America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Pope Francis Under Fire from Black Christians for Allowing Gay Blessings - SHOULDN'T BLACK 'CHRISTIANS' BE MORE CONCERNED WITH MASS GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS BY BLACK MUSLIMS IN NIGERIA???
BOTTOM LINE, BLACKS HATE EVERYONE! WHITES, GAYS, ASIANS, JEWS AND THEN THEY GO OFF AND SHOOT EACH OTHER IN BLACK CHICAGO! DOES ANYONE HAVE THIS WEEKEND'S BLACK ON BLACK SHOOTINGS NUMBERS???
Pope Francis Under Fire from Black Christians for Allowing Gay Blessings
ROME — Pope Francis has met with stiff opposition from black Christian leaders after approving the blessing of gay couples.
“We, your black Pentecostal brothers in the United States, standing in solidarity with our Catholic brothers in Africa and the diaspora,” begins an open letter to Pope Francis, are compelled to “condemn your decision to bless homosexual unions.”
The letter is signed by the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, founder and director of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies and a minister for the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ.
Speaking for American black Pentecostal Christians, Rev. Rivers writes that “it is with alarm and anguish that we received the document Fiducia Supplicans,” the recent text from the Vatican’s doctrinal office permitting the blessing of gay couples.
The authorization of the blessing of “couples whose sinful conduct is central to their relationship is easily interpreted in ways that contradict the biblical principle of the complementarity of male and female,” Rivers states.
“The decision is already almost universally being interpreted as approving the blessing of sexual sin; indeed, it invites the inference that it was meant to be interpreted thus,” he adds.
By authorizing “the blessing of two men precisely as partners (i.e., as a “couple”) in a same-sex relationship, there is a recognition of the validity of the partnership — a partnership that is, on the ‘couple’s’ own self-understanding, sexual,” Rivers notes.
Rev. Rivers goes on to note that this is the interpretation given by the pope’s fellow Jesuit, Father James Martin, “a high profile priest of the Catholic Church who ministers to what it pleases him to call the ‘LBGTQ community.’”
Father Martin “welcomes Fiducia Supplicans as a development of Catholic teaching in the direction of honoring same-sex sexual partnerships,” he observes, and “interprets and understands the teaching of the document exactly as we do.”
The difference is that Father Martin “approves same-sex sexual partnerships and desires that the Church of Jesus Christ recognize and honor them,” whereas we, “in the name of the Holy Bible and our Lord Jesus Christ, most emphatically disapprove of homosexual conduct and relationships that are centered on such conduct.”
In his opposition to Fiducia Supplicans, Rev. Rivers joins a number of African prelates who have also expressed their consternation over the Vatican text.
The Catholic bishops of Angola and São Tomé in Central Africa, for example, said that blessings for homosexual couples “would create enormous scandal and confusion among the faithful, so we have determined that it should not be carried out in Angola and São Tomé.”
Similarly, the Catholic Bishops of Burundi said that “God hates sin, but loves the sinner,” and declared: “No priest can bless public sinners who make no gesture of repentance to renounce their sins.” The text goes on to assert that refraining from blessing same-sex couples “does not mean excluding them from the Church or abandoning them, since they are still her children.”
More strikingly still, the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon noted that according to Catholic teaching acts of homosexuality are “intrinsically disordered and contrary to the natural law.”
The “gesture of blessing a ‘homosexual couple’ would be tantamount to encouraging a choice and a practice of life that cannot be recognised as being objectively ordered to the revealed designs of God,” they state.
“Consequently, we formally forbid all blessings of ‘homosexual couples’ in the Church of Cameroon,” they add.
For their part, the Catholic bishops of the Democratic Republic of the Congo stated that “we say NO to any form of blessing of same-sex couples,” while urging priests to refrain from blessing same-sex couples as this could “lead to confusion.”
Same-sex unions contradict the created order, the bishops declared, adding that Sacred Scripture condemns them as “grave depravations and abominations.”
The Catholic bishops of Ghana noted that the Vatican declaration had “caused a lot of consternation among many people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike,” adding that for those in the state of sin, “prayers are meant to lead them to conversion” and not to “legitimize their way of life.”
“In conclusion, we wish to reiterate that priests cannot bless same-sex unions or marriages,” they stated.
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — At least 140 people were killed by gunmen who attacked remote villages over two days in north-central Nigeria’s Plateau state, survivors and officials said Tuesday in the latest of such mass killings this year blamed on the West African nation’s farmer-herder crisis.
The assailants targeted 17 communities during the “senseless and unprovoked” attacks on Saturday and Sunday, during which most houses in the areas were burned down, Plateau Gov. Caleb Mutfwang said Tuesday in a broadcast on the local Channels Television.
“As I am talking to you, in Mangu local government alone, we buried 15 people. As of this morning, in Bokkos, we are counting not less than 100 corpses. I am yet to take stock of (the deaths in) Barkin Ladi,” Gov. Mutfwan said. “It has been a very terrifying Christmas for us here in Plateau.”
Amnesty International Nigeria’s office told The Associated Press that it has so far confirmed 140 deaths in the Christian-dominated Bokkos and Barkin-Ladi local government areas of Plateau based on data compiled by its workers on the ground and from local officials, though locals feared a higher death toll with some people unaccounted for.
Some of the locals said that it took more than 12 hours before security agencies responded to their call for help, a claim the AP couldn’t independently verify, but which echoes past concerns about slow interventions in Nigeria‘s deadly security crisis, which has killed hundreds this year, including in Plateau.
“I called security but they never came. The ambush started 6 in the evening but security reached our place by 7 in the morning,” said Sunday Dawum, a youth leader in Bokkos. At least 27 people were killed in his village, Mbom Mbaru, including his brother, he said.
No group took responsibility for the attacks though the blame fell on herders from the Fulani tribe, who have been accused of carrying out such mass killings across the northwest and central regions where the decadeslong conflict over access to land and water has further worsened the sectarian division between Christians and Muslims in Africa’s most populous nation.
The Nigerian army said it has begun “clearance operations” in search of the suspects, with the help of other security agencies, although arrests are rare in such attacks.
“We will not rest until we bring all those culpable for these dastardly acts to book,” said Abdullsalam Abubakar, who commands the army’s special intervention operation in Plateau and neighboring states.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who was elected this year after promising to help tackle the security challenges that his predecessor failed to address, has yet to make any public comments about the latest attacks days after they happened.
Tinubu’s government and others in the past haven’t taken any “tangible action” to protect lives and ensure justice for victims in the conflict-hit northern region, Amnesty International Nigeria director Isa Sanusi told the AP.
“Sometimes they claim to make arrests but there is no proof they have done so … The brazen failure of the authorities to protect the people of Nigeria is gradually becoming the ‘norm,’” he said.
Nigeria: Fulani Muslim Christmas Killing Spree Leaves 170 Christians Dead
ROME — Fulani Muslims carried out coordinated attacks on Christians over Christmas in 26 villages of Nigeria’s Middle Belt, leaving some 170 dead.
The Islamist attacks all took place in Plateau State in central Nigeria, beginning on December 23 and lasting through December 27.
“The unprovoked attacks were well-coordinated and deliberate, specifically targeting Christian communities,” said Father Andrew Dewan, communications director for the Pankshin Diocese, where the killings took place. “I can confirm that the victims are 100 percent Christian.”
In his December 28 interview with the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Father Dewan noted that “not one Fulani was affected and no Fulani houses were burned.”
On the other hand, Christians were “summarily shot and killed,” the priest said, and “houses and corn that had been harvested were set ablaze; churches and clinics were also set on fire.”
“For those who believe that this conflict is not religious, this latest attack proves that it is clearly a religious conflict,” Dewan said.
“The fact that it took place at Christmas, and the deliberate targeting of Christians in a mixed community where Muslims are not attacked, clearly bears all the hallmarks of a religious conflict,” he added.
“The attacks were deliberate and also symbolic because of the timing,” the priest noted. “There had been rumors in the mainstream and social media that Fulanis were going to attack, and that the aim was to inflict pain and maximum destruction on the Christians.”
While 167 deaths have already been confirmed, the total death toll “is definitely going to rise because there are still many people in hospitals, with varying degrees of injuries and wounds,” he stated.
People flee following an attack by gunmen in Bokkos, north central Nigeria, Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023. (AP Photo)
Regina Lynch, ACN International executive president, compared the slaughtered Christians to the innocent children massacred by King Herod, who sought the death of the child Jesus 2000 years ago.
“Our Christian brothers and sisters killed in Nigeria, and in other countries of the world, are the ‘Holy Innocents’ of the 21st century,” she said, in reference to the feast day celebrated by Christians on December 28.
“The bloodshed as followers of Jesus will, we are sure, be the seed of new Christians,” she added.
In her statement, Lynch also called on the Nigerian government to “finally confront this problem and provide safety to its citizens.”
The governor of Plateau, Nigeria, denounced on Tuesday, in response to the massacre of at least 160 people during the Christmas weekend, the continuous, long-term occupation of at least 64 Christian communities in his state by presumed Islamist terrorists.
“When people are dislocated from their villages and they have to run for shelter … if they stay away from those communities for a sustained period of time, the terrorists would come in,” Governor Celeb Mutfwang told the Nigerian outlet Channels TV on Tuesday, according to the newspaper Daily Trust. “As I am talking to you today (Tuesday), in Riyom Local Government, in Barikin Ladi Local Government, schools have been occupied by these terrorists for almost a number of years now.”
“We have not less than 64 communities that have been displaced and their lands have been taken over by these terrorists,” he said.
“I can tell you these schools that are being occupied, it didn’t just start now, some of those schools have been occupied in the last three, four, five years,” he continued. “Children therefore in those schools have not been able to go to school, they have to relocate, we even have primary health care centres abandoned because of these terrorists which means that our health care system is put in jeopardy.”
Mutfwang lamented the perception that the Nigerian federal government in Abuja, which has been Muslim-led since 2015, has no interest in protecting Christians.
A woman cries while trying to console a woman who lost her husband during the funeral service for people killed during clashes between cattle herders and farmers, on January 11, 2018, in Ibrahim Babangida Square in the Benue state capital Makurdi. Violence between the mainly Muslim Fulani herdsmen and Christian farmers has claimed thousands of lives across Nigeria’s central states over the past few decades. (PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images)
“Under the last regime [of former President Muhammadu Buhari] the feeling among people in Plateau State, particularly the victims of these terrorist attacks, is that it looks as if the terrorists were given official government backing to be able to terrorise them,” the governor denounced, “because little or nothing was done to repel these attacks.”
Current President Bola Tinubu was Buhari’s hand-chosen successor, taking office in early 2023 following a contentious election in which three candidates declared victory simultaneously.
Nigerian news outlets reported on Tuesday that local officials in Plateau had confirmed the deaths of at least 160 people and over 300 injured in a series of attacks beginning on Saturday by assailants described as “gunmen” or “bandits,” targeting at least 18 villages and destroying residences and community sites. According to the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard, initial reports of a targeted assault began to surface on Saturday and “gunfire could still be heard on late Monday afternoon throughout the state.”
The Plateau massacres were joined by local reporting documenting similar attacks on churches or Christian populations generally in at least two other states, Ebonyi and Adamawa.
Local government official Monday Kassah told reporters on Monday that authorities believe the Plateau slaughters were “well coordinated,” despite media descriptions of the assailants as “bandits.” In reality, the groups terrorizing Christians in the Middle Belt are more often than not organized jihadist terror gangs belonging to the Fulani ethnic community.
“People were even warned not to say they are Fulani herdsmen who have been causing these atrocities such that when you open the general media they are talking about bandits – bandits or they say ‘unknown gunmen’ or things like that,” Father Remigius Ihyula, a university chaplain and emergency relief coordinator in the Diocese of Makurdi, told Breitbart News in July, “so you read about bandits. It’s rubbish: they are Fulani men going about with cattle and with guns and killing people and the government won’t do anything about it.”
Ihyula serves a diocese in Benue, where jihadist attacks have displaced an estimated 2 million Christians as of 2022. Benue is a majority-Christian state.
The Nigerian newspaper Vanguard identified the terrorists as Fulani.
“Recall that from December 23 to Christmas Day, coordinated attacks were carried out by persons who survivors say are Fulani herders,” Vanguardreported. “Apart from the killing of over 100 persons in the communities affected, property worth millions of naira has also been destroyed and hundreds of people have been displaced.”
