Tuesday, September 15, 2020

THE MUSLIM GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS

 

Militant Islamists Slaughter More than 500 Christians in Ethiopia

Ethiopian Orthodox Christians take part in the celebration of Timkat, the Ethiopian Epiphany, in Gondar, on January 19, 2020. - Timkat is the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian festival which celebrates the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan river. (Photo by EDUARDO SOTERAS / AFP) (Photo by EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP via Getty Images)
EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP via Getty
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Muslim extremists have carried out a door-to-door anti-Christian murder campaign this summer, killing over 500 Christians since June, Christianpersecution.com reported.

The Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church has called on the government of Ethiopia to act decisively to stop the ongoing slaughter of Christians and the destruction of churches, the September 9 report states.

Since late June, the attacks by Oromo Islamist radicals have entailed the murder of upwards of 500 Christians, including pregnant women, children, and entire families in the Oromia regional state, which includes the nation’s capital of Addis Ababa.

The assailants are members of a Muslim Oromo male youth movement called Qeerroo, meaning “bachelors.”

Throughout the summer, the Qeerroo radicals traveled about in cars, armed with guns, machetes, swords, and spears, seeking out and slaughtering Christians door to door, the Barnabas Fund reported earlier this month in a chilling story ignored by mainstream media.

The targeted killings of Christians followed on the alleged assassination of a popular Oromo singer, Hachallu Hundessa, who was reportedly shot dead on 29 June while driving in the outskirts of Addis Ababa.

A field report released in July stated: “These were the most horrific days for Christians in the Oromo region. There are different factions in the region. Some are ethno-nationalist and others are religious. The majority of those who got killed in a brutal way (beheaded and mutilated) are Orthodox Christian of Amhara Ethnicity.”

The report declared that no governmental security forces were present at the scene of the murders and no one stopped or interfered with the killings.

At that time, Archbishop Abune Henok, Primate of the diocese of West Arsi in the Oromo region, stated that Orthodox Christians were purposefully being targeted and killed, noting that more than 239 Orthodox Christians had already been slaughtered.

Attacks on Christians were confirmed in numerous towns and villages including Arsi Negele, Ziway, Shashemane, Gedeb Asasa, Kofele, Dodola, Adaba, Robe, Goba, Bale Agarfa, Chiro, Harar, Dire Dawa, Adama, Dera, Asela and Kembolcha, reaching to the far south-east and east of the country.

Some of the Islamists carried lists of the names of Christians, particularly prominent Church members, and hunted them down, often with the assistance of local officials in the Oromia region, Barnabas reported.

Attackers captured one local Christian and told him to remove the thread around his neck worn by many Ethiopian Christians as a sign of their baptism. When the man refused, his captors cut off his head.

“The attackers said that it is only he/she who prostrates with us before Allah for prayer who is considered an Oromo,” the man’s widow declared.

Local eyewitnesses also recounted that the killers desecrated corpses by “dancing and singing, carrying the chopped or hacked body parts of those they slaughtered.” Raiders also dragged the hacked bodies of an elderly Christian couple through the streets of Gedeb Asasa.

Along with the killings, extremists also burned down numerous Christians’ businesses and houses, vandalizing or destroying others, reportedly causing billions of dollars’ worth of property damage.

The ongoing murders have been compared to the surge of killings that led to the Rwandan genocide. Initially slow to intervene, government security forces have since carried out thousands of arrests, including of local officials complicit in the attacks.

Quran (9:29) - "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the Jizya [the tax for being a Jew or Christian] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."


 The BLM’s Marxist agenda is on full 

display across America today. Exploitation 

of the insurrectionist riots in which it plays 

a leading role to demonize Jews and Israel 

is, too. 

The new Fox ‘Soul’ network has announced that it will air Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s “Message to America” on a special July 4th program, despite his history of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia.


Life Sentence for Kori Muhammad, Death Sentences for His Four Victims

“Delusional” Nation of Islam beliefs fueled racist murders in Fresno, California.

  

“Let black people go with our own land and reparations, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell.”

