Qaradawi: Now This Is a Guy With Chicago Values!

Reported July 28 in the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report:

EXCLUSIVE: Obama OIC Envoy Meets With Qaradawi Associate In Mauritania; Abdallah Bin Bayyah Part Of Antisemitic Religious Body

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) has announced that Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has attended a meeting in Mauritania that was hosted by Abdallah bin Bayyah, an associate of Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi. According to the ISNA report, the subject of the meeting was “challenges faced by religious minorities in Muslim-majority communities” and participants included:

The meeting last week was hosted by Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, Vice Chair of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, in his new Global Centre for Renewal and Guidance in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Participants included Dr. Nourredine al-Khademi, Tunisian Minister of Religious Affairs; Dr. Ahmed Toufiq, Moroccan Minister of Islamic Affairs and Endowment; Mr. Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Dr. Ahmed Ould Neini, Mauritanian Minister of Islamic Affairs; Dr. Abderrazak Juessoum, President of the Algerian Muslim Scholars Association; and other prominent scholars. The scholars also met with President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania to brief him on the purpose of their visit to Mauritania and the goal of their project. The President was very supportive and offered the scholars his assistance facilitating the development of solutions to this enormous challenge.”

Abdallah Bin Bayyah, last known to be living in Saudia Arabia, is a well known global Muslim Brotherhood figure also from Mauritania. According to an on-line biography, Sheikh Bin Bayyah was born in Eastern Mauritania and was the son of “one of the greatest scholars of his time.” According to this source, Sheikh Bin Bayyah was taught Islamic subjects by his father and in his early 20’s, was sent by the Mauritanian government to Tunis to study Islamic jurisprudence. Upon his return to Mauritania, he became a judge in the Ministry of Justice. He was also chosen to be the head of the Shariah section of the court of appeals and later to “High Authority for Religious Affairs.” Sheikh Bin Bayyah held numerous government posts including Vice-President, Prime Minister, and Permanent Secretary of the People’s Party of Mauritania. Sheikh Bin Bayyah is a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the theological body headed by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi and affiliated with the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, essentially comprising the European Muslim Brotherhood.

The ECFR meets annually and a Wall Street Journal reporter who attended a 2004 meeting described the extremism and antisemitism that took place:

“…members, speaking in Arabic, explained how European Muslim family life was under attack. ‘Extremist fundamentalist powers based on aggression on the part of the Crusader and Zionist alliance in the West are now preparing their cultural strategy according to a new wave of secular tendencies,’ said Ahmed Ali Al- Imam, a Sudanese religious figure who advocates the implementation of sharia in his religiously divided country. Other papers accepted traditional norms that directly contradict Western law and society, especially regarding women and marriage. Women should only cut their hair with their husbands’ permission, and “any woman who would marry without a male guardian’s consent, her wedding is invalid,” declared Muhammad Hawari, a Germany-based member of the group. Sometimes the group’s advice seems aimed at Muslims from another era. ‘Children should eat clean food and use clean water. They should not urinate in water wells,’ Mr. Hawari wrote in a paper. Adoption, he added, was forbidden, because a woman might be seen in a state of undress by a child other than her biological offspring. And if a child is adopted, Mr. Hawari said they should not be given equal rights to biological children.”

The same reporter also wrote that a Council member cited “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic forgery written in czarist Russia, in a position paper on how Muslim families are under threat in Europe. “The Protocols, the speaker said, was evidence of a Jewish plot to undermine Muslim moral values through sexual permissiveness.” Qaradawi himself is a virulent anti-Semite is often referred to here as the most important leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood, an acknowledgement of his role as the de facto spiritual leader of the movement.

For a short time, Rashad Hussain was embroiled in controversy after the GMBDR reported both his associations with the US Muslim Brotherhood and remarks that he had made in 2004 about the prosecution of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian that were later deleted from the publication that reported them. Mr. Hussain at first denied remembering that he had made the remarks calling the prosecution “politically motivated persecution” but later, after an audio tape surfaced documenting the remarks, he acknowledged the comments but said that they had been “ill advised.” Mr. Hussain also admitted that he had complained to the publication about being misrepresented after the remarks were first reported but that the publication had deleted them on their own volition. The remarks did not appear to have been deleted until after Mr. Hussain had been appointed White House Counsel. (for an analysis of these events, go here). Since that time, Mr. Hussain has appeared at numerous events sponsored by the US Muslim Brotherhood including those held by the Center for the Study of Islamic and Democracy (CSID), the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals (CAMP), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). A Hudson Institute report identifies both the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) as elements of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Previous posts have discussed the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood ties of the other organizations.

In May, a post reported that ISNA held a symposium together with the Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) which featured prominent members of the global Brotherhood including Abdallah Bin Bayyah and U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi.

A report by the Hudson Institute has identified ISNA as a major part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. The organization has a long history of fundamentalism, anti-semitism, and support for terrorism and during the recent Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Although recently ISNA has issued condemnations of terrorism which for the first time identify Hamas and Hezbollah by name, there is no indication that the organization has ever addressed or acknowledged its history.

###

How I’m Spending My Summer Vacation

The pressures of a difficult year got worse in early July when the medicos told me I was overdue for another coronary bypass surgery, (my second).  I’m still not quite all back from that yet, but I’m getting there. I stay home from work, take walks when the temperature is below 80, take a lot of naps with the dog, and feel guilty about how little blogging I do these days.

Meanwhile our long national nightmare has still not ended, and threatens to repeat itself – but this time even worse -- in November.

Fast and Furious Deserves Better than a Slow and Genial Response

Finally.

Yesterday’s House committee vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress has some commentators worried that the whole thing might lead to blowback against Republicans on Election Day. Better perhaps to stay focused on President Obama’s lousy performance on the economy. Bill Bennett is worried that Darrell Issa comes off as Oscar the Grouch.

My feeling right now is that, if America’s vacillating voter is so fragile, uninformed, and illogical that his only reaction to all of this is to be offended and vote for President Obama from spite, then we don’t need to bother with an election: we’ve grown too stupid to cohere any longer as a republic. For my money, I don’t think we need to be afraid of taking it to Obama with everything we’ve got. Lord knows we’ve got plenty.

The political analysts tell us it’s all down to independent voters, who apparently are a species as jumpy and hard to befriend as chipmunks. Any loud partisan words or edgy speculations about where the president was born will send them scurrying the safety of the Democratic ballot.

Our 2008 candidate ran under the smiley-face banner, and we all know how that turned out. John McCain, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and plenty of others, had their minds made up in 2008 that if they were seen by the public as embracing Obama’s genial and benign façade in good faith as the genuine Obama, then, even if Republicans lost the election, they’d enjoy a cooperative and mutually beneficial few years under a benign Obama presidency. Thence followed three-and-a-half years of serial backstabbing. The insistence by moderates that Republicans dare not step off the high road resulted in the current situation of the whole nation at the bottom of a very low ditch.

My definition of an independent voter is one who still hasn’t managed to figure out what side he’s on, requiring him to make up his mind every voting day based on whatever unpredictable criterion matters to him at the time. If he already needs to make a choice, I say we do all we can to make the distinctions between us and them crystal clear.

The difference on this issue can clarify that choice just as well as any other for a voter whose criteria are changing and ultimately unknowable.

Obama’s side knows this. That’s why his media friends have tried so hard to keep independents from finding out about it.

###

School Board Corruption in Farmington Hills?

We’ve received the following press release from the Thomas More Law Center.  Take a look at the detailed allegations behind the hyperlink.  They’re a good example of how sophisticated Islamists can play venal officeholders (like school-board officials, for instance] to establish an influential presence in a new community.