“Our village has been completely razed down by Fulani; my uncle, known by everyone as Baba Pray, was murdered in the church, and the village has been deserted,” a victim identified as Israel James told Vanguard.
The Fulani are a majority Muslim ethnic group, one of the largest in Nigeria. Fulani terrorist militias have waged jihad against the Christian communities of Nigeria’s Middle Belt – the states that form the border between the majority Muslim north and majority Christian south – for decades, committing acts of genocide and occupying Christian land left by the dead and displaced.
The Nigerian government has historically done little to protect Christian communities from Fulani terrorists; federal officials initially announced the death toll of the Christmas attacks in Plateau to be just 16 people.
“Fundamentalist Muslims are in control of all the security organs of State including the police, the military, and intel agencies,” Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern (ICC), explained to Breitbart News in December. “Fundamentalist Muslim actors embedded in the security apparatus of the Nigerian State in Nigeria have aided and abetted the Muslim Fulani’s slow-moving anti-Christian genocide and/or jihad for two decades now.”
In Plateau, Vanguardlamented in 2018 that jihadist mass killings had become “a regular occurrence” with no interruption by the federal government, illustrating “how worthless life has become in Nigeria.” In March 2022, the Coalition for Minority Rights, an advocacy group, documented 625 “bandit attacks” on Plateau civilians since 2001, likely an undercount given the remote locations of many communities. Daily Trustdocumented another 27 attacks in Plateau between January and June 2023.
Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Gen. Christopher Musa appeared to absolve his government of responsibility to protect citizens from terrorism, demanding during a Christmas speech on Monday that Nigerian civilians “take ownership of security challenges in the country.”
“It (Christmas message) entails that all Nigerians should take ownership of the challenges we’re facing as a country. The security challenges, especially, are not armed forces or police challenges or any individual parastatal,” he outrageously declared, according to the Daily Trust.
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas jihad massacres in Israel, Muslim clerics in mosques all over the United States have prayed for the victory of the Muslims and the destruction of Israel. But in one mosque in Bayonne, New Jersey, a cleric went even farther than that.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported that during a recent Friday sermon that was streamed on YouTube from the Bayonne Mosque and Community Center, an unnamed Muslim preacher emphasized the importance of Hamas’ jihad against Israel for the entire “Muslim nation,” and prayed an incendiary prayer that included the request that Allah would give the wealth, possessions and even the children of non-Muslims to the Muslims as booty, that is, the spoils of war.
The cleric preached: “Today, we are making the same supplication [as the Prophet did] for the group of people remaining in Gaza today, who are protecting and guarding the remaining dignity of the Muslim nation, and Allah be praised, before what happened on October 7, I met a brother from Gaza, and I said that to him.” This is puzzling language for anyone who believes the standard narrative that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is over land, and can be solved by Israel ending its “occupation” and dismantling its settlements.” If that were the case, what would it have to do with the “dignity” of Muslims around the world
The New Jersey cleric is assuming what analysts of the conflict in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the capitals of Europe steadfastly ignore: that as “The Palestinian Delusion” explains, the real cause of the conflict is the Islamic idea that any land that was governed by Islamic law at any point belongs by right to the Muslims forever. This idea is based on a Qur’anic command, “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191). The claim that the Israelis drove the Muslim Arabs out of what is today the modern state of Israel is a historical myth: they were told to leave by the Arab League in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The Arab League was promising to destroy Israel in a matter of weeks, after which they could return. Nevertheless, they now claim to have been driven out, making the destruction of Israel a matter of fulfilling the immutable will of Allah.
With these kinds of ideas in mind, the preacher continued: “And I said to him: ‘You are protecting the remaining dignity and honor, and some kind of respect for this nation.’ So I always make that supplication. When you think about it that way, that they are protecting the remaining dignity, the remaining sort of… kind of like… to show some power of this nation – it is our brothers and sisters in Gaza. We ask Allah to protect them. We ask Allah to grant them victory.” The nature of the victory he envisioned, however, should make every non-Muslim’s blood run cold.
“Oh Allah,” the cleric began his prayer, “punish the infidels, come upon them from wherever they do not expect. Oh Allah, instill fear into their hearts. Oh Allah, destroy their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. Oh Allah, let us inherit their homes, wealth, and land where we have not set foot yet. Oh Allah, turn them, their wealth, their children, and their lives into booty for Islam and the Muslims. Oh Allah, turn them into booty for Islam and the Muslims.” Yes, he really said that. Read it again.
And so in the waning days of 2023, we have the spectacle of a religious leader in New Jersey praying that the wealth and even the children of non-Muslims become the property of the Muslims as “booty.” The name of the eighth chapter of the Qur’an in Arabic is al-Anfal, which is variously translated as “booty” and the “spoils of war.” The Qur’an envisions the Muslims waging war on non-Muslims and capturing their belongings and even their women, and using them for their own purposes. Several passages of the Qur’an (4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, and 70:30) make it clear that Muslim warriors are permitted to seize infidel women and use them sexually.
That kind of exploitation is all too common, but it’s jarring to see a Muslim cleric in the United States wish for it so openly. Nor is there any indication that anyone at the Bayonne Mosque and Community Center uttered any words of dissent. The multiculturalism and diversity agenda was not sold to Americans with this sort of thing in mind. But this is what has been its result.
The crime show “Fatal Family Feuds” on Saturday night aired a peculiarly unsatisfying episode. While it offered the usual lurid details of a heinous crime, it was unusually reticent about what caused that crime, and said nothing about why similar crimes are so common in some areas of the world. That’s because the root causes of the crime in question were inextricably bound up with the left’s favorite religion, Islam. While TikTokers are converting left and right, this was a particularly inopportune time to cast aspersions upon the religion of Osama bin Laden and Hamas.
The crime in question took place on Oct. 20, 2009, in Peoria, Arizona, when a man named Faleh Almaleki got into his Jeep Cherokee and ran down his twenty-year-old daughter Noor, as well as her boyfriend’s mother, Amal Khalaf.
Noor died not long thereafter, and Faleh Almaleki was charged with first-degree murder, aggravated assault, and two counts of leaving the scene of a serious accident. Faleh Almaleki did not, however, face the death penalty. His attorney, public defender Billy Little, requested that the County Attorney’s Office not seek the death penalty because Almaleki was a Muslim. “An open process,” he explained, “provides some level of assurance that there is no appearance that a Christian is seeking to execute a Muslim for racial, political, religious or cultural beliefs.”
And indeed, the County Attorney’s Office ultimately decided not to seek the death penalty, although it denied that Little’s request had anything to do with the decision. County Attorney Office spokesman Mike Scerbo insisted: “Cultural considerations played no part in the decision not to seek the death penalty.” Notably, he didn’t make the same denial about the other factors Little enumerated: racial, political, or religious beliefs.
Cultural considerations, meanwhile, played a decisive role in Faleh Almaleki’s actions, as he himself avowed. “By his own admission,” said county prosecutor Stephanie Low, “this was an intentional act, and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family. This was an attempt at an honor killing.” Felah Almaleki was found not guilty on a charge of premeditated murder, but was convicted of second degree murder and is in prison now.
“Fatal Family Feuds” has no problem discussing the murder of Noor Almaleki as the result of a clash of cultures. “Amal was raising her children in the Western culture,” said Maricopa County prosecutor Laura Reckhart. “Felah and Sahem,” Noor’s mother, “tried to raise their family in the traditional Iraqi culture.” Noor wanted to live an American life, and her father strenuously objected to that. Her friend Heather Goodin recalled: “Noor definitely wanted to be independent. She couldn’t wait to move out.”
In keeping with its overarching theme, however, the show depicts the murder of Noor Almaleki as the fallout from a feud between her own family and that of her boyfriend. Journalist Abigail Pesta is quoted as saying that Noor’s desire for independence “was the root of an incredible family feud that just escalated into something unthinkable.” Goodin, however, states the case more accurately: “Her dad wanted her to live the way he wanted her to live. They just wanted her to stop being so Americanized.” Oxygen.com explains: “Felah was adamant that Noor not have any relationship of any type with other males, Reckhart said.” Amal Khalaf’s son Marwan “told investigators that Felah saw Noor’s actions as ‘bringing dishonor to the family.’”
Where did he get this idea? Why did it move him to murder his own daughter? About this, the show says nothing, because it’s all about Islam. “Fatal Family Feuds” gives viewers no hint of the fact that the “traditional Iraqi culture” in which Noor Almaleki was raised is deeply rooted in Islam.
In the Qur’an, a mysterious figure, known as Khidr in Islamic tradition, kills a boy in an apparently random and gratuitous attack. He then explains: “And as for the boy, his parents were believers, and we feared that he would overburden them by transgression and disbelief. So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them one better than him in purity and nearer to mercy.” (18:80-81) The import is clear: killing a child for impiety is not unjustified.
And according to Islamic law, “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2).
Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honor ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”
“Fatal Family Feuds” wouldn’t dare tell viewers such things. And so they’re helping ensure that such murders will happen again in our vibrantly diverse new America.
In 2019, Yousra Fazili addressed a congressional hearing to complain about the arrest of her cousin by Indian authorities. The woman who now serves as Chief of Staff for the Pentagon Comptroller claimed that her cousin was the innocent victim of oppressive Indian authorities.
According to the daughter of Kashmiri Muslim immigrants, her cousin Mubeen Shah had been arrested under India’s Public Safety Act even though he was “not a politician or a dissident, he isn’t a freedom fighter, or even a kid in the street throwing stones. He’s just a businessman. His life’s work has focused on bringing economic opportunity to Kashmir.”
In reality, as the Hindu Post noted, Shah had “lionized Kashmiri jihadists, agreed with a description of convicted terrorists as ‘inspirations for the youth,’ and promised that ‘we all are ready to spill our blood’” to keep the region Muslim. On Facebook, Shah appeared to have posted a picture describing Mohammad Afzal Guru, an Islamic terrorist tied to the ‘The Army of Muhammad’, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, as the “Pride of Kashmir”. Guru had been executed for his role in a December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.
Fortunately for Shah, he had his Fazili family deeply embedded in America’s political establishment. Yousra’s sister, Sameera Fazili had been brought in as a senior policy advisor to Obama’s National Economic Council. And when Biden took office, she became the deputy assistant to the president and the deputy director of the National Economic Council.
When Shah was arrested, Sameera and Yousra Fazili “dialed friends in the State Department” and the State Department demanded information about him from the Indian government. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a radical leftist sympathetic to Islamic terrorists, agitated for his release.
Soon Shah was out and Yousra Fazili was in, joining her sister in a high-level position in the Biden administration. Where Sameera had worked on the economic side of things, Yousra became the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs three years after agitating on behalf of a terrorist supporter.
It was incredible even by the standards of an administration that seemed to have abandoned even the most elementary forms of background checks and security screenings.
But before long, Yousra Fazili appeared to be providing materials on Islam to federal contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and then to the Defense Intelligence Agency. She made the leap to the Department of Defense, first serving as the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs and now serves as the Chief of Staff to the Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Pentagon.
But before that she was working for the state sponsor of Hamas.
Rep. Jack Bergman, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Austin, expressing his concern “about the security clearances and responsibilities entrusted to Yousra Fazili, the Chief of Staff for the Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Pentagon” due to her past work as “‘strategic’ advisor to Meshal Al-Thani, the Qatari Ambassador to the U.S., for over three years.”
Qatar is a close ally of Iran, hosts Hamas leaders and has ties to Islamic terrorist groups all over the world. Reports link the Qatari royal family to Al Qaeda. The Islamic terror state harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who escaped when Qatari officials allegedly tipped him off and he left on a “a specially equipped government executive jet, complete with blacked-out windows.”
Furthermore, as Rep. Bergman points out, Qatar was engaged in covert hostilities against the United States. Fazili worked for the “Qatari Ambassador at the time that her client was targeting prominent Americans in an effort to silence Qatar’s critics, including the then-Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, and the former acting head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Morell.”
How does someone go from working for an ally of Iran and Hamas to a prominent position at the Pentagon in a matter of years?
The failure by the Biden administration and the Pentagon to perform even the most elementary vetting of Yousra Fazili is a massive national security failure. Yousra Fazili had testified on behalf of her cousin, while lying about his support for Islamic terrorists, and had publicly supported Islamic terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. The efforts by the Fazili sisters to rally support for him in the State Department should have made that public knowledge in D.C.
