated,’ senior Iran aide says,” Times of Israel, August 25, 2015:

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday said Israel “should be annihilated,” and that the thawing relations with the West would not translate into a shift in Tehran’s position concerning the Jewish state.

Hussein Sheikholeslam, a foreign affairs adviser to parliament speaker Ali Larijani, told Iranian media that contrary to remarks by British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, “Our positions against the usurper Zionist regime have not changed at all; Israel should be annihilated and this is our ultimate slogan.”

Hammond was in Iran on Monday for the reopening of the UK embassy in Tehran, and said that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had indicated a “more nuanced approach” to Israel’s existence. Hammond said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s “revolutionary sloganizing” should be distinguished from “what Iran actually does in the conduct of its foreign policy.”

“We’ve got to, as we do with quite a number of countries, distinguish the internal political consumption rhetoric from the reality of the way they conduct their foreign policy,” the Guardian quoted Hammond saying.

Sheikholeslam told a Hamas news outlet earlier this month that Iran has resisted pressure exerted by the P5+1 world powers during the nuclear negotiations to halt its political involvement in Gaza, Syria and Yemen.

“These powers admitted that the reason for their pressure on us is our position on Israel,” he said. “We told them that we reject the existence of any Israeli on this earth.”

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The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS: #1 Bestseller in Radical Political Thought

The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISISMy latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS, has zoomed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in the “Radical Political Thought” category, topping none other than Saul Alinsky, whose perennial guide to Leftist subversion and character assassination, Radicals, comes in at #2.

The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS is available at any self-respecting bookstore, as well as at Amazon.com in paperback (order here) and on Kindle (order here). Here are a few more advance reviews:

“Robert Spencer has been telling, and warning, us of the activities of the jihadists since 2003. Every single day for twelve years he has kept a vigilant eye on all the barbarisms of the Islamic terrorists and is surely the best informed and almost the only truly qualified expert capable of analyzing the emergence, development, and ideology of the monstrous death cult known as ISIS. Spencer also offers ways to com- bat this group, a group that President Obama refuses to recognize as posing any threat to American security and interests. On so many sad occasions when he was not taken seriously enough, Spencer was forced to remind us, ‘I told you so.’ It is time to listen to Robert Spencer.” — Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and Defending the West

“Robert Spencer has given us a series of immensely informative and accurate books, enlarging our knowledge on vital current issues. This latest one adds a potent analysis of ISIS, the most pressing danger of our time, which Spencer knows to its core. This essential book pro- vides us with the intellectual tools that are indispensable for success- fully overcoming this threat to our civilization, and should be widely read. It is an urgent necessity.” — Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide

“Here is everything you need to know about the gravest threat to the U.S. and the free world today. Spencer goes way beyond the superficial cable headlines and the misleading conventional news reports into the deepest levels of ISIS that no other analyst has ever gone before. It is an eye opening masterpiece that will leave you absolutely shocked. Robert Spencer is truly amazing in how he breaks through the fog of denial and peels away layer upon layer of misinformation surrounding ISIS; how he shows the unparalleled savagery of ISIS and why Western leaders are living in lala land when they ludicrously assert that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam; and discards and destroys the political correctness in Washington that has masked the existential danger to our society by the continued growth of ISIS and the continued charade that it is merely a ‘death cult.’ If you want to know the truth and full story, you have to read Spencer’s book. If you want to blind yourself to reality and the true danger to your family and friends, then ignore this book at your peril. I have been investigating Islamic terrorism for nearly twenty-five years and I can honestly state that this book is one of the most important books on terrorism I have ever read. Buy copies for your family members, for your friends, and last but not least for your elected political leaders.” — Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad and Jihad Incorporated

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Minnesota: Somali Muslim Day Care Fraud Cases Piling Up

Again, not enough time to give you all the ins and outs of these cases, you need to read this story yourselves.  Thanks to a reader for sending it!

For those of you thinking that this is Minnesota’s problem, think again!

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement is giving grants to some of the nine major federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for resettling refugees to help refugee women set up dare care facilities to provide “culturally appropriate” day care in towns where you live (see below)!  BTW, they are basically using your tax dollars to compete with American women who might want to become day care providers.   And, you might want to ask, well what about assimilating to America if they are placing Somali kids only in Somali run day care centers?  Where is the multiculturalism in this?

From Alphanews:

Since the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) fully-staffed their new child care fraud investigative unit in the spring of 2014, they’ve worked with the FBI to shutter daycare centers around the state. Of the cases that have hit the news since then, all have involved Somali-run businesses.