Ties to Terrorism? Grand Jury Sought to Investigate Allegations of Corruption Involving Farmington Public Schools and Islamic Cultural Association

ANN ARBOR, MI – The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, announced today that it submitted a letter to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette asking that he conduct a grand jury investigation into the Farmington Public Schools sale of Eagle Elementary School to the Islamic Cultural Association (ICA), which has ties to terrorist organizations.  

The Law Center informed Attorney General Schuette that “a fog of corruption has indeed enveloped the Farmington Public Schools relating to its 2011 agreement to sell Eagle Elementary School to the Islamic Cultural Association, and that this fog of corruption can only be pierced by a grand jury investigation and the use of other investigative tools in the law enforcement arsenal of the Attorney General’s Office.”  [Click here to read entire letter]

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Council of the Thomas More Law Center, commented, “By agreeing to sell Eagle Elementary to the ICA under these suspicious circumstances, Farmington Schools sacrificed the interest of their children and taxpayers to bring into their community an organization with ties to terrorist organizations.” 

According to the real estate broker who represented ICA in the purchase of Eagle Elementary, ICA owns and operates the HUDA, an Islamic school in the Village of Franklin, Michigan. The Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan, reports that ICA shares direct ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (hereinafter “CAIR”) and the North American Islamic Trust, Inc. (hereinafter “NAIT”), both of which were named as unindicted co-conspirators/joint venturers in U.S. v. Holy Land Found. for Relief & Dev. (“HLF”), the largest terrorism funding trial in U.S. history.   Federal prosecutors proved that HLF worked closely with the U.S. designated terrorist organization Hamas to fund terrorist activities.

Moreover, during the HLF trial, several FBI agents testified to the unmistakable financial connections and dealings between HLF, CAIR, and NAIT.  After the trial, the FBI severed ties with CAIR and NAIT due to their status as unsuitable liaison partners.  Steven Pomerantz, the FBI's former chief of counterterrorism, even noted that "CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups."  

Organizations such as CAIR and NAIT defend such criticism by diverting attention away from their misdeeds and financial ties to Islamic terrorism through accusing those who criticize their associations and actions as being “Muslim bashers” or “Islamophobes.” 

Dawud Walid, Executive Director of CAIR-Michigan, testified in support of ICA during the Farmington Public Schools board meeting relating to the purchase of Eagle Elementary.  

The interconnected relationships of ICA, CAIR and NAIT serve as a partial backdrop for the real estate transactions orchestrated by Farmington Public Schools.

The June 13, 2012 Thomas More Law Center letter to the Attorney General letter with 442 pages of exhibits was written on behalf of concerned citizens from West Bloomfield, Farmington and Farmington Hills.  According to the letter, these concerned citizens have information, which supports claims of bribery, illegal campaign contributions, and violations of the Open Meetings Act and governmental practices dealing with the sale of public property.  [Click here to read the 22-page Summary of Allegations] 

In creating a new Public Integrity Unit last year, Attorney General Schuette stated: "[e]nriching yourself at public expense is not only shameful, but compromises the integrity of government and violates the public trust.  Weeding out corruption is top priority.”  Information compiled through various sources indicates that the Farmington Public Schools (FPS) secretly negotiated a No-Bid, below-market, sale of valuable district property against the recommendations of its legal counsel, a specially-convened internal committee, and district residents. [Click here to see video clips of residents addressing  FPS Board]

While the District repeatedly rebuffed parties interested in purchasing the vacant elementary school telling them it was not for sale, FPS was exclusively negotiating behind closed doors in apparent violation of the Open Meetings Act, for many months with their favored buyer, the Islamic Cultural Association.  

Not only did FPS conceal its dealings from the public, it apparently misrepresented the status of the property to municipal officials from Farmington and Farmington Hills. On May 3, 2011, less than three weeks before it would publicly announce the Islamic Cultural Association’s offer to purchase Eagle Elementary, in a joint meeting with Farmington and Farmington Hills City Councils, FPS represented that Eagle was slated for demolition.

On October 16, 2011, two days prior to FPS’s determinative vote on whether to extend the expiration date of the purchase agreement for the ICA to obtain Eagle Elementary, Dr Nabil Suliman, who does not reside in the Farmington School district nor does he have any children in Farmington Public Schools, contributed $2,000 ($1,000 over the legal limit) to FPS Board member Karen Bolsen.  

Concluded Thompson, “Our letter to the Attorney General focused on a catalog of suspicious circumstances dealing with corruption that can best be resolved by a citizens grand jury.  A grand jury with the power to subpoena witnesses and compel testimony would insure that the guilty are brought to justice and the innocent exonerated.”

###

We Didn’t Start the Fire

Last Wednesday news reports began to surface about the arson of a Muslim community center’s storage garage here in Dearborn on June 12^th.  Some graffiti insulting Arabs was also spray-painted on the structure.

By the time first news stories came out, CAIR was already calling it a hate crime and “possible religious intimidation.” (“Police unsure that fire, graffiti at Dearborn Woods was racially motivated”).

Imam Mohamad Mardini, of the adjacent American Muslim Center, called the fire an “isolated incident,” and said it was probably done by teenagers.

"See, this is not something because we're Muslims. I mean, yes, it is serious and we want to find who did it. But this is teenagers misbehaving," Mardini said.

Dearborn police were also skeptical that the motive was bias.

"I don't know that I see anything here to turn this into a racially motivated crime," said Sgt. Ken Muscat as he surveyed the scene Wednesday. Muscat and Detective Michael Moyer both said the phallic graffiti wasn't there when they initially checked out the fire Tuesday.

But CAIR already had its teeth in.

“If a bias motive is revealed in this case, the FBI should add its resources to those of local law enforcement authorities to help bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Walid, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations-Michigan.

But Walid didn’t intend to wait until a bias motive was or wasn’t revealed, because he’d already started broadcasting to his constituents that it was a hate crime.  That way, CAIR can just go ahead now and add this to its catalogue of hate crimes – more evidence that America is an Islamophobic country. Listen to how far Walid can run with a thing even without a shred of evidence:

"One person I talked to said, 'I can see this happening in Tennessee, but not in Dearborn, Michigan,' " said Walid, who notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the potentially racist crime. "That's a very bad sign of where we are in America.” (“Anti-Arab vandalism at Dearborn community center a "very bad sign of where we are in America," advocate says”).

It’s always helpful when a guy that every media outlet in America refers to as a “civil-rights advocate” maligns the entire population of Tennessee as bigots.

ACCESS Executive Director Hassan Jaber also couldn’t help describing the vandalism as a “possible hate crime.”

By June 15, only two days after the first news stories about this “hate crime,” the Arab American News was reporting that the police had caught the suspects, and they were “young, and probably high school students.”  (“Police catch youth involved in anti-Arab graffiti near Dearborn mosque”). The students were not identified.

Then the story vanished.

So first a teenage prank becomes a hate crime and probably an effort at “religious intimidation,” and then the FBI sticks its nose in and voila!, CAIR now has another pin to stick in its national map of Islamophobic incidents.

And then, just like in this case and the 99.9% of the time, it all turns out to be nothing after all.  But we all know, and CAIR is banking on, how newspapers never run headlines afterwards saying, “Nothing Happened After All!” or “Never Mind!”

The fact that nothing really happened where most of those CAIR pins are stuck in doesn’t matter at all to CAIR.  The point is that there are lots and lots of them, and that all together they make a very large and very ugly stain on that USA map.  A blotch Walid  and Ibrahim Hooper can then point to as proof of  just how bad things are for you if you’re a Muslim in America.

I’m convinced that Walid knew from the earliest reports that this was going to turn out to be some goofy kids committing vandalism. He never believed the FBI was going to turn up evidence of a Christian militia launching the opening attack in their Islamophobic war against an outbuilding full of lawn mowers and garden rakes. As always, Walid’s demands for federal investigation are a cynical tactic in his own war against free speech about Islam in America.

