Swiss Miss, or, We Need All the Alp We Can Get

We see that the NAACP has decided to take its battle against voter ID laws to the United Nations.

WASHINGTON — Taking a page from its past, the NAACP will go before a United Nations panel in Switzerland next week to argue that new voting laws approved by some U.S. states violate civil and human rights by suppressing the votes of minorities and others. (“NAACP to challenge state voting laws before U.N. panel in Geneva”).

Nobody’s kidding anyone that the UN has any jurisdiction over state election law. But on the verge of Obama’s re-election bid, any stink is good stink.

Jealous acknowledged that the Human Rights Council has no direct authority over American states, but he hopes that it can exert influence through public pressure.

"The power of the U.N. on state governments historically is to shame them and to put pressure on the U.S. government to bring them into line with global standards for democracy, best practices for democracy, that's where we are," he said. "There are plenty of examples — segregation of the U.S. to apartheid in South Africa to the death penalty here in the U.S. — of global outrage having an impact."

You may recall that “apartheid” is the Afrikaans word for, ‘You have to confirm your identity to vote.” And we all know that best practices to prevent voter fraud is to require that people can vote without having to identify themselves.

This is my favorite part:

[NAACP president Benjamin Todd] Jealous said the U.N. panel will hear Wednesday from two Americans impacted by the new laws: a convicted felon who served her time and a University of Texas student who might not be able to vote this year because of a law approved by the state legislature requiring voters to show government-approved photo identification.

You can always tell the quality of the argument by the seriousness of the victims.  The convicted felon (who didn’t serve her time, she was granted clemency by Bill Clinton in 2001), is prevented from voting in Virginia by a law that’s been on the books there since 1901. Like it or not, this can hardly be blamed on the Tea Party.

Then the UN will hear from the “University of Texas student who might not be able to vote this year” for lack of government-approved photo identification. I hope the UN panel asks the witness this fair question, “You needed a passport to travel here to Geneva. Can’t you use that?” (Yes, under the Texas law, you can).

Beyond Teflon

Unions that are mainly concerned with protecting workers seem to be going the way of the dinosaur. Now the unions only care about protecting Democrats in office.

Consider this evidence from the AP:

WASHINGTON -- Unions may be united in working to re-elect President Barack Obama, but their leaders also are trying to repair bitter divisions over his rejection of an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Trade unions representing workers who would benefit from thousands of new construction jobs from the Keystone XL pipeline are furious at other unions that joined environmentalists in opposing the project. (“Union leaders look to heal divisions over pipeline battle”).

It was Obama who rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, but the trade unions are furious at – well, it doesn’t matter who they’re furious at, because they’re not furious at Obama.

Or not allowed to be.

After the White House blocked the pipeline in January, Laborers union President Terry O'Sullivan said he was "repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women."

His harsh words were directed at groups such as the Transport Workers Union and the Amalgamated Transit Union, which said the risk of possible oils spills and environmental contamination outweighed the benefit of new jobs.

There’s no question it was President Obama who blocked the pipeline, but the only people this union boss can think of to be repulsed by are other union people who echoed environmentalist opposition to Keystone XL.  Fine, blame them along with Obama.  But why can’t he blame Obama?

Are the unions jammed so far down into the lint of Democratic Party pockets that their leaders dare not utter one word of criticism against the party’s choice for re-election?   Do we even need to ask?

If necessary, groups bloodied by the President’s disastrous governance can lash out all they want against other groups that lobbied for Obama’s bad decisions, but remember that whatever went wrong, it wasn’t Obama’s fault.

Pathetic.

Hail to the Gap-Filler-in-Chief

Fresh from last month’s endowment upon America’s women of the unalienable right to free contraception, the White House this month is bestowing a new “right” upon lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender couples “to live where they choose.” (“HUD secretary announces equal access housing rule”).

Federally subsidized housing must be made available regardless of an applicant's sexual orientation or gender identity under a U.S. Housing and Urban Development rule that went into effect this week.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan touted the new rule Friday morning at a White House conference on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender housing and homelessness at Wayne State University.

Donovan said HUD-funded housing providers cannot inquire about an applicant's sexual orientation or gender identity. Furthermore, Donovan said, Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgage financers are now prohibited from making loan decisions based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

"If you're denying HUD housing to people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, actual or perceived, you're discriminating," Donovan said. "You're breaking the law and you will be held accountable. That's what equal access means. And that's what this rule is going to do." (“HUD's Donovan in Detroit touts equal housing rule”).

By shrink-wrapping this new right in the form of an administrative rule, the President Obama doesn’t have to worry about interference from that pokey institution that convenes in the Capitol Building (known derisively around the Oval Office as “Congress, Shmongress”). For lack of political support from the American people, Congress has never voted to amend either the Civil Rights Act of 1964, nor the Fair Housing Act, to confer the same federal protected status on homosexuals that it does on race, religion, or disability.

The incessant blubbering by gay activists about discriminatory treatment from America’s homophobe majority is concerned less with solving any actual problem than with winning a protected-class status for homsexuals. Federal protected status would supercharge the already highly-effective homosexual lobby, placing virtually all opposition to the gay agenda on the wrong side of powerful antidiscrimination laws.  Think of the amendment of the Civil Rights Act as the LGBT version of Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb.

But to justify a dubious solution, first you need a pretend problem. Just like last month’s revelation that America’s ivy-league law schools are a ticking time bomb of women pining for unaffordable birth control pills, so the new HUD rule is being announced in the context of the faux problem of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender . . . homelessness.” 

Believe me, if the problem of LGBT homelessness registered even so much as a blip on the national radar screen, President Obama would never have bypassed standing invitations from Berkley, Harvard, or the University of Chicago to stage his “White House conference” (i.e., campaign event) at Wayne State University – my own alma mater, I should mention – not to mention an institution of higher learning of such note I had a prospective employer in New York City say to me, quote: “Never heard of it.”

Donovan’s operation here was so small he didn’t even have his own Sandra Fluke to regale attendees with the agonizing extent of the LGBT homeless problem. In fact, he more or less admitted they hadn’t actually found a problem yet, but we’re definitely looking.

Donovan said Friday plans are under way to conduct the first-ever national study of LGBT housing discrimination. He called it a “historic and important study” that HUD designed based on town halls conducted on the issue. The study is designed to get “a clearer picture of the problem” and to make “the case that LGBT discrimination is real and that we need to do something about it.”

Of course, if the studies prove that LGBT housing discrimination isn’t real, HUD’s conveniently already done something about it.

HUD’s new rule only applies to federal housing, so it can’t confer full protected status on LGBTs by itself.  But it’s clearly meant to be a stepping stone: According to Donovan’s assistant secretary for fair housing, John Trasvina, HUD’s new rules lack the full force of law until the Title VIII Fair Housing Act is amended. “’We are treating this as a program rule,’ Trasvina said. ’We need Title VIII to be amended.’”