Thus spake convicted murderer Kori Muhammad, 42, at his June sentencing in Fresno, California. Muhammad drew a life sentence without possibility of parole for the 2017 murders of Carl Williams, Zackary Randalls, Mark Gassett and David Jackson, all targeted solely because they were white. The case passed with little attention from national media, despite relevance to ongoing racial violence.

Kori Muhammed was born Cory Allen Taylor and changed his name after converting to Islam as a teenager. In 1995, Muhammed participated in the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March in Washington. In his social media posts, Muhammad made references to “grafted white devils,” as the Nation of Islam explains, created 6,000 years ago by the mad scientist “Yacub.” According to police, Muhammed also supported a separate country for all “non-white” residents of the United States.

Muhammed believed he was part of an ongoing war between whites and blacks, and that a battle would soon take place. Derek Bavin, a classmate at Fresno City College, recalled that Muhammad would miss weeks of classes then accuse his instructors of being racist. He released hip-hop albums with repeated references to violence between blacks and whites.

Kori Ali Muhammad also boasts a long criminal history, with arrests for weapons, drugs, forgery and making terrorist threats. He was sentenced to seven years in 2008 and released early in 2016. In April of 2017, Muhammad felt “disrespected” by Carl Williams, 25, so Muhammad killed the man. When police sought him for the shooting, Muhammad planned to “kill as many white men” as he could before being caught. So on April 18, 2017, Muhammad drove through downtown Fresno targeting white victims.

When he walked up to a utility truck, Muhammad said in his confession, “I saw a Mexican driver and a white guy. I didn’t want to target the driver because he was Mexican, so I shot the white dude.” The “white dude” was Zachary Randalls, 34, whom Muhammad did not know and, as with all four victims, targeted solely because of his skin shade.

Muhammad encountered Mark James Gassett emerging from a Catholic Charities USA building and gunned him down with a .357 magnum revolver, shooting the victim again after he fell to the ground. Muhammad also encountered David Jackson, 58 emerging from Catholic Charities and shot him dead with the powerful revolver.  On arrest, Muhammad proclaimed “Allahu Akbar,” and when sworn in he raised his right fist.

“This is just a warning,” said Muhammad in an interview with the Fresno Bee. “If America does not treat black people right, it will be destroyed by God.” Muhammed showed no remorse for the killings and told reporters, “I say get over it. There will be no pity party.” Muhammad also discussed his mental illness and that would be an issue in the trial.

Based on examination by a physician, judge Jonathan Conklin found Kori Muhammed competent to stand trial. Prosecutor Brian Hutchins argued that Muhammad’s delusional views are part of his religious beliefs associated with the Nation of Islam. Muhammed’s attorneys withdrew his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

“You think COVID-19 is bad, wait till you see what’s coming next,” Muhammad said during the trial. On April 22, the Fresno jury found Kori Muhammad guilty of first degree murder in the death of Jackson, Gassett and Randalls, and second-degree murder in the death of Williams. The jury also found Muhammad guilty on four counts of attempted murder, discharging a gun into a home, and being a felon in possession of gun.

Judge Conklin delayed the sentencing so the murder victims’ families would have a chance to make statements in court. Harold Wagner, stepfather of Mark Gassett, said Muhammad was an “evil coward,” and others lamented the loss of their loved ones. In his own statement, Muhammad proclaimed, “Let black people go with our own land and reparations,” and mocked the victims’ relatives by blowing kisses.

The case drew no official statement from California Gov. Gavin Newsom or attorney General Xavier Becerra, not even as an example of “gun violence.” Like Micah Johnson, who gunned down five police officers in Dallas in 2016, Kori Muhammad targeted victims because of their race, yet media did not describe the quadruple murderer as the racist perpetrator of a hate crime.

Kori Muhammad was held on $2.6 million bail, but if cash bail had been eliminated, as Democrats seek, he would have been free to continue his killing spree. Had Muhammad drawn a death sentence it would never be carried out. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom, reprieved 737 convicted murderers on California’s death row, including serial killers and cop killers.

In California, murderers lives matter more than those of their victims. Californians can expect more racist violence from those whose delusional beliefs are associated with the Nation of Islam.

“People don’t appreciate the black man,” Kori Muhammed told the Fresno Bee. “We built pyramids and trade routes and made great nations. We are the first to walk the Earth and we will be the last to walk it.”