He didn’t care at all about the culprits who started this fire, because punishing some kids for arson won’t give him what he wants. He didn’t care about the American Muslim Center, either, whose imam wanted nothing to do with the damage Walid was causing with his big mouth. On the very first day of this story cycle, Walid was already looking beyond this petty crime to CAIR’s ultimate goal:

"I think there’s a bigger issue we have to deal with in our country, in relation to anti-Muslim, anti-Arab disccusion that takes place," Walid said today. "Islamaphobia, in my opinion has become somewhat of an accepted form of bigotry in our country. Even if it was children, they were influenced by that discussion."

It’s not the serious crime of arson, not even the less serious crime of graffiti.  It’s not even the teenage vandals who started the fire. It’s the discussions we have to criminalize, says Walid.  We started the fire,  by talking openly, where the little pitchers could hear us, about the dangers of Sharia or the violence built into the religion of peace.  Walid wants to stop that.  He wants to stop the discussion, and he wants to stop the people who are having the discussion.

He wants to stop you and me. 

And he doesn’t care how many times he has to scream for a federal case to do it. 

Don’t look any farther, Mr. FBI Special Agent.  You’ve found your religious intimidation.

###

Guess the Secret Word

We’ve had our disagreements with the Dearborn Press & Guide. But the hometown paper deserves credit this week as the only media outlet that bothered, in its coverage of Lisa Brown’s vagina, (pun indifferently intended) with the crucial fifth W of the   5 W’s of reporting: who, what, when, where, and WHY.

Both the national and local coverage of the ludicrous events among Lansing Democrats last week in the capitol building tacitly affected cluelessness as to why a state rep would be sanctioned to a day of silence for the utterance of a mere “anatomically, medically correct term.”

Not so the P&G, or at least its special writer, Charlie Crumm, who understood the situation from the get-go:

When can you say “vagina” on the state House floor?
It's not the word itself, but how it's used, apparently.
Rep. Lisa Brown, a West Bloomfield Democrat, ended her remarks Wednesday on legislation regulating abortion clinics in Michigan by saying that she was flattered that “you're so interested in my vagina, but no means no.” 

“It was thought that reference crossed the line and he gaveled her,” said Ari Adler, spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall.  

“It had nothing to do with their gender, it had nothing to do with their religion. It had nothing to do with the topic itself,” Adler said Friday. “The fact that they said vagina on the house floor isn't a problem.” (“When can you say vagina? West Bloomfield House Democrat banned from speaking”).

Yes, of course,  it’s how it’s used – and why.  Brown abused her speaking privileges using it to insult her opponents in a crass and uncalled for manner just because her side lost.  It would have been hard to take coming from a bratty 13-year-old -- let alone a lawmaker. Brown should have been gaveled down, and I’m glad she was.

Similarly, when Brown’s colleague in juvenile mouthiness, Rep. Barbara Byum, had to throw her bit in by hollering “Vasectomy!,” Crumm also managed to report the other  side of why she was silenced:

Byrum, an Onondaga Democrat, was ruled out of order Wednesday when she attempted to introduce an amendment.
“There are times it’s been done by both sides,” Adler said. “Byrum had an amendment we considered not germane. She was not recognized. She started yelling on the House floor.”

“Rep. (John) Walsh (the Speaker Pro Tem) gaveled her down for her actions.”

Crumm only did what a competent reporter should do, which is report both sides of a controversy. It shouldn’t be outstanding in itself, but in this case it does stand out; not a single news account about this I looked at last week was able to manage it.

Most typical was Laura Berman at The Detroit News, who’s been a columnist in this town since the Boxer Rebellion. In order to stay solid with the hoo-hoo sisterhood, she had to play  “let’s pretend” really hard to come across as being a complete stranger to the notion of legislative decorum.  Blithered Berman last week:

Maybe there's an unwritten rule that Michigan legislators can't utter the word "vagina." Only last week, in a column for Dome magazine, 14-year former legislator Maxine Berman (no relation to me) revealed that she had never heard the word on the House floor. 

Ye gods! To think that in this modern age of the horseless carriage and penicillin there’s still a deliberative body somewhere that attempts to pass laws while never uttering the word “vagina”! No wonder no one’s been able to pass historic legislative initiatives like the Green Jobs and and Vagina Protection Bill, the Vagina Rights Act, and the Vaginal Dream Act of 2012?

And of course all right-thinking people would like to know how the all-male, paternalistic, sex-hating old-boys club Republican caucus in the Michigan legislature would like it if they’d been denied a century-and-a-half of floor speeches discussing their penises, penises, penises?!

Anyway, Lisa Brown, who has lied outright throughout this entire thing, was still insisting that she had no idea why she was gaveled out of order.

“Both Rep. Byrum and I were gaveled down without cause yesterday while voicing our opposition to the Republican’s war on women here in Michigan,” Brown said on her web page Thursday. “Regardless of their reasoning, this is a violation of my First Amendment rights and directly impedes my ability to serve the people who elected me into office.”

As polemical indicators go, “regardless of their reasoning” leaves no room whatsoever to hope that whatever follows will be reasonable. We’re very touchy about First Amendment violations here at DU; but when controversies come up, the reasoning of the participants simply has to be a factor.

In this case, reason hasn’t a damned thing to do with all this, which is why Pulitzer-studded NPR thinks Eve Ensler showing up to do a free performance of the Vagina Monologues is a relevant development in the story.  To put it delicately, Lisa Brown has done nothing but talk through her “anatomically, medically correct term.”

And the idiot media just have to play along.

###

Sluts on Parade, or, Yes, Vagina, There Is a Panty Clause

“Shreck!” – Former Detroit City Council Member Monica Conyers at a Council meeting

“Nigger!” – Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at the 2008 State of the City Address

“Vagina!” – State Representative Lisa Brown addressing the Michigan House

“Vasectomy!” – State Representative Barbara Byum’s outburst on the floor of the Michigan House

“Stop having sex with us, gentlemen. Find somebody else to do it with.” – State Representative Rashida Tlaib addressing Republican lawmakers from the floor of the Michigan House

What do all these Democratic politicians have in common? – oops — I think I just gave away the answer.

As part of this ongoing pattern, this past week has been a bad one for Michigan Democrats. Even if they don’t realize it.

First, as Robert Laurie explains it at Henry Payne’s The Michigan View (“Laurie: Another Embarrassing Week for Detroit”):

We started the week with an out of control attorney. In an inconceivable display that carried all the political weight of a child's foot stamping tantrum, Detroit's top lawyer, Krystal Crittendon, filed a lawsuit to block the consent agreement between the city and the state.

The consent agreement is literally the only thing standing between bankruptcy and payless paydays in Detroit on the one hand, and the appointment of an emergency financial manager by the governor on the other – a fate Detroit’s black movers and shakers consider nothing less than the reinstitution of antebellum chattel slavery.  Governor Snyder, who doesn’t intend to let a foundering Detroit pull the whole state down with it, made it plain that he wasn’t sending any more state aid if the lawsuit wasn’t dropped. After asking Crittendon, “pretty please,” to drop the lawsuit, Mayor Bing hired a law firm “to take on his city's own legal department.”

A circuit judge tossed out Crittendon’s suit, but it was near-run thing, judges these days being what they are.  Writes Laurie:

So, those who want to see the consent agreement move forward have scored a victory. The council, which has stalled the process at every turn, will now be force to implement the deal and will be dragged, kicking and screaming, to a brighter future for Detroit.

