Ralph Nader: Biden's First Year Proves He Is Still a "Corporate Socialist" Beholden to Big Business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jTIUtjkDss
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Amazon, this year alone, petitioned for nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers and foreign nationals seeking to take high-paying white collar jobs. Microsoft and Google, likewise, petitioned for more than 3,300 employment-based green cards.
BIDENOMICS: The issue is not the survival of what the leader of the most powerful imperialist country calls “democracy.” Joe Biden really means capitalism, the profit system, which has produced a level of economic inequality that is entirely incompatible with any genuine democracy. Instead, it is generating fascist movements all over the world, which aim to abolish all democratic rights and subject the working class to the naked dictatorship of the rich. PATRICK MARTIN
Emulating Islam: The Left’s War on the Christian Cross
In many ways, the “secular Left” and Islam appear to be diametrically opposed: the Left is sexually promiscuous, Islam isn’t; the Left believes in countless genders, Islam doesn’t; the Left believes in all sorts of freedoms, Islam believes only in draconian sharia -- and so on and so forth.
When it comes to Islam’s views on Christianity, however -- that it is an inferior faith to be subjugated and discriminated against (Koran 9:29) -- the Left appears to be in agreement.
For example, a 61-year-old Christian woman who escaped to Britain from her Nigerian homeland -- where a genocide against Christians is currently underway -- experienced something similar in her adopted nation. Mary Onuoha, formerly a nurse at England’s Croydon University Hospital since 2002, was over the years repeatedly harassed by management and finally “bullied” out of her job for refusing to remove her small cross necklace, which she has worn for 40 years. As Mary explained in an interview:
This has always been an attack on my faith. My cross has been with me for 40 years. It is part of me, and my faith, and it has never caused anyone any harm... At this hospital there are members of staff who go to a mosque four times a day and no one says anything to them. Hindus wear red bracelets on their wrists and female Muslims wear hijabs in theatre. Yet my small cross around my neck was deemed so dangerous that I was no longer allowed to do my job.
Her bosses eventually claimed that her cross necklace “harbored bacteria… even though many colleagues were allowed to sport other items expressing their religious beliefs, be they turbans, hijabs or bracelets.” The question she often responded with, and which her superiors never answered, was “why I should hide my faith while others were allowed to show their own.”
The worst incident occurred in November 2016, when a manager actually called her away during surgery to berate her about her cross: “I said ‘I cannot leave the patient,’ but the manager insisted. I was so embarrassed. Theatre [operation room] is a pressured environment, and I was astonished that senior staff were prepared to potentially endanger a patient’s life in order to intimidate me to remove it [her cross].”
In the end, because “she refused to take it off, Mary was moved to clerical duties and became subject to what she describes as a sustained campaign of bullying that left her unable to work.” She took her case to court and only recently, according to a January 8 report, won. Ruling in her favor, the judge found that management had forced Mary to work in a “humiliating, hostile and threatening environment” and that when Mary complained, their response had only been “offensive and intimidating.”
And all because she wore a small cross necklace. As Andrea Williams, who represented Mary in her lawsuit, explained:
From the beginning this case has been about one or two members of staff being offended by the cross -- the worldwide, recognised and cherished symbol of the Christian faith. It is upsetting that an experienced nurse, during a pandemic, has been forced to choose between her faith and the profession she loves. Why do some NHS [National Health Service] employers feel that the cross is less worthy of protection or display than other religious attire?
Mary’s “victory has, however,” continues the report, “been achieved at a high price. Many Christians in the NHS and other workplaces have had to hide their crosses and Mary had to persevere through two years of incessant harassment by her managers.” Nor is this phenomenon limited to Britain’s NHS. According to a 2013 report,
A British Airways check-in worker's right to express her religion was unfairly restricted when she was prevented from wearing a cross at work, the European court of human rights (ECHR) has ruled. In a landmark judgment defining the limits of religious freedom, Nadia Eweida, 60, a practising Coptic Christian, was awarded €2,000 (£1,600) in compensation by the court in Strasbourg after it ruled against the United Kingdom.
In both of the above cases, the cross-wearing women came from nations -- Nigeria and Egypt -- where Muslims persecute and discriminate against Christians. There, they were willing to face the abuse for wearing their crosses, these tiny emblems of hope. Accordingly, and as I know from talking to such people, they are often shocked beyond belief to discover that the Western nations they fled to -- and which they mistakenly assumed were Christian nations -- share in Islam’s well-documented aversion for the Christian cross.