Outcry over Louis Farrakhan Rant Calling Prominent Jews Including Alan Dershowitz ‘Satan’

9 Jul 2020627

4:04

Notorious antisemite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan live-streamed a three-hour Independence Day rant on YouTube where he calls prominent Jewish Americans, including Jonathan Greenblatt and Alan Dershowitz, “Satan,” as well as repeating the lie Israel was behind  George Floyd’s killing.

The Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM) on Wednesday called on YouTube to remove the video, saying it was “in clear contravention of YouTube’s own policies on hate speech.”

Farrakhan’s Fourth of July address also aired Saturday on Revolt TV, a cable channel owned by Sean “Diddy” Combs. Combs encouraged his 15.6 million Twitter followers to watch the video, tweeting “Everyone can watch…Just not the scared ones.”

Everyone can watch… Just not the scared ones.

— Diddy (@Diddy) July 4, 2020

In the address, the 87-year-old Nation of Islam leader called the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan.”

“Mr. Greenblatt, you are Satan. Those of you that say that you’re Jews, I will not even give you the honor of calling you a Jew. You are not a Jew… you are Satan and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim when he sees Satan, pick up a stone, as we do in Mecca,” Farrakhan said.

“When you know who Satan is, you don’t have to kill him [but] the stone of truth, that’s what you throw. We cast truth at falsehood till we knock out its brains,” he continued.

He also called Jewish renowned defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz  “a skillful deceiver” and “Satan masquerading as a lawyer.”

Farrakhan also implicated Israel in the death of George Floyd and in police violence in general.

“That’s why you gotta come at us like a coward,” he said. “Like snakes trying to wrap yourself around us so you could give us the treatment that you were taught in Israel. You may, as you gonna stop your police from going to Israel to learn how to kill better.”

“Your days of killing us without consequence are over,” he added.

Greenblatt took to Twitter to respond to Farrakhan’s “trademark antisemitism.”

“This is routine for Farrakhan- give him a platform, he never fails to espouse hatred,” Greenblatt said.

CAM Director Sacha Roytman-Dratwa wrote in a letter addressed to Matt Halprin, YouTube’s vice president of global trust and safety:

Louis Farrakhan has a long history of antisemitism, incorporating it into the very legitimate, important fight for civil rights and equality. His perversion of these values by promoting hatred and dehumanization of Jews is quite simply unacceptable.

According to CAM, by allowing the video, which has garnered nearly 900,000 views in three days, to remain on its site, “YouTube is allowing him to hijack the worthy cause of racial justice and use the video sharing site as a platform for anti-Semitism.”

“[Farrakhan] even suggested the Jewish community seeks to kill him, saying, ‘If you [Jews] make that move, I can guarantee your destruction,'” the letter reads.

In his address, Farrakhan bizarrely attempted to disavow accusations of antisemitism.

“They tell lies to make you think I am a bigot or antisemite, so that you won’t listen to what I’m saying. So far they’ve been pretty successful,” he said.

“If you really think I hate the Jewish people, you don’t know me at all. [I’ve never] uttered the words of death to the Jewish people,” he went on.

In the past his rancorous antisemitic rants have included calling Jews members of the “Synagogue of Satan” and claiming Jesus called the Jews “the children of the devil.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he was not surprised by Farrakhan’s remarks.

“At this stage of history, no one can be surprised by the rants of America’s Godfather of antisemitism,” he told The Algemeiner.

Cooper also condemned Farrakhan’s “lurid antisemitic conspiracy linking the Jewish state to the death of George Floyd.”

 

 

The new Fox ‘Soul’ network has announced that it will air Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s “Message to America” on a special July 4th program, despite his history of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia.

Fox ‘Soul’ Network to Air Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan July 4

Scott Olson/Getty

28 Jun 20205,435

2:02

The new Fox ‘Soul’ network has announced that it will air Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s “Message to America” on a special July 4th program, despite his history of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia.

LIVE ON FOX SOUL: THE CRITERION

THE HONORABLE MINISTER LOUIS FARRAKHAN will deliver his MESSAGE TO AMERICA on JULY 4th at 11am ET / 8am PT.