Yet, for some reason, they couldn't do this without giving the city one last black eye by making themselves, and Detroit, look foolish in the extreme. Once again, the eyes of the nation fell upon Motown, and once again, we emerged a laughing stock.

Meanwhile, in Lansing, outstate Democrats were misbehaving in the state legislature, after losing a fight over a bill to put some minor restrictions on abortion.

On the House floor . . . the rhetoric from female legislators on both sides of the divisive issue was emotional and personal.

"I'm flattered that you're all interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no,'" said state Rep. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield.

State Rep. Margaret O'Brien, R-Portage, dismissed claims that the bill is a "war on women."

"This bill is not an assault on women," O'Brien said. "Rather it's an important protection to ensure women are not forced into abortion, that women aren't given substandard health care."

State Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, called for women statewide to boycott having sex until Republican lawmakers reconsider the bills.

"Stop having sex with us, gentlemen," Tlaib said. "Find somebody else to do it with." (“Abortion bill passes House on mostly party line vote”).

Reporter Chad Livengood says the rhetoric was “emotional and personal on both sides,” but from what he writes it’s clear that’s not so. Rep. O’Brien is obviously talking about about the substance of the bill, while Reps. Brown and Tlaib are clearly talking about, respectively, Rep. Brown’s vagina, and Rep. Tlaib’s decision to stop saying “yes” to what sounds like her extensive active sexual activity with Republican lawmakers until they change their minds about this bill.

Not wanting to miss out on all-this high-minded fun, Rep. Barbara Byrum “shouted 'vasectomy!' after not being allowed to speak about a proposed amendment.”

In the face of these undisciplined outbursts, House Speaker Jase Bolger temporarily suspended both Brown and Byrum’s privilege to speak.

In response to being appropriately silenced for violating decorum, (not for saying the word “vagina”), Brown stooped even lower.  Brown told the media on Thursday that she was most likely “’banned for being Jewish and rightfully pointing out that HB 5711 was forcing contradictory religious beliefs upon me and my religion,’.”  Unless her religion requires her to dispose of her terminated fetuses by throwing them in a Dumpster, or requires her to get an abortion only in places that aren’t licensed to perform surgery, the bill shouldn’t clash with her faith.

In the wake of what should have been a hugely embarrassing display by the abortion caucus of the Michigan House this week, Laura Berman and other media folks are playing along with the pretense that they’ve never heard of the concept of legislative decorum before. The only thing that could explain why House leaders have temporarily silenced two misfit Democrat lawmakers is “an unwritten rule that Michigan legislators can't utter the word ‘vagina.’”

To finish out a perfect week, on Saturday Detroit hosted “SlutWalk,” a protest against “rape culture” that, from what I can make out, stands for the proposition that women who dress provocatively in public are constitutionally entitled to a before-the-fact guarantee of the quality of man they provoke, and the exact limits of his provocation. The protest includes an equally irrational message denouncing “victim-blaming” for women who’ve suffered sexual assaults, but that message made little sense to me. The epitome of blame-the-victim defenses in rape cases is to, in effect, call the victim a slut. These women are calling themselves sluts.

You figure it out, if you want.

Anyway, I was struck by the pictures of women carrying signs that prominently featured the word “VAGINA,” apparently explaining that it’s not a dirty word. Events of the last week have taught me that Republicans and conservatives have a mortal terror of the word “vagina.” (Full disclosure: the more times I put the word “vagina” in an online post the more hits I get.)

Like most of the things liberals think about me and my kind, I have no idea what they’re talking about. The fact is, each morning I ask God to bless all the vaginas in the world. I don’t think I ever miss a day when I don’t ask female co-workers how their vaginas are doing, or if there’s anything new with their vaginas. Just the other day I asked a grandmother how her college-age granddaughter’s afflicted vagina were coming along, and commiserated with her that there aren’t more TV shows that focus on life with a vagina.

Vagina, vagina, vagina, that’s what I say.

Now can we move on already?

###

A Woman’s Right

I think we need a closer look at what the sex-selection abortion industry in America says about the whole abortion-on-deman regime.  Please take a look at my view of it over at American Thinker.

Citizen GM

From Wednesday’s Detroit News:

Commentary: Why is U.S.-owned GM partnering with company that does business with Iran?

Earlier this year, GM announced a new partner: French automotive giant PSA Peugeot Citroen (Peugeot). While many are still speculating about the financial implications of this trans-Atlantic alliance, there is no doubt that from a foreign policy perspective, it is problematic, and raises numerous questions that GM is unfortunately refusing to answer.

My organization, United Against Nuclear Iran, learned of the GM-Peugeot partnership earlier this year, as well as GM's subsequent acquisition of a 7 percent share of Peugeot. This concerned us greatly, since Peugeot was actively doing business in Iran — a nation run by a brutal regime that is allied with al-Qaida, has killed dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, plots terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and is illegally pursing nuclear weapons.

The facts are beyond dispute: Peugeot is partnered with Iran's Khodro Group, a subsidiary of an entity — IDRO — controlled by the Iranian regime and associated with Iran's brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Over half a million Peugeot vehicles were sold in Iran in 2010 alone, making Peugeot the leading foreign auto manufacturer produced and sold there. Peugeot has more expatriate employees working in Iran than any other western company.

UANI respectfully raised these concerns in a March 9 letter to GM Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson, asking that GM "use its influence and leverage to compel Peugeot to immediately end its business in Iran."

"In the event Peugeot does not comply," we added, "UANI calls on GM to end its partnership with Peugeot."

In response to UANI, a GM spokesman, Greg Martin, told Agence France-Presse that Peugeot has "halted its business dealings with Iran." GM also told the Wall Street Journal that Peugeot had "made the decision to suspend the production and shipment of material into Iran some time ago."

These would ordinarily be welcome and reassuring statements. However they simply do not jibe with reality.

According to industry data, in the last year, ending March 19, nearly half a million Peugeot vehicles were produced in Iran — some 38,000 in the final month alone. On April 15, a report out of the Middle East read, "Iran's largest carmaker Iran Khodro Company branch in Fars is scheduled to produce 15 thousand Peugeot Pars sedans." Another, on April 19, said that Peugeot's Iranian partner "has not yet received any official announcement from Peugeot indicating a halt in their mutual cooperation."

In fact, the very article in which Martin was quoted included a contradictory statement from a Peugeot spokesman, who said that while Peugeot had halted March and April shipments, the larger decision about ceasing business in Iran was being taken "month by month." Similarly, a report in Just-Auto last month quoted a Peugeot spokeswoman saying Peugeot had suspended Iran shipments until July, but is considering resuming them in September.

We are always open to new information or explanations but, faced with the facts, it is hard not to feel like GM and Peugeot are simply trying to make this controversy go away without making the responsible decision to truly end their business in Iran.

The tragedy is that Peugeot's business with Iran's regime and military has been occurring just as the U.S. and its allies are trying to economically isolate Iran and pressure it into changing course. Hundreds of companies have pulled out of Iran, either voluntarily or as a result of sanctions, including automakers Porsche and Hyundai. Both informed our organization this year that they ended their business in Iran, and we were happy to applaud them for their responsible decisions. Companies that remain in Iran, however, provide the regime with a lifeline it uses to stay in power and finance its nuclear program.

In light of the taxpayer-funded $50 billion bailout of GM and the U.S. Treasury Department's current 32 percent stake in GM, it is completely unacceptable for GM to be financially aligned with a company that is doing work with a regime responsible for the deaths of U.S. servicemen. The GM-Peugeot partnership seems to run afoul of U.S. sanctions, and it should be investigated. We call on Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to hold GM accountable for whom it partners with.

And we again call on GM and Peugeot to take the responsible action of evaluating Peugeot's business in Iran, and putting a complete and final end to it.

Mark D. Wallace is CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran. He served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, representative for U.N. management and reform.