Nor are Christian immigrants the only ones to face such discrimination in Britain. So do natives -- and they, perhaps unsurprisingly, rarely get vindicated. For example, the same report discussing Coptic woman Nadia Eweida’s victory adds:
But three other Christian applicants – Lilian Ladele, a local authority registrar who also lives in London, Shirley Chaplin, 57, a nurse from Exeter, and Gary McFarlane, 51, a Bristol marriage counsellor – who also claimed they had suffered religious discrimination lost their appeals.
Secular groups welcomed the four decisions…
The three aforementioned other cases also concerned Christians who were disciplined or fired from their jobs for religious reasons. Shirley Chaplin’s case was near identical to Mary Onuoha’s case: she too was a nurse at an NHS hospital who was disciplined and demoted for refusing to remove her cross necklace: “In her case, however,” continues the report, “the Strasbourg judges considered the fact that hospital authorities had asked her to remove it for the protection of health and safety and to prevent infections spreading on a ward ‘was inherently more important.’ Hospital managers, the judges agreed, ‘were well placed to make decisions about clinical safety.’”
“It seems ridiculous to me,” was Shirley’s response:
I wore it [the crucifix] on my confirmation when I was 16, I've been a nurse since 1978. I've worn it without incident, I've nursed a very wide range of patients, I've been bitten, I've been scratched, I've had computers thrown at me, but no-one has ever, ever grabbed my crucifix. To say it's a health and safety risk, I really don't agree with that at all.
The same sort of thing is happening right here in the United States of America -- and at the highest levels. Most recently, according to a December 23, 2021 report,
A Texas-based religious business that makes specialty dog tags [identifier necklaces for soldiers] with Bible verses and Christian imagery has filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Defense over its decision to prohibit the company from selling religious tags with U.S. armed forces trademarks…
For over 20 years, Shields of Strength had been allowed to include the military trademarks alongside Bible verse quotes and Christian imagery, such as a cross. The business boasts of having sold or donated around 4 million dog tags.
First Liberty Institute, which represents Shields of Strength, said the military's policy is unconstitutional, “arbitrary and capricious,” adding, “It’s a cruel insult to our service members to deny them a source of inspiration, hope, and encouragement simply because it contains a religious message. DOD officials caved to the empty threats of those who make their living by being offended. There’s no legal reason for the military to discriminate against Shields of Strength.”
In conclusion, if Islam and the left are dissimilar in many ways, they certainly share the same hostility for one particular thing -- to the point that some might argue that is the whole impetus behind their being, contradistinction, opposition to that one thing: Christianity, especially visible and proud reminders of it, such as the cross.
Islam, beginning with its prophet, who “had such a repugnance to the form of the cross that he broke everything brought into his house with its figure upon it,” has been responsible for destroying countless crosses, past and present. Islam, however, is at least honest and open about its hatred. As for the so-called “left,” perhaps it is high time to take the sage advice first uttered by the one behind the cross: “You will know them by their fruits.”
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
Image: RawPixel
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Excludes Hollywood’s Jewish Founders and Filmmakers
On Sept. 25, 2021, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures was launched to memorize the world of film.
It was a good idea.
The cinematic experience is unique and well known the world over. Where else can a diverse group of people be engaged such that they forget their differences and experience almost identical emotions simultaneously?
The world of film is also where art and technology unite to deliver a unique mix of sound and image.
Beyond entertainment, cinema is an important module of literature. Many films have also transcended the realms of the cinema halls to become cultural milestones the world over.
Motion pictures have existed for more than a century, hence a museum dedicated to the magic of the movies was not just a welcome idea, it was essential.
However, once launched, a major problem with the Museum became instantly apparent to its patrons.
The story of Hollywood’s founding is both exceptional and inspiring. A group of primarily Jewish émigrés arrived in America to escape anti-Semitic persecution in Europe and set up what would become a multibillion-dollar industry.
This includes Paramount Pictures co-founder Adolph Zukor, Warner Bros. founders Harry and Jack Warner, Universal Pictures co-founder Carl Laemmle, Columbia Pictures co-founder Harry Cohn, and MGM co-founders Sam Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer.
While partisan hatred may have marred the universal charms of what used to be wholesome entertainment, Hollywood still continues to captivate audiences globally and is likely to last as long as the human race.
Shockingly, the history of the origins of Hollywood and its Jewish founders at the Museum was conspicuous by its absence.
There was even little reference of Jewish auteurs who shaped Hollywood. Sunset Boulevard director Billy Wilder was the only one who had a small placard next to one of his six Oscars noting that he fled Nazi Germany because of his religion.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, responded as follows:
“I would’ve hoped that any honest historical assessment of the motion picture industry — its origins, its development, its growth — would include the role that Jews played in building the industry from the ground up. As I walked through, I literally turned to the person I was there with and said to him, ‘Where are the Jews?’ The omission was glaring.”
Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban and his wife Cheryl, who made the largest donation of $50 million to the Museum told Rolling Stone that they “firmly believe that the Jewish contributions to the film industry, from its founding to today, should be highlighted.”
The director of the museum director and president, Bill Kramer said:
“Representation is so important to us, including our Jewish founders. If we are not talking about them in enough detail or more prominently, we want to hear that and we want to respond to that. And we’re really happy to be able to make a change and are going to course correct.”
Based on reports, this seems to be a case of exclusion and not an omission of details.
Kramer later informed Rolling Stone that a year from now, the museum will launch an exhibit of the founding fathers and the birth of the studio system, which will mark the first and only permanent exhibition in the collection.
There has been scant coverage in the news media of this scandalous exclusion.
The issue was covered by Rolling Stone and also carried the Jewish publication Forward, as well as the Wrap, and a few others.
For any museum curator of any culture or organization, the top priority should be the details of its founding. While it may be essential to include contemporary figures in order that it appears relevant, without the founders the organization would never have existed.
It is hence outrageous and revolting that the Jewish founders of Hollywood were excluded. The organizers may have said they will make amends, but it could be argued that the damage is already done.
We have to wonder why this glaring omission occurred.
It has to be remembered that in the past, despite having Jewish founders, many major Hollywood stars from the golden era such as Edward G. Robinson, Hedy Lamarr, Lauren Bacall, and Kirk Douglas were compelled to opt for stage names to conceal their Jewish identity because of the bigotry within the industry and among audiences.
But those were the old days, contemporary Hollywood claims to celebrate a commitment to diversity and ‘representation.’
However, that commitment to diversity increasingly seems to exclude the Jewish people who are among the most persecuted groups in the history of mankind.
The focus is only on people of color and LGBTQ individuals.
Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogan, have spoken about anti-Semitism in contemporary Hollywood.
Perhaps woke liberal Hollywood is focused on the superficial and hence perceive the Jewish founders as people of ‘white privilege’ who were rich, and powerful people. Perhaps they blame these founders, much like the founding fathers of the nation, for systemic racism within the industry and hence think the founders do not deserve mention or respect.
Perhaps the top echelons of Hollywood, owing to their warped ideals see Israel as an aggressor and that somehow has translated into them thinking of the Jewish people as oppressors rather than oppressed.
In recent times there has been a blatant display of anti-Semitism.
Harry Potter star Emma Watson took to Instagram to express support for the Palestinian cause.
Other showbiz stars such as Susan Sarandon, Games of Thrones star Lena Headey, ‘comedian’ John Olivier, Roger Waters, Dua Lipa, Viola Davis, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, and even Israeli-born Natalie Portman have expressed pro-Palestinian views.
The fear among people in Hollywood is that they may be ‘canceled’ for not toeing the line.
Israeli Gal Gadot received backlash for supporting her homeland of Israel.
Hence the stars try to make an overt demonstration to appear as true believers of the groupthink.
Today, Israel is the only truly liberal, democratic, and pluralistic state in the Middle East. It is also the only true ally the U.S. has in the Middle East. Isreal stands for diversity and tolerance, the very ideals that Hollywood claims to strive for.
Yet the powerful in Hollywood seem to harbor an irrational dislike for Israel.
Is this plain anti-Semitism, masquerading as a concern for Palestinians?
What is more amazing is that some prominent Jewish filmmakers have joined the groupthink.
Even Steven Spielberg who made the masterly Schindler’s List which was a profound tribute to the humanity of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust made the film called "Munich." That film attempted to paint a false equivalence between the torture-murder terrorists who massacred Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics and the Israeli government. It was abominable Palestinian propaganda.
The liberals in Hollywood keep falsely claiming that President Trump and his supporters for being Neo-Nazis.
By relentlessly discriminating against the Jewish people, it is they who are behaving like Neo Nazis.
The motives behind this shameful exclusion seem to be malicious rather than erroneous.
It is time for the powerful Jewish people to stand up for this bigotry. If they can exclude the founding father of Hollywood in a museum to celebrate showbiz, they can do anything.
The Holocaust remembrance falls on Jan. 27 this year, and silence at such time will be tantamount to complicity.
CAIR Warns of Threat from Jews and 'ProntPage Magazine'
CAIR’s Islamophobia report shows why it’s accused of anti-Semitism.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terror.
A week before a Muslim terrorist attacked a Texas Temple in a bid to free CAIR’s favorite terrorist, Lady Al Qaeda aka Aafia Siddiqui, the hate group released another of its increasingly discredited “Islamophobia” reports seeking to cut off donations to Jewish and anti-terror groups.