Khadra Hirsi

Khadra Hirsi

Khadra Abdisafad Hirsi, 47, was the director and co-owner of Ace Daycare Center in Eden Prairie. In February, Hirsi pleaded guilty to knowingly submitting fraudulent claims to the state of Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program. From November of 2011-May of 2013, Hirisi inflated the number of children using her daycare’s services and fraudulently obtained $300,000 in payments from the state of Minnesota and the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services.Earlier this month Hirsi was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison and ordered to pay $300,000 in restitution.

[….]

Deqo daycare center, which had three locations in Apple Valley, St. Paul, and Minneapolis was shut down in 2013 due to licensing violations and prosecutors charged husband and wife Ahmed Aden Mohamed and Yasmin Abdulle Ali for bilking the state out of nearly $3.7 million, $3.1 million of which was collected from April 2012-January 2013. The duo had recruited more than 100 parents to enroll their own children in the program.

There is much more here.

Now be sure to visit the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Microenterprise Development—Home Based Child Care program where your tax dollars are handed out in grants to help Somalis (and other refugees) become day care owners and operators.  Go here and be sick!

And, I suspect that the contractor administering the grant is not audited to determine where exactly this money is spent!  People ask me all the time how can a contractor make enough money simply by collecting the per-head payment for each refugee they resettle.  Well, it is grants like these that send more money into their coffers.

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RELATED VIDEO: Day care fraud in Ohio

Iran’s Supreme Leader: U.S., Israel conspiring against the Qur’an

Obama hardest hit. After all his pandering to Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic groups in the U.S., all his fantastic praise of the nonexistent Muslim role in building the United States, all his appeasement and accommodation of Iran, this is what he gets.

 

“Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urges Islamic unity against real enemies: U.S. and Israel,” by Kellan Howell, The Washington Times, August 22, 2015:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader, on Saturday called on the Islamic nations to unite in the face of the world’s “bullies” and greatest enemies: the U.S. and Israel.

Mr. Khamenei accused the U.S. of seeking to incite “third-party” states against the Islamic Republic but said “such third parties are only deceived puppets,” Iran’s Fars news agency reported.

He argued that the bullying powers are conspiring “against the [Koran] and not Shiism and Iran, because they know that the [Koran] and Islam are the center of awakening nations.”

Mr. Khamenei added that Iranians chant slogans like “death to America, death to Israel” because they have “realized that their real stubborn enemy is the world arrogance of Zionism,” the Times of Israel reported.

Speaking to Iranian officials in charge of the Hajj — the massive annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca — Mr. Khamenei said the pilgrimage was the perfect opportunity for Iranians to convey his message to other Muslims and encourage Islamic unity.

“The world bullies are fully, seriously seeking to stir violence and discord under the name of Islam and are trying to disrepute the religion of Islam, foment internal fights among Islamic nations and even among the people of one nation to weaken the Muslim Ummah, and transferring the Iranian nation’s experience about unity and recognition of the enemy to other nations in the Hajj season can defuse these plots,” he said, The Times of Israel reported….

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Multiculturalism and the Rise of Islamic Terrorism by Ralph Sidway

William Kilpatrick offers a broad analysis of how “the multicultural experiment of elevating other cultures by denigrating our own” fosters widespread detachment from our civilizational identity, and breeds allies for Islamic supremacism:  “As befits two movements with global ambitions, the leftist-Islamist alliances are cropping up all over the planet… Sometimes the alliance goes beyond moral and financial support and manifests itself in actual violence.”

“Multiculturalism and the Rise of Domestic Terrorism,” by William Kilpatrick, Crisis Magazine, August 18, 2015:

In a speech launching a five-year plan to combat homegrown terrorism, UK Prime Minister David Cameron said that “Many people born in Britain have little attachment to the country and that makes them vulnerable to radicalization.”

It’s not as though Muslims who live in Britain don’t eat fish and chips or root for their local football club. But, apparently, a not insignificant number can indulge in British pastimes and still feel unconnected to the country they live in. In her 2006 bookLondonistan, Melanie Phillips described how a separate and alien culture had developed in England as a result of Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism—an experiment that had been fostered by British elites in media, government, and even in churches.

The problem was, said Phillips, that in order to make room for other cultures, the elites had hollowed out their own culture so that “British society presented a moral and philosophical vacuum that was ripe for colonization by predatory Islamism.” She laid much of the blame on educators:

The British education system simply ceased transmitting either the values or the story of the nation to successive generations, delivering instead the message that truth was an illusion and that the nation and its values were whatever anyone wanted them to be.