Tuesdays With Mortality

We've been inspired by the news that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama is a "student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas," whose views he consults when running the Presidential Index Finger down his kill list. This image was planted to portray President Obama as a “a steely commander who pursues the enemy without flinching,” yet still elegantly balancing his martial prowess by means of cerebral tête-à-têtes with comparably-gifted lightworkers from the Church’s history.

That all America didn’t react to all this with a great national vomiting shows just how conditioned we’ve gotten to the media’s most ludicrous claims about The One. That, or only 3% of us actually pay attention to news. Of course, then there’s always that double standard. President George W. Bush once made the political error of stating that he prayed for guidance as commander-in-chief, and it was three years before the New York Review of Books worked through the backlog of hysterical titles about America’s descent into a theocracy.

Not that I’m sorry about any of the guys Obama has ordered blown up, except on the sole ground that killing them deprives us of invaluable intelligence we would have if we captured them instead. There’s no room in the Obama strategy for that, thanks to his directives that American interrogation techniques had to be childproofed, and thanks also to his mixed-up approach to terrorist detention.

Until this recent suggestion was leaked that Obama likes to soak in the heavier Christian classics like Augustine and Aquinas, the external evidences of Obama’s interest in Christianity have been exactly zero. The Left complains a lot about the popular misconception that Obama is actually a Muslim, a misconception they always want to blame, unfairly, on Fox News. But Obama’s the one who’s shown a consistent animosity toward Christianity, even while observing a consistent reverence for, and indulgence of, Islam. Even if we wanted to believe the unattributable reports about Obama huddled up with his Summa Theologica and his pack of Terror Target baseball cards, it’s still too little, too late for rehabilitating his image to that of a Christian thinker.

To say Obama’s public attitude toward Christianity has been ambivalent is too kind by half. There was that crack about bitter Christians clinging to their religion for starters, and then his effort to excise reference to the “Creator” from the Declaration of Independence by means of executive misquotation, among a long list of other examples. Explaining Obama’s treatment of Christianity as consistent with current progressive thinking about the separation clause doesn’t explain the unabashed affection he displays for the religion of the Prophet. Nothing he’s ever said about Christianity, including his own experience of it, rivals his statement that the Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset,” or “his unprecedented revelation that he considers it “part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” (Isn’t that already Ibrahim Hooper’s job?)

He always shows obvious reverence when speaking about or quoting the “Holy Qu’ran,” (the only reverence, I believe, he has ever shown toward anything).  But when Christian believers hear the way he speaks about the Bible or those who cling to it, that elitist-intellectual-professorial-liberal-agnostic dialect he adopts is as impossible to miss as a Brooklyn accent.

The New York Times reports that Obama studies Augustine and Aquinas’s just-war theory to aid his determination to take moral responsibility for [his] actions”  while targeting drone strikes.   I doubt very much there’s much in Augustine or Aquinas that could actually enable Obama to better distinguish which jihadi murderer is more deserving of a drone strike today. As John Yoo observes, the ancient traditions upon which just-war theory was built holds that all such terrorists are “hostis humani generis, the enemy of all mankind, who merit[] virtually no protections under the laws of war.” (“John Yoo: Obama, Drones and Thomas Aquinas“). (I also don’t believe that Obama derived his high-flown terminology distinguishing just and unjust wars (“I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”) from the Doctors of the Church.)

In an odd turn, just before the Obama campaign decided to link the president with these two prominent heroes of the Church, the Air Force was shutting down a training course for missile launch officers because secularists complained it included “documents that appeared to be using a religious justification for missile launches,” including “references to St. Augustine”:

David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said that the program had initially been designed to “help folks understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. In the missile launch industry, it takes a certain mindset to be able to walk in the door and say, yes, I can do that.”

But he added: “Senior leadership looked at [the material for the course] and said, no, we could do better than this.”

The last time we heard senior leadership saying “we could do better than this” was when the Muslim Brotherhood complained that FBI agents were being exposed to materials describing a link between Islamist violence and Islam. Now Air Force brains have to figure out a way to sanitize ethics training to exclude all traces of Judeo-Christian influence because “we separate church and state. They don’t do that in other countries. We do that here.”

I’m sure when they’ve found something better, they’ll pass it up right up to the Commander in Chief.

###

Two Fascists Have I?

CAIRO -- Two candidates claim spots in a June runoff as the country awaits official results of its first free, multi-party presidential election.

Mohammed Morsy, whose Muslim Brotherhood controls parliament, and Ahmed Shafiq, the ousted regime's last prime minister, appear to have won voting on Wednesday and Thursday here.

Liberal Egyptians and largely youthful revolutionaries who helped to bring down Hosni Mubarak last year howled with dismay and fear over the apparent outcome. . . .

Liberal activists say Shafiq and Morsy represent a choice of "military fascism and religious fascism." (“Egyptian military, Islamists claim slots in runoff”)

When liberals, even liberal Egyptians, use the word “fascism,” they invariably have no clearly defined meaning in mind, beyond that a government has made something illegal that liberals want to do. I don’t think Mubarak was actually a fascist in the correct usage of the term, and I don’t know that if the military prevails in Egypt whether they will be fascist, either.

For what tiny insight I have into Egyptian election politics, my money’s on the Brotherhood.  But if there’s any circumstance that can make military fascism the preferred choice for a society, it’s the prospect of Islamic fascism. I’m no expert on the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, but I do know that its women weren’t required to veil, it was capable of maintaining a peace treaty with Israel, and even though the survival odds for a Coptic Christian were lower than they should have been, they’ve all but vanished since the Brothers started taking over.

I also know that Islamic jihadism is the only contemporary ideology on Earth that inspires atrocities again and again that, when one makes a direct comparison with the Third Reich, forces the conclusion that, no, even the Nazis wouldn’t have done that.

Detroit On Its Knees

One day a man asked an old friend how things were going, and the friend replied that, as a matter of fact, he had recently taken up prayer.

Concerned, the first man responded, “Are things as bad as that?”

We’re all for prayer here at DU.  But when the top law enforcement leadership of a dysfunctional city announces that their latest anti-crime initiative is based upon the city’s preachers singing “Nearer My God to Thee,” it’s time to pray about moving. (“Detroit clergy launch prayer walks, youth rallies to counteract crime”).

Oh, hang on.  In the last five home invasion stories I’ve read about the victims had wanted to move, but were too broke -- and their houses too worthless – for them to get out.

Good thing Detroit is coming back!

It’s not that I don’t appreciate U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade’s message to gang members, on behalf of “we the collective,” that “we care about you,” but “you will be prosecuted and put in prison' " if you commit crimes. It’s just that I don’t know why we have to care about gang members first, as if they spray-paint the city’s walls and shoot up each other’s houses because there aren’t enough policemen smiling at them.

And it’s not that I’m so far gone in my faith that I don’t appreciate Reverend Warfield’s solution to Detroit’s crime wave to “pray for and pray with our various neighborhoods."

It’s just that “Operation Ceasefire,” which reportedly “focuses on meeting with young offenders to talk about and provide resources on alternatives to crime,” hasn’t got a thing to say about the complete breakdown of law enforcement protection in Detroit. 

And to make sure that even the level of protection armed Detroiters provide for themselves is even weaker, geniuses in Lansing are trying to repeal the Michigan law allowing victims of violent attacks to defend themselves with lethal force rather than run away -- the former standard -- especially from their own homes. Rep. Tim Bledsoe, Democrat (what else?) thinks “Michigan should return to the old standard because stand-your-ground is "the only law that I can think of that actually promotes violence." (“House Dems seek repeal of Michigan's stand-your-ground law”).