How’s that? Instead of Congress passing laws that are given affect by means of administrative rules, we now have an administrative rule presuming to require Congress to pass conforming legislation to catch up.

Or we can look at it as the executive giving a friendly assist to a fellow branch of government.  Detroit’s U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who attended the conference at WSU,

applauded President Barack Obama's administration for implementing the rule in the absence of congressional action to fill a "gap" in the anti-discrimination protections of the Fair Housing Act.

"I think this rule is a big deal," McQuade said. "It takes an act of Congress, and, my gosh, we can't even get a budget out of these people."

Well, to be fair, we can’t get a budget out of some of these people. But more to the point, if Congress can’t pass a budget, the President doesn’t get to implement his own – even if it’s to fill a “gap.”

Some things do take an act of Congress.  You can look it up.

‘Keep Dearborn Clean’ Is Now ‘Keep Dearborn Quiet’

The City of Dearborn’s bank account is $100,000 lighter after paying the legal fees and costs of the Christian evangelist, George Saieg, thanks to a federal appeals court finding that Dearborn police trampled his free speech rights at the 2010 Arab-American festival.

City police in 2010 barred George Saieg and his allies from freely walking sidewalks with literature to convert Muslims to Christianity. Chief Ron Haddad says he was just controlling foot traffic, but a federal appeals court says the city violated the First Amendment. (“Dearborn pays $100,000 in lawsuit by evangelists”).

If you’re interested in reading the court’s opinion you can do so here.

This constitutional violation of George Saieg’s rights can now be combined with the constitutional violation of Terry Jones’s rights found by a Michigan judge last November when he tossed out Jones’s phony conviction. That ruling found a due process violation, but the city and county officials who tossed legal procedure into a sausage-grinder -- Mayor Jack O’Reilly, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, Chief of Police Ronald Haddad, and Judge Mark Somers – did it with the specific purpose of silencing Jones from criticizing Islam.

Then there is the case of the four missionaries of Acts 17 Apologetics, who were falsely charged with inciting a crowd at the Arab American Festival in 2010.  The four were acquitted. Andrew McCarthy said of the incident: ““Camouflaged as a crackdown on ‘disturbing the peace,’ [this] was transparently the enforcement of sharia’s prohibition against preaching religions other than Islam.”

Now there is a civil rights case being brought by the Thomas More Law Center and David Yarushelmi on behalf of Acts 17 against the Usual Suspects, including, naturally Chief Ron Haddad and Mayor Jack O’Reilly. I am reasonably confident the city, unless it settles first, will be found liable of violating the freedoms of speech and religion of these plaintiffs.

Does anyone else notice a pattern here?

His Honor may need to write us all another open letter reassuring us how there is no “Sharia law being practiced in the courts or civil law of Dearborn [or] … in our courts, [or] at our City Hall, [or] in any of our places of worship.”

Meet the Martyrs of Georgetown, or, How’s That Gates of Hell Thing Working Out for Ya?

There are worse things to call Sandra Fluke than the names Rush Limbaugh called her.

I’ll admit to wincing when I heard his comments last Thursday, and then when he doubled down on Friday.

The thing was, Ms. Fluke’s testimony notably avoided all details about her own sexual choices. Consequently, Rush’s use of the terms he used only had the effect of defaming her. In fairness, Rush was also responding to the context of her appearance, and the inferences anyone could draw from it. Here is this young lady willingly making a televised appearance before a Congressional committee, styling herself as spokesman for a body of female law students whose grim faces tell the story of all they’ve “suffered, financially and emotionally and medically,” from a lack of free contraception.

Rush’s comments unleashed several days of the rest of us having to listen to the indignant denunciations of both sides. The left’s opportunistic attacks on Rush there’s no need to chronicle, except to note their consensus that we’ve all just lived through the Foulest Insult Ever Uttered in All of Recorded History. On our side Monday Bill Bennett, whom I swear donned his whitest surplice for the segment, sanctimoniously bullied any callers daring to take issue with his denunciation of Rush, especially if they cited the left’s double standards and hypocrisy. We can’t descend to their level, he intoned.

Their level? We don’t even inhabit the same universe. The two sides aren’t even mad about the same thing. Conservative consciences are outraged by the word Rush used because it impugns a woman’s chastity. But between laughing at the idea of chastity and quoting expert findings that abstinence plays no role in preventing unwanted pregnancies, the left has no track record of treasuring that particular virtue. The only time the word “slut” sets liberal hounds baying is where its use suggests a moral distinction between chastity and the – so far – boundless sexual experimentation for which our forebears fought and died, or something like that, in the storied upheaval of the 1960s. The left doesn’t give any more of a damn about Sandra Fluke’s besmirched honor than they did about Cindy Sheehan’s fallen son: Ms. Fluke is a willing and useful idiot, and both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have used her as one the best they could.

Now Rush has apologized, and in true liberal style Ms. Fluke is refusing to accept his apology, because doing so would mean dropping the subject, and these people aren’t ready to drop it yet by a long shot.

And so the opportunistic lefty criticisms of Rush continue, while I guess we’re all stipulating that Ms. Fluke is not a lewd woman. Fine with me.  And I’ve even read a few conservative commentators generous enough to say that, while they don’t agree with her on the contraception issue, they’ve no objection to her activism, which is, of course, her right.

Well, I have an objection to her activism. I don’t see it as morally defensible to select a church-affiliated law school that refuses to fund birth control with the express purpose of undermining its principled position.

Which is exactly what Sandra Fluke did when she selected Georgetown as her law school. As reported at the Jammie Wearing Fools blog, “In one of her first interviews she is quoted as talking about how she reviewed Georgetown’s insurance policy prior to committing to attend, and seeing that it didn’t cover contraceptive services, she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy.” (“Sandra Fluke’s Appearance Is No Fluke”).

And as far as I’ve been able to find out, Ms. Fluke’s not even Catholic.

And yet she has  purposely made herself into a weapon to attack a fundamental teaching of the Catholic faith.  The victory she was aiming for wasn’t free contraception at all, but forcing the Church to step down from the moral high ground to her ground.  She wasn’t so much a student in Georgetown as a sapper.

Obviously, a social activist like Ms. Fluke, savvy enough to get noticed even before all this leading a host of lefty causes -- and then get into Georgetown’s law school -- doesn’t need the Jesuits to buy her birth control. She can get her own. But that isn’t what she wants.

What she wants is for the Church to give her the Pill. She wants the Pope and all those bishops who stand in contradiction to her values to give in, and admit that 98% of Catholics and 100% of the modern world must be right, and Christ and His Church must be wrong.