A similar process has been underway for a long time in the U.S. For many years, America has been deeply invested in the same multicultural experiment of elevating other cultures by denigrating its own. Our educational, media, and entertainment establishments have subjected young people to decades of anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Christian conditioning. As it turned out, the flip side of “tolerance for diversity” was intolerance for one’s own culture and the things that make it distinctive.

The result? As Robert Spencer observed, “people who are ashamed of their culture will not defend it.” Such people might even feel that attacks on our country are justified by our history of slavery, racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Still others will feel justified in carrying out the attacks. In England, the police are now uncovering on average one jihadist plot per day.

The situation is not yet as desperate in America, but we seem nevertheless to be generating a steady supply of homegrown terrorists. On the surface, they blend in with the culture. Major Nidal Hasan was an Army psychiatrist, the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston were into sports and school, and Mohammod Abdulazeez, the Chattanooga shooter, seemed in many respects to be the all-American boy. On the outside, they appeared to be ordinary Americans. On the inside they were more like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers—aliens with alien ambitions.

The worrisome thing is, our educational system, along with other institutions of cultural formation, seems to be on course to creating a whole nation of pod people—people with little attachment to their country or countrymen.

This detachment can take three forms. In some cases, individuals turn away from involvement in their culture to self-absorption. To assuage the loneliness of the unconnected self, they might turn to drugs or pornography or serial sex. Except for the world of pop entertainment, they are unconscious of the larger world. Like the clueless young people interviewed on the Watters’ World segment of the O’Reilly Factor, they might be unsure who the first president was, in which century the Civil War was fought, or who John Kerry is. None of that seems important to them. If a group of bearded men wearing long robes and speaking Arabic moved into the apartment above, they’d probably think, “that’s cool” and light up another joint.

The second form that the detachment takes is a transfer of allegiance from one’s own history and culture to a neo-Marxist perspective. Thanks in large part to our educational system, a growing segment of our population has come to look upon its own culture as the root of all the world’s evils. Unlike the self-absorbed detachers, they are politically engaged, but their political aims have to do with undermining traditional society and radically transforming it. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement is representative of this group.

The third group, the one that Prime Minister Cameron is primarily concerned about, is composed of those whose first loyalty is to the ummah—the worldwide community of Muslim believers. They may live in the UK, France, or the U.S., but their allegiance lies elsewhere. They may have always felt this way, or they may have undergone a conversion. The majority in this category pose no direct threat to the larger society; they simply prefer to lead their lives separate from it. These separate communities do, however, provide the soil in which the radicals take root. They are, to use another metaphor, the sea in which the jihadis swim. The radical Muslims themselves are in some ways similar to the anti-Western Westerners who repudiate the Western tradition. The radicals not only reject Western culture, they see it as evil and they want to bring it down.

Because they have the same goals—the destruction of Western and Christian civilization—the members of the second group often act as enablers of Muslim radicals. I’ve written before about the leftist-Islamist alliance—the leftist professors who support the cause of Hamas, the left-leaning foundations which finance the “Islamophobia” campaign, and the left-leaning politicians who support the Muslim Brotherhood. But sometimes the alliance goes beyond moral and financial support and manifests itself in actual violence. The best example of this are the antifa or “antifascist” gangs in Europe who use brownshirt tactics to suppress any protest against Islamization or the leftist policies—such as mass immigration—which promote Islamization. Numerous anti-Islamization rallies and marches in Europe have been broken up by much larger groups of young antifas throwing punches and sometimes bricks and bottles.

As befits two movements with global ambitions, the leftist-Islamist alliances are cropping up all over the planet. In Australia recently, an organization called Reclaim Australia held a series of rallies to protest Islamization. They were met by violent “anti-racist” counter-demonstrators, some of them wearing face coverings. Here’s an account of one such encounter in Melbourne:

I made my way onto Spring Street, where there was an even larger mob, maybe 500 or 600 people, some with megaphones… There were a few late comers or stragglers attempting to get through to the ‘Reclaim Australia’ section. It was futile. As soon as anyone in the mob identified a person as a Reclaimer, a large horde of 20 or 40 of the mob would rush to them, and in many incidents I witnessed, assault them, knock them to the ground, and kick them on the ground. It became a mob mentality. Anyone with an Australian flag had it stolen from them and was assaulted. Almost every assault I witnessed was by twenty or more on one.