For More information visit https://t.co/cQCGt59mm7 and tune into FOX https://t.co/ZQ7BibvsBi or Download the FOX SOUL APP pic.twitter.com/CdJoQLcEnP

— foxsoultv (@foxsoultv) June 26, 2020

Farrakhan’s history of hateful rhetoric is well-documented. In 2018, he compared Jews to termites. That same year, he drew criticism for defending the use of the phrase “death to America” during a conversation with students in Iran.

The main FOX network launched Fox Soul in January in an effort to reach African American audiences — and to reach beyond the conservative branding of Fox News. Fox Soul offers four hours of streaming programing daily.

Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D), founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, made an impassioned plea on Twitter on Sunday for Fox Soul to cancel the program.

.@AmericansAA calls upon @FOXTV to immediately cancel the planned JULY 4 broadcast of Dishonorable Minister of Hate @LouisFarrakhan on @foxsoultv@splcenter considers the Nation of Islam to be an extremist hate group. So why amplify this hateful voice?!#CancelFarrakhanNowpic.twitter.com/FJo632h4cR

— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) June 28, 2020

 

The advertisement (above) for Fox Soul’s special Farrakhan broadcast includes a link to the Nation of Islam’s website.

The website (link not provided) is billing Farrakhan’s appearance as The Criterion: Announcement to the World. The website also includes links to purchase the Nation of Islam’s antisemitic trilogy, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.

The Nation of Islam has had controversial relationships with the anti-Trump “Women’s March,” and provided security for the recent funeral of George Floyd.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Black Lives Matter: Not Just Communist, But 

Viciously Anti-Semitic Too


No matter the color of their skin, Jews are going to be labeled “white.”

June 29, 2020 

Clare M. Lopez

By the time violent rioters tore through the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Fairfax, Los Angeles on the night of Saturday May 30, 2020, it was too late. The vicious antisemitic, anti-Israel language of the M4BL and Black Lives Matter’s demands that included accusations against Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide” had been brushed aside. Black Lives Matter (BLM) delegations had traveled to the Middle East to endorse Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria and pose for photo ops with the Palestinian flag. Statements from delegation leaders spoke of “occupation, ethnic cleansing and brutality” that Israel supposedly has perpetrated against the region’s Arab-Muslim population.

Even when city after city across America went up in flames after the May 25, 2020 killing of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer, with BLM ‘protesters’ assaulting private businesses, their owners, and law enforcement officers alike, smashing store fronts, setting fires, and destroying property, some among America’s Jewish leadership could hardly get their statements of support out fast enough. Jewish American organizations, the Reform Movement, rabbinical leadership figures, progressive and Zionist activists, even the Hasidic Community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn in New York City all practically fell over one another in their haste to endorse the BLM movement.

The Jewish Federation of Santa Barbara was no different. On June 13, 2020, the group – including, among others, the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, ADL Santa Barbara Tri-Counties, Santa Barbara Congregation of B’nai B’rith and Santa Barbara Hillel – issued a statement to condemn “racism” and “institutional biases.” The Focus Project, whose online website is remarkably empty, disseminated a set of talking points on June 16, 2020 that appear to date from September 2019. An increasingly popular trope is included among them that distorts the ancient Jewish term ‘Tikkun Olam’ in a way to make it seem like some kind of modern-day social justice program. In fact, ‘Tikkun Olam’ is a Kabbalist term that made its way into Judaism by way of the Aleinu prayer that is specific to Rosh Hashanah. ‘Tikkun Olam’ is not from the Torah (md’oraita) in origin at all – and therefore not one of the 613 obligatory commandments (mitzvot) nor anywhere to be found in the normative rabbinical literature concerning the praxises of Jewish Law (Halacha). Rather, as a kind of companion bit of moral guidance, ‘Tikkun Olam’ urges Jews to repair one’s individual relationship to the Almighty by way of observance of the actual ‘mitzvot’, or obligatory commandments that lead to perfecting personal behavior.