Kathleen Sebelius, who is a Catholic, showed the same single-mindedness in mandating away the Church’s freedom of conscience. That didn’t have anything to do with achieving any political goal of the Obama administration, either, because Obamacare was already a Leviathan; in fact, Sebelius could have saved the President a lot of flak by just granting the waiver the Church requested. But Sebelius’s motives were elsewhere.

Politics doesn’t explain everything, and it doesn’t explain this, because this isn’t primarily a political clash. Sebelius and Ms. Fluke’s objectives are not political ones, but spiritual, (bearing in mind that “spiritual” isn’t a synonym for “good”): they want the Church’s shepherds to corrupt themselves, and through them, to corrupt the Church.

Cathy Cleaver Ruse at the Wall Street Journal Online asks it this way: “Should Ms. Fluke give up a cup or two of coffee at Starbucks each month to pay for her birth control, or should Georgetown give up its religion?” (“Limbaugh and Our Phony Contraception Debate”).  

Clearly, Ms. Fluke chooses the latter, but for something much more important than her Starbucks. Besides, hasn’t she already  proved her willingness to give things up?  She already told us she gave up being educated elsewhere so she could fight to get the Jesuits into giving up Humanae Vitae.

Whether people know it or not, the Church recognizes sins far graver than fornication -- sins against the soul that are far deadlier than those of mere bodily weakness. In early 20^th century Mexico, the bitterly anticlerical government tormented the Church with a hundred humiliations, including forcing priests to marry.  The idea being, once make them break their solemn vow of celibacy, and then what good will they be to the faith? Lacerating the conscience has always been the weapon of choice for the pimp, the pusher, the pederast, and the dictator.

What do I care if Sandra Fluke is sleeping around? Or if she’s prim and pure as Sister Carol Keehan?

That’s not what disgusts me about Sandra Fluke.  It’s not her sexual choices that matter, so much as her spiritual ones.  What disgusts me about her is that she’s out to destroy my Church.

And I don’t really know if there’s a single word to call people like her.

But if there is, it’s a damned sight uglier than “slut.”

‘Blasphemy and Free Speech’

Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute delivered a lecture in Washington D.C. on February 3^rd, on “Blasphemy and Free Speech,” adapted in the February issue of Imprimis. In his lecture, Marshall warns of the threat to free speech posed by Islamic efforts to choke off religious discussion “in the name of preventing ‘defamation of’ or ‘insults to’ religion, especially Islam.”

Even while Americans enjoy the First Amendment’s protections against criminalizing criticism of Islam, Marshall says, those protections are weakened by extra-legal intimidation that leads to self-censoring. This has been especially obvious in the media:

In 2009, Yale University Press, in consultation with Yale University, removed all illustrations of Mohammed from its book by Jytte Klausen on the Danish cartoon crisis. It also removed Gustave Doré’s 19th-century illustration of Mohammed in hell from Dante’s Inferno. Yale’s formal press statement stressed the earlier refusal by American media outlets to show the cartoons, and noted that their “republication…has repeatedly resulted in violence around the world.” . . . .

Many in our media claim to be self-censoring out of sensitivity to religious feelings, but that claim is repeatedly undercut by their willingness to mock and criticize religions other than Islam. As British comedian Ben Elton observed: “The BBC will let vicar gags pass, but they would not let imam gags pass. They might pretend that it’s, you know, something to do with their moral sensibilities, but it isn’t. It’s because they’re scared.”

The second threat Marshall warns of is the Obama administration’s close cooperation with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The OIC is a Saudi-based, 56-member group committed by its charter “to Combat defamation of Islam.” According to Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, the OIC’s anti-defamation philosophy was inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa directing that all zealous Muslims were bound to kill Salman Rushdie. “While not explicitly embracing vigilantism,” writes Shea, the OIC “quickly endorsed Khomeini’s novel principle: that Western law should be subject to Muslim measures against apostasy and blasphemy.” (“An Anti-Blasphemy Measure Laid to Rest”).   It was the OIC, for instance, who, after an initial  mild and non-violent response to the publication of Mohammed cartoons in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, deliberately exploited the cartoons to rile up member states during a December 2005 conference in Saudi Arabia. The OIC got the result it wanted when “Muslims across Africa, Asia, and the Mideast set out from Friday prayers for often violent demonstrations, killing over 200 people.”

But imposing anti-blasphemy restrictions by force isn’t limited to Islamic states. As Marshall says:

Western governments have begun to give in to demands from the Saudi-based OIC and others for controls on speech. In Austria, for instance, Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolf has been convicted of “denigrating religious beliefs” for her comments about Mohammed during a seminar on radical Islam. Canada’s grossly misnamed “human rights commissions” have hauled writers—including Mark Steyn, who teaches as a distinguished fellow in journalism at Hillsdale College—before tribunals to interrogate them about their writings on Islam. And in Holland and Finland, respectively, politicians Geert Wilders and Jussi Halla-aho have been prosecuted for their comments on Islam in political speeches.

Marshall properly describes as a grave threat the “the specter of cooperation between our government and the OIC to shape speech about Islam.”

The first indication of this came in President Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, when he declared that he has a responsibility to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam whenever they appear.” Then in July of last year in Istanbul, Secretary of State Clinton co-chaired—with the OIC—a “High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance.” There, Mrs. Clinton announced another conference with the OIC, this one in Washington, to “exchange ideas” and discuss “implementation” measures our government might take to combat negative stereotyping of Islam. This would not restrict free speech, she said. But the mere fact of U.S. government partnership with the OIC is troublesome. Certainly it sends a dangerous signal, as suggested by the OIC’s Secretary-General, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, when he commented in Istanbul that the Obama administration stands “united” with the OIC on speech issues.

Last March Nina Shea reported that the OIC’s decade-long effort to get the UN to pass criminal penalties for “defamation of religions” (Islam) was finally laid to rest in 2011, thanks in part to the Obama State Department’s assistance (though built upon free-speech push-backs begun during the Bush administration). Based on Shea’s article, I’m guessing credit for that course correction belongs to Hillary Clinton, not the president.

Regardless, this one victory isn’t going to force the OIC to give up on its main mission to dictate to the entire human race what we can and can’t say about Islam.

Free speech is in trouble when the current president has so weak a grasp on his constitutional prerogatives as to tell the Muslim world that he is bound to “fight negative stereotypes of Islam whenever they appear.” National security is in trouble, too, when the same commitment is applied by banning “employment of ‘stereotypes about Arabs or Muslims” from FBI counterterror training materials. (“FBI busy purging its training materials of all traces of truth about Islam and jihad”).

Please read the rest of Marshall’s Blasphemy and Free Speech.

Detroit 911

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing was calling on Detroiters Monday to respond to a wave of shootings by young people in the city, imploring citizens, “Let’s stop the madness.” (“Bing tells troubled city: ‘Let’s stop the madness’”).

“When you’ve got parents afraid of their kids, you know you have not done a good job as a parent,” Bing said. “You need to start disciplining those young people when they come out of the womb. Mothers and fathers ... you can’t start disciplining a kid at the age of 12 or 14, it’s too late.”