Well, I can think of another law Democrats loooove that promotes violence: Roe v Wade, or what I like to call the Stamp Out Your Offspring Law, but I’m sure Bledsoe is less concerned with protecting infants from parental violence than protecting armed criminals from confrontations with victims who can actually shoot back.

There’s a good reason the announcement of the Operation Outreach initiative never mentions that the Detroit Police Department will play a key role in the “anti-crime” effort, even though half the DPD brass showed up to have their picture taken. And that reason is that the program is how to handle crime now that we’ve all stopped denying that Detroit lacks adequate police protection. 

Item:

Detroit — The body of a Detroit man made it all the way to a funeral home without authorities noticing a gunshot wound on the chest, and now police want to know what happened. (“Gunshot wound goes unnoticed until body arrives at funeral home”).

Now police want to know what happened.

"The DPD's Internal Affairs will be investigating this matter to determine if all departmental procedures and protocols were followed," Sgt. Eren Stephens, a spokeswoman for the department, said Tuesday.

Never mind who shot “59-year-old Leslie Brooks”: there’s a more important meeting of the Keystone Kommission to analyze how a dead body found in Detroit fails to muster enough interest for the cops to hypothesize that foul play might be involved. (“Crimsetoppers Alert! Gunshot wounds to the torso may look innocent, but STAY WATCHFUL for telltale signs of criminal activity!”)

Meanwhile, the DPD has been so busy doing whatever it is they do that they haven’t had time, after 9 years, to fully comply with court-ordered reforms requiring officers to stop engaging in “ex­cessive force, false arrests, il­le­gal de­tentions and unconstitution­al con­ditions of confine­ment.” 

How many years does it take to get the word out to the few officers actually assigned to the street to stop making false arrests? How many years does it take to clean up conditions in jail cells so bad they earn judicial notice as “unconstitutional”?

Until 2003, when the feds stepped in to try to clean it up, the number-one investigative tool employed in Detroit homicide investigations was unlawful dragnets whereby all the neighbors and friends of a victim – including infant babies and old people – were summarily arrested without regard to due process and detained until one of them finally admitted they knew who killed Cookie Head Jenkins.

Sure Dearborn and Detroit needs more good auto jobs – but how about we first get a Bill of Rights?

Am I being too hard on Detroit’s finest? Just possibly. But don’t get me started on what I see as the failings of the DPD going back decades. I’ll only mention the most important failing – that no one in the city seriously believes that the Detroit police protect any one from crime.

# # #

Media–New Evidence on Zimmerman Earns a Yawn

The media aren’t quite ready to give up on the hysterical version of the fate of “Little Trayvon” (as Fox News’ Shepherd Smith calls him) they all ran wild with a few months ago.

The release Thursday of dramatic photos of George Zimmerman’s injuries, his medical reports, and other exculpatory information is being underreported with these kinds of ho-hum headlines: “Evidence in Martin slaying probe released to public” (The Detroit News) (tells you a lot), and “Evidence mixed for Zimmerman’s self-defense claim”) (AP).

Mixed? The known facts are now completely unavoidable that Zimmerman was having the hell beat out of him by the 6-foot, 160-pound Martin before Zimmerman fired a fatal shot.

But instead of backing off the shredded account that Zimmerman, Elmer-Fudd style, hunted Martin down with the premeditated plan of executing him for being black, the AP continues to insist that the released information still leaves “many of the pertinent questions . . . unclear,” including “why did Zimmerman feel that deadly force was warranted?”, and “Did the fact that Martin was black play a role in Zimmerman’s actions?”

Actually, the second question isn’t pertinent to the case at all, unless you’re a race hustler, so I won’t dignify it here.

As to the first question about deadly force, it’s pertinent, but it’s not unclear.

I believe I would feel that deadly force was warranted If someone had blacked my eyes, broken my nose, was sitting on top of me and banging my head onto the pavement – in other words, was applying something approaching deadly force against me. The Stand Your Ground threshold for deadly force is the belief that you are facing “imminent death or great bodily harm.” Look at the photos of Zimmerman’s swollen nose and the back of his head, and I’d say Martin pushed Zimmerman well past imminent great-bodily-harm before his victim had a chance to fire his weapon.

But the AP isn’t quite ready to let this go. The spin is that Zimmerman instigated a confrontation by approaching Martin in the first place. But Stand Your Ground provides immunity to a person who isn’t committing a crime himself and is in a place he has a legal right to be. For the time being in Florida it’s still not a crime to get out of one’s car or to approach a stranger to inquire what he’s up to. The fact that under the given circumstances -- only some of which were within Zimmerman’s control -- a fight erupted that ended in a fatal shooting, cannot be blamed on Zimmerman’s decision to get out of his car.

The Martin family attorney, Ben Crump, would love to make the mistaken conclusion of one police detective “the headline.” Said Crump, “The police concluded that none of this would have happened if George Zimmerman hadn’t gotten out of his car. . . If George Zimmerman hadn’t gotten out of his car, they say it was completely avoidable.”

But it’s not a conclusion at all, only speculation, that “none of this would have happened if George Zimmerman hadn’t gotten out of his car.” He may as well say that “none of this would have happened if Trayvon Martin hadn’t gone out to the store.” The AP also thinks it proves something that “the original lead detective in the case believed Zimmerman caused the fight by getting out of his vehicle to confront Martin, who wasn’t doing anything criminal, and then could have defused the situation by telling Martin he was just a concerned citizen and tried to talk to him.”

Except Zimmerman wasn’t doing anything criminal, either, in spite of the lead detective’s overly broad concept of what ought to be against the law. As for Martin, it’s true enough that, as far as we know, he wasn’t doing anything criminal, right up until he decided to clobber Zimmerman.

We don’t know on what facts, or on what imaginary reconstruction of what happened, the lead detective decided that Zimmerman “caused the fight by getting out of his vehicle to confront Martin.” Nor can I figure out why it was Zimmerman’s sole responsibility to defuse the situation. Indeed, just as much as Zimmerman (speculated the detective) could have defused the situation, so also could Martin have responded to Zimmerman’s concerns by explaining that he was living in the subdivision, was on his way home, and wasn’t doing anything wrong.

But notice how the AP has adopted the Florida prosecutor’s short-cut way of telling the story to avoid even the barest reference to Martin’s decision to assault Zimmerman. According to the Affidavit of Probable Cause filed by the Florida State Attorney, “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.” But human beings confront one another all the time in our world where struggles do not ensue. Some key fact has been left out. Similarly, the lead detective’s account of what happened proceeds directly from “Zimmerman . . . getting out of his vehicle” to a “situation” that needed to be “defused” -- as if Zimmerman’s mere act of approaching Martin could have called forth no other reaction from Martin than to physically attack Zimmerman. There was a situation to defuse because somebody lit that fuse, obviously, but neither the detective’s truncated narrative nor that provided in Florida’s affidavit and these latest media accounts are willing to state that the guy holding the match was Trayvon Martin.

The lead detective was ready to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter for, in effect, the decision to get out of his car and see what Martin was up to. The original prosecutor wisely decided that Zimmerman’s self-defense explanation was plausible. Manslaughter only occurs when a death resulting from one’s actions is foreseeable. If you get into your car, run a red light, and kill someone, there’s a good chance you’ll be charged with manslaughter. It’s not manslaughter just to get into your car.

And if you happen to believe that Zimmerman should have known that approaching Martin would foreseeably lead to some kind of a violent confrontation, then there goes the original myth that Martin – to anyone who wasn’t a rabid, gun-toting racist like Zimmerman – would appear to be only a little child skipping home harmlessly from the candy store. 