Now, just as ‘perfecting of one’s personal behavior before the Almighty’ has nothing to do with the social justice narrative per se, neither does it have anything to do with supporting a communist/Marxist, pro-Maoist organization, one of whose BLM co-founders’ declaration of the group’s Marxist ideology was featured on Twitter just days ago. Yes, the BLM movement was founded by three African-American women with longtime Marxist backgrounds: Alicia Garza, Opal I. Tometi, and Patrisse M. Cullors. Its original Platform (issued in August 2016, but scrubbed up a bit in its more recent iteration) called for collective ownership of all resources, the breaking up of banks, redistribution of wealth by way of confiscatory taxes on ‘high earners,’ free health care, and free education. Truly, Karl Marx would have blushed.

But back to the question of how BLM rioters came to be rampaging through Jewish neighborhoods of Los Angeles, CA, reportedly shouting “F___Jews”, and spray painting “F___Israel” and “Free Palestine” on the walls of the Congregation Beth Israel and at least four other synagogues. How did Jews come to be collectivized into the enemy “white privilege proletariat” class by these BLM Marxists?

That original BLM Platform also explicitly supports the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement. Another indicator comes from Cullors (who organized the 30 May pogrom in LA): she reportedly told a New York Times reporter, “Let’s go into the heart of what is symbolically white in Los Angeles, which is Beverly Hills…These people need to hear our pain and our grief. We wanted to bring this to communities who often aren’t dealing with police violence.” No matter the color of their skin, therefore, Jews are going to be labeled “white”—as a pejorative from which it is always going to be impossible to escape. It goes back farther than that, however. By 2015, BLM representatives traveled to the Middle East to make common cause with Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Fast forward to late May 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s BDS national working group blatantly tried to link that killing to Israel, by claiming that U.S. police forces learned riot control techniques from Israeli police. Then, on June 1, Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right of Return Coalition, published a hideous cartoon at its website showing an Israeli soldier with his knee on the neck of a keffiyeh’ed Palestinian, arm-in-arm with an American police officer with his knee on the neck of a black man. The article it accompanied was entitled “Al-Awda PRRC statement of solidarity for Black lives and Black struggle.”

The BLM’s Marxist agenda is on full 

display across America today. Exploitation 

of the insurrectionist riots in which it plays 

a leading role to demonize Jews and Israel 

is, too. 

 

Raymond Ibrahim Interview: Truth About Islam Must Be Acknowledged

How an ideology's teachings are antithetical to Western values.

  

Note: Journalist Niram Ferretti interviews Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center, for the Italian publication, L’Informale (original here).  Pasted below are excerpts from the English version.

Question: How much is the concept of jihad intended as holy war, central to the way Islam has interpreted itself during the centuries?

The concept of jihad was central from the start—at least according to the earliest Muslim historians who often portray the first warriors of Allah as being zealously motivated by the notion of jihad.

Question: The last time that Islam tried to penetrate Europe through war was on the 12th of September 1683 at Kalhenberg, near Vienna, where 65.000 thousand Christians fought against 200,000 Ottoman Turks. For how long after that date did jihad against the West stopped and when and why was it resumed?

Raids continued for some time, particularly by sea, and well into the late 1700s, meaning for about a century after the successful defense of Vienna.  Even as the Ottoman Empire was beginning its slow retreat from eastern Europe, the Muslim slavers of the so-called Barbary States of North Africa wreaked havoc all along the coasts of Europe—even as far as Iceland.  The United States of America’s first war—which it fought before it could even elect its first president—was against these Islamic slavers.  When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams asked Barbary’s ambassador why his countrymen were enslaving American sailors, the “ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that … it was their right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners….”

Question: In his seminal book of 1996, Samuel P. Huntington wrote about Islam and the West the following sentence, “Kto? Kovo? Who is to rule? Who is to be ruled? The central issue of politics defined by Lenin is the root of the contest between Islam and the West”. Do you agree?

Yes, inasmuch as that Muslims must always work to make Islam rule over non-Muslims, based on their sharia, which while allowing for truces and times of peace—particularly when Islam is weak vis-à-vis infidels—also sees the spread of Muslim rule as the culmination of the Islamic mission that began in the early 630s.

Question: Let us now talk about your new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. What has brought you to write a book focused specifically on the battles which have occurred along the centuries between Islam and the West?