I sympathize with the frustrations Bing must feel at this seemingly intractable problem. But I have no idea what tools he imagines are available to the government to remedy a culture as pathologically degraded as the one giving birth to this mayhem.

Don’t just shake your head at the drive-by murder of an infant sleeping on a sofa at 4 am. Shake your head at the fight that his mother got into at a baby shower the day before – “arguing about seating, turning tables over” -- that precipitated the revenge shooting.

And don’t just shake your head at the murder of 12-year-old Kadejah Davis by a 19-year old who shot through the front door of her house.   Shake your head at what led up to the violence:

“A 19-year-old Detroiter was accused this month of killing 12-year-old Kadejah Davis when his mother allegedly brought him to help her settle an argument over a cellphone with the victim’s mother. Joshua Brown allegedly fired shots through the home’s front door that struck the girl. He is charged with first-degree murder and his mother, Heather Brown, is charged as an accessory.”

I’d echo Mayor Bing that it may be too late to start disciplining your kid, when you’re the one chauffering him to finish your childish argument with another “adult” over a cellphone and you know he’s packing a firearm.

Then there’s the 14-year-old who murdered his mother after a feud about sneaking out with his friends. I don’t know what kind of shotgun he was using, but shooting her ten to 12 times meant having to go to the trouble of stopping to reload – repeatedly.

The Detroit News describes a 6-year old in critical condition after being “caught in a hail of indiscriminately fired bullets” during an attempted carjacking.  But they weren’t indiscriminate: the two 15-year-old thugs who fired into the car the child was riding in were outraged that their attempted carjacking wasn’t going as well as they’d hoped.

And what city did Bing mmistake himself for being mayor of when he appealed to “mothers and fathers”  to discipline their kids, when “nearly 80-percent of Detroit children born with no daddy’s name on the birth certificate”?

Appealing to Detroit’s adults to set a better example is a laughable suggestion if any of the the adults include the seven grown women punching and kicking each other and security guards at the Motor City Casino last week.

Some Michigan politicians are suggesting a tough new law that imposes a mandatory life sentence for killing someone by shooting into an occupied house.  That sounds right.  But do the kind of people who’ve been drenching Detroit in blood all month really strike anyone as capable of having the kind of forethought a law like that might restrain?

When life is this cheap, when parents and other community elders are passing on to children the lesson that anger and revenge are to be nurtured and acted out rather than resisted, all the community policing the city can afford isn’t going to do any good.

Ikhwan and White House: ‘N Sync

Ted Belman at American Thinker spells out the links between the President of the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Why is Obama in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Dr. Essam Abdallah, an Egyptian liberal intellectual, in an article published last October in the leading liberal pan-Arab journal Elaph, refers to certain reports coming out of Washington:

These reports reveal the depth of the below-the-surface coordination between the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Jordan. This bloc of regimes and organizations is now becoming the greatest Islamist radical lobby ever to penetrate and infiltrate the White House, Congress, the State Department and the main decision making centers of the US government. All of this is happening at a time when the US government is going through its most strategically dangerous period in modern times because of its need to confront the Iranian Mullahs regime, which is expanding in the Middle East, as well as penetrating the United States, via powerful and influential allies.

Abdallah alleged that "the popular revolts in the Arab world -- and the Obama Administration's position towards them -- were determined by political battles between various pressure groups in Washington."

He followed up with another article this month in which he asks:

[W]hy isn't the West in general and the United States Administration in particular clearly and forcefully supporting our civil societies and particularly the secular democrats of the region? Why were the bureaucracies in Washington and in Brussels partnering with Islamists in the region and not with their natural allies the democracy promoting political forces?

Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism said of this article: "This is one of the most important articles I have read in years." He then made allegations of his own:

It was just revealed two days ago that FBI Director Mueller secretly met on February 8 at FBI headquarters with a coalition of groups including various Islamist and militant Arabic groups who in the past have defended Hamas and Hizballah and have also issued blatantly anti-Semitic statements. At this meeting, the FBI revealed that it had removed more than 1000 presentations and curricula on Islam from FBI offices around the country that was deemed "offensive." The FBI did not reveal what criteria was used to determine why material was considered "offensive" but knowledgeable law enforcement sources have told the IPT that it was these radical groups who made that determination. Moreover, numerous FBI agents have confirmed that from now on, FBI headquarters has banned all FBI offices from inviting any counter-terrorist specialists who are considered "anti-Islam" by Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

This comes as no surprise to me. In August of 2011, after making the case, I wrote, "To my mind, the alliance between the Obama administration and the Muslim Brotherhood is the cornerstone of Obama's New Middle East policy."

The most damning bit of evidence was reported by Herb London in his article, "U.S. Betrays Syria's Opposition":

In an effort to understand and placate Syrian opposition groups, Secretary Clinton invited them to a meeting in Washington. Most of those invited, however, have links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Missing from the invitations are Kurdish leaders, Sunni liberals, Assyrians and Christian spokesmen. According to various reports the State Department made a deal with Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood representatives either to share power with Assad to stabilize the government, or replace him if this effort fails. One organization, the Syrian Democracy Council (SDC), an opposition group composed of diverse ethnic and religious organizations, including Alawis, Aramaic Christians, Druze and Assyrians was conspicuously -- and no coincidentally -- omitted from the invitation list.

There’s a lot more.  Please read the rest of Belman’s article here. 

Dearborn Wild for Ron Paul

A bit too late for the primary, but we note that Osama Siblani’s pro-Hezbollah Arab American News has endorsed Congressman Ron Paul in the Republican primary.

In a rambling editorial that mirror’s Paul’s own non-sequiturial speaking style, the editorial praises Paul’s for his “noble stances” on foreign policy:

A return to true diplomacy with the likes of Iran and other nations deemed to be threats is the answer, the Air Force veteran Paul defiantly persists as he has for years in Congressional hearings, not continued policies of sanctions and interventions that cripple civilian populations along with hostile rhetoric and condemnations that often only serve as the pretext to more wars serving financial elites, part of the 'Military Industrial Complex' former president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against.  (“Our endorsement: Ron Paul is the right man for the job”).

Anyway, the AAN is crazy for Paul because he’s opposed to all intervention in the Middle East and thinks Iran should have the bomb if they want one.

I’ve always known that Ron Paul’s foreign policy ideas are a disaster.  Why do so many conservatives take him seriously?