Fortunately, the court doesn’t get to re-write the Stand Your Ground law to include an affirmative obligation to remain frozen with inaction to avoid consequences beyond all possibility of foreseeing. If the law is applied as written, the judge will dismiss the charges because Martin unquestionably assaulted Zimmerman, who then applied deadly force to save himself.

# # #

The ‘United Arab States’?

With its capital in Jerusalem, no less.

From Thursday’s Detroit News:

Cairo— At a campaign rally for the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate for president, a hardline cleric and TV preacher sang Mohammed Morsi's praises before thousands massed in the stadium of an industrial city in Egypt's Nile Delta.

"We are seeing the dream of the Islamic Caliphate coming true at the hands of Mohammed Morsi," the cleric, Safwat Hegazy, blared from his podium.

"The capital of the Caliphate and the United Arab States is Jerusalem, God willing," he added, as thousands cheered and waved the Brotherhood's green flag, chanting, "The people want to implement God's law."

On the campaign trail for the presidential election, now only seven days away, the Muslim Brotherhood has taken a sharp turn rightward, becoming bolder in saying it wants to bring a state where religion and Islamic law play a major role — and insisting that it has the right to rule.

As a result, it has moved away from the more moderate face that it promoted since even before the fall of Hosni Mubarak 15 months ago. During campaigning for parliament elections late last year, the Brotherhood insisted that implementing Islamic law was not its immediate priority, instead speaking vaguely of an "Islamic background" to government. It also sought to assuage fears that it seeks to take over the country by promising to work with other, liberal factions. (“Egypt's radicals growing bolder”).

Surprised? Neither am I.

The Associated Press reporter attempts to explain the Brotherhood’s current hard line Islamism as a “turn” resulting from recent political disappointments. But those of us who have made it our business to pay attention to the history and unchanging goals of the Ikhwan expected precisely this to happen from the very outset of Egypt’s misnamed “Arab Spring.” This isn’t the result of a turn. The Brothers wanted a caliphate all along, and were only waiting until they felt strong enough to drop the moderate act.

As the AP story tells it:

Whatever the reasons, the group no longer tap-dances around questions of implementing Islamic Shariah law.

"We will not accept any alternative to Shariah. ... The Quran is our constitution and it will always be so," Morsi told a crowd of supporters at a Cairo University rally.

In an interview with the Associated Press, [Brotherhood deputy leader Khairat] el-Shater — who appears alongside Morsi on the campaign trail so often that critics say he would be shadow president — said laws must conform with Shariah. He said the Brotherhood would stipulate that officials tasked with reforming Egypt's economy, politics, media and other sectors also have religious expertise.

"Those who decide what system works best are specialists who are not only political scientists but who also studied Shariah," he said.

# # #

Enhance Your Sensitivity!

Any of you who may have wondered what goes on at BRIDGES meetings, you’re in luck!

Hamad and O’Reilly on the same stage!

Town hall meeting on immigration is May 17

A Detroit-area group formed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to link U.S. Arabs and Muslim Americans with local and federal authorities is hosting a town hall meeting next month to discuss immigration concerns.

The group is called BRIDGES, which stands for Building Respect in Diverse Groups to Enhance Sensitivity.

It says the May 17 meeting at Dearborn City Hall will feature Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. It also will include remarks by U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade and Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly.

6:00 p.m.

And the Winner Is . . .

Hat tip to Creeping Sharia.

The Eastern Echo, Eastern Michigan University’s “independent” student newspaper, is heralding the success of the Muslim Student Association in its fund-raising efforts. The Muslim Student Association was founded directly by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963 as part of the Ikhwan’s civilization jihad. 

Says the Echo:

The Muslim Student Association won the 2012 Student Government Charity Challenge. Each year EMU’s Student Government holds a contest amongst the student organizations to see who can raise the most money for a Michigan-based nonprofit of their choice, with the promise of matching the winner’s amount up to $2,000.

Sounds commendable, no? to hear that the MSA is plowing its award-winning donations back into a Michigan beneficiary – perhaps to help out Michigan’s poor, unemployed, or disabled. But wait, the money isn’t going to end up in Michigan – it’s all going to the Ummah, the only charity the MSA ever has or ever will care about.

“We got the full $2,000,” said Zaineb Al-Kalby, vice president of the MSA. “We picked the organization Life for Relief and Development and all of the money we raised is going to help out the people of Syria,” she said, alluding to the country’s current and very violent uprising.

And don’t bet that the money actually is destined for deserving folks in Syria.  

Life for Relief and Development is a Hamas front whose original operator was Muthanna al-Hanooti, an agent for Saddam Hussein who was using LIFE to persuade the US to drop its sanctions against Iraq. He was convicted in 2011 of violating the sanctions against Iraq. He was also the one-time executive director of CAIR-MI before Dawud Walid got the job. According to a 2001 FBI report, “’Al-Hanooti collected over $6 million for support of Hamas,’ . . . and was present with CAIR and Holy Land officials at a secret Hamas fundraising summit held in 1993 at a Philadelphia hotel. Prosecutors added his name to the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case.”

The EMU newspaper (named the “Echo” for reasons we can clearly understand) was also excited to report on MSA’s “Walk In My Shoes Day”:

a day in which non-Muslim women wear a hijab and dress modestly for a day, as would a Muslim woman, and then discuss their experience and observations. “We want people to ask why they’re wearing a hijab. We get asked that all the time. We want people to openly discuss these kinds of things,” said [MSA vice president Zaineb] Al-Kalby.”

Why EMU women couldn’t dress modestly for a day without putting on a hijab is a question that comes to mind. But, that aside, finagling students who have little grounding in their identity as Westerners to imitate Islamic practices is a clever way to plant an unconscious sympathy for Islam that can pay off for the Ummah later.    As any college student can tell you, your parents’ religion is stupid, but Islam is cool.

And by contrast with what’s not cool, DU has been unable to confirm that last year’s “Hang Out In My Habit Day” sponsored by campus Catholics is going to be repeated this year. That was the day in which non-Catholic women dressed up as discalced Carmelites observing the Grand Silence.  Last year’s event led to some confusion as most of the campus’s Catholic students had never actually clapped eyes on a nun who  wore a habit, and then were frustrated when their repeated questions about it were met with wordless frowns. Then there were the LGBT students who all assumed that the participants were transgendered Act Up! members irreverently mocking  a homophobic and patriarchal church, only to be disappointed that the faux-nuns they skipped after all over campus never actually led them to a Rainbow Pride event. When it was discovered that the participants were all women, the ACLU promptly filed a lawsuit.

The point is that $2,000 of EMU Student Government funds has been donated to Life for Relief and Development to be used somehow and somewhere to build the global caliphate.

Governor Christie Has an Islam Problem?

From NRO:

Chris Christie’s Islam Problem

By Daniel Pipes & Steve Emerson

A Quinnipiac poll in April showed Chris Christie as the most popular potential Republican vice-presidential candidate, thanks to his budget cuts and standing up to government employees’ unions. But the governor of New Jersey has a problem, specifically an Islam problem, that can and should get in the way of his possible ascent to higher office. Time and again he has sided with Islamist forces against those who worry about safeguarding American security and civilization.

Some examples:

2008: When serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christie embraced and kissed Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, and praised him as “a man of great goodwill.” He did this after Qatanani had publicly ranted against Jews and in support of funding Hamas, a U.S. government–designated terror organization, and on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas. In addition, Christie designated a top aide, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness for Qatanani.

2010: After Derek Fenton burned three pages of a Koran at a 9/11 memorial ceremony, his employer, New Jersey Transit, got Christie’s approval to fire him. Protecting Islam at the expense of the constitutional right to free speech, Christie endorsed Fenton’s termination: “That kind of intolerance is something I think is unacceptable. So I don’t have any problem with him being fired.” The American Civil Liberties Union successfully represented Fenton to get his job back.