Yousra’s sister Sameera, despite her role in the Obama and the Biden administrations, also had a troubling past with extremist groups.
When Biden brought her into the National Economic Council, it was revealed that Sameera was a member of Stand With Kashmir (SWK) “which was founded by her cousin, Hafsa Kanjwal” and which had “praised and defended the actions of a number of violent Islamists” including Asiya Andrabi who had “met with Al Qaeda officials and told them that if ‘you belong to Sheikh Osama’s Al-Qaeda then you are very welcome because he was a legitimate leader of Jihad.’”
Her cousin, Hafsa Kanjwal appeared at a pro-Hamas rally and at foreign conference led by a former Palestinian Islamic Jihad board member, and called for Muslims operating in America to “put a check on American exceptionalism.” Finally she’s an instructor at The People’s Forum: an organization funded by a Chinese Communist based operation whose offices face a “red banner that reads, in Chinese, ‘Always Follow the Party’ and a “plate depicting Xi.”
How exactly does someone a few degrees of separation from Al Qaeda go on to serve as Chief of Staff for the Pentagon Comptroller?
The exposure of Yousra Fazili comes only a few weeks after it was revealed that Ariane Tabatabai, the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, had worked with an operation set up by the Iranian government and coordinated her congressional testimony with them. Despite published emails between Tabatabai and Iran, the Pentagon allowed her to keep her position and her security clearance.
“We have confirmed that Ms. Tabatabai’s employment and clearance processes were carried out in accordance with all appropriate laws and policies,” a Department of Defense official replied to Sen. Joni Ernst.
Two Muslim Pentagon Chiefs of Staff were shown to have worked with enemy nations. And the Defense Department and the Biden administration has chosen to keep them on the job.
When associates and employees of enemy governments that are tied to Islamic terrorism can waltz in and take high-ranking positions in the Department of Defense, national security no longer means anything. The Pentagon has been infiltrated by political hires who would have been disqualified from even being considered twenty years ago on the basis of their associations, their views and their links to enemy governments.
Now Iran and Qatar can plant their employees and catspaws at key positions throughout the Pentagon. And we wonder why our intelligence and our operations are so badly compromised.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Reader Interactions
Direct Action Campaign Calls Out Pro-Hamas Campus Hate Groups
[Robert Spencer's new book, The Critical Qur'an, will be out May 3. Preorder now: HERE.]
If I were queen, I would reward every reader who completed Robert Spencer's new book, The Critical Qur'an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. The Critical Qur'an is an essential book that every thinking person would benefit from reading. About one in four humans is a Muslim. Given child marriage, polygyny, and women's low status, Muslims have high fertility rates and the percentage of the world's population that is Muslim is predicted to increase till Islam is the world's majority religion in 2075. While it is true that the Qur'an is often not read or understand by most Muslims, Muslims do revere the Qur'an. Muslims may have little idea what the book contains, but they are ready to kill over it. When, in 2005, Newsweek circulated false rumors that Americans were flushing Qur'ans down toilets – which is of course impossible – at least seventeen people were killed in ensuing violence and "a council of more than 300 mullahs …threatened to declare holy war."
In the past, reading the Qur'an was difficult. Some translations used pseudo-King-James English, for example archaic forms like "thee, thou, thine," in an attempt to make the Qur'an sound Biblical, and, therefore, holy. Some translations attempt to paper over the Qur'an's lack of clarity by adding parenthetical fixes. For example, Qur'an 2:1 begins "Alif Lam Meem." No one knows what this means. One translation tries to "help" the reader with a parenthetical explanation: "Alif-Lam-Mim. [These letters are one of the miracles of the Quran and none but Allah (Alone) knows their meanings]." The reader is left to wonder how the incoherent equals the miraculous. Translators try to draw a smiley face over darker Qur'anic passages. "Jihad," which clearly means actual warfare to claim territory, booty, corpses, and slaves for Allah, is translated as "struggle." Spencer's new translation avoids these pitfalls, and, on the sentence level, it is easy to read.
Many make assumptions about the Qur'an based on false comparisons to the Bible. The works are different in important ways. The King James Bible contains 783,137 words in 66 books. These books were composed over the course of hundreds of years in three different languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Christians and Jews agree that their scriptures were not actually written by God himself, but by roughly forty different human authors. The genres of Biblical books include hymns,letters, proverbs, prophecy, erotica, history, allegory, andreportage. Jews and Christians have long engaged in exegesis of their sacred texts – that is, Jews and Christians debate what Bible passages mean and how they should be applied. Jews and Christians respect hard copies of their scriptures, but they do not worship these hard copies, nor do most attribute supernatural attributes to them. To do so would be idolatry.
The Qur'an contains c. 77,430 words, making it less than one tenth the length of the Bible. Islam teaches that the Qur'an was never written by anyone. It is uncreated. Like God himself, the Qur'an has always existed and will always exist. There are numerous rules for handling the Qur'an. Kufar – Non-Muslims – should never touch the Qur'an in Arabic, but may touch "interpretations" in other languages. One must say "interpretation" because the Qur'an exists only in Arabic, the language of Allah. Muslims must perform ablutions before reading the Qur'an. The Qur'an must be stored in a specially designated place, and never be put on the floor or taken into a bathroom.
To say that the Qur'an was created, as opposed to eternally existing, is a death penalty offense. Even Western scholars have hesitated to explore the Qur'an's origins. For example, scholar Christoph Luxenberg must hide behind a pseudonym to protect his life. The Qur'an "leaves no room for dispute"; see also Qur'an 33:36. Indeed, the Qur'an suggests that even a second of doubt will lead to an eternity in hell (e.g. 49:15) . Thus, rather than debating or discussing the meaning of the Qur'an, Islam places emphasis on memorization. A Muslim once said to Robert Spencer that he had memorized the entire Qur'an, and one day he was going to find out what it says. The hafiz, or Qur'an memorizer, did not speak Arabic, and had no idea of the meaning of the sounds he had memorized.
Mohammed Hijab, an Islamic apologist, demonstrated Muslim beliefs about the magic powers of the Qur'an in a November 10, 2021, YouTube discussion with Dr. Jordan Peterson. Hijab began to recite in Arabic, in the voice prescribed for reading the Qur'an. That prescribed voice is a singsong, nasal drone, with drawn out vowels. Peterson asked what Hijab's point was. Why recite Arabic to me, a non-Arabic speaker? Hijab said, "We believe that the Qur'an has divine qualities itself. We believe it is a physical cure." Just exposing Peterson to the sounds of the Qur'an might cause Peterson to convert to Islam. Ibn Kathir, an important exegete, claimed that recitation of Sura 2 causes Satan to fart. It can be argued that Islam treats the Qur'an as if it were a "divine, conscious agent."
Muslim history claims that Islam was founded by an orphaned, illiterate, seventh-century Meccan caravan driver named Muhammad who was visited by the angel Jibril (from the Biblical Gabriel) who ordered him to recite. Muhammad's followers wrote down his recitations and compiled them into the Qur'an. Textual criticism suggests that the Qur'an is a compilation of heavily edited, pre-existing material. Recent scholarship theorizes that, during the Arab Conquest, conquerors decided that their new, Arab empire, no less than the Christian Byzantine and Zoroastrian Persian empires, required a state religion. These Arab conquerors took bits and pieces of Jewish,Christian, Zoroastrian and Pagan material and compiled them into the Qur'an.
Christianity's early centuries were rocked by Christological debates. These debates asked, "What was the nature of Jesus?"Some said Jesus was human; others said he was divine; still others argued that Jesus was some combination of human and divine. Jesus' proposed divinity troubled many. They understood the divinity of Jesus as an assault on Judaism's monotheism. Some were offended by Jesus's divinity for a different reason. If Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, then God urinated and defecated. These bodily functions were seen as beneath a divinity.
Islam's emphasis on Jesus being merely a man, not a divinity, may testify to the influence of nontrinitarian Christianity on the formulation of Islam. The shahada is the Islamic confession of faith. "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Merely stating the shahada makes one a Muslim, yet it may be a buried statement of nontrinitarian Christian creeds. "There is not God but Allah" is a rejection of Jesus' divinity and the trinity. According to new theories, "Muhammad is the messenger of God" may be a reference to Jesus. "Muhammad" is translated as "the praised one" and "the messenger of God" is a denial of Jesus' divinity. "The praised one" was but a messenger, not God himself. The nontrinitarian Christians' discomfort at the thought of God urinating or defecating is reflected in al-Wahidi's commentary on the Qur'an. "Our Lord does not eat or drink nor has He any need to relieve Himself" but Jesus "was fed like any other child, and then he ate and drank and relieved himself … Then how could he be the son of Allah?"
The Old Testament recounts the history of the creation of the world and God's choosing the Jewish people as his own, and leading them out of slavery in Egypt. The New Testament offers Jesus' biography, a short history of the early church, and the letters of early Christians. No clear history of what is conventionally thought of as the early days of Islam is to be found in the Qur'an itself. There's no caravan driver, no Mecca, no new religious revelation, and the word "Muhammad" is mentioned only four times, and it is not clear that the word refers to a person or if it means, only, "praised one." Many argue that early references to Muhammad may in fact be references to Jesus.
Muslims express exaggerated praise for the Qur'an. For example, Ibn Kathir said, "The Arabic language is the most eloquent, plain, deep and expressive of the meanings that might arise in one's mind. Therefore, the most honorable Book, was revealed in the most honorable language, to the most honorable Prophet and Messenger, delivered by the most honorable angel, in the most honorable land on earth, and its revelation started during the most honorable month of the year, Ramadan. Therefore, the Qur'an is perfect in every respect."
In fact, though, the Qur'an is possibly the world's worst-written influential book. Muslims will of course object to this assessment. Their first objection: only an Islamophobe would call the Qur'an badly written. My reply: No, I'm happy to acknowledge the excellence of many Islamic cultural products, for example, the Taj Mahal, calligraphy, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's singing, and Muslim Arab folktales. Second objection: The Qur'an is the product of an oral culture. This objection lacks merit. Most people in the world have been illiterate. The Bible is the product of a population where most people could not read or write. Acknowledged masterpieces of world literature, including the Iliad, the Bhagavad Gita, and Zen Koans all emerged from predominantly oral cultures. One Thousand and One Nights, an Arabic-language collection of previously oral folklore, has entranced audiences around the world. Third objection: translations cannot capture the fine qualities of the Arabic Qur'an. I have never read The Iliad in Greek, the Vedas in Sanskrit, Psalm 23 in Hebrew, or Arabic folktales in Arabic, nor do I need to. The excellence and power of these works transcends translation. For those questioning the quality of Robert Spencer's new Qur'an translation, visit this site. You can find any Qur'an verse as translated by six different translators. Study that website all you might; you will not find a translation that can remedy the Qur'an's many problems.
What's wrong with the Qur'an? The Qur'an uses pronouns like "he," "we," and "they," but the Qur'an offers few clues as to whom is meant by these pronouns. The Qur'an hops from topic to topic, not just paragraph by paragraph, but within the same sentence, for example in 4:29: "Do not squander your wealth among yourselves in vanity, except in a trade by mutual consent, and do not kill yourselves." After telling men that they are superior to women and that men should beat their wives (4:34), the Qur'an offers, in 4:36, a sentence fragment, that is a sentence with a subject but no verb. "Kindness to parents." Other translators rescue this fragment by adding the missing verb, e.g.,"Show kindness to parents" or "Do good to parents." Spencer makes so such rescue effort. Qur'an 6:143 is a similar sentence fragment. It reads, "Eight pairs two of the sheep and two of the goats." There is no verb, and, therefore, no sense. Another sentence fragment, this one also missing a verb: "Those who chose unbelievers for their friends instead of believers." Another fragment, 74:30, reads "Above it are nineteen." Above what are nineteen what, exactly? There are more than a few verses that leave the reader scratching her head, e.g., "Would one of you love to eat the flesh of his dead brother?" 49:12, "We used to wade with waders" 74:45, and "Color from Allah, and who is better than Allah at coloring?" 2:138.
Scholar Gerd Puin estimates that twenty percent of the Qur'an is unclear to anyone. This lack of clarity is thanks in part to words, often of non-Arabic derivation, like "jibt," "sijill," "ghislin,""abb," "as-sakhkhah," "sijjin," "illiyyin," "tasnim," "saqar," and many others, whose meanings are uncertain. The full text of a scholarly, 1938 book entitled "The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an" can be found here. The Qur'an acknowledges its own lack of clarity in 3:7, in which Allah states that he alone knows the meaning of some verses. Which verses? He never says. Readers can only guess which verses they are understanding correctly and which verses whose meaning is beyond their grasp.