Maybe Just a Down Payment on ‘Enough’

Now we’re making progress. After 5 days of telling us that President Obama’s apology for U.S. forces accidentally burning defaced Qu-rans in Afghanistan is not “enough,” an Islamic official has finally named what he believes might be enough. From Gateway Pundit:

The top Iranian military Commander today said, “Nothing but burning the White House can relieve the wound of us, the Muslims, caused by the Burning of Quran in the US… And hang the commanders.”
Fars News reported:

A top Iranian military commander said the US helplessness in the confrontation against Islam is the real cause underlying the burning of the Muslims’ Holy Book by American soldiers in Afghanistan, and stressed that nothing but burning the White House and hanging the US commanders responsible for this cowardly action can relieve the Muslims’ pain.

“The US has committed such an ugly action and burnt Quran because of the heavy slap it has been given by Islam,” Commander of Iran’s Basij (volunteer) force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said on Saturday.

He stressed Muslims’ sensitivity to the crimes underway in Afghanistan by the US forces, and said Muslims do not accept the US apology, because it makes numerous military mistakes and then just asks for the Afghans’ apology, and this is not acceptable.

“Nothing but burning the White House can relieve the wound of us, the Muslims, caused by the Burning of Quran in the US,” he underscored.

“Their apology can be accepted only by hanging their commanders; hanging their commanders means an apology,” he reiterated.

Obama has sent a letter to his Afghan counterpart Karzai, apologizing for the burning of copies of the Holy Quran.

Sorry!

Kira Davis apologizes to Karzai, too.  Thanks to Townhall and Gateway Pundit. 

‘Allah Makes Us Do It’

If you aren’t beginning to feel bullied yet, you will.

Right now, Afghanistan is in the middle of a storm of anti-western violence that the Washington Post mistakenly refers to as “fratricide.” (“NATO personnel recalled from Afghan ministries in wake of deadly attack”). It might be accurate in a normal world to call it fratricide when an ally turns his weapon on a brother in arms.  But there’s no way in hell Afghanis see us, or any infidels, as brothers.

A rampager in Kabul was quoted Friday explaining why Islamic rage can only expand, not contract, even when the leader of the free world has groveled.

“We don't care about Obama's apology,” said Kamaluddin, a 25-year-old Kabul protester who uses only one name. “We have to protest to be responsible to our God. They are burning our Quran. An apology is not enough.” (“Gunman kills 2 US advisers in Afghan ministry”).

“We have to protest to be responsible to our God.” There’s the key thought. Muslims have to do this, otherwise Allah will hold them accountable. Now there’s a report out of Pennsylvania that a state judge dismissed an open-and-shut case against a Muslim defendant charge with assault and harassment:

The victim, Ernest Perce, wore a “Zombie Mohammed” costume and pretended to walk among the dead (in the company of an associate who was the “Zombie Pope” — and who, you’ll be shocked to learn, was not assaulted). The assailant, Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim immigrant, physically attacked Perce, attempted to pull his sign off, and, according to police, admitted what he had done right after the incident. The defense argued that Elbayomy believed it was a crime to insult the prophet Mohammed (it is, under sharia law), and that because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam. (“The Sharia Court of Pennsylvania — the Transcript”).

The judge dismissed the case against the assailant, finding the defendant lacked any “intent to harass, annoy or alarm,” because he only intended “to have the offensive situation negated.”  Exactly.  (And when has that motivation ever led to an assault?)   The judge lambasted the victim, an atheist, for being ignorant about Islam, and told him “you’re way outside your bounds on First Amendment rights.”  The judge adopted the defense offered by the assailant’s attorney that in many Muslim countries “something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society, in fact, it could be punishable by death, and it frequently is, in their society.”

I’m putting to one side the judge’s abject unfitness to sit on an American bench because I’d like to focus instead on the assailant’s conviction that “because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam.“

The case of Hamza Kashgari, the Saudi journalist who was repatriated to Saudi from Malaysia to face execution for tweeting an imaginary man-to-man conversation he had with Mohammed, is yet another illustration of this absolute requirement that every earthly insult of Islam requires at least one death, if not more. A senior Saudi cleric didn’t see how Kashgari’s apology possibly could change the conditions laid down by the Qu’ran: “’Repenting will not work…any man who insults God or our Prophet (PBUH) should be killed,’ he said.” (“Senior Saudi cleric says Twitter blasphemer should be killed even if he repents”).

If you haven’t noticed by now, defending Islam against insults – either by preventing them or avenging them – may be the single biggest motivating force among Muslims worldwide. Remove the imperative to defend Islam – or else -- and there would be no need to destroy Israel, or to have knocked down the World Trade Center, or to honor-kill one’s daughters, or to commit a suicide attack on a health clinic, or to stop off on your way home from the mosque to help slaughter Christians coming out of Mass – all targets routinely condemned by their Muslim attackers as constituting  intolerable offenses against Allah.

I’m not actually suggesting Islam could get rid of its absolute imperative to defend Islam, just trying an exercise to help imagine what the world would be like without it.  I don’t really believe Islam can be reformed that way.  The belligerent view is too essential to Islam, too much of a mirror of its founder’s intolerant character.

Every religion defends itself, of course, that’s not the problem. Right now Catholics in America are defending the Church against Obama’s tyrannical health-care mandates. Coptic Egypts in Christian are defending themselves against an Islamic drive for their extinction.   But no one is being murdered as part of that defense.

Perhaps the difference is that a billion Catholics around the world aren’t held personally responsible to avenge every insult against the Lord Himself, while a billion Muslims have been taught they’re “responsible to” Allah to defend his honor at the cost of their own lives, or someone else’s.

And it would be a good place to remember that the burning of the Qu’rans in Afghanistan was accidental. Yet still Allah demands blood. 

No wonder they hate us. We keep making Allah mad.

When one considers the amount of energy the Ummah devotes to making sure that every word or deed insulting to the Prophet is either stopped before it happens, or avenged to the uttermost, the advantages of a worldwide Sharia state immediately become obvious. If the entire world were run like Saudi Arabia, there would be so much less to avenge. 

And then . . . Peace?

McCain + Graham + Ikhwan

Andrew C. McCarthy at NRO  provides some much-needed perspective on the players in the Middle East’s uprising:

 

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have taken time off from helping install an Islamist government in Libya (mainly the Muslim Brotherhood, with some help from al Qaeda) and calling for the arming of the Syrian “rebels” (mainly the Muslim Brotherhood, with some help from al Qaeda) to heap praise on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The post-Mubarak regime for which democracy project enthusiasts like McCain and Graham clamored is poised to try Americans they have taken prisoner. This is a particular blow for the senators because they sit on the board of one of the NGOs at the center of the crisis — the International Republican Institute, a progressive endowment that is a clearinghouse for channeling millions of American taxpayer dollars for “civil society development” across the globe. The IRI has served as a McCain fiefdom since he was given control of it 20 years ago. It is one of the organizations whose members have been accused of violating Mubarak-era Egyptian laws that bar NGOs from receiving foreign funding — laws that the Muslim Brotherhood opposed because they made it harder for the Brothers to rabble-rouse under the guise of “promoting democracy.”