So if you’re worried about the advance of global jihad, it’s not just the young Muslim browsing radical sites on the Internet that you need to worry about. You also have to worry about all those college grads who majored in Marxism and Peace Studies, and are dead set on ridding the world of “racists” and “fascists.”

By comparison, the first group of detachers—those who are mainly into themselves—seems the least dangerous of the three. That’s generally true. On the other hand, the self-absorbed sometimes become disenchanted with the pursuit of self and seek to find their identity in a larger cause. Sometimes they end up in church, sometimes in the radical left, and sometimes in radical Islam. Judging by his blog posts, the Chattanooga jihadist, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez seems to have traveled this route. Having tried out drugs, drink, fast cars, and other vain pursuits, he finally found a purpose in jihad.

However, the main threat posed by those who seek constant diversion is that they are too distracted to notice the larger world and the dangers lurking in it. They are oblivious to anything outside their own pleasure zone. Thus, they can be of little help in resisting the twin threat posed by leftism and Islamism. The same can be said to a lesser degree of those we might call the semi-detached (or semi-attached, if you prefer). Such people don’t reject Western and Christian values, but they are not actively engaged in promoting or defending them. They don’t hate America, but they are too busy earning a living or raising a family to think much about existential threats to their society. Thanks to years of relentless indoctrination from the schools and the media, their links to core cultural principles are tenuous. The result is a certain passivity concerning events over which they supposedly have no control: “Ho-hum, I see there’s been another jihad attack. I hope the authorities will do something about it.”

An individual’s will to resist tyranny, whether of the leftist or Islamic variety, depends to a large extent on the strength of his attachments—particularly attachments to family, church, and country. But the liberal state does everything it can to weaken those ties. And once the ties that bind are slackened sufficiently, it’s difficult to care strongly about anything. If the current attacks on marriage, family, religion, and patriotism—up until recently the main glue of society—are as successful as the social engineers hope, there will soon be nothing left worth fighting for.

Which raises a question: What happens when the leaders of a society are themselves detached from that society? What happens, for instance, when the leaders of the U.S. government begin to see themselves not as representatives of the American people but as members of a worldwide order of global elites—a sort of non-religious “ummah”?…

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A Strange Turn of History: The ‘Risk of a Nuclear Attack has gone up’ by Michael Devolin

“In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.” –President Barack Obama, 2009

While reading Philip Taubman’s book The Partnership, a story about “five Cold Warriors and their quest to ban the bomb,” I was amazed by how he mentions President Obama in glowing terms—as a politician concerned and speaking out about the dangers nuclear weapons pose to the world at large—but refers to Iran as a one of those countries whose “nuclear program” the same world should regard as suspect and a veritable kindle stick to what has always been a volatile and preponderantly Muslim Middle East. He quotes President Obama who, during a visit to Prague in 2009, remarked, “In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

Surprisingly, in light of the “Iran deal” recently orchestrated by Obama’s shamelessly sycophantic John Kerry, Taubman tells that it was the view of William Perry (one of the Cold Warriors) way back when that, “the intersection of terrorism and the weapons programs in North Korea and Iran will push nuclear threats out of control. ‘If Iran and North Korea cannot be stopped from building nuclear arsenals,’ he said, ‘I believe that we will cross that tipping point, with consequences that will be dangerous beyond most people’s imagination.’ ” He recounts that in 2008, during a presidential debate, Obama said that “…the biggest threat to the United States is a terrorist getting their hands on nuclear weapons.” So, I am not so perplexed by Philip Taubman’s blind and salivating support of Barack Obama as I am by President Obama’s complete repudiation of his professed convictions then about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the absence of what should have been, to date, a corresponding foreign policy as regards Iran. His recent imbecility, or, as it has become known, “the Iran deal,” has not only evoked the choler of his Republican opponents but also that of some of his fellow Democrats, including Robert Menendez and Chuck Schumer.

What kind of leader wilfully enables a professed enemy of the USA to produce nuclear weapons? Certainly not a leader known for patriotic rhetoric, and certainly not a leader known for telling the truth. This is the same Barack Obama who, during his first term as President, condemned Iran unreservedly, as though there was never any doubt that Iran was a rogue nation and a danger to the security of the entire world, let alone the Middle East: “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” But now he’s given the green light to Iran to continue its “nuclear program,” as though Iran were a trusted friend and not a sworn enemy of the United States of America—as though the Republic of Iran has no intention of developing nuclear weapons. “I’m not naïve,” said President Obama back in 2009. Oh, but yes you are, Mr. President.

