student Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

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Muslim facing deportation after threating to execute Donald Trump

March 4, 2016/in Featured, National Security, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Jihad Watch

Now he is playing the victim: “It’s just a stupid post. You can find thousands of these every hour on Facebook and the media. I don’t know why would they think I am a threat to the national security of the United States just because of a stupid post.”

The thing is, a death threat is serious business. Or it ought to be.

Anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who utters such a specific threat to kill anyone should be prosecuted. There shouldn’t be any leeway on this because Elsayed wrote the threat on Facebook, or because such threats are common.

Incidentally, in pilot class did he express any interest in learning how to take off and to land, or just in learning how to fly the plane? Just wondering.

“A flight student from Egypt is facing deportation from the United States after being investigated by federal agents for posting on his Facebook page that he was willing to serve a life sentence for killing Donald Trump and that the world would thank him,” by Amy Taxin and Brian Rohan, Associated Press, March 3, 2016:

Ohoud Ali Mohamed Nasr El Sayed

ORANGE, Calif. (AP) — A flight student from Egypt is facing deportation from the United States after being investigated by federal agents for posting on his Facebook page that he was willing to kill Donald Trump and the world would thank him.

While U.S. prosecutors have not charged 23-year-old Emadeldin Elsayed with a crime, immigration authorities arrested him last month at the Los Angeles-area flight school he attended and now are trying to deport him, attorney Hani Bushra said Wednesday.

Elsayed, who is being held in a jail in Orange, California, is devastated at seeing his dreams of becoming a pilot dashed over what Bushra acknowledged was a foolish social media post. An immigration court hearing will determine whether Elsayed will be deported.

“It seems like the government was not able to get a criminal charge to stick on him, so they used the immigration process to have him leave the country,” Bushra said. “The rhetoric is particularly high in this election, and I just feel he got caught up in the middle.”

Trump is leading the Republican presidential contenders and has used especially tough talk on immigration to win over many voters. He has vowed to build a wall along the entire Mexican border and has called for temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country.

U.S. Secret Service agents interviewed Elsayed in early February after he posted a photo of Trump on Facebook and wrote he was willing to serve a life sentence for killing the billionaire and the world would thank him, Bushra said. The agents returned eight days later and told him federal prosecutors had declined to charge him but said his visa to attend flight school had been revoked. He was arrested by immigration authorities.

Elsayed said he wrote the message because he was angered by Trump’s comments about Muslims. He said he immediately regretted it, and he never intended to harm anyone.

“It’s just a stupid post. You can find thousands of these every hour on Facebook and the media,” he told The Associated Press in a phone interview from jail. “I don’t know why would they think I am a threat to the national security of the United States just because of a stupid post.”

Elsayed said the agent who interviewed him mentioned last year’s shooting rampage by a Muslim husband-and-wife couple in San Bernardino and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, which were carried out by Muslims who had sought flight training in the United States.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that Elsayed was arrested because he violated “the terms of his admission to the United States.” The agency did not provide further details.

The State Department and Secret Service declined to discuss the case. A Trump campaign spokeswoman also declined to comment.

Elsayed is from Cairo, but he said he spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as a civil engineer. He came to the United States for the first time last September to attend Universal Air Academy with the hope of returning to Egypt and getting a job at an airline, he said….

Muslim student arrested for Islamic State NYC jihad mass murder plot

June 17, 2015/in National Security/by Jihad Watch

Saleh “denied sympathizing with Islamic State and granted them permission to examine his computer, authorities said. Investigators found the computer contained Islamic State propaganda, according to court filings.” War is deceit, as Muhammad said.

In any case, the glib dismissal by Western authorities of the Islamic State as having nothing to do with Islam fails to explain why Muslims such as Saleh are attracted to it. And so it does nothing to counter that attraction. This willful ignorance and denial is only endangering Americans, as it prevents the formulation of a realistic strategy to counter the Islamic State’s appeal.

“U.S. arrests New York man for Islamic State-inspired bomb plot,” by Joseph Ax and Nate Raymond, Reuters, June 16, 2015:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. authorities have accused a New York City college student of plotting to set off a pressure cooker bomb in the city in support of the militant group Islamic State, according to court documents made public on Tuesday.

Munther Omar Saleh, 20, was arrested early on Saturday morning after he and another man got out of their car and ran toward a surveillance vehicle that had been tracking their movements, according to documents filed in federal court in Brooklyn.

A defense lawyer for Saleh could not be identified on Tuesday. The other man, who was also arrested, was not named in the court documents and could not immediately be identified.

U.S. authorities have charged a number of so-called “lone wolf” plotters in recent months who have apparently been inspired by Islamic State, and authorities have said they are pursuing similar cases in all 50 states.