The books of the Bible are arranged more or less chronologically, with some thematic arrangement, and events in those books are also arranged chronologically. For example in Luke's Gospel, Jesus is first born, then he preaches and heals, then he is crucified, then he rises from the dead. The Qur'an is not arranged chronologically. With the exception of the very short first chapter, the Qur'an's chapters are arranged from longest to shortest. This bizarre choice confounds the reader seeking coherence. Given that chapter length appears entirely arbitrary – the chapters contain more or less the same material, repeated endlessly – why some chapters are long and others are short escapes the reader. Chapter titles do not relate to the theme of the chapter. One of the Qur'an's most notorious verses, "Kill them wherever you find them" is found in the chapter entitled "Women." In any case, the phrase is repeated three times in the Qur'an. Sura 9, perhaps the most bloodthirsty chapter, is titled "Repentance."
That a Qur'an chapter is titled "Women" should not mislead the reader. Women are afterthoughts; they exists as the possessions of men. They appear as child brides, as sex slaves, as Heavenly whores, and as war captives. In verse 43 of "Women," females are identified as a source of pollution. Men should not pray if they have been sick, if they have urinated or defecated, or if they have had contact with a woman. After such contamination, men must cleanse themselves, possibly by rubbing their face and hands with dirt (a practice called Tayammum). Women are inferior to me n (2:282, 2:228, 4:34, 4:11). The Qur'an instructs men on how to handle divorce from pre-pubescent wives with whom they have had sexual intercourse. Females are a "field"that men should enter however they wish. There are dozens of named male characters, but only one named female character: Mary. Compare the Qur'an's lack of named female characters with the indelible females of the Bible, women who changed the course of Jewish and Christian history: Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, Rahab, Deborah, Judith, Ruth, Esther, Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene, the sisters Martha and Mary, Junia, Priscilla, Anna the Prophetess, etc.
The Qur'an chapter entitled "Mary" is, as is the case with other chapter titles, not closely related to Mary. In a commentary on this chapter, Mary is given voice to mourn that she is not "an owned slave woman" – she is unfortunate because she is not some man's property. The Qur'an confuses Mary, mother of Jesus, with Miriam, sister of Moses, who lived over a thousand years before Jesus' mother. The Qur'an tells Mary, "Do not grieve. Your lord has placed a stream beneath you." It's not clear how this stream placement should cheer Mary up.
The Qur'an is repetitious. Repetition is frequently encountered in oral lore. See the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant.
"Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po'ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth
Born was the grub that digs and heaps up the earth, came forth…"
This poetic repetition echoes creation itself; the multiplicity of lines with parallel construction reflects the abundance of creatures the chant catalogues, and also their place in an orderly universe. Repetition makes this important lore easy to remember and its has a hypnotic effect on the listener.
The Qur'an makes no such use of repetition. Rather, as Spencer's footnotes show, the Qur'an includes repetitive, garbledf ragments – not coherent retellings – of Jewish and Christian scriptural and folkloric material, and Zoroastrian and Pagan elements. The Qur'an offers repeated, fragmented mentions of the Exodus story from the Bible, and extra-biblical material like a folktale of Jesus making clay birds fly. A sixth-century Christian legend, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, tells of seven men who retreated to a cave during Roman persecution. The men awoke two hundred years later and were surprised to find that Christianity was now the empire's official religion. The Qur'an's telling of this tale, found in 18:9-26, is so thoroughly garbled that a reader with no previous knowledge of the Christian source would not have any idea what these verses allude to. Don Richardson, author of "Secrets of the Koran,"estimates that if all repetitions were removed, the Qur'an would be forty percent of its current size.
God's rebuke of David, recounted in 2 Samuel 12, is one of the most moving, terrifying passages in the Bible. I can hardly think of it without crying. Through the prophet Nathan, God rebukes David for murdering Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, a woman David lusted after. The Qur'an takes this terrifically moving, cinematic passage and flubs it so badly in the retelling that it is a literary crime (38:21-25).
Qur'an 4:157 states that Jesus did not die on the cross. Muslims believe that Allah placed either a dummy or a Jesus lookalike on the cross. Spencer's footnotes identify this belief as an appropriation from a third century Gnostic text, "Second Treatise of the Great Seth." Gnostics were nontrinitarian Christians. As Spencer writes, they held an "abhorrence of the material world and the flesh, which led to their denying altogether the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation." Jesus was too supernatural to suffer death on the cross.
Ex-Muslim Ridvan Aydemir insists that Qur'an 4:157 deals a devastating blow to the Qur'an's integrity. Aydemir argues that, yes, the Gnostics had a reason, that was consistent with their own belief system, to tell a story in which Jesus did not die on the cross. Those compiling the Qur'an borrowed that passage from a Gnostic document, but could not borrow the logic behind the passage. The Jesus of the Qur'an is not, as was the Gnostic Jesus, a supernatural creature, too rarefied to be crucified. The Jesus of the Qur'an is simply a human being, comparable to any other mortal. Aydemir quotes Qur'an passages that mention other prophets being killed; similarly, Jesus, a mere prophet, could have been killed. The Qur'an's logic, that prophets are killed and that Jesus is merely a prophet, as human as anyone else, does not support Jesus' not being killed on the cross. Aydemir points out that the Qur'an borrows other belief system's narratives without borrowing the logic informing those narratives.
The Qur'an has a limited number of themes that it hits upon with a thudding monotony. Those themes include the following. Allah is all powerful. Allah saves and damns arbitrarily. Allah created some people just to send them to hell fire. Muslims must not pray for these damned souls or feel sad for them. Compare this to the Bible, which records that God wants all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 18:23) If Muslims don't please Allah, Allah can kill them all and create a new group of people who will please him. In a footnote, Spencer points out that Allah says that he "loves" only those who fight for him in jihad, and he does not love unbelievers. Allah has a very thin skin and grouses about humans who "mock" and "ridicule" his "warners." Allah promises sadistic tortures to scoffers. He will burn off their skins and replace those skins with new skins so that they can be burned off again "so that they may taste the torment" 4:56 He will turn white faces black. Kufar in Hell will consume boiling water, pus, and a fruit made of devils' heads. This fruit will boil in their bellies. "As for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads, By which what is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted, And for them are hooked rods of iron" (22:19-21). The Qur'an's narrator says that those who disagree with him should hang themselves (22:15). Allah promises an afterlife of pleasant gardens, fruits, and silk clothing to Muslim men.Heavenly beings with large, firm – "not sagging" – breasts will service Muslim men.
The Qur'an is ferociously hostile to non-Muslims. The Qur'an directs special fury at Christians and Jews. The very first chapter condemns Jews as having angered God, and Christians as having gone astray. Muslims who pray the full allotment of daily prayers repeat this condemnation of Christians and Jews seventeen times daily. Muslims are as superior to Christians and Jews as human beings are to animals (3:110, 98:6). Jews are so irredeemable that Allah turned them into apes and pigs. In 2:54, Moses tells sinning Jews to kill themselves; Ibn Kathir, a commentator, reports that 70,000 Jews lost their lives as a result of Moses' suicide command.
The Qur'an repeatedly emphasizes that one must not worship anyone but Allah. This point is hammered home in various ways. Don't assign a partner to Allah. Don't pray to anyone but Allah. Don't imply that Allah needs "helpers." All of these phrasings have one target: Christians, and their belief in the Trinity. The Qur'an misunderstands the Trinity, suggesting that Christians worship God the Father, Jesus, and Mary. This is not the Trinity. The Qur'an also drastically misunderstands the purpose of the incarnation. To say that Allah has a son is a "monstrous thing" (19:89) because to do so is to imply that Allah has some weakness or need and his son is a "helper." The incarnation of God as a human being was not so that Allah would have a "helper." Rather, the purpose of the incarnation is expressed succinctly in John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
No other world scripture is so obsessed with condemnation of two other belief systems, in this case, Judaism and Christianity. Without its condemnations of Jews and Christians, the Qur'an would not be a book-length work, but a pamphlet, .
Jihad is another main theme of the Qur'an. The Qur'an makes abundantly clear that jihad is warfare for the sake of expanding Islam's worldly power, not an interior struggle to, say, remain on a diet, a message promoted by a 2013 CAIR public relationscampaign. The Qur'an says, multiple times, that believers should strike the necks of kufar, kill them wherever the Muslims find them, etc. As if these passages were not grisly enough, a Qur'an commentator offers, "Strike them on their foreheads to tear them apart and over the necks to cut them off, and cut off their limbs, hands and feet." Other commentators are even more bloodthirsty, demanding that Muslims smite the very toes of the kufar.
Muslims should suspect even their wives and their children of being traitors to Allah (64:14). "Among your wives and your children there are enemies for you, therefore beware of them. Your wealth and your children are only a temptation, while with Allah is an immense reward." Other verses warn the believer against ties with parents and children who are not Muslims (9:23-24). Muslims are warned not to take Jews or Christians as friends (3:118, 5:51). Astute readers will, of course, recognize in these warnings the rules set down by cults, who demand that members sever ties with those not members of the cult.
The Qur'an is as remarkable for what it lacks as for what it contains. The Qur'an does not offer that new, world-changing expression of a timeless, soul-deep truth. There is nothing in the Qur'an that compares to the Jewish Ten Commandments, or tzelem Elohim, a loving God who creates humanity in his own image; the Christian Sermon on the Mount; the Hindu Kalidasa's Exhortation of the Dawn; Buddhism's Four Noble Truths; or the Greek Protagoras' observation that "Man is the measure of all things."
In a 2006 lecture at Regensburg University, Pope Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos. "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Mohammad himself is said to have said something similar. In hadiths, Mohammad announced that he was "superior" to other prophets because he alone was made "victorious with terror" and the earth's treasures were made lawful to him; in other words, he could violate the most primordial taboos. He could kill, he could steal, and he could rape other men's wives.
Spencer's new "Critical Qur'an" doesn't offer only an accurate and accessible translation. It offers commentary by canonical Islamic experts, including Ibn Kathir, a fourteenth century exegete, and Syed Abul Ala Maududi, a twentieth-century author. Thus, the reader knows not just what the Qur'an says, but how influential Muslims understand it. Spencer's footnotes also draw the reader's attention to variations in the Qur'an. These variations are of a utmost importance, as it is a tenet of Islam that the Qur'an is a perfect, eternal, unchanging and unchanged document that exists in Heaven. Variations in the text give the lie to this tenet.
Spencer's footnotes relate Qur'anic passages to taqiyya; to Islam's intellectual stasis; to suicide bombing; to Muslims'resistance to Israel's right to exist; to why it is morally acceptable for Muslim men to harass non-Muslim women; to why it takes four Muslim male witnesses to prove a rape case; and to treatment of dhimmis, that is, non-Muslims who live in Muslim states, and who must be economically fleeced and publicly humiliated. As Spencer points out, Qur'an verses, for example 10:94, record that the scriptures of Jews and Christians in the seventh century were authentically divine products. And yet Muslims today insist that Jews and Christians "corrupted"their scriptures. The Qur'an contradicts current Muslim belief about Jewish and Christian scripture. David Wood describes this as the "Islamic Dilemma."
Spencer's footnotes describe Islamic traditions designed to justify changes in the Qur'an, a book that Islam teaches is perfect, unchanging, and unchangeable. Again, one current theory is that the Qur'an was not written as one document, the product of one man, Muhammad. Rather, many scholars now think that the Qur'an was pieced together from pre-existing materials, materials that were then heavily edited to meet the needs of Arab conquerors. These changes occurred over time. Some early Muslims might have witnessed, and questioned, such changes. Traditions were invented to explain away the changes. For example, Muhammad's child bride Aisha is made to say that sheep ate some Qur'an verses that previously existed but then went missing.
Spencer points out the Qur'an's contradictions. Iblis is identified as a jinn, but, contrarily, as an angel. Sometimes one can intercede for another; sometimes one cannot. In one Qur'anic retelling of Exodus, Pharaoh survives. In another, he drowns. The number of days it took Allah to create the world varies, as does the substance from which Allah created mankind. Muslims insist that the Qur'an contains prescient scientific knowledge. In fact, though, as Spencer points out in a footnote, the Qur'an presents a pre-scientific picture of the earth and the solar system 13:2. For example, the heavens rest on "invisible supports" and the sun sets in a muddy pool, 18:86.