The Brotherhood, of course, actually seeks an Islamic state ruled by repressive sharia law. From the organization’s founding in the 1920s to this very day, its motto remains, “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu Akbar!” Only a few days ago, its Supreme Guide in Egypt reaffirmed that the Brotherhood’s goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate. Its chief sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who explains that secular democracy is anathema for an Islamic society, has prescribed a gradual transition to sharia. Just three years ago, the Brotherhood’s leadership explicitly called on Egyptian youth to prepare for jihad — “raising young people on the basis of the principles of jihad so as to create mujahideen who love to die as much as others love to live, and who can perform their duty toward their God, themselves, and their homeland.”

The Brothers, furthermore, have unmitigated contempt for the West and seek the eradication of Israel. Qaradawi promises that Islam will conquer America and Europe and has issued fatwas approving suicide bombings in Israel and againstAmerican troops in Iraq. The terrorist organization, Hamas, is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. The Brotherhood’s agents in America have written that their mission here is a “grand jihad” to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within by sabotage.

But why should any of that preclude warm words from the ummah’s favorite Republicans? 

 

Please read the rest of it at (“McCain & Graham [Heart] the Muslim Brotherhood”) 

FBI’s Mueller to Brotherhood’s ISNA: ‘I’m Your Puppet’

As reported it Monday’s Detroit Free Press:

After complaints from some Muslim and Arab-American groups, the FBI has pulled more than 700 documents and 300 presentations that stereotyped Islam or were factually inaccurate, an FBI spokesman said. The federal agency also intends in coming weeks to roll out plans on how it will vet training materials.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the agency had pulled the documents at a meeting two weeks ago with advocacy groups.

"The steps taken by the FBI ... are certainly welcomed," Abed Ayoub said Friday. He is the national director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a Dearborn resident.

Ayoub and members of six other religious or ethnic groups met with Mueller in Washington, D.C., to discuss their concerns. They expressed opposition to training materials and presentations by experts for FBI agents that they considered anti-Muslim. Some of the materials say Islam promotes violence and extremism. (“FBI ditches training materials criticized as anti-Muslim”).

Mueller’s meeting two weeks ago “also included leaders from the Islamic Society of North America; Muslim Public Affairs Council; Arab American Institute; Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Interfaith Alliance, and Shoulder to Shoulder, an interfaith group that stands with American Muslims.”

The FBI has no business meeting with leaders from the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA was explicitly named as a Muslim Brotherhood front group in the “Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America” introduced as evidence during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing  trial.  The kernel of that strategic goal is anchored on this blog right below DU’s masthead, where you can read about the Brotherhood’s “Grand Jihad” in “destroying Western civilization from within.”   During the Holy Land trial ISNA was expressly identified by the U.S. government as an unindicted co-conspirator in that case, specifically labeling ISNA as a “member of the US Muslim Brotherhood.”

MPAC is hardly better. The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has produced an 88-page report on MPAC that looks beyond its stated “magnanimous and genuine intentions,” to a consistent pattern in which it “routinely defended designated terrorist organizations; as well as individuals and charities that are supporters of terrorism; opposes U.S. counterterrorism measures as part of a consistent knee jerk reaction claiming bias and discrimination behind law enforcement efforts; and reflects a blatant conspiratorial anti-Semitism.”

Andrew C. McCarthy exposes MPAC as “(an organization with a history of praising the Brotherhood and Hezbollah — and of suggesting that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks).”

If you think the occasional meet-and-greet between Washington officials and any of a vast number of community organizations is just part of the way things are, you might want to consider that in 2010:

Main Justice, an independent news organization that covers the Justice Department, reported . . . that MPAC is “one of two Muslim-American organizations now attending regular meetings led by the Civil Rights Division and including government officials [from] the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies." (“MPAC Pursues Islamist Ideology in Guise of Civil Rights Defender”)

That sounds encouraging, no?  The DOJ’s Civil Division head Thomas Perez is a committed Progressive so broad-minded he was seriously entertaining Islamist advocates last October demanding “a legal declaration that U.S. citizens’ criticism of Islam constitutes racial discrimination.”   Besides MPAC, the other Islamist group keeping personal coffee mugs in Perez’s conference room is Muslim Advocates.    These guys have formed an Axis with with MPAC, CAIR, and the ADC to suppress government efforts to address homegrown Islamic terrorism: primarily by forbidding agency personnel from ever using “Islamic” and “terrorism” in the same sentence.   Last fall we looked at all Muslim Advocates and MPAC were doing to initiate full sanitizing of  phrases like “violent Islamic extremism” from the FBI’s vocabulary. (“Train in Vain”).

While all that was going on in D.C., here in Detroit:

the head of the Detroit FBI office, Andrew Arena, met with about 50 Arab-American and Muslim leaders in October to address their concerns about anti-Muslim training.   And U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade of the Eastern District of Michigan worked on outreach, speaking on an Arab-American radio show to assuage concerns.

This latest concession by Mueller looks like another stage in the Axis’s sanitation operation.  The result is what Andy McCarthy calls  “the FBI . . . allowing itself to become a marionette whose strings are pulled by such groups as ISNA,” CAIR, and MPAC. 

How many stages can be left before FBI and Homeland Security are completely speechless to address the threat of jihad?

When is the nation’s premier counterintelligence organization ever going to learn?

Still on the Job In New York

New York Post writer Michal A. Walsh reports on the AP’s war on the New York Police Department’s anti-jihad efforts:

Looking for Jihad in all the right placesBy MICHAEL A. WALSH

There’s a reason New York City has not been hit by radical Muslim terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001, and its name is the New York City Police Department.

Closely watching wannabe jihadis not only at home but across the country and around the world, the NYPD has foiled countless terror operations, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway system, the Stock Exchange, the trans-Hudson tunnels and JFK Airport, among others.

But try to tell that to the Associated Press, which for months now has been waging a journalistic jihad against the NYPD and its counterterrorism tactics in the name of “civil rights.”

The latest salvo, “NYPD Monitored Muslim Students All Over Northeast,” discloses that undercover officers kept tabs on various Muslim student organizations — often viewed as breeding grounds for freelance jihadism — across New York state and New England and patrolled their Web sites.

The NYPD “monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania,” writes Chris Hawley. “Police . . . recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed . . . names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.”

The AP story also breathlessly notes that “the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students,” even though “Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity.”

Was the AP born yesterday?

There’s always a gap between what public officials say to the “gotcha” media and what they actually must do — especially when it comes to terrorism. If officials could candidly talk about the daily reports they get about possible lethal jihadist activity, the country would be in a state of permanent panic.

So — like the Pentagon calling Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 defenseless service members at Fort Hood, Tex., in 2009 “workplace violence” — they publicly downplay localized, spontaneous jihad, even as they seek to combat it behind the scenes.