In his book World War IV, Norman Podhoretz pointed out back in 2007 that many members of the “foreign-policy elites” were coming to the conclusion that making compromises with the Republic of Iran was not a viable option simply because of the fact that this regime, even then, showed nothing but contempt for Western diplomacy and goodwill. “You can’t piss through an Ironwood tree,” as they say up here in Canada, and you can’t expect an Islamist regime like Iran to give up its enthralling dream of hegemony over all other nations in the Middle East when that same dream can only be realized by means of nuclear weapons capability. And you can’t expect Iran’s religious madmen to give up their lust for killing Jews when they’ve proudly ingeminated their public support of terrorists bent on the annihilation of the State of Israel for so many years now that it’s become an Islamic custom. Think Al Quds Day. Podhoretz recounts that even his unflattering political opponents eventually had to acknowledge his astute ascertainment about the religious madmen of Iran: “As one who had long since rejected the faith in diplomacy and sanctions, and who had been excoriated for my heretical views by more than one member of the foreign-policy elites, I never thought I would live to see the day when these very elites would come to admit that the carrot-and-stick approach would not and could not succeed in preventing Iran from getting the bomb.”

Mr. Podhoretz goes on to tell that, even though his opponents acknowledged his wisdom and foresight regarding Iran, “the lesson they drew from this new revelation was, however, a different matter.” Instead of “drawing the logical conclusion—namely that military action had now become necessary,” they opted for the “complacent idea that we could live with an Iranian bomb.” Promoting military action against Iran, Podhoretz argued that “deterrence could not be relied upon with a regime ruled by Islamofascist revolutionaries who not only were ready to die for their beliefs but cared less about protecting their people than about the spread of their ideology and their power. If the mullahs got the bomb, I said, it is not them who would be deterred, but us.”

And this, alas, this reversal of roles, from having some measure of control over our destiny to placing our destiny into the hands of our sworn enemies—is the irremissible fate foisted on us (and our children) by President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry. I am very distressed by the fact that the present government of the greatest superpower in the world (USA) has now given legitimacy (cheap though it may be) to a vicious regime whose mullahs have had ties to what Neil Kressel referred to as “worldwide holy war network,” to such Islamist savages as Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, and all because President Barack Obama obdurately insists that the West can “live with an Iranian bomb.”

This certainly is a strange turn of history, President Obama, but not because the “threat of global nuclear war has gone down,” nor because “the risk of nuclear attack has gone up,” but because you, in every grandiloquent speech you gave back in 2009, promised you would work toward creating a world free of the threat of nuclear war. Instead, because of your underhanded dealings with Iran, beyond the gaze of those who actually love and cherish the freedoms and security we enjoy here in the Western hemisphere, have made the world a much more dangerous place.

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California: Santa Cruz Muslim Threatened to Bomb Two Colleges

“University of California Santa Cruz police officers arrested a 25-year-old Santa Cruz man in connection to an anonymous social media post that referenced homicide, suicide, explosives, and a past university shooting.” “The post didn’t target any individuals, though it included general threats against two campus colleges, Oakes and Porter.” Hawari doesn’t seem to have actually had any explosives; he may have simply been trying to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Qur’an 8:60).

AYMAN-KAREEM-HAWARI

Ayman Kareem Hawari

An update on this story. “Man accused of making terrorist threats against UC Santa Cruz,” KSBW, August 21, 2015:

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. —University of California Santa Cruz police officers arrested a 25-year-old Santa Cruz man in connection to an anonymous social media post that referenced homicide, suicide, explosives, and a past university shooting.

A concerned parent called UCSC police at 7 p.m. Wednesday after he discovered the post.

Investigators identified Ayman Kareem Hawari as the post’s creator, UCSC Police Chief Nader Oweis said.

Officers arrested Hawari on a suspicion of making terrorist threats and resisting arrest. He was booked into the Santa Cruz County Jail Thursday.

So far, officers have found no connections between Hawari and the university.

“The post didn’t target any individuals, though it included general threats against two campus colleges, Oakes and Porter,” Oweis said….

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France train jihadi trained in Islamic State, was being watched by police

A Strange Turn of History

France: Dead Islamic State Train Jihadi was Being Watched by Police

Not closely enough, obviously. Why was he allowed to return to France after training with the Islamic State? The Islamic State is at war with France. Going there should be considered an act of treason, disqualifying one from returning to the country.