Spencer's footnotes also help bridge the gap between the English translation and the Arabic original, pointing out words of non-Arabic origin and places in the text where the rhyme scheme and other formal features break down, indicating interpolations into a pre-existing source document that was then patched into the Qur'an.
An Islamic website offers attractive quotes from the Qur'an. One of the quotes says "speak to people kindly," but this appears in the midst of a text that calls non-believers apes, pigs, and the vilest of created beings, describes graphic tortures for them and tells Muslims never to befriend them, not even if they are parents or children. "Remember me; I will remember you," says one quote. This from an Allah who states repeatedly that if Muslims displease him, he will destroy them utterly and take up a better group of people . "Wives are a garment for you," says one quote. Yet this book includes instructions on how to divorce a pre-pubescent child; before dumping her, one must make sure that she has not somehow gotten pregnant. "Allah does not burden a soul more than he can bear," says another quote. This same Allah repeatedly says that he creates people for the specific purpose of sending them to Hell, a Hell he describes with fiendish enthusiasm. "The life of this world is only the enjoyment of deception." And yet Paradise is utterly earthbound. It's all about rivers of booze, delicious food, silk garments, and sex slaves with round, "not sagging" breasts. The only thing that's missing is big-screen color TVs. There is no description of what Heaven will entail for women. "Men are in charge of women" are superior to women, and should beat them, says 4:34. But this website translates that verse as saying that men should protect women.
Compare this to the matrix of Bible quotes. Hosea, a prophet, married Gomer, an adulteress. Even though she cheated on him, Hosea could not quit her. Their story reflects God's love for the Jewish people. When the ancient Hebrews went astray, God could not get over his love for them. In the book of Hosea, God speaks of his frustrated love, "I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer." God's frustrated love for sinning humanity is also expressed in the New Testament which records, Christians believe, the son of God dying a torturous death for his love of humanity. In the extreme of pain, Jesus says, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do."These quotes are deeply embedded in rich narratives that demonstrate the truths the quotes hope to convey. Compare this to the Qur'an that mentions "kindness to parents" just a few words away from the advice to husbands to beat their wives. Both quotes are completely free of any supportive, illustrative narrative.
Please buy and read Robert Spencer's "Critical Qur'an." I emphasize "buy" because his book is a gift to thinking people, and "the workman is worthy of his hire." The most moving sentence in this translation was written by Spencer himself. He dedicates his book thus, "Offered with love to all the people of the world who love the Qur'an." I do not see how anyone could read this book, and all of its footnotes, and conclude that the Qur'an is divinely inspired. Muslims deserve to have access to the research presented so very clearly herein.
Several Suspected Islamists Arrested over Christmas Terror Attack Plot on Cologne Cathedral
Several suspected Islamist terrorists have been arrested in Germany and Austria over alleged planned attacks during the Christmas holiday season including at the Cologne Cathedral, which was searched by police with explosive-sniffing dogs on Saturday evening.
According to a report from Bild, Germany’s largest-circulation newspaper, police have arrested several suspected terrorists said to be from Tajikstan and who allegedly planned to carry out terror attacks in Europe on Christmas or New Year’s Eve. The suspected Islamist terrorists are believed to have connections to the “Islamic State in Khorasan Province” an offshoot of ISIS primarily located in Afghanistan.
One of the chief targets of the seemingly foiled terror attack was the 13th-century Cologne Cathedral, Germany’s most-visited tourist attraction. On Saturday evening, police searched the historic site with bomb-detecting dogs to ensure that no explosives had already been hidden in the cathedral.
23 December 2023, North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne: The still image from a video shows a police sniffer dog on duty at the cathedral. Visitors to religious services at Cologne Cathedral and tourists will have to be prepared for increased security standards over the next few days. Photo: Sascha Thelen/dpa (Photo by Sascha Thelen/picture alliance via Getty Images)
A Cologne Police spokesman said: “Due to a warning of danger for Cologne Cathedral, the Cologne police will take special protective measures from this evening. The police will not comment on details of the available findings due to ongoing investigations by the police state security service.”
Even despite the arrests, security measures will be stepped up over the next week, with all visitors to the cathedral set to be screened before being permitted to enter the building.
Cologne Police Chief Michael Esser said: “Even if the reference refers to New Year’s Eve, we will take everything into account this evening to ensure the safety of cathedral visitors on Christmas Eve. In coordination with the security officer of the cathedral chapter, the cathedral is searched with sniffer dogs after the evening mass and then locked. Tomorrow all visitors will be screened before entering the church.”
In addition to standing as one of Germany’s top historical landmarks, the Cologne Cathedral was also the epicentre of the infamous sex attacks on New Year’s Eve in 2015, which was brought to international attention by reporting from Breitbart London. Over a thousand women in Cologne claimed to have been sexually assaulted, with the majority describing their attackers as appearing to be of North African or foreign descent.
On top of the alleged plot in Cologne, other targets for the suspected Islamist terrorists included locations in Madrid, Spain and Vienna, Austria where several of the arrests on Saturday were made.
“Due to a current threat assessment by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the continued increased terror alert level, there is generally an increased risk in Austria during the Christmas holidays,” a Vienna Police spokesman said.
The arrests come after multiple terror attacks across Europe in the wake of the October 7th Hamas terror attack on Israel, with Islamist jihadis killing multiple people in Belgium and France. Earlier this month, the European Union warned that because of the war between Israel and Hamas, there was a “huge risk” of Islamist terror attacks in Europe during the Christmas holiday season.
Other Tajik members of the “Islamic State in Khorasan Province” terror group were arrested in Germany and the Netherlands over the Summer over an alleged plot to carry out a major terror attack. The seven-member group had reportedly smuggled into Germany after posing as refugees from Ukraine with fake documents.
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Nicaraguans Face a Dark Christmas of Communist Repression as War on Christians Continues
Millions of Nicaraguans will spend Christmas under the growing repression of communist dictator Daniel Ortega, who has arrested and banished members of the Catholic Church, prohibited Catholic festivities, and intimidated Christians into silence.
Nicaraguans are a majority Catholic people. Out of the country’s roughly 6.35 million citizens, 50 percent identify as Roman Catholic and 33.2 percent identify as Evangelical Christian. Another 2.9 percent identify as practitioners of other religions.
Ortega, who himself claims to be Catholic, has maintained a fierce animosity against the Catholic Church throughout the four decades of Sandinista rule in Nicaragua, declaring a “war” against the Vatican in 2022 and openly stating that he has never held any respect for the Church’s bishops.
Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have used the full might of the Sandinista regime they rule to punish the Nicaraguan Catholic Church for its support of pro-democracy dissidents during 2018’s wave of peaceful protests, when thousands of Nicaraguans flocked to the streets calling for the end of four decades of communist rule.
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, lead a rally in Managua, Nicaragua. Nicaragua’s government on August 23, 2023, declared the Jesuit religious order illegal and ordered the confiscation of all its property. (AP Photo/Alfredo Zuniga, File)
The Church’s support of the pro-democracy dissidents led to Ortega branding Catholic bishops “terrorists,” accusing them of conspiring to stage a coup. Ortega also claims that the Church was “covering up [for] a gang of assassins” that, according to him, tried to assassinate him in 2018.
The Ortega regime’s “punishment” of the Catholic Church started as violent assaults against Catholic churches in Nicaragua carried out by Sandinistas on behalf of the ruling regime. It has now morphed into full-blown regime persecution of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church, dramatically escalating in 2022 and 2023.
The Ortega regime has banned the Nicaraguan Catholic Church from celebrating its traditional festivities and processions. Public celebrations of the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the feast of the Immaculate Conception became the latest additions to a growing list of banned celebrations ahead of this year’s Christmas season.
Nicaraguan authorities repeatedly claim that the prohibitions are necessary for “public security” reasons, providing no evidence for how these peaceful religious activities allegedly pose a threat. Such warnings prevent the faithful from freely exercising their religious freedom.
During Lent in 2023, the Ortega regime banned all Holy Week processions nationwide, including the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross) processions that commemorate Jesus Christ’s last day on Earth prior to resurrection.
In 2022, Catholic processions for Saints Michael and Jerome and La Purisima and La Griteria, unique Nicaraguan celebrations that honor the Blessed Mother Mary, were also banned.
People decorate a sculpture of the Virgin Maria de la Concepcion during celebrations marking “La Griteria” at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Managua, on December 7, 2023. (Photo by AFP)
Journalists who “dare” to cover their local Catholic festivities are subject to the Sandinista regime’s retaliation. Such is the case of Nicaraguan reporter Victor Ticay, who police arrested in his hometown of Nandaime for the “crime” of covering La Reseña, a centuries-old local Catholic procession celebrated in Nandaime during Holy Week, and publishing footage of the event on social media.
Ticay was sentenced in August to eight years in prison on “spreading fake news,” “conspiracy to undermine national integrity,” and “treason” charges.
When it comes to repression against members of the Nicaraguan Church, the most significant case is the arrest and sentencing of of the Bishop of Matagalpa, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, an outspoken critic of Ortega who has been held asa political prisoner since August 2022.
Álvarez was arrested in August 2022 alongside seven other members of the Catholic Church at the end of a two-week long police raid on the priest’s house. Days before his arrest, Murillo accused Álvarez of having committed “sins against spirituality.”
Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years in prison for “treason” in February and was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship, rendering him a stateless person — an act that is in clear violation of international law. Álvarez’s lawyer, Yonarqui de los Ángeles Martínez García, was permanently barred from practicing law in May.
As of December 17, Álvarez has spent over 500 days in prison.
A man watches the mass of Monsignor Rolando Alvarez via Facebook in Managua, on August 11, 2022. (OSWALDO RIVAS/AFP via Getty Images)
Last week, 63-year-old Bishop Isidoro del Carmen Mora Ortega (no relation to the dictator) was arrested, becoming the second bishop behind bars in the country.
Bishop Mora’s “crime” was that he had offered prayers for Álvarez alongside members of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference. The Bishop was reportedly intercepted by the Nicaraguan Police when he was on his way to the Santa Cruz parish, where he planned to preside over the Confirmation of 230 parishioners, according to local sources.
In November, several members of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church who have been persecuted recounted their harrowing experiences to Congress. The witnesses detailed how they were arrested, interrogated, and brutalized by the communist regime, which accused them of being part of an “organized crime” syndicate simply for being Catholic.
“We were accused of being members of an organized crime gang and that the leaders were the bishops, and above all they said Rolando [Álvarez]. I was accused of undermining the dignity of the state and of Nicaragua, of spreading false news,” one of the witnesses said.
Álvarez is the first Catholic priest to be arrested following Ortega’s return to power in 2007. Since his arrest and sentence, the priest has only been shown in pictures and footage released by the Ortega regime that show Álvarez looking visibly thin. Álvarez remains imprisoned inLa Modelo, located in the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Managua. La Modelo is infamously known for the torture and beating of prisoners that occurs on a daily basis.
The seven men arrested in the raid on Álvarez’s home — four priests, two seminarians, and a layman — were sentenced to ten years in prison in February on “treason” and “fake news” charges.
In October, Catholic priests Julio Ricardo Norori and Iván Centeno were kidnapped by Nicaraguan police forces dressed in civilian clothing while they were in their respective churches.
Nicaraguan citizens hold a demonstration in front of the Nicaraguan Embassy in Costa Rica to protest against the Nicaraguan government and the detention of Nicaraguan bishop and regime critic Rolando Alvarez, in San Jose, on August 19, 2022. (OSCAR NAVARRETE/AFP via Getty Images)
Other members of the Catholic Church were banished instead of arrested in 2022, including the papal nuncio, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, and 18 nuns from the Missionaries of Charity congregation. Monsignor Silvio Báez fled Nicaragua in 2019 at the request of Pope Francis after several threats made to Báez’s security.
In 2022, the Ortega regime began to forcefully shut down Catholic television and radio stations. As of November 2023, at least 15 Catholic media outlets have been closed down along the dozens of dissident media outlets shutdown or seized by the communist Ortega regime.
The regime froze the Nicaraguan Catholic Church’s bank assets and seized or shut down Catholic-led universities throughout the country. The Jesuit order-run Central American University (UCA) of Managua was completely seized by the regime in August. The John Paul II University and the Autonomous Christian University of Nicaragua (UCAN) were shut down by the regime in March.