2011: Christie appointed an Islamist, Sohail Mohammed, to the New Jersey state superior court. Mohammed’s record includes serving as general counsel to the American Muslim Union (which has stated that a “Zionist Commando Orchestrated The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks”), acting as spokesman for Muslim prisoners who went on a hunger strike after being jailed during Ramadan, defending Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian (his indictment, Mohammed said, was “nothing but a witch-hunt”), and helping Qatanani’s legal defense. Mohammed established himself not just as the Islamists’ lawyer but as one of them.

When members of New Jersey’s Senate Judiciary Committee asked Mohammed appropriately tough questions about his enthusiasm for Islam’s archaic law code, the Shari’a, Christie ridiculed the lawmakers: “Shari’a law has nothing to do with this [appointment of Mohammed] at all. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. . . . So, this Shari’a law business is crap. It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. I mean, you know, it’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.” For this outburst, unsurprisingly, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) thanked and applauded Christie.

2012: The revelation that the New York Police Department had conducted surveillance of Islamists in the New Jersey towns of Newark and New Brunswick prompted not gratitude but outrage from Christie, who termed the action arrogant and paranoid while mocking NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly as “all knowing, all seeing.”

In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

Two factors render this pattern especially curious: First, soft-on-Islamism policies are common among Democrats but rare among Republicans (Grover Norquist being the major exception). Second, Christie takes an ostentatiously pro-Israel stance, as reflected by his speeches and his recent “Jersey to Jerusalem” trip; this makes him unusual, for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a. How does one reconcile the Christie contradiction?

It could be ego: The governor is more brilliant than we are. It could be that, other than fiscally, he is not a conservative. Or, as several analysts suggest, it could be cynical double pandering: Muslims get what they want most and Zionists get what they want most, with each side ignoring what Christie does for the other. Indeed, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut pursued this double-track policy (soft on Islamism, staunch on Israel) and he became the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 2000, when practically no one noticed the contradiction.

Whatever his reasons, we conclude that Chris Christie lacks the moral compass and integrity needed to serve as vice president of the United States.

###

First Blossom of the Arab Spring – Sharia Stamping Out Free Speech

Tunisia’s revolution was the first of what came to be known as the “Arab Spring,” enjoying last fall their first democratic election since 1956. But thanks to Tunisia’s active Islamists, a satellite TV channel owner, Nabil Karoui, has just been convicted and fined for showing “Persepolis,” an animated movie about a young girl who lives through the Iranian revolution.

In the weeks after the broadcast, Karoui’s house was destroyed by a mob of vandals and [Nessma, the TV channel’s ] offices were repeatedly attacked — all because of a short scene in which the girl imagines herself talking to God, who appears as an old man with a long, white beard.

Now, Karoui’s on trial, and so is Tunisia’s year-old revolution and the young democracy it has wrought. For hundreds of years, Tunisia has boasted a complex blend of Islamic and Western values, and now, having ousted their autocratic leader, Tunisians are struggling to find the right balance. No part of that wrenching, sometimes violent debate has been more divisive than the issue of freedom of speech.

Last month, on this capital city’s main boulevard, Islamist activists attacked actors who were celebrating World Theater Day; Islamists smashed musical instruments and hurled eggs. A hard-line preacher stood in front of Tunis’s Grand Synagogue and called for the murder of Tunisian Jews. And a Tunisian philosopher who showed up at a TV station for a debate on Islam was shouted down by extremists, who said he was no scholar of the faith because he has no beard.

In each case, calls for a state crackdown on offensive speech banged up against cries for the government to defend even unpopular expression. Karoui’s day in court became a nonstop, seven-hour shoutfest that will determine whether he is fined, imprisoned, or worse. A verdict is expected Thursday.

In Tunisia, defendants hire a lawyer, but any lawyer in the land may join the prosecution or defense, and those lawyers have the same right to argue in court as hired attorneys. The result: a pulsating black mass of robed men (and a handful of women) surging to the front of Courtroom 10, each with his own view of what should be done to Karoui.

Shouldn’t the death penalty be considered, asks lawyer Nasser Saidi: “Anything related to God is absolute. This was a test of the Tunisian people’s ability to defend God, and they have passed the test.” (“Tunisian court case exposes rift over free speech in new democracy”).

On Thursday Karoui “was fined 2,400 Tunisian dinars (about $1,400) for violating public morals and disturbing public order.” (“Controversial Tunisian Court Ruling Reflects Dilemmas of the Arab Spring”). Not so bad an outcome considering that Karoui’s chief attorney was answering Islamist demands for his client’s execution by arguing that he deserved no more than “five years max.”

For me, this kind of a clash highlights the impracticability of democracy accommodating Islam.

As the reporter for the Washington Post, explained,

The two sides argue as if they live in different galaxies. They cite different laws — God’s and man’s. They base their arguments on different histories — Western traditions of transparency and individual rights vs. Islamic concepts of Koranic authority and the obligations of the community of believers.

Except those arguments aren’t based on different histories at all, but on the same history – the history of “Western [Christian] traditions” vs. “Koranic authority” – the 1400-year history of Islam vs. world.

Democracy is unimaginable without free speech. But Shariah can’t tolerate free speech, because followers of the Prophet see themselves as responsible for defending Allah from insult.

Kouri’s prosecution “was a test of the Tunisian people’s ability to defend God,” said Islamist lawyer, Nasser Saidi, and it “means they have passed the test.” It was also a test of their democracy. And that test they failed.

###

Honor Killing and the ‘American Way of Life’

We did not attend the “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference” in Dearborn this past Sunday, but Pam Geller is providing updates at her Atlas Shrugs website. Jessica Mokdad was murdered in Warren in 2010, allegedly by her Islamic stepfather because of the shame of her becoming too “Westernized.” He is charged with first-degree murder in her death. As expected, the local media coverage of the event was slanted against the organizers of the conference.

Niraj Warikoo’s treatment of the event in the Detroit Free Press is more or less what we’ve come to expect. He described Sunday’s conference at the Hyatt as an “anti-Islam conference” put on by “[a]nti-Islam advocates” who, as he allows Osama Siblani to say for him, “stand against America and against the American way of life.” (“Muslims oppose anti-Islam gathering; dueling events held in Detroit, Dearborn”).

Warikoo couched the counter-conference held nearby in Detroit in starkly kinder terms: calling it an “Arab-American conference,” attended by those, again quoting Siblani, who “stand for America.”

As for honor killing, Warikoo quotes Imam Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn saying that, “Honor killing has no religious roots in Islam,” and then drops it. 

Are we supposed to take Qazwini’s word for it?

Francis X. Donnelly at the Detroit News was only slightly more balanced, at least not sanitizing his article of the central issue of  honor killing. He did feel a need to describe Geller’s conference as a “conservative meeting,” and remarked that only “few” of the speakers at either conference were women. (“Women’s slaying puts Arab leaders, bloggers at odds with dueling conferences”).

Apparently, the “Arab-America conference” led by Qazwini represented liberalism. Donnelly’s bringing up the ratio of women speakers to men at the Hyatt conference is done in spite of the fact that the co-organizer of the conference was noted woman, Pam Geller, that Nonie Darwish was another of the speakers, and that the entire conference was named for a woman, Jessica Mokdad, and in the interest of ending the honor-killings of – women.

Both reports highlighted that the family of Jessica Mokdad objected to the use of her name for the conference on honor-killings. In light of the fact that honor killings are committed by family members against family members, are covered up by family members, and are motivated by an unholy fear of shame brought upon a family for harboring a (female) who is insufficiently traditional in the way she conducts herself, I’d take the objection in the spirit intended.

No one expects fair coverage these days. 

Which is a real shame in itself.