The reports, originally titled, ‘Fear Inc’, started out bad and have only gotten worse over the years. The 2021 report, ‘Islamophobia in the Mainstream’, is a cynical campaign to smear pro-Israel groups like EMET, CAMERA, and MEMRI for calling out CAIR’s anti-Semitism.
In MEMRI’s case, the group is guilty of posting video clips of Islamic support for terrorism and anti-Semitism that make CAIR and its pro-terrorists look bad, like the CAIR-TX panel on Aafia Siddiqui in which Linda Sarsour described Lady Al Qaeda as a political prisoner as well as a CAIR rally in support of Lady Al Qaeda not long after the anniversary of September 11 at which a speaker blamed "Zionist judges" for the plight of Muslim terrorists in Guantanamo Bay.
CAIR complains that MEMRI "inaccurately translates news" and is guilty of "inflammatory representation", but the speakers at the CAIR events are using English and the only inflammatory materials are coming out of their mouths.
It’s understandable that CAIR wouldn’t want people hearing that a speaker at one of its rallies was accusing the Jews of being behind the imprisonment of Siddiqui only to have a Muslim terrorist attack a synagogue over her. The problem here isn’t islamophobia: it’s anti-Semitism.
The Coalition for Jewish Values, representing thousands of Orthodox Jewish rabbis, correctly responded to the latest CAIR smear campaign by calling it “both pro-terror and anti-Semitic”.
The CAIR report mentions the term “Jew” or “Jewish” fifteen times, but fails to reference either Al Qaeda or ISIS. It dangerously insinuates that the only reason anyone is upset about Islamic terrorism is because there’s a Jewish conspiracy to smear Muslims as terrorists.
It’s not hard to imagine how future anti-Semitic terrorists like Faisal Akram will react to that.
The main targets here are Jewish communal charities and pro-Israel groups like CAMERA, which challenges anti-Israel media bias, and EMET, which advocates in support of Israel.
CAIR's case against CAMERA is that in 2012, it "published a report called The Islamic Society of North America: Active, Influential and Rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. The report accuses multiple American Muslim organizations and individuals to be (sic) front groups for terrorism."
The Islamist group does not bother trying to actually disprove the material or even linking to the report. That way readers don’t know that the report has damning information about CAIR.
The report CAIR denounces noted that, “Ghassan Elashi, a founder of the Texas chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), another Brotherhood derivative, received a 65 year sentence” in a Hamas financing case, and that, “Judge Jorge Solis ruled that “the government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA, NAIT, with the Holy Land Foundation, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.”
This isn’t Islamophobia, these are cold hard facts. But you can see why CAIR would be worried.
The CAIR smear report further complains that the head of EMET Sarah “Stern alleged that Muslim student groups want to destroy America from within.” The actual source describes Sarah Stern speaking about “Muslim Student Association groups”. The MSA, a specific network with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than the general “student groups” that CAIR implies, has been linked to anti-Semitic invective on college campuses and support for Islamic terrorism.
MSA and CAIR also have close connections. Once again, CAIR defines Islamophobia as criticism of its network. That becomes absurdly obvious when CAIR denounces the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and its Muslim leader Zuhdi Jasser as islamophobes.
CAIR declares, with a straight face, that an organization with “Islamic” in its name is really “an anti-Muslim lobby group founded by Zhudi (sic) Jasser”. In typical fashion, CAIR misspells Zuhdi Jasser’s name, while accusing a Muslim of being an Islamophobe. CAIR seems to have learned nothing from the Southern Poverty Law Center which was forced to pay out $3.4 million to Maajid Nawaz and apologize to him for smearing the Muslim as an anti-Muslim extremist.
But this is one of many misspellings, absurdities, and errors that fill the botched smear of a report which is remarkable only for its hopeless sloppiness and elementary ignorance.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a longstanding critic and target of CAIR since the original Fear Inc. smear campaign, comes under attack yet again. But CAIR’s report also makes it clear that its research is so terrible that it would be thrown out by an elementary school teacher.
CAIR claims that we engage in "antiMuslim lobbying" (sic) and "many anti-Muslim and xenophobic projects including, Jihad Watch, ProntPage MAgazine (sic), TruthRevolt. com, Israel Security Project, Discoverthenetworks.com, Students for Academic Freedom, and Individual Rights Foundation." TruthRevolt hasn’t existed since 2018. CAIR’s report is 4 years out of date. The Israel Security Project also isn’t a current entity and it takes work to misspell FrontPage.