But in some quarters, the “civil rights” meme trumps everything, including self-preservation. It’s hardly “racist” to prudently note that Islamic religiosity characterized the 9/11 hijackers, Maj. Hasan and others and is used as a motivational tool by jihadis.

Nor is it “racist” to note that, too often across the Islamic world, believers pour out of mosques on Friday nights whipped into a frenzy by their imams and shouting “Death to America.”

What the NYPD is doing is simply good — and entirely legal — police work. The events of 9/11 obliged the department to transform itself from a municipal police force into a combination cop shop, intelligence service and paramilitary organization that can and does operate globally, not just locally.

But the modern left is dubious at best about the moral legitimacy of pro-active self-defense — thus the smugly selfrighteous AP series.

Most Americans — including Muslim Americans — get it.

The AP reports one monitored student saying of the cops: “I can’t blame them for doing their job. There’s lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us.”

That’s a voice of common sense and good will. There should be more like it.

On 9/11, America was shot in the back by 19 devout, praying Muslims, some of whom had infiltrated our nation posing as “students.” What the politically correct AP apparently sees as an “oppressed minority” is correctly viewed by the NYPD as a possible “suspect pool” for the next attempted terrorist attack.

Attempt they will. Al Qaeda may be operationally damaged, but the failed Times Square bombing serves as a potent reminder that eternal vigilance in the war against radical Islam is a price that even pacifist New Yorkers must pay for the right not to get blown up at Macy’s.

And if that offends the AP, tough.

Muslim Secrets Are Safe for Now

This post has been revised since it was first published. 

The Oakland Press and the Dearborn Press & Guide are teaming up in a series of video reports entitled “Muslim Secrets.” The videos are being produced by Oakland Press reporter Aftab Borka, a journalist from Pakistan who has done reporting for CBS. The first video in the series, asks American Muslims , “Do Muslims want sharia law in America? ” But rather than giving answers, the report only moves along the “Islamization of knowledge” in America.

Borka interviews a handful of Muslims, some of them religious figures, some not, like an Oakland University student and the chief of oncology at Beaumont. None of the them actually answered the question, “do you want Sharia law in America?” Nor did any of them define what Sharia is to them.

Instead, Borka explains thus: “Not surprisingly, every Muslim interviewed for this report had a different and not-so-straight answer. All of them had a different interpretation of Sharia law.”

“Not surprisingly”? I think that’s surprising.  Especially the tidbit about his interviewees not giving straight answers. Have Borka’s Muslims got something to hide?  Isn’t this supposed to reveal the American Muslims’ attitude towards Sharia, straight from the horse’s mouth? This doesn’t bode well for unveiling “Muslim Secrets.”

Combine the not-so-straight answers with the one point on which Borka’s sources do all agree: “don’t believe what the opponents say,” and it leaves a reader no place to turn for the facts.

So, “to understand what Sharia law really means” in the context of all this muddy thinking, who better can Borka  turn to than one who preaches Sharia – our old friend Dawud Walid.

“Well,” explains, Walid:

Sharia and law will not necessarily be the best two phrases to conjoin or combine together. But Sharia simply means a path toward faithfulness of how a Muslim seeks to live a life holistically pleasing God. This ranges from our ritual worship to regulating how we are involved in ethical transaction of businesses.

Clear enough? Notice the way Walid’s “range” carefully avoids mention of those aspects of Sharia which cause Americans the greatest alarm: executions for leaving Islam, fatwas against non-Muslims who criticize Mohammed, honor killings, the Friday-after-mosque riots of violence against Christians, the reduction of women to chattels, the inferior status in Muslim lands of nonMuslims , and the endless slaughters wreaked by jihadis whose motivation – documented in miles of martyrdom videos – were, to use Walid’s euphemistic phrase, “to live a life holistically pleasing God” by slaughtering infidels.

Walid also hasn’t got a word to say about the political applications of Sharia, according to which Islam the religion and Islam the government power “conjoin” to rule absolutely in nations with Muslim majorities.

I have the feeling the people bringing us “Muslim Secrets” aren’t going to give us an honest answer to their own questions.

All that Borka tells us about Walid is that he’s “a well-known Muslim leader in southeast Michigan, and chairman of Council of American Islamic Relations.”  

Is that all?  Borka’s an experienced journalist and, even if he really didn’t know anything about Walid before, (which I can’t believe), an hour’s research would have confirmed a bucketful of facts about Dawud Walid that are directly relevant to the question “do you want Sharia in America?”

1. Walid’s organization, CAIR, is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwhan) and front organization for Hamas, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing trial.

2. In 1998, CAIR’s national chairman, Omar Ahmad, told his Muslim listeners that

Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.

3. The Muslim Brotherhood’s/Ikhwan’s stated goal in North America

is kind of a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. [...] It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes.

4. Walid is a consistent supporter of Hamas, though he keeps his references to Hamas veiled, as in this speech in 2010:

Now how in the world can there be a realistic discussion about peace talks when the entity which represents the elected government of the Palestinian people during a fair election that was monitored by international inspectors, including former president Jimmy Carter is not at the peace table? *

5. When Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, it promptly began imposing Sharia. (“Report: Hamas makes tactical retreat from Sharia-enforcing thuggery”).

6. Now that the Ikhwan has majority power in Egypt, it intends to impose Sharia on all Egyptians, including Christians.

Not only does Borka’s reporting utterly fail to look at all sides – citing not a single critic of Sharia while avoiding all substantive analysis of what it means – but Borka uses Walid, (or vice versa) to level the same old attacks against “random blogs” and, as Walid loves to repeat, “a ‘highly-funded, well-organized Islamophobia network’ for projecting a wrong perception since Sept. 11, 2001.”

Which is another fact Borka owed us that I left off my list above, that the Muslim Brotherhood, through its front group, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), invented the concept of “Islamophobia” as a way “to silence critics of political Islam.”

As far as Walid will admit, no scholar of Islam anywhere in America has ever supported the adoption of the harsh principles of the Qu’ran in the United States. Ideas to the contrary have simply “been manufactured and projected by the Islamophobic industry in the United States of America.”

Walid’s ridiculous challenge to find five imams who are calling for chopping off hands in the USA is intended to misdirect readers away from the actual demands that CAIR and other Muslim groups are making all the time: primarily in the form of speech codes forbidding criticism of Islam and unwritten practices and policies that favor Muslims out of fear of being accused of anti-Muslim bias.

Walid, (and many of those “well-financed random blogs” like this one), are well aware that the capacity of Muslims to impose Sharia in a country where they are a minority is much different than in countries where Muslims are a majority.  As Andrew McCarthy observes:

Where Muslims are a tiny minority, and where countervailing cultural forces are robust enough and unapologetic enough to hem in Islam’s supremacist ambitions, Islam can be moderate and its adherents solid citizens. Where sharia is permitted to spread its wings, liberty is strangled. And where Muslims are a majority turned loose to enforce sharia, it is . . .  a “human-rights disaster.”