Much like the socialist Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Ortega regime persecution includes not just silencing real Catholic voices, but hijacking the faith in the service of socialism.
Ortega and his wife Murillo, after banning the festivities of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, celebrated their own socialist version of the festivity last week, in which Murillo accused the Catholic Church and dissidents of her husband’s communist regime as spreading “terrorist hate.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Christians in Northern India Forgo Christmas Celebrations After ‘Record’ Year of Persecution
The Hindu nationalist government of India presided over the escalation of Christian persecution in the country at a “record pace” in 2023, religious freedom experts told Breitbart News, and faces little to no pressure to protect their Christian populations from the West.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly claimed in public — including on the lawn of the White House in June — that India is not a hotbed of persecution or violence against religious minorities.
“I’m actually really surprised that people say so. And so, people don’t say it. Indeed, India is a democracy,” Modi said while standing next to President Joe Biden during a visit to Washington this year. “We have always proved that democracy can deliver. And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”
In reality, Hindu nationalists organized mob attacks on Christian communities throughout the year, burning down churches and often destroying entire neighborhoods, leaving Christians displaced. The worst of the violence in 2023 occurred in Manipur, northern India, where members of the majority Hindu Meitei tribe went on a rampage against majority Christian Kuki-Zo communities throughout the spring and summer, often filming their atrocities. Modi’s government did not comment on the matter until a video went viral in the rest of the country showing a mob of presumably Meitei men raping Christian women in broad daylight and parading them naked through the streets.
“The police were there with the mob which was attacking our village,” one of the assaulted women revealed in an anonymous interview in July. “The police picked us up from near home and took us a little away from the village and left us on the road with the mob. We were given to them by police.”
At least tens of thousands of people remain displaced in Manipur as of September, according to the United Nations.
As a result, Christmas celebrations will be largely absent in Manipur, local media reported Thursday.
“The violence continues. In this environment, nobody can celebrate Christmas, or any other festival like before,” Manipur local Helamboi Baite told the Indian outlet. “It won’t be the same for us. Maybe, families would have a somber celebration inside their homes, but I don’t think any gathering will take place in the streets.”
Manipur Christians held a mass funeral for the remains of 87 people killed in the mob violence erupting in May on December 19; they had not received the remains of their loved ones before then.
“The youngest tribal victim in the ongoing violence is one-month-old Isaac, while the oldest is 87-year-old Veinem Chongloi,” the Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum (ITLF), a Kuki-Zo organization, said in a statement, according to The Print.
The outburst of anti-Christian violence in Manipur followed a protest by Christians in New Delhi in February in which a crowd of between 15,000 and 20,000 people demanded the Modi government act to protect Christian communities.
“We’ve gathered here peacefully because we want to share the anguish of our fellow citizens who follow the Christian faith in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and so many other places where their basic fundamental rights are being snatched,” said the United Christian Forum, a human rights group participating in the rally.
The national government in New Delhi rarely actively participates in this violence but also does little to stop it.
“The Brahmins that sit atop the cultural landscape of India (Prime Minister Modi and his political party, the BJP) see Christianity as a direct threat to their status and power and are therefore intent on strangling it,” Jeff King, the president of International Christian Concern (ICC) and author of The Last Words of the Martyrs, told Breitbart News. “Modi is a very savvy world-leading politician that will never be seen making anti-Christian comments. His main job is to stay silent in response to attacks on Christians.”
“Violence against Christians this year continued at a record pace,” he explained, “and will eclipse the 600 recorded attacks in 2022. Large-scale riots by radical Hindus in Chhattisgarh and Udar Pradesh displaced thousands of Christians and destroyed hundreds of homes and churches earlier this year, beginning in the late fall of 2022.”
“Because of Modi and his government’s inaction in Manipur, we saw an incredible outbreak of anti-Christian violence,” King continued. “Christians suffered greatly under the brutal attacks and hundreds of churches were targeted. While it’s been difficult to get accurate information from the region because of the government’s lockdown, by summer 200-400 Christian churches, including at least two dozen Meiti churches, and dozens of temples had been destroyed along more than 3,500 houses.”
“Just in the last 12 months, you have massive riots in Chhattisgarh against churches and of course in Manipur in the north, where over 350 churches were destroyed,” David Curry, the president and CEO of Global Christian Relief, told Breitbart News in a recent conversation. “And when you think of it, that’s a lot of churches, that is a lot of people who have been displaced, hundreds of thousands — and the government has done little to nothing about it.”
“They wouldn’t even acknowledge it was happening until a video escaped of that young Christian girl being raped caused such an uproar. So it’s shameful,” he added, urging the U.S. government to pressure “friends” such as India and Nigeria, where jihadist terrorists regularly destroy Christian communities, to address the safety and freedom of Christians at home.
Biden welcomed Modi to Washington for a state dinner, the highest honor for a foreign head of government, in June. The leaders exchanged personal gifts and Modi signed a range of agreements with both Washington and American companies, prominently a deal to jointly manufacture jet engines with General Electric. The Biden administration was careful not to condemn Modi’s handling of mob violence against Christians in his country, instead hailing India as a “vibrant democracy” and worthy partner.
U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi participate in a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on September 24, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Sarahbeth Maney-Pool/Getty Images)
“I think what the American government should do is start with our friends and I put Nigeria and India in that category because these are countries which, by all rights, are democracies,” Curry told Breitbart News. “They’re going to want to have relationships with us and we should use that friendship and all of the hundreds of millions — and ,who knows, even billions of dollars — that we are putting into security and so forth in these countries to create a stronger human rights and religious freedom environment.”
“But India is going the other way despite all that we are doing with them and for them, military contracts, et cetera, business contracts,” he observed. “They — the government, the administration in charge there — is targeting Christians and Muslims, any religious minorities, those that are not Hindus and creating a very difficult environment for them.”
“We need to draw a tough line on religious persecution,” he urged.
King, of ICC, predicted violence against Christians in India would continue unabated without outside pressure.
“Until India’s business interests and Western capital flows are affected, the hate speech and anti-Christian activities urged on by Modi (silently) and the BJP (openly) will continue or keep growing,” he told Breitbart News.
Christians in Nigeria will celebrate Christmas this year facing a relentless onslaught of jihadist terrorism seeking to eliminate them from the country, experts told Breitbart News, with little support from their government.
In the northeast, Nigerian Christians have endured decades of attacks by Boko Haram, the Islamic State-affiliated terrorist organization committed to killing Christians and forcing young girls into sex slavery “marriages” with their fighters. In the central Middle Belt, jihadists belonging to the majority-Muslim Fulani ethnic group regularly conduct raids on Christian communities, burning down entire villages and occupying land historically populated by Christian majorities. The objective in both cases is the genocide of Nigerian Christians and the establishment of a sharia “caliphate” system.
International Christian Concern named Nigeria the world’s top oppressor of Christians in its 2023 report — the world’s most dangerous place to be a Christian — as a result of the “20-year genocide against Christians” there by Boko Haram, the Fulani, and other jihadist elements.
Clergymen carry white coffins containing the bodies of priests allegedly killed by Fulani herdsmen, for burial at Ayati-Ikpayongo in Gwer East district of Benue State, north-central Nigeria on May 22, 2018. (EMMY IBU/AFP via Getty Images)
“You have to distinguish between the tribe and the group of extremists within that category. With that understanding, the Fulani feel as though all of a certain territory belongs to them by right, by history, and you might say they view it as their God-given caliphate,” David Curry, the president and CEO of Global Christian Relief, told Breitbart News, “because they have a theology. This is not just a tribal issue, this is not just a land issue, and it’s not a climate issue, as is sometimes stated … No, this is, they view this as their God-given right.”
The persecution has plagued the country for years with little or no intervention from the government and, unlike in many other parts of the world where Christians face genocidal action, even though they make up a significant percentage of the population. While a slight plurality of Nigerians are Muslim, about 45 percent of the country belongs to some form of Christian church.
It largely occurs in the form of raids of Christian communities, in both north and central Nigeria, by jihadist attackers who kill and abduct as many Christians as possible — then take their homes and settle in their land.
“Last Christmas, essentially, there was a spate of attacks where something like 100 plus people were attacked, unfortunately the numbers are always inexact,” Edward Clancy, the director of outreach for the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, told Breitbart News in a recent interview, naming the Middle Belt state of Benue as a particularly troubling hotspot of genocidal violence.
The Daudu IDP camp in Benue state, Nigeria (Courtesy of the Catholic Diocese of Makurdi Foundation for Justice, Development, & Peace)
“There’s, I believe, like 3 and a half to 4 million people in the state – and like 2 million plus, over 2 million are displaced,” he explained. “So it is not a good place to be on the outskirts. For example, the Diocese of Makurdi, they’ve lost 14 parishes.”
“Now 14 parishes — people in North America we hear about parishes merging, closing, things like that,” he continued. “This is a place in Nigeria where first of all a parish is not just one building, it’s oftentimes two, three, four, even a dozen buildings because it’s such a large area that a parish can represent 10 or 12 places of worship. So the diocese has lost 14 of these parishes and when we say lost, we mean like lost territory, there are Christians being forced out so there are no more residents there.”
“In one four-month span this year, more than 50 separate attacks killed over 500 Christians. Not a week goes by that Christians aren’t brutally kidnapped, tortured, and killed in the Middle Belt,” Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern (ICC), explained to Breitbart News this week. “The adoption of Sharia criminal law in 12 northern states has contributed to the ongoing persecution of Christians in the region.”
These descriptions of Benue are consistent with that given to Breitbart News in July by Father Remigius Ihyula, a university chaplain and emergency relief coordinator in the Diocese of Makurdi.
“These killings have been consistent. We have documented atrocities that have risen to the level of genocide against our people,” Father Ihyula told Breitbart News. “People, women and children, are killed on a daily basis. They are butchered, they have been driven from their homes, some have been living in camps for about ten years. They cannot go back to their homes.”
Father Remigius Ihyula of Benue State, Nigeria (Courtesy of the Catholic Diocese of Makurdi Foundation for Justice, Development, & Peace)
In northeast Nigeria — particularly in Borno state, the birthplace of Boko Haram, Christians face similar routine abductions, mass killings, bombings, and other attacks.
Curry of Global Christian Relief lamented in a recent conversation with Breitbart News that the new Nigerian government offered “a lot of lip service,” but no significant action to protect Christian populations. Having recently returned from northeast Nigeria, Curry said camps of internally displaced Christians — whose homes had been destroyed by jihadists — were largely left with no state protection.
“So the camps that I visited, none of them were protected. They were all vulnerable. They remain vulnerable, and the government seems to be doing little to stop the incursion of Boko Haram,” he explained. “Now, at one point, I was 15 minutes away, I was at a camp that was 15 minutes from a Boko Haram headquarters and the government knows they’re there. They know what they’ve done, and they allow them to remain. It’s outrageous.”
“So in this case, it could be that the regional leaders, unless there is an imminent danger to the general population, are not going to care if these Christians are attacked,” Curry said. “That sounds outrageous except when you see it firsthand, you can’t imagine why they don’t have protection around these camps where Christians have already been traumatized and also why they’re not policing the area.”
“They don’t have any helicopters on site to observe the movements of Boko Haram, who clearly exist 15 minutes from their camp,” he added.
Politicians at the national level often do not need to appeal to Christian voting blocs to stay in power and ignore their concerns entirely.
Nigeria President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu (L) arrives to attend a swearing-in ceremony at Eagle Square venue in the capital, Abuja, Nigeria on May 29, 2023. Former President Muhammadu Buhari (R) was also present at the ceremony. (Photo by Emmanuel Osodi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Former President Muhammadu Buhari, an ethnic Fulani Muslim who previously ruled as a military dictator, claimed in 2015 that Nigeria had “won the war” against Boko Haram and largely refused to acknowledge its existence in his eight years in power. His successor, fellow Muslim Bola Tinubu, broke with the tacit tradition of choosing a Christian vice presidential running mate and has not made any major moves to curtail genocidal activity against Christians in the country since taking office this year.
“The Nigerian government cannot be trusted on this subject,” Curry told Breitbart News. “Either their political alliances or moral framework has not allowed them to really go after these terrorists. … I don’t know whether it’s political alliances or just moral bankruptcy but the government is not protecting these Christians in these regions in the north.”