After smearing the Freedom Center, CAIR attacks Gatestone Institute, falsely accusing it of spreading “anti-Muslim narratives and hysteria.” In fact, Gatestone’s ranks include multiple Muslim writers, among them, Zudhi Jasser. CAIR’s only example of its Islamophobia is that it “took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times that called on Muslims to codnemn (sic) worldwide violence, thereby implying that Islam was the cause of global violence.”
CAIR neglects to mention that this was actually an ad by Muslims, including Nawaz and Jasser, Tarek Fatah, the founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, and multiple others, that quoted the Koran and urged Muslims to oppose ISIS.
That CAIR slanders an ad by Muslims opposing ISIS as Islamophobic says everything about its bad faith, its dishonesty, and its extremism. And that of the reporters who quote its reports.
CAIR is counting on media outlets to repeat its lies, rewrite its executive summary without delving into its report, and noting the multiple errors and misspellings, or following up on its actual sources, or to avoid mentioning any of this if they actually do their due diligence.
Above all else, CAIR doesn’t want the media to connect the dots between the latest anti-Semitic attack in Texas and this report accusing Jews of being behind an “Islamophobia network.”
This has always been the thrust of CAIR’s Islamophobia reports, but it’s never been this blatant.
CAIR is trying to delegitimize mainstream pro-Israel groups as Islamophobic for advocating for the Jewish State and for being willing to report on its ugly ties to hate and terror. But if reporters start questioning CAIR now, they would also have to reevaluate the past and present smears of the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Gatestone, the American Freedom Law Center, and other counterjihadist groups.
Like bad banks and worse narratives, CAIR has become too big to fail, because of all the politicians and reporters who have added to its credibility over the years.
CAIR’s latest Islamophobia smear report shows why it’s so often accused of anti-Semitism.
And why no one in the media will hold the hate group accountable.
Jesus Christ as Palestinian Terrorist
How Islam’s appropriation of Biblical figures is used against Jews and Christians.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Not only has Islam transformed Jesus Christ into a Muslim, and a “Palestinian” one at that; Palestinians are apparently trying to transform him into a “heroic martyr”—a term often translated by those on the receiving end of such heroism as a “terrorist.”
As a January 14, 2022 article by PMW explains:
The PA uses many euphemisms and terms to refer to terrorists, and they are applying two of them to Jesus. The first is Fida’i, literally “self-sacrificing fighter.” For example, terrorist Ashraf Na’alwa, who brought a rifle to work, tied up a young mother of a 15-month-old, and then murdered her and another coworker, was called by Fatah: “The heroic Fida’i.” Fatah official Rawhi Fattouh applied this status to Jesus: “Jesus the first Palestinian Fida’i.”
The second term is Shahid – Islamic “Martyr” – the word the PA uses for every terrorist killed during his/her attack, including suicide bombers. Senior Fatah leader Tawfiq Tirawi applied both terms to Jesus: “The first Fida’i and the first Martyr, the messiah Jesus.”
It must, of course, be remembered that for Palestinians and Muslims in general, those who sacrifice their lives for the cause of Allah—and Allah is very much interested in things like land and territorial disputes—are the apple of that deity’s eye, deserving of the highest paradisiacal rewards. As the Muslim prophet, Muhammad, explained in an oft cited and canonical hadith, “the martyr”—the shahid— “is special to Allah”:
He is forgiven from the first drop of blood [he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise. . . . Fixed atop his head will be a crown of honor, a ruby that is greater than the world and all it contains. And he will copulate with seventy-two Houris [celestial sexual women—“big-bosomed” and “wide-eyed” says the Koran (56:22, 78:33)—created by Allah for the express purpose of sexually gratifying his favorites in perpetuity ].
In this context, Jesus Christ, whom Muslims have appropriated and transformed into “Isa the prophet,” is a great martyr—not because he was crucified for the sins of mankind (Islam teaches someone else was crucified in Christ’s place at the last minute), but because he gives his life to fight infidels and uphold sharia.
To understand the true nature of Islam’s Jesus, consider what some of the most canonical hadiths say about him (translations of the following are from Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period by James E. Lindsay and Suleiman Mourad)
In one, Jesus approvingly quotes Muhammad saying that whoever makes him, Muhammad, Christ’s equal—and thereby contradicts the oldest Christian Creed (1 Cor. 15: 3-7)—will go to heaven: “Whoever testifies that there is no god but God, alone with no partner, and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger, and that Jesus is His servant and messenger … Allah will admit him to paradise for saying that.”
In another hadith, a woman says to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast that suckled you.” To this, a shocked Jesus replies: “No, but blessed is he who reads the Qur’an and follows what is in it!”