The relevant question, Do Muslims want Sharia in America?, is never answered.  Not even close.

*Walid loves to speak between the lines. In a portion of the Borka video not included in the published transcript, Borka narrates that Walid “is even against the death penalty in America.” When Borka asks Walid if he “personally believes that there is no place for these harsh (Saudi-style) punishments that we see around the world in America,” Walid doesn’t answer yes or no, detouring instead into an irrelevant  commentary about what he considers the “harsh punishment” of executing convicts in the United States “based on circumstantial evidence.”  I’ve never heard Walid  provide a straight answer to anything.

On the Bright Side, We Can Call it an Anti-Muslim Hate Crime

In the latest of at least 20 arrests on terrorism-related charges in the in the last year, Amine El Khalifi, was arrested by the FBI yesterday “a few blocks from the Capitol . . . carrying what he believed to be a loaded automatic weapon and a suicide vest ready for detonation.” (“Federal agents arrest Amine El Khalifi; he allegedly planned to bomb Capitol”).

Earlier on Friday, in preparation for his martyrdom, Khalifi “prayed at Dar Al-Hijrah, a Northern Virginia mosque.” The mosque’s imam, Johari Abdul-Malik happened to be leading prayers at the Capitol for Muslim personnel, including Keith Ellison, around the time Khalifi was planning his departure for Paradise.  The Washington Post reported the imam’s reaction  in an early version of its story on Friday, which has since been revised to remove the statement:

“Clearly the alleged perpetrator... has no regard for Muslim leaders either from our mosque or from the leadership of Muslims in America,” said Johari Abdul-Malik, prayer leader of the Dar al-Hijrah Mosque in Northern Virginia, after leading the prayers in one of the meeting rooms of the Capitol.

“Whoever this guy was, if he was aiming for the Capitol, he would have gotten all of us,” Abdul-Malik said.

Imagine the nerve of this suicide bomber. So was hoping to blow up the Capitol Building and a lot of infidels. But he would have gotten us too!

And Allahu Akhbar To You Too

And now the Underwear Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, at last leaves Michigan for s supermax cell, condemned to four consecutive life sentences, plus fifty years. (“Attempted bomber of Detroit-bound plane gets life in prison”).

But as he departs for good he has offered us one last lesson about the faith to which he is devoted, if we have ears to hear: “Mujaheddin are proud to kill in the name of God. And that is exactly what God told us to do in the Koran.”

‘Pregnancy Is Not a Disease’?

On Friday night the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a response  to President Obama’s  statement about the HHS contraception mandate being modified to “accommodate” conscience rights of religious believers. 

February 10, 2012

Regulatory changes limited and unclear

Rescission of mandate only complete solution

Continue urging passage of Respect for Rights of Conscience Act

WASHINGTON – The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have issued the following statement:

The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the "preventive services" regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated "preventive services" prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such "services" immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of "religious employers" that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS's nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

·It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

·It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer's policy, not as a separate rider.

·Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer's plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today's proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

‘This Will Make Them Like Us’

The Wall Street Journal invites readers to “Meet the men the U.S. might release as a goodwill gesture”:

The Taliban FiveThe Obama Administration is pursuing peace talks with the Taliban, and as a goodwill gesture it has been leaking the news that it may pre-emptively release five of their leaders held at Guantanamo. We thought you might like to meet them.

Their identities are an open secret, and last week the White House gave a restricted briefing to a few Members of Congress to win their support. The men are among the 46 out of 171 detainees left at Gitmo that an Administration review in 2010 deemed "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution." Two years later, these detainees are evidently no longer too dangerous.

These upstanding citizens are:

• Mohammad Fazl, around age 45, was the senior-most Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan and their deputy defense minister when captured in November 2001. He was at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress, outside the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, when hundreds of Taliban prisoners revolted against their captors in the Northern Alliance. CIA operative Johnny Michael Spann died in the melee, becoming the first American casualty of the Afghan war. A confidential annex of the Administration's 2010 review suggests that Fazl may be responsible for Spann's death.

According to his secret 2008 Gitmo file, which was published by WikiLeaks, Fazl also commanded foreign fighters in Afghanistan and "possessed vast power and financial resources."

He was close to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Before 9/11, Fazl commanded troops in central Afghanistan who massacred hundreds of Hazaras, a Shiite Muslim ethnic minority. His Gitmo file also says the Iranian government suspects him of "being connected" to the killing of its diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.

• Mullah Norullah Nori served with Fazl in northern Afghanistan and was with him at Qala-i-Jangi fortress. The U.S. suspects him of involvement in Spann's murder. He is an alleged war criminal for his role in the massacre of Shiite Afghans, which he has told his Gitmo interrogators were justified by the Taliban's desire to "establish their ideal state."

• Mohammed Nabi was "a senior Taliban official" who helped smuggle weapons to attack U.S. troops and finance the Taliban. He is one of a few leaders who was, according to his Gitmo file, "loyal" to the Haqqani network, a terrorist group based in western Pakistan and allied with the Taliban. He has a record of poor behavior while in custody at Guantanamo.

• Khairullah Khairkhwa, former Taliban governor of Herat province in western Afghanistan, was "directly associated" with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, his interrogators say. He met often with officials from Iran, which has tried to undermine post-Taliban Afghanistan. Khaikhwa says he's also a friend of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and his lawyers say he wasn't ideologically committed to the Taliban.

• Abdul Haq Wasiq, 40, was the deputy head of Taliban intelligence, which tortured and murdered civilians. His Gitmo interrogators say he has withheld what he knows about outside Islamist groups that the Taliban worked with to fight the U.S., and he may belong to al Qaeda. His release, says an intelligence source, would be "highly problematic."

The Administration's plan seems to be to turn these five over to the custody of the Qatar government. But once there the U.S. will have lost all leverage over their fate, and the likelihood is that they will eventually be released outright, be traded in a prisoner exchange, or escape. Some or all are likely to rejoin their terror trade.

Congress can't stop these transfers, but it can raise a fuss. At a minimum, Fazl and Nori ought to be properly investigated—and perhaps put on trial—for Spann's murder and war crimes committed in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The release of the confidential sections of the Gitmo review related to the Spann case would also inform a public debate and address widespread concerns on Capitol Hill about any transfers.

The bigger question is why the U.S. would trade anyone in exchange for nothing more than a Taliban promise to talk. As they see the U.S. heading for the Afghan exits in 2014, with military combat operations ending by 2013, the Taliban have little incentive to make any concessions. They know they merely have to wait.

One of the failures of the Afghan campaign is that we still haven't killed or captured Mullah Omar. By freeing the Taliban's senior figures from Guantanamo, President Obama will send another signal of weakness that will make them even less likely to negotiate in good faith.

#