“Fundamentalist Muslims are in control of all the security organs of State including the police, the military, and intel agencies,” King, of ICC, said. “Fundamentalist Muslim actors embedded in the security apparatus of the Nigerian State in Nigeria have aided and abetted the Muslim Fulani’s slow-moving anti-Christian genocide and/or jihad for two decades now.”
King was nonetheless slightly more positive towards Tinubu, expressing a “glimmer of hope” in his administration.
“The new president has a Christian wife and has appointed several Christian heads of state. The president has also begun implementing increased military efforts against Fulani militants,” he said, “and has disappointed the extreme Islamic north, which has been facing economic challenges since his appointment.”
Clancy, of Aid to the Church in Need, lamented that the lack of improvement, “just based on that alone,” makes for a worse situation for Christians “because this will have a cumulative effect.”
“It’s worse because this will have a cumulative effect of year after year after year of wearing people down, destroying communities, making these little villages on the outskirts of states or not so close to the cities become devoid of any Christian presence,” he explained. “Up in Maiduguri, which is up in the northeast in Borno, which is the birthplace of Boko Haram. Maiduguri is essentially the Christian center of a very Muslim area of the country.”
“And there, there are neighbors, communities in that region. And again, Christians have left and you have this area where it might be a mix of Christians and Muslims, farmers, living near each other in relatively in peace,” he continued, “and now you have these Christian families that can’t even go to their farms because it’s not safe and if they do go to their farms and do any farming, they can’t go to the markets because the markets are not safe.”
“These areas could literally become devoid of Christians,” he warned.
Solomon Acharga, a yam farmer in Benue looks on beside his empty farm storehouse at Northbank, Benue State, Nigeria, on August 12, 2021, due to persecution of Christian farmers by majority Fulani jihadists in the Middle Belt. (KOLA SULAIMON/AFP via Getty Images)
The threats have yet to succeed in eliminating Christianity completely, however, and Nigerians will continue to celebrate in the face of threats, the experts agreed.
“In the areas I was at, there is a strong population, if not the majority, of Christians and they’re going to celebrate Christmas,” Curry said, “but they’re going to do it in the posture of vulnerability because they know at any minute they could be attacked for their faith.”
“And certainly Christmas for many persecuted believers is something that they have to sort of practice and celebrate underground. But in Nigeria, by and large, they will celebrate in their homes, but it won’t necessarily be underground,” he added.
“The amazing thing is that Nigerians in Nigeria will celebrate Christmas with all of this going on,” Clancy concurred, “with the attacks that happened in Pentecost last year and then the attacks that happened earlier this year around Christmas … they still continue.”
“They still continue doing their jobs, filling their vocations, living their Christian lives, and the churches for the most part will be filled and they will be very joyful and they will celebrate,” he noted. “And for us in the West, we have to look at that not only as joy in the face of persecution and suffering but also the bravery, the fact that they are in a sense undaunted by what we would think, ‘ok I’m leaving.'”
Where is the protest? That is the question Justin Bieber’s former manager Scooter Braun wants answered by the music industry after he accused it of ignoring the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
Record producer Braun has released a video featuring an interview with a relative of one of the victims of the tragedy that demanded artists in the music industry break their silence and address the Hamas brutality, Fox News reports.
In the video posted to the record company executive’s Instagram page on Friday, Braun and Rachel Goldberg, the mother of a young man named Hersh – who is still being held hostage by terror group Hamas – spread awareness about her son and other victims of the deadly attack on the Nova music festival that happened near Kibbutz Re’im on the 7th.
“Say something, ask for the hostages to come home,” Braun said , adding “Say that no music festival deserves this.”
“Shame on us if we don’t” use our influence, the record exec stated.
Sitting with Goldberg, Braun stated, “Her son is now 76 days being held in Gaza. The last images she saw of him, he had his left arm blown off. He’s a lefty like she is.”
Braun then rebuked mainstream music artists and journalists for their silence.
“I find it insane that I’m the one standing here with her, or that we’re the ones who had a conversation,” he said, adding, “There should be people with 100 million followers and much bigger platforms who do this for a living, who are artists, who are reporters, who should be giving her a platform.”
RELATED: “It Is Evil” — U.S. Diplomat Breaks Down Witnessing Aftermath of Hamas Attack in Israel
Chargé d’Affaires a.i. Stephanie Hallett via Storyful
The manager noted how Goldberg has tried to reach out to “so many people” to talk about the people harmed in the attack, but hardly any have gotten back to her.
In 2017, Braun helped organize a major benefit concert for the victims of the terrorist attack that took place at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.
Grande performed at the benefit along with Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Coldplay, and others, raising more than $12 million. “There’s been so much negativity and such a lack of leadership when we’re looking to have hope,” Braun said at the time.
Follow Simon Kent on Twitter:Follow @SunSimonKentor e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com
Pro-Palestinian Protest Disrupts Christmas in San Francisco: ‘No Xmas as Usual’
A group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators tried to disrupt Christmas weekend shopping in San Francisco’s Union Square on Saturday in the latest attack on the Christian holiday, seen by radical leftists as an example of bourgeois complacency.
Hundreds of protesters gathered among holiday crowds in San Francisco’s central shopping district Saturday to call for an end to hostilities between Hamas and Israel, as well as for charges to be dropped against demonstrators who shut down the Bay Bridge last month.
Chanting “free Palestine” and “cease-fire now” while holding yellow protest signs that read “No Xmas as usual in a genocide” and “DA Jenkins drop all charges on the Bay Bridge 78,” the protesters — many of them representing the Party for Socialism and Liberation — stood outside the former Westfield mall on Market Street as holiday shopping was underway with Christmas just two days away.
By 1:30 p.m., protesters had blocked traffic on Market Street between Powell and Ellis streets. About 30 minutes later protesters marched down Market Street and confronted police, leading to the arrest of one demonstrator. It was not immediately clear why the protester was arrested. Later, protesters marched to Union Square and surrounded the Christmas tree and ice skating rink.
The “Bay Bridge 78” refers to the 78 people who were arrested for blocking the San Francisco Bay Bridge last month during an anti-Israel protest. As Breitbart News later noted, that protest temporarily blocked a number of ambulances from delivering organs to waiting transplant patients.
The Union Square protest is only the latest attempt by pro-Palestinian protesters to disrupt Christmas across the nation. Past efforts have included disrupting the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting in New York City, and forcing California’s state Christmas tree lighting to be moved indoors, to a “virtual” format.
The San Francisco protest is also another blow to retail shopping in Union Square, which has been hit hard by crime and has seen a recent exodus of retailers.
Update: The protesters removed ornaments from the Christmas tree in Union Square, causing it to shut off and possibly damaging it:
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). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Video: Pro-Palestinian Protesters Yell Abuse, Storm Live TV Christmas Celebrations
An annual Christmas celebration in Melbourne, Australia, was briefly interrupted Sunday night after pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the stage during the live broadcast and tried to hijack events.
News.com.au reports children performing were rushed from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl stage to safety after several protesters carrying Palestinian flags appeared from nowhere to interrupt the show.
Local network live television coverage were filming hosts when the anti-Israel incident unfolded in the Victorian state capital.
One protester even tried to grab the microphone, managing to say “while you’re carolling, kids are dying in Gaza” before the audio was cut and a chorus of boos from the audience grew louder.
The on-stage host interrupted his scripted dialogue when he realised the commotion on stage wasn’t part of the show.
“Hang on one second,” he said.
“Nice and easy.”
The singer tried to keep the crowd calm and informed as security guards removed the protesters from the stage.
Member of Australia’s Jewish community spoke out against the protest.
“You can always count on anti-Israel extremists to make everything about them and to appall decent, ordinary people,’ Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Alex Ryvchin said.
“The chorus of boos tells them loud and clear they’re not wanted.”
Others were equally quick to take to social media and voice their disgust at the protesters choosing a Christian celebration to air their abuse of Israel.
Carols by Candlelight has been held on Christmas Eve in Melbourne since 1938, the Melbourne Agereports.
The annual event raises money for Vision Australia’s children’s services, with all proceeds supporting families and children who are blind or have low vision.
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'Muslim migrants are destroying European culture' - Poland's former prime minister | Interview
What it tells us is that Comer is onto something dangerous for Biden and the Biden machine will stop at nothing to protect its kingpin and take down his rival. Call that corruption piled upon corruption. One can only hope that Comer will recognize that he's over the target and expose these thugs to the max, the getting to the bottom of the whole corrupt foundation of House Biden before they can do any more damage to the country. MONICA SHOWALTER
A growing number of Americans is beginning to realize that there is another purpose to & message behind DEMS’ actions that extends to everyday people who might not like or support one or more of the things that the cabal is forcing upon them—weaponized federal agencies & the military, protection for BLM and Antifa violence, open borders for illegal & unvetted aliens, costly & destructive “green” policies, massive taxpayer funds sent to Ukraine, prevention or punishment of free speech, & so much more. GREG SALSBURY
The Middle Class Meltdown: The Alarming Crisis Facing the Middle Class in America
JOE BIDEN is known as a serial liar, a "public servant" who has somehow managed to accrue tremendous wealth, a race-baiting opportunist, a Catholic-in-name-only, and a bought-and-paid-for politician in bed with criminal cartels and foreign foes. In another era, Joe Biden would have been run out of his country much the same way Benedict Arnold was two and a half centuries ago; in an era when integrity, honor, fortitude, fidelity, and grit have been jettisoned for immorality, unscrupulousness, weakness, betrayal, and craven pliability, however, he is elevated to king sleazeball in a city drowning in sleaze. JB SHURK
In keeping with the Democrat party obsession with eradicating everything good, just, holy, and wholesome, the Bidens have created an identity confused abomination out of the traditionally religious observance of Christmas.
Days ago, the Biden White House released a video showcasing Jill Biden’s contrived Christmas decorations festooning the colonial solemnity of the White House. Though the nutcracker theme could generously be described as tacky, Jill and Joe left plenty of room for moral outrage.
Gone is Melania’s provocative panache and Trump’s instinctive deference to religious tradition. I’ll take a few bold stylistic risks and mean tweets over a cavalcade of sexual perversion meant to desecrate this nation’s celebration of the birth of Christ, the Redeemer of all mankind. Joe and Jill are gonna have a lot of explaining to do before His judgement seat.
Tediousness in decor and a bizarre broadway troop performance can be forgiven as an expected faux pas from a couple struggling to maintain the illusion of competency and familial sympathy. But, unveiling Jill’s Holliday composition with a crossdressing extravaganza in a macabre mockery of America’s most hallowed and wholesome observance should earn them a special place in the annals of the reprobate.
Should we really be surprised by this, from a man and woman so bereft of parental instinct as to callously throw aside a bona fide granddaughter like yesterday’s trash? A forgotten space where a stocking should hang speaks loudly of the first family’s depravity. The Bidens’ disregard for the meaning of Christmas is natural, from a purely political couple using one another as political capital to be expended to the last penny. This season, Jill’s been busy wringing out the last droplets of Joe’s vitality into the stainless steel basin of personal advantage.
There is nothing of Christ in the Biden Holliday crèche. The manger is a cold, empty void with the devouring state at its black heart. How many infants have been consumed by the titanic gravitation of unfettered selfishness and Democrat sponsored butchery? Just like Herod’s attempt to destroy the Christ child, any threat to statist power is met by a cruel sword that reaches even to the womb. The angelic harbingers of Christ’s birth are transformed by the Biden’s hubris and ethics of identity politics into Sodomite avatars of licentiousness. Biden’s addled mind and Jill’s cooly clinical manipulation combine to form animalistic monstrosities which shamble in and out of shadow. The entire tableau is sulphuric, and an affront to the Judeo-Christian principles that have made this nation great.
The Biden Christmas is akin to a Herodian debauch, complete with the head of John the Baptist served up to placate the insatiable lusts of the LGBTQ+ whatever constituency. And just like Herod’s court, there’s the specter of incest lurking within the narrative. These days, Biden seems barely able to contain his lecherous instincts, unbound by the constraints of cognition. Like Herod, he leers from his panoply at young girls with their fresh locks, dancing playfully, beckoning for his fondle and sniff.
All of the obvious mockery reminds me of who’ll have the last laugh in Biden’s paean to the gods of identity.