Ayoub-El-Khazzani

Ayoub El Khazzani

“French train ‘gunman’ named, as the humble hero who stopped him waves leaving hospital,” by Scott Campbell, Levi Winchester, Alix Culbertson, and Helen Barnett, Sunday Express, August 22, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

THE man suspected of being the crazed gunman who tried to open fire on a packed train has been named, as the hero who stopped him was seen leaving hospital.

Counter-terrorism experts have named the suspect as Ayoub El Khazzani, a 26-year-old Moroccan who has links to Islamic State and was being watched by French police.

Spencer Stone, the US Air Force serviceman who stopped him in his tracks, was today personally commended by President Barack Obama.

Mr Stone ran down the aisle of the Amsterdam to Paris train to tackle the would-be terrorist.

The US Air Force serviceman was injured in the hand as he came face to face with the AK-47 wielding attacker.

He waved quickly as he left the Lille hospital this evening, before slipping into a black car with diplomatic number plates.

President Obama telephoned Mr Stone along with US National Guard soldier Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Anthony Sadler, to congratulate them for their courage and quick action.

The American president wished Stone a full and speedy recovery, and expressed how proud all Americans are of their extraordinary bravery.

The group thwarted the Morrocan [sic] gunman’s attempts to take out the train passengers after hearing his loading his gun in the toilets.

The gunman stormed out and opened fire shortly after crossing the French border but fortunately the trio and British passenger Chris Norman overpowered him and tied him up before he could slaughter passengers.

He was carrying at least nine magazines of ammunition with enough rounds to kill all 554 passengers on the train.

US National Guard soldier Alek Skarlatos, 22, said he helped tackle the attacker with his friend Spencer Stone, who is in the US Air Force, who was stabbed in the neck.

He said: “I just got back from Afghanistan last month, and this was my vacation from Afghanistan.”

Their friend, Anthony Sadler, was travelling with them and described the moment the pair jumped into action.

He said: “As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells, `Spencer, go!’ And Spencer runs down the aisle.

“Spencer makes first contact, he tackles the guy, Alek wrestles the gun away from him, and the gunman pulls out a box cutter and slices Spencer a few times. And the three of us beat him until he was unconscious.

“He was just telling us to give back his gun. ‘Give me back my gun! Give me back my gun!’ But we just carried on beating him up and immobilised him and that was it.”

A Spanish anti-terrorist official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed El Khazzani had lived in Spain until last year, moved to France then travelled to Syria where he is believed to have trained with ISIS before returning to France.

French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said the suspect had been flagged by Spanish authorities last year for links to ISIS….

“Jihadi John”: “I will go back to Britain…and will carry on cutting heads off”
UC Santa Cruz: Muslim threatened two campus colleges with explosives

Germany: Violent Protests Erupt over Muslim Refugees

More ‘Invasion of Europe’ news…..

From the UK Independent:

Asylum-Seekers-in-Germany-01

This chart gives some idea of what Germany is faced with as the government tries to find relocation sites for tens of thousands of refugees.

Up to 1,000 protesters have clashed with police in eastern Germany in riots reportedly sparked by the arrival of 250 migrants.

Police said protesters shouting “foreigners out” and carrying banners against the “asylum flood” threw bottles and stones at busloads of asylum seekers arriving in Heidenau, near Dresden.

At least 31 officers were hurt in violent scuffles as police used tear gas to disperse crowds.

Peaceful demonstrations began after news spread that the town was welcoming a large number of refugees who are set to be housed in an empty building. (then they turned violent)

[….]

Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the influx of asylum seekers is the biggest problem Europe currently faces. Germany, which has relatively liberal asylum laws, is taking in more refugees than any other European country, many from war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq.

There is also another bit of news from the UK.  It seems that immigration has surpassed concern for the economy as the number one issue on peoples’ minds there.

More ‘Invasion of Europe’ news here.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of riots in Dresden, Germany is courtesy of the Associated Press.

Former CIA Operations Officer: Iran has never told the truth about its nuclear program

Clare Lopez, a former CIA Operations officer and the Vice-President of Research & Analysis at Center for Security Policy. is our featured guest on today’s short promotional for the “DAY OF ACTION” in Santa Barbara, California on Sunday Aug 30, 2015.

Clare is one of America’s top experts on Iran and their march to the Atomic bomb and she has much to say about the very bad Iran nuke deal made by the Obama Administration.