Yes, as indicated by the title, the book is a military history between Islam and the West, narrated around their eight most decisive clashes, the first and last of which occurred more than a millennium apart.  But while the eight battles/sieges form the centerpieces of the book’s eight chapters, the bulk of the narrative chronologically traces and tells the general, but much forgotten story of Islam and the West, most of which of course revolved around warfare—with all the attendant death, destruction, slavery, and geopolitical demarcations and map rearrangements. We can say I began working on portions of this book some twenty years ago—since around 1998-99, when I first started doing academic research for what became my MA thesis in History: a close examination, including through the original Arabic and Greek sources, of the battle of Yarmuk—the first major military encounter between Islam and the Eastern Roman Empire in 636, highlighted in Chapter 1 of the Sword and Scimitar.

Question: To what extent is the Islamic terrorism that we are facing today a continuation of the battles between Islam and the West that you describe in Sword and Scimitar?   

To a very great extent.  Both the motivation and the pattern of terrorist acts are very much mirror reflections of past Islamic motivations and patterns.  In other words, from the start to finish, the book pages are full of all the ugly words and deeds committed by modern groups such as the Islamic State—ordering Europeans to convert to Islam or face the sword; the willful destruction of churches; the mass slaughter—including by beheading, crucifixion, or burning—of Christian defenders, and the mass enslavement and rape of Christian women and children—all of these permeate the pages of my book.

Question: Islam is a way of life. It is a complete set of ideas and rules which differs deeply from our Western values. Is there any chance of an accommodation between Islam and Western societies or this is just wishful thinking?

Can water and oil mix?  In the same manner, pure Islamic teachings and pure Western values are often antithetical to one another.  For example, the West believes in freedom of religion, whereas in Islam those who seek to apostatize are penalized, including by death; the West believes in freedom of speech, whereas in Islam any critical talk concerning Muhammad can get one killed.   One can go on and on but the point should be clear.  Of course, a nominal/secular Muslim may be able to assimilate in a Western society, but that is not a reflection of Islam, which is hardly nominal but rather a full way of life based on sharia.

Question: According to you what are the ways in which Europe on one side and the United States on the other should face the reality of Islam in such a manner that could be helpful both for Westerners and Muslims? What are the false assumptions that must be rejected?

First, the truth must be acknowledged—including for example the truth that, for well over a millennium, Muslims invaded European/Christian territory on the same logic that Islamic terror groups cite—that it is their right to invade, conquer, butcher, and enslave infidels for no less a reason that because they are non-Muslims.  If this is how Muslims have been behaving for centuries, is there really any need to find “reasons” why some of them are behaving so now?  Are grievances, territorial disputes, etc., necessary to explain this unwavering hostility?  Once these facts are embraced, the rest, including policy—for instance, the question of Muslim immigration—should become self-evident.

Question: How inbred is religious violence in Islam and how it differs from the way in which it is presented in the Bible and has accompanied Christianity in the course of its history?

Many apologist for Islam like to claim that the Bible, especially the Jewish scriptures (or the Old Testament), is just as if not more bloody and violent than the Koran—so why do we insist that Muslim violence is rooted to Muslim scriptures? The problem with comparing violence in the Bible — both Old and New Testaments — with violence in the Koran is that it conflates history with doctrine. The majority of violence in the Bible is recorded as history; a description of events. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of violence in the Koran is doctrinally significant. The Koran uses open-ended language to call on believers to commit acts of violence against non-Muslims. See “Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?” for my most comprehensive and documented treatment of this tired apologia.


ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN AMERICA - AMAZON'S MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS HAS $200 BILLION BUT PAYS SHIT WAGES

So, in the present moment of booming stock markets and child hunger, you might be feeling too inured to America’s grotesque levels of inequality to summon much interest in yet another report testifying to the one percent’s total victory in the 50 Years Class War.


Study: Inequality Robs $2.5 Trillion From U.S. Workers Each Year

A better world was possible. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Every few months, some group of socially conscious number crunchers will remind Americans that a tiny elite is binge-eating the nation’s economic pie while the rest of us plebeians fight over table scraps. Journalists will then aggregate eye-popping statistics and edifying charts, progressives will share these over social media, adorned with red-faced (and/or guillotine) emoji — and the moral arc of history will carry on bending toward neofeudalism.

So, in the present moment of booming stock markets and child hunger, you might be feeling too inured to America’s grotesque levels of inequality to summon much interest in yet another report testifying to the one percent’s total victory in the 50 Years Class War.