But it is only when he returns in Islam’s version of the “end times” that the Muslim Jesus truly shines. According to Islamic teaching, he will return to “break the crosses, slaughter the pigs, end the jizya tax on non-Muslims, making warfare against the People of the Book (e.g. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, etc.) and others licit.” In the midst of the final showdown between the forces of Allah and the forces of Antichrist (al-Dajjal), Jesus will first appear “praying behind” an Islamic leader. Then, “after Jesus finishes his prayer, he will take his lance, go toward the Antichrist and kill him. Then Jesus will die and the Muslims will wash him and bury him.”
In such a manner is he a “martyr”—no different, for many Muslims, than his supposed Palestinian kinsmen who blow themselves up in the service of Islam.
Here, then, is yet another stark reminder that Islam’s appropriation and subsequent mutilation of biblical figures is not a source of “commonalities” and “bridges” between Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other, as the “ecumenists” insist. Rather, it is Islam’s way of manipulating the figures of Judaism and Christianity for its own agenda and precisely against Jews and Christians.
Florida Teen Converts to Islam, Murders 13-Year-Old Boy
The questions the authorities and establishment media won't ask.
When Corey Johnson was 17, he murdered a 13-year-old boy, Jovanni Sierra Brand, and stabbed two other people because they “idolized celebrities and disrespected his Muslim faith.” Johnson is now 21. On Thursday, he got a life sentence for the murder, but no one seems to be pondering the larger implications of the case.
The UK’s Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Palm Beach County Judge Cheryl Caracuzzo sentenced Johnson to life in prison and said on Thursday she did not believe rehabilitation was likely for Johnson after he remained emotionless during the heartfelt testimony of Jovanni’s mother.”
When he was in court Thursday, Johnson did make an attempt to show remorse: “I wish I could take it back, I wish I could do something to make this right. I’d like to apologize not because it will change anything, but because I’m really truly sorry.” Johnson also, according to the Daily Mail, said that he “regretted following the Islamic extremist group ISIS, and that he hoped to help people to compensate for the crimes he had committed.”
The most important aspect of this story, however, apart from the lives lost and ruined, is the fact that Johnson had only recently converted to Islam when he killed Brand and had already come to the attention of law enforcement before he committed murder. “At the time of his arrest for the killing of Jovanni in 2018,” the Daily Mail reported, “Johnson already had federal charges pending against him for threatening a Catholic school in England.”
His case was so serious that FBI agents met with administrators at his high school; Johnson “had reached out to ISIS online saying that he wished to join the murderous terrorist group.” In October 2016, he sent threats to McAuley Catholic High School in Doncaster, England (there is no indication of why he chose that school). “Authorities said the threats were so serious that up to 100 students withdrew from the school for fear of an attack.” One of the messages Johnson sent to the school said: “We have our sights set on you, and by Allah we will kill every infidel student at this school inshallah) #McAuleySchoolMassacre.”
So he reached out to ISIS, wanted to join the terrorist group, and sent threats of a jihad massacre to a school. Yet over a year later he was still running around loose and unsupervised to the extent that he was able to buy a knife, even though he was underage, and use it on three people, killing one. Corey Johnson was never placed on a “watch list.” Nothing was done at all.
Local10.com reported at the time of the attack that “in his statement, Johnson advised he stabbed the victims because of his Muslim faith,” and that “just before the attack, Johnson was reading the Quran from his phone ‘to give him courage to carry out his intentions.’”
So now Jovanni Sierra Brand is dead, and there is no bringing him back, but surely authorities have learned from the blunders that led to his being killed and have taken steps to make sure that nothing like Johnson’s jihad attack happens again, right? Of course not. In the years immediately following 9/11, counterterror agents were taught that one sign of a potential jihad killer was a sudden turn to devout observance of Islam. Devout Muslims weren’t all jihadis, but all jihadis, especially those who were converts to Islam, were devout. During the Obama administration, however, all that was removed from counterterror training: it was “Islamophobic” and “singled Muslims out,” as if some jihad terrorists were Methodists, yet Methodism wasn’t being studied.
Years after that, Corey Johnson showed all the signs of being a dangerous jihadi. Nothing was done because to have acted upon those signs would have been “Islamophobic.” After the murder, Brand’s family was reportedly planning to sue the Publix supermarket chain for selling Johnson the knife he used as a murder weapon. They should instead have sued law enforcement for not watching Johnson more closely and the establishment media for relentlessly demonizing anyone who ever suggested that selling Johnson his Qur’an may have been just as dangerous as selling him the knife.