Join us in STOPPING THE IRAN DEAL!

We have TWO amazing events on August 30th!

The first is a Roundtable Luncheon featuring a panel of national and local experts on the Iran Treaty, on the US and Israel and how it will affect Santa Barbara County. Tickets are $60. Sponsorships are available at different levels. A ticket to the lunch gets you a VIP seat at the rally (details below). If you are not able to attend but would like to donate (100% tax-deductible) to help offset to costs of this grassroots effort, it would be appreciated. To purchase tickets, to sponsor or to donate, go to: StopIran.eventbrite.com

After the lunch, there will be a Stop Iran NOW Rally at the Santa Barbara Courthouse Sunken Gardens co-hosted by Stand With Us, The Clarion Project, The United West and other local groups. The rally is FREE and we need as many people as possible to attend. Please forward to your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers. It’s up to US to stop this deal! Signs and flags will be provided.

Boston University Professor Defends Islamic State Sex Slavery

“In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes.” See, the Islamic State doesn’t practice sex slavery because it is sanctioned in the Qur’an and Sunnah, but because the U.S. did bad things in Iraq. This is what passes for analysis on most university campuses these days. Much more below.

“The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think,” by Kecia Ali, Huffington Post, August 19, 2015 (thanks to David):

…Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.

The disingenuous reasoning here is appalling. Can’t anyone in academia deal with a topic honestly anymore? I know Kecia Ali is a university professor, and university professors today are mostly muddle-headed ideologues more interested in pushing their far-Left agenda than having rational discussion or searching for the truth, but this is ridiculous. There are so many things wrong with that paragraph that it is a breathtakingly compact example of how contemporary academics obscure, rather than expose, the truth. Here are a few of the ways Kecia Ali outrages the truth in that paragraph:

“Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so.”

Actually, the Qur’an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an “excellent example” (33:21), which in Islamic theology has amounted to the proposition that if Muhammad did it, it is right and worthy of emulation. The fact that “the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it” actually inhibited the development of abolitionist movements within Islam, because of the absolute prohibition on declaring something to be wrong that Muhammad considered to be right.

“…indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point.”

Actually, it would settle the point if those majority-Muslim societies had outlawed slavery on the basis of Islamic principles, but they didn’t. They abolished slavery under pressure from the West. There was never an indigenous Muslim abolitionist movement, and to this day, slavery is practicedsub rosa in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, etc., and justified precisely on the contention that if the Qur’an assumes it and Muhammad practiced it, it cannot be wrong.

“It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so.”

Here again, this point is only valid if there were some mainstream Qur’anic case against slavery, reinterpreting the pro-slavery passages in a different way. But there isn’t. “Objective scholars” — as if Kecia Ali were one — may not find slavery in the Qur’an or Islamic law, but note that Kecia Ali is writing for an audience of Leftist non-Muslims in the Huffington Post: she is not trying to convince Islamic State slave owners that slavery is wrong on Islamic grounds. It is, in other words, far easier to lull non-Muslims into complacency about a human rights abuse that Muslims justify on Islamic grounds than it is to convince the Muslims who are perpetrating it to stop doing so.

“Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.”

Kecia Ali here assumes that the Bible and Qur’an are equivalent in their teachings and mainstream interpretation. In reality, the abolitionist movement arose in the UK and US among Christian clergymen who argued against the ongoing applicability of the Biblical passages justifying slavery on the basis of the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God and equal in dignity on that basis. The Qur’an and Islam, by contrast, make a sharp dichotomy between believers (“the best of people,” Qur’an 3:110) and unbelievers (“the most vile of created beings,” Qur’an 98:6), and consequently there was no teaching of the equal dignity of all human beings upon which an abolitionist movement could be based.

Kecia Ali probably knows all this, or should if she doesn’t. But she doesn’t tell her hapless HuffPo marks, that is, her readers.

Slavery was pervasive in the late antique world in which the Quran arose. Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet’s normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery. What is known of Muhammad’s life is disputed, but his biographies uniformly report that slaves and freed slaves were part of his household. One was Mariyya the Copt. A gift from the Byzantine governor of Alexandria, she reportedly bore Muhammad a son; he freed her. Whatever the factual accuracy of this tale, its presence attests to a shared presumption that one leader could send another an enslaved female for sexual use.

What she leaves out (again) of all this is the normative character of the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example for Muslims. That normative character is not some crazy literalist subsect of Islam. It is mainstream Islamic theology among all sects and madhahib.