A federal agent said in court papers that Saleh, a resident of the New York City borough of Queens, spent hours online researching how to build a pressure cooker bomb and reading accounts of the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

In numerous online postings, Saleh expressed support for the Islamic State and at one point posted on Twitter, in an apparent reference to the militant group Al Qaeda, “I fear AQ could be getting too moderate,” according to court papers.

He also praised various militant attacks, including the January massacre at the headquarters of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in France and murders carried out by Islamic State, authorities said.

A police officer observed Saleh on successive days in March on foot at the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey and New York, seemingly looking around, the court papers said.

The behavior prompted officers to interview Saleh, who denied sympathizing with Islamic State and granted them permission to examine his computer, authorities said. Investigators found the computer contained Islamic State propaganda, according to court filings.

Saleh is studying at a college that specializes in aeronautics, the court papers said.

The complaint filed against Saleh mentions a third unnamed co-conspirator but does not say an arrest has been made….

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UC Berkeley student’s article on Islam pulled over fears for her safety

June 13, 2015/in Culture War, National Security, Religion/by Jihad Watch

I saw the piece when it first went up in the Berkeley student newspaper, marveled that it was published at all in such a place, and had planned to post an excerpt at Jihad Watch, but it was gone before I got a chance. Now we know why: there are concerns for the safety of the student who wrote it, and such concerns are entirely reasonable, given the fact (however often denied by dishonest Islamic apologists in the U.S.) of Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. The article was also noteworthy for the author’s frank admission that “yes, Islam does allow men to have four wives and sex slaves” — truths also often denied by Western Islamic apologists. In any case, “free speech” Berkeley ought to be in an uproar over the fact that this student is under threat, and the student paper ought to be filled with avowals of her human rights and declarations of how she must and will be protected. However, Berkeley ain’t what it used to be, if it ever was.

Terrorism Works, part 924,103: “Student’s Anti-Islam Article Retracted Due To ‘Safety’ Risk,” by Austin Petersen, Libertarian Republic, June 8, 2015:

An opinion piece written by a student at the University of California-Berkeley explaining her decision to leave Islam has been pulled from the school newspaper’s website over fears for the author’s safety.

The opinion piece, titled “On Leaving Islam,” recounted the personal story of the narrator (whose name we will withold) growing up a devout (though moderate) Muslim in Pakistan, but later abandoning the faith as she learned more about the world.

“If someone had told me six years ago that I would leave Islam and end up an atheist, I would never have believed him,” the author writes to open the piece. “But now, as a Muslim apostate and atheist, my journey couldn’t have led me any further from what I once knew to be true.”

According to the author, her departure from the faith was driven substantially by her inability to reconcile it with her increasingly liberal personal beliefs.

“I never accepted the male superiority and traditional gender roles that were part of my society,” she says. “For most of my teen years, I felt torn apart by my contradictory beliefs. On one hand, I was a radical feminist who supported gay rights. But on the other hand, I was a practicing Muslim whose religion was clearly homophobic and placed men above women.”

The author made several attempts to find a way to couple Islam with her personal beliefs, but ultimately it was not to be.

“After trying to understand Islam through a plurality of perspectives — orthodox, feminist, Sufi and liberal approaches — I decided to leave Islam, but by that point, I had realized that I didn’t need to look at things as black and white. I could leave Islam without dismissing it or labeling it as wrong,” the author said.

While the author’s rejection of Islam is in far less harsh terms than those used by other apostates, such as Ayaan Hirsh [sic] Ali, her willingness to state her beliefs has apparently still exposed her to a backlash. A few days after the article was posted, it was taken down and replaced by a note from Californian editor-in-chief Kimberly Veklerov that reads “This opinion blog has been retracted because of personal safety concerns.”

The precise nature of these safety concerns, and whether they arose in reaction to direct threats levied against the author, is not clear. The Daily Caller News Foundations reached out to both the author and Veklerov for further details, but only Veklerov replied and she declined to comment.

There is an element of irony that the author should be so imperiled by writing the article, because it has a moderate tone and offers substantial praise for the Muslim world.

“Islam is still extremely misrepresented and shrouded with stereotypes,” the author writes. “I want to address these stereotypes and portray Islam in all its diversity. I’ve experienced the religion firsthand and have also viewed it as an objective bystander… I want to share what I’ve learned about Islam over the years. I plan to defend it and give credit where it’s due — Islam, after all, gave women the right to work and own property back in the seventh century — and I also plan to ruthlessly point out areas that need reform (yes, Islam does allow men to have four wives and sex slaves).”…

The full text of the article, without the author’s name, can be read here.