How many people even know that this incident happened at all? The murder of Jovanni Sierra Brand should have been the occasion for a national discussion about the phenomenon of converts to Islam becoming violent, which keeps happening, and what should be done about it. Has Johnson’s mosque been investigated? Who converted him to Islam? Has the person who converted Johnson converted others? No one is answering or even asking such questions. They don’t fit the narrative.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Blaming Israel, Not Muslims, for Christian Woes
When true culprits go unnamed.
The following article is reprinted from JNS. Written by Chaim Silberstein and Hillel Fendel, it quotes and uses statistics provided by Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Crime Wave Nobody Sees: Yet Another Muslim Rape Gang in the UK
The British political and media elites continue to ignore why this keeps happening.
If you thought that the Muslim rape gangs that plagued Britain for years while authorities did nothing for fear of being called “racists” or “Islamophobes” were a thing of the past, think again. A gang of six Muslims is in court now over charges that the forced eight underage girls into sexual activity multiple times between 2013 and 2017. There is no indication that this will be the last Muslim rape gang in shattered, staggering, dhimmi Britain, either. Yet still no one in Britain dares speak of the root causes of this appallingly recurring phenomenon.
The details are about as revolting as you might expect. The MailOnline reported Tuesday that the men “sexually exploited and abused vulnerable young girls after luring them over Facebook with the promise of drink and drugs.” They “committed the offences against eight girls under the age of 16 in the Redditch area of Worcestershire.”
Abdul Hussain, 21, Usmaan Asghar, 22, Arslan Tazarab, 25, Ethashan Tazarab, 21, Usman Ali, 28 and Numan Mohammed, 23, “are charged with a total of 24 sex offences going back almost ten years - including sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.”
Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said: “This case is about eight girls in their early to middle teens and from 2013 to 2017 they were sexually abused by these defendants. Some were crudely groped simply because they were in reach. Some were lonely and wanted attention. Others had made poor lifestyle choices which made them vulnerable. This included drinking, taking drugs, and being sexually available - they were easily taken advantage of. One was faced with demands for oral sex, she gave up resisting. When she did resist and saying no, she was grabbed and forced to comply.”
Why does this keep happening? The answer to that question is quite clear, but no one wants to see it. In France, a Muslim quoted Qur’an while raping his victim. A survivor of a Muslim rape gang in the UK has said that her rapists would quote the Qur’an to her, and believed their actions justified by Islam. Thus it came as no surprise when Muslim migrants in France raped a girl and videoed the rape while praising Allah and invoking the Qur’an. In India, a Muslim gave a Qur’an and a prayer rug to the woman he was holding captive and repeatedly raping. And the victim of an Islamic State jihadi rapist recalled: “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God…He said that raping me is his prayer to God.”
In India, a Muslim kidnapped and raped a 14-year-old Hindu girl, and forced her to read the Qur’an and Islamic prayers. In Pakistan, another Christian woman recounted that her rapist was also religious: “He threw me on the bed and started to rape me. He demanded I marry him and convert to Islam. I refused. I am not willing to deny Jesus and he said that if I would not agree he would kill me.” Rapists demanded that another girl’s family turn her over to them, claiming that she had recited the Islamic profession of faith during the rape and thus could not live among infidels.
The Qur’an teaches that Infidel women can be lawfully taken for sexual use (cf. its allowance for a man to take “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.” (33:59) The implication there is that if women do not cover themselves adequately with their outer garments, they may be abused, and that such abuse would be justified.
However, anyone who points all this out will be excoriated as a “racist” and an “Islamophobe,” and accordingly ignored. This has been going for years, and there is no sign that it’s going to stop anytime soon.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Fact: The 2016 killing of a gorilla in Cincinnati received six times more media coverage than the beheading by ISIS of 21 Coptic Egyptian Christians who refused to recant their faith. This is just one example of the woeful paucity of reporting on rampant Muslim persecution of Christians around the world. Others abound.
In Nigeria, no fewer than 32,000 Christians were butchered to death by the country’s main jihadists over the course of the decade that just ended. Another more than 3,000 Christians were murdered there during the first seven months of this year, and three months ago, Muslims attacked a Christian community, murdering 49 Christians and kidnapping another 27.
The situation in other Muslim countries is better, but that’s little comfort. Raymond Ibrahim, author of a 10-year-old monthly Gatestone Institute series entitled Muslim Persecution of Christians, says that “the phenomenon of Muslim persecution of Christians is real: it’s unwavering, constant and systemic, and it conforms to sharia-approved patterns—meaning its root source is Islam.”
Ibrahim emphasizes that in addition to the “pure genocide” of Christians in Nigeria, this same jihadist spirit is well entrenched or increasing in other African nations, such as Somalia, Mauritania, Kenya, Mozambique and many more. In Christian-majority Uganda, it is common to see Muslims attacking or killing family members for converting to Christianity.