Like their earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome, jurists formulating Islamic law in the eighth to 10th centuries took slavery as a given. They formalized certain protections for slaves, including eventual freedom for women like Mariyya who bore children to their masters; such children were free and legitimate. Jurists sought to circumscribe slavery, prohibiting the enslavement of foundlings and prescribing automatic manumission for slaves beaten too harshly. But the idea that some people should dominate others was central to their conceptual world; they used slavery-related concepts to structure their increasingly hierarchical norms for marriage.

Yet again: Kecia Ali doesn’t tell her unfortunate readers that Islamic law is not considered to be some man-made document like the U.S. Constitution; on the contrary, in Islamic theology Sharia is considered to be the unchangeable and perfect law of Allah himself. As such, its allowance for slavery is considered to be as divinely inspired and unalterable as the rest of it.

Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution, and jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries.

“Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution” — an unsupported and false claim. “Jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries” — everyone did it, you see, so it must be OK. This tu quoque argument might hold water if theologically-justified slavery persisted in religious contexts other than Islam today, but it doesn’t.

To say this is not to present an apologetic defense of Islam;

Don’t kid yourself, professor.

to the contrary, effective Muslim ethical thinking requires honesty and transparency about the lasting impact on Muslim thought on slavery and non-consensual sex.

Honesty and transparency on this issue would be refreshing, but it isn’t forthcoming in this article.

However, singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of “authentic” Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity.

The Islamic State’s attempt to create an imagined pristine community relies on a superficial and selective enactment of certain provisions from scripture and law, an extreme case of a wider phenomenon.

Once again, an assertion without evidence. How is the Islamic State being superficial and selective in its interpretation of the Qur’an and Sharia? Kecia Ali doesn’t tell us. She just wants us to take her word for it.

Religious studies scholars, of course, must analyze their doctrines.

I’m all for that.

What beliefs do they express? How do they formulate them? What one mustn’t do is take them at face value, as the legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth.

And why mustn’t one do this? Because above all, Kecia Ali and the Huffington Post don’t want you to have a negative view of Islam. But why should one not think that the Islamic State’s practices are the “legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth”? Yet again, we just have to take Kecia Ali’s word for it.

In fact, the stress they put on the errors of their Muslim opponents, who actively dispute their interpretations of many things including slavery, makes very clear that there is no one self-evident interpretation of Islam on these points.

Note that Kecia Ali doesn’t actually offer an alternative interpretation of the Qur’an passages that the Islamic State adduces in order to justify slavery. She just tells us that some unnamed “Muslim opponents” of the Islamic State have offered this. Who? When? Where? She doesn’t tell us. Why not? Could it be that this Muslim challenge to the Islamic State hasn’t actually happened at all?

…In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine. The fact that the Islamic State must preface its collections of rulings for slaveholding by defining terms such as captive and concubine illustrates that it is drawing on archaic terms and rules, ones that no longer reflect anything like the current reality of the world.

I doubt that even the Islamic State jihadis would deny that these are old terms and rules that have fallen into desuetude. But they would argue that they are part of the law of Allah; the fact that they’re old and long unused doesn’t change that, and actually only increases the urgency of reviving them, so as to bring the practice of Muslims back in line with the commands of Allah. Here yet again, Kecia Ali is attempting a sleight-of-hand, pretending that this issue is all about human law, not about the law that Muslims consider to be that of Allah himself.

By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war. None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.

The idea that the New York Times is interesting in retailing “familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity” is beyond ludicrous. For years, the Times has again and again obscured and whitewashed numerous incidents of barbarity committed by Muslims and justified by their perpetrators by reference to Islamic texts and teachings. Rukmini Callimachi’s piece was highly anomalous in acknowledging, even in a slight and incomplete manner, that the Islamic State justifies its practices by referring to teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah. But to admit that fact would be to expose as false and manipulative the ever-present narrative of Muslim victimhood, and Kecia Ali is not going to do that.

In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.

“Moral high ground is in short supply.” Because the U.S. Constitution “continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime” (the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”), we shouldn’t judge the Islamic State’s barbaric practice of sex slavery.

Kecia Ali’s moral equivalence here is nothing short of monstrous. But for her efforts, she will no doubt be hailed in Leftist circles and laden with honors, while the Islamic State’s sex slaves, for whose rights and human dignity she could have and should have spoken out instead of engaging in this gruesome apologetic for their enslavement, continue to suffer daily torture.

This is American academia today.

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