But a new study from the Rand Corporation, in partnership with the Fair Work Center, illustrates the impact of a half-century of upward redistribution in bracingly concrete terms: If income had been distributed as evenly over the past five decades as it was in 1975, the median full-time worker in the U.S. would enjoy annual earnings of roughly $92,000 a year. As is, that worker makes just $50,000.

It’s no secret that wage and productivity growth began decoupling in the 1970s. Charts like this one from the Economic Policy Institute have been ubiquitous in progressive economic policy debates since the Great Recession:

But RAND’s innovative methodology — which involved constructing a new metric for inequality that compares income growth to GDP, and then using that metric to gauge changes in the income distribution across every U.S. business cycle since 1975 — allowed it to translate the abstractions of macro-level income shares into something much more tangible. Between the mid-1970s and 2018, per capita GDP growth in the U.S. increased by 118 percent. Had income growth on every rung of America’s class ladder kept pace with those gains, annual earnings at the bottom would be nearly twice as high as they are now. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. earners would collectively take home $2.5 trillion more in income each year.

Graphic: RAND Education and Labor
The 1970s were a pivotal decade. Graphic: RAND Education and Labor

There are a few significant limitations to RAND’s data. Chief among these is that the study only measures taxable income, which does not capture any potential increase in non-monetary forms of compensation, such as health-care benefits. There is no question that such perks make up a larger share of labor’s compensation today than they did in 1975. That may say more about runaway rent-seeking in America’s health-care system than it does about worker’s true income gains. But a perfect apples-to-apples comparison would take note of the value of benefits.

Separately, it seems likely that had America’s income distribution held constant since 1975, inflation would have been much higher in recent decades — and thus, “2018 dollars” in the counterfactual universe would be worth less than they are in our own. The reason for this is simple: Rich people have a lower propensity to consume each additional dollar of income than working people do. Thus, if you concentrate income gains among the rich, the bulk of those dollars will be invested; which is to say, they will be used to bid up the prices of stocks and real-estate. If you concentrate income gains among workers, meanwhile, the bulk of those gains will be spent on goods and services, thereby bidding up consumer prices.

This is a crucial part of the inequality story in the United States. Under Paul Volcker’s leadership, the Federal Reserve consciously sought to overcome the high inflation of the late 1970s by breaking the bargaining power of U.S. workers, and reducing labor’s share of income. Thanks to the Reagan revolution, among other things, the central bank accomplished this objective too well. Now, instead of contending with inflationary pressures, the Fed must make increasingly audacious interventions in capital markets to ward off the perennial threat of consumer price deflation — even as asset prices rise to evermore spectacular highs.

Nevertheless, RAND’s projections remain a useful approximation. Although the income distribution it posits would probably be one more vulnerable to inflation, it would also probably be more conducive to economic growth. In 2014, OECD economists estimated that increases in income inequality had reduced U.S. GDP growth by as much as 8 percentage points over the preceding two decades.

Further, if we acknowledge that economic power is easily translated into the political variety, it seems likely that in RAND’s counterfactual universe, ordinary Americans would enjoy more generous social benefits and workplace protections than they do in our dimension. Thus, even if we stipulate that a more equitable income distribution would mean a weaker dollar in 2018, it’s possible that RAND’s counterfactual underestimates what the real value of the median workers’ annual income would have been under such a distribution.

Regardless, the paper makes the radical regressivism of the contemporary U.S. political economy plain to see. Progressives often mock nostalgic invocations of some bygone golden era in American life, noting that the postwar period was less than “great” for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, or women trying to make a place for themselves in the professions. And this allergy to white male-centric nostalgia has much to recommend it. But it is also the case that the first three decades after the Second World War witnessed a degree of shared prosperity that was never seen before or since. And if the income distribution of 1975 had been maintained over the ensuing decades, according to RAND’s methodology, wages for most Black workers would be nearly twice as high as they are now.

Actually-existing America has a lot of problems, many of which cannot be reduced to questions of economics or class power. But it is hard not to suspect that most of our nation’s troubles would be less severe, if America’s working-class had an extra $2.5 trillion to spend each year.