In Pakistan, Ibrahim writes, “blatant and systemic discrimination against Christians is downright disgusting. Not a week seems to go by without a young, underage Christian girl being abducted, raped and then forced to convert and marry her abductor—with the police and courts siding with the abductors and rapists.”
In Egypt, numerous churches have been bombed by Muslims over the years, killing many worshipers, while others have been banned outright, and kidnappings and forced marriages of Christian women and girls to their Muslim abductors have reached record levels.
Palestinian Authority Christians
What about in the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas? A 2019 report by Edy Cohen of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies cited three horrifying incidents that received very little attention, because they are “not connected to Israel.” These stories “encapsulate the persecution of Palestinian Christians,” in the words of an HonestReporting.com report.
One of them occurred on April 25, 2019, when Muslims stormed a village near Ramallah in response to a Christian resident who complained to police that the son of a Fatah leader had attacked her family. Rather than protecting the innocent civilian, police ignored the armed Fatah-affiliated rioters as they lobbed petrol bombs at homes and fired live rounds into the air.
The men even demanded that the Christians pay a jizya, a yearly tax historically levied, by authority of the Quran, on permanent non-Muslim subjects (dhimmi) of Islamic states.
In the two other incidents in Cohen’s report, vandals broke into, desecrated and stole equipment from churches in Bethlehem and Ramallah. In 2013 in Gaza, the Christian Holy Family School was set on fire, while the five Christian schools in the district were closed by Hamas government order.
“The only thing that interests the P.A. is that events of this kind not be leaked to the media,” Cohen wrote, because Fatah exerts heavy pressure on Christians not to report the attacks, so as not to damage the P.A.’s image.
"[Many] Christians in the PA … fear—with good reason—that Muslim aggression against them will only escalate. Such fears are all the stronger in light of the thunderous silence of the Western (and Israeli) media in the face of the Christian minority’s ongoing disappearance from the P.A. and Islamic lands in general—in striking contrast to the growth, prosperity and increasing integration of the Christian community in Israel proper.”
Church leaders blame Israel
With all this, a recent declaration by church leaders in Jerusalem puzzlingly lays all blame for Christian woes in the Holy Land at the feet of Jewish and Israeli elements. They warned that Christians have become targets of “frequent and supported attacks by radical fringe groups”—Jewish ones, that is. Nowhere do they mention attacks, both physical and otherwise, initiated against Christians by Muslims. The religious leaders warned of a “systematic [Jewish] attempt to drive the Christian community out of Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land.”
Several days later, two leading Christian clerics, one in Britain—no less than the head of the Church of England, Justin Welby—and one in Jerusalem, wrote an article supporting the claims and clearly suggesting that Israel is at fault for the decline in the Christian population in the Holy Land. This, even though the Christian population in Hamas-run Gaza has plummeted by 80 percent (!) over the past 15 years, to around 1,000.
The article states: “The growth of settler communities and travel restrictions brought about by the West Bank separation wall have deepened the isolation of Christian villages and curtailed economic and social possibilities.” Again, these vague and undocumented accusations totally obfuscate the true picture of ongoing Palestinian-Arab persecution of Christians. The article does not even mention the P.A. or Muslims.
Regarding the insinuations that Israel is responsible for a drop in its Christian population, the facts tell a different story. Though the percentage of Christians in Israel has dropped drastically over the decades, largely because of the massive Jewish immigration to the Jewish state, in absolute numbers the Christian population in Israel proper has actually grown, and Israel is the only Middle East country in which this is the case.
It is notable that the Christian charity organization “Open Doors” attributes to “Islamic oppression” the steep decline of Christian numbers in the P.A.-controlled areas. The organization claims that “Islamic extremist militants” have been causing Christians to fear violent attacks.
Keep in mind that Christian numbers are dwindling in Muslim lands around the world. In 2019, Christians comprised 5 percent of Middle Eastern populations, compared with 20 percent a century ago.
Despite all, it might be of some consolation to know that even the Welby article notes that “Christians in Israel enjoy democratic and religious freedoms that are a beacon in the region.”
Israel officially recognizes no fewer than 10 Christian denominations that regulate personal status issues, such as marriage and divorce: Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic—to which most Israeli Christians belong—as well as Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Maronite, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Chaldean Catholic and (Anglican) Episcopal. Israel is the only country in the region where freedom of Christian worship is not only permitted, but also protected.
In light of the Welby accusations, it behooves honest and freedom-loving citizens, especially in the Christian world, to protest yet another blatant anti-Semitic attempt to delegitimize Israel. These transparently false attacks serve only to delegitimize their own credibility. Shame.
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