Psalm 2 isn’t typically cited during the Christmas season, but in light of Jill’s flippant treatment of the sacred, this portion is particularly apropos. “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” (Psalm 2:1) Throughout the Bible, God asks questions. He meets mankind at the level of intellect and requires faith, but not an unreasonable faith. God continues, “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder…” (vs. 2,3) People like the Bidens chafe against God’s law, His declarations concerning the nature of man, the role of identity, and sexuality. For them, God’s description of sexual confusion as an abomination (Romans 1: 24-27) has no meaning, especially when His law conflicts with political expediency. Even despite God’s codification of His law into the very fabric of reality, the statist (obsessed with the supremacy of politics and man’s power to govern) presses forward with hysterical fantasy. Even the purely scientific facts of genetics, and the observable composition of chromosomes are powerless in the face of absolute madness — the mentation of a vain thing.
Impending judgment is no laughing matter, “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.” (vs. 4,5) And, “Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion…Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (vs. 6,9)
That may not sound like much of a Christmas message, but making peace with God was the very reason for Christ’s birth. His death on the cross made it possible for mankind to be reconciled to God, and this reconciliation is readily available to anyone who comes to Christ in faith and, with a repentant heart, asks for his forgiveness and salvation. That is precisely what is meant in verse 12, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.”
Jill and Joe Biden are just marionettes dancing on the strings of the most sinister presence in the universe. No, not Barack Hussein Obama. Though, he’s certainly playing his part, too. Our national survival is at stake, not from an axis of evil, but from our own departure from Him who has bequeathed to the boy in the manger, “the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” (v.8).
MINNESOTA NOW FLIES THE MUSLIM FLAG OF SOMALI
GOOGLE IT!
IF THE MUSLIM ISLAMICIST TAKE OVER AMERICA, MINNESOTA IS A GOOD START, DO YOU THINK THEY WILL NOT CANCEL CHRISTMAS???
JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN PLACES OF WORSHIP ARE FORBIDDEN BY LAW IN SAUDILAND. NEVER FORGET IT WAS THE SAUDIS WHO INVADED US SEPT 11 AND BROUGHT DOWN THE TWIN WORLD TRADE CENTERS.
THE NEO-FASCIST DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS BEEN PRO-MUSLIM SINCE CLOSET MUSLIM BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WAS PRESIDENT AND DEDICATED HIMSELF TO SERVING THE SAUDIS DICTATORS FOR.... ? GOOGLE IT! IT WAS A SAUDI BILLIONAIRE WHO PAID FOR GAMER LAWYER BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA'S EDUCATION AT HARVARD! GOOGLE IT!
GAMER LAWYER JAMES BIDEN OF THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY HAS ALSO TURNED TRICK$ FOR THE SAUDIS.
They Justified Hamas Terrorism. Now Biden Is Letting Them Dole Out Taxpayer Dollars.
Climate Justice Alliance, tapped to distribute $50 mil in federal funds, has backed the 'Palestinian freedom struggle'
They Justified Hamas Terrorism. Now Biden Is Letting Them Dole Out Taxpayer Dollars.
Climate Justice Alliance, tapped to distribute $50 mil in federal funds, has backed the 'Palestinian freedom struggle'
In the aftermath of Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack against Israel, left-wing nonprofit Climate Justice Alliance expressed "unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle" and blamed the attack on Israeli "settler-colonialism." Now, the Biden administration is entrusting the group to distribute $50 million in taxpayer funds.
President Joe Biden's Environmental Protection Agency announced the move in a Wednesday press release, which named Climate Justice Alliance as one of several "national grantmakers" tasked with doling out $50 million to local organizations in the name of "environmental justice." In order to receive the taxpayer funds, those organizations will primarily work with the alliance, not the Biden administration. As a "grantmaker," the left-wing nonprofit is tasked with awarding "subgrants"—which range from $150,000 to $350,000 each—and implementing "tracking and reporting systems."
The decision raises questions as to how Biden's EPA landed on Climate Justice Alliance for the program, given that the group has publicly condemned the administration over its support for the Jewish state. Climate Justice Alliance, a network of nearly 90 left-wing environmental groups from across the country, issued an Oct. 20 statement accusing Biden of using "US taxpayer dollars … to support a policy of genocide."
"With this newest round of genocidal attacks by Israel on the civilian population … the Israel government has defied international law," the group said. "President Biden must oppose this."
In addition to its criticism of Biden over the Democrat's handling of the war, Climate Justice Alliance has worked to justify Hamas's terror attack on the Jewish state.
The "Free Palestine" section of the group's website includes a statement from its sister organization, It Takes Roots, which calls the attack "the most recent escalation in the 75-year history of settler-colonialism and violence across historic Palestine" and expresses "unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle for self-determination and to live freely with their human rights fully intact on their lands."
Climate Justice Alliance has also made clear that it cannot separate its environmental activism from the Palestinian cause. One week ago, the group released a video titled, "The path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine," which "uses an anti-colonial framework to show how Climate Justice and the liberation of Palestine are connected."
"Our hope in creating this new resource is to mobilize additional sectors of the climate movement for the fight to free Palestine," the group said, "and to begin to shift the politics of the mainstream climate movement from carbon fundamentalism to climate justice."
In some cases, groups affiliated with the alliance have broken the law to express their contempt for Israel. One of the group's members, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, has helped organize illegal anti-Israel protests in the Capitol rotunda and other Capitol complex buildings.
Neither the EPA nor Climate Justice Alliance responded to requests for comment. Vice President Kamala Harris in the EPA's Wednesday press release said the money to Climate Justice Alliance and other groups would "put equity at the center of our nation's largest investment in climate history."
The EPA program that enlists Climate Justice Alliance to distribute taxpayer-funded "subgrants" is called the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking program and is funded through Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. As part of the program, Climate Justice Alliance and 10 other groups will receive $50 million in taxpayer funds that they will then distribute to "community-based nonprofit organizations and other eligible organizations representing disadvantaged communities."
Climate Justice Alliance has significant control over that money. The EPA's press release notes that the group and other "grantmakers" are in charge of designing their own "comprehensive application and submission processes" before they "award environmental justice subgrants, implement tracking and reporting systems, and provide resources and support to communities."
Judge Glock, senior fellow and director of research at the Manhattan Institute, said that while the federal government "does occasionally select grantees to send out subawards," the EPA's new environmental justice program is unique given its "size and the incredible level of discretion given to the grantees to make subawards."
"Something that is on multiple levels an incredibly broad, general program with not very clear goals, and then to designate these grantmakers to make their own grants with even less clear goals, I certainly haven't seen anything like this before," Glock told the Washington Free Beacon. "And it's a lot of money—it's not a little amount of money, and they're going to some pretty extreme groups."
In addition to its anti-Israel activism, Climate Justice Alliance is a staunch supporter of the "Green New Deal movement," which it says stems from "decades of Indigenous/frontline wisdom." The group also touts its efforts to lead a "just transition" toward green energy and away from "the profit-driven industrial economy rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy."
Climate Justice Alliance announced its participation in the EPA program in a Wednesday statement, saying it is "excited and ready to serve as a bridge, model, and catalyst among organizations nationwide to … strengthen the environmental justice movement."
"We look forward to ensuring that thousands of $150,000 to $350,000 EPA grants move to marginalized, environmental justice communities to address historic harms," said Jacqueline Patterson, founder of the Chisholm Legacy Project, a Climate Justice Alliance member.
As we approach the last year of Joe Biden’s term, it’s an opportune moment to reflect back on January of 2021. Our new President had been inaugurated (though we still don’t know that he was elected). Democrats believed the evil Trump had been vanquished from the body politic forever. We were assured that blue-collar Joe from Scranton was going to return normalcy to Washington -- as if that were a good thing.
Biden was riding high in the polls. His “wingmen” were in control of the executive branch. His allies were in power in Congress and his media lapdogs would guarantee that all news was good news. It was a heady time for team Biden.
The Left was giddy too. In Joe Biden, they had found that one kid in the gang who would act on any suggestion and accept any dare. Nothing could stop them now. This would be their opportunity complete the “fundamental change” that Barack Obama had started, but not finished -- because he had a sense of self-preservation that Joe lacks.
So, the Left unleashed their man-child in the candy store without adult supervision. Joe did what any spoiled child would do. He indulged his every wish -- and he wished to play king. He plundered the candy store like a Viking raider, with complete disregard that the sugar-high would be followed by a stomachache. The man-child was oblivious to the notion that in the adult world, choices come with consequences. That’s a lack of wisdom universal to immaturity regardless of whether one is 8 or 80.
Biden’s first year in office was a time of historic action -- and not in a good way.
Goaded by the Left, Joe unleashed his inner id, using his pen and phone to fulfill his lusts, and those of his radical toadies. With every action he considered, his gallery of sycophants remained behind him chanting: Go ahead Joey. Do it. We double dog dare you. And Joe did it -- consequences be damned.
He bragged about beating the tyrant Trump, and signed executive orders at a rate of dozens per day -- to cancel any accomplishment of Trump. It was irrelevant to him if Trump’s achievements were beneficial to Americans. If Donald did it, Joe undid it because… well, just because.
He threw our borders open to foreign invasion, simply because Trump had closed them. Joe’s policies added an additional 3.8 million criminals to our society. That’s enough people to populate Los Angeles -- admitted with no vetting, no control, and no apology.
Joe added $5 trillion to our national debt -- enough $100 bills to reach the Moon and back 10 times. The spending drove inflation to a 40-year high. Interest rates reached a 20-year high, as the Federal Reserve struggled to tame the mess. In so doing, Joe placed home mortgages out of reach for many Americans.
He choked domestic energy production, making us again dependent on foreign oil. Prices for gas and electricity skyrocketed. In the process, he enriched Russia (a producer of oil) and China (a producer of solar and wind technology). We’re expected to pay no attention to the little issue that the Biden family received millions of dollars from Russia and China, for no apparent service.
Joe surrendered unconditionally to the Taliban in Afghanistan. As we fled, 13 soldiers were killed, Joe broke our word to our allies, and he armed a global threat. It was done because he wanted a talking point on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center.
Joe shipped billions of dollars of our war material to Ukraine -- which coincidentally was another multi-million-dollar benefactor of the Biden family. While he armed Ukraine, our own military has fallen to its lowest level of preparedness since before WWII. But our soldiers do get their pronouns correct now.
Joe funded Hamas, using Iran as a financial cutout. Hamas then committed the single largest one-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas’ Bidenbucks facilitated murder, gang rape, kidnapping, and infanticide. While the world watched in horror, Joe went on another beach vacation.
Joe used the power of the executive branch to infringe on our rights of assembly, religion, speech, property, due process, and self-defense. When stopped by the courts, he didn’t comply but pursued workarounds -- showing utter contempt for the Constitution that he is sworn to defend.
He weaponized our criminal justice system, breaking all legal precedents in a childish tantrum to punish anyone whom he disliked. Actual criminal wrongdoing was irrelevant. Political adversaries, pro-life protesters, election deniers, and non-compliant members of the press had their homes raided and faced criminal prosecution via creative application of laws, for purposes that were never intended.
Biden gave a national address standing before a satanic red backdrop with symbols of his military power standing at attention. He dehumanized half of the Americans whom he is sworn to represent, calling them semi-fascists. In other comments he has repeatedly threatened military force against anyone who challenges his government.
Joe Biden’s first year in office was a time of great hubris, for which I’m sure he felt entitled, given his 46 years of “government service.” But Greek philosophy frowns on hubris for a reason:
Hubris was not something you wanted to be accused of if you were in ancient Greece. It was thought to be behavior outside the norm. Most specifically, that behavior in which one would attempt to defy -- or challenge -- the gods. To display such arrogance meant that you became a target of Nemesis and she is inescapable.
So, has Joe:
Acted outside the norm in weaponizing the government against its people? Check.
Defied God by infringing on God-given rights? Check.
Displayed arrogance by ignoring his oath and the courts? Check.
Joe dared Nemesis, the Greek Goddess of Divine Retribution, to pay him a visit. It seems that Nemesis has now arrived, signaling that the party has ended, and the hangover has begun.
As we near the end of Joe’s first term, his last year looks very different from the first.
Biden’s approval is down to 34 percent, and that doesn’t appear to be the floor.
The party he leads is losing the minority vote, and tearing itself apart over its hatred of Jews.
His son is facing felony charges for being the collections guy in the family bribery business.
The House of Representatives has opened an impeachment investigation, because the corruption became too great to ignore.
Biden faces the possibility that his legacy will be as America’s most corrupt President.
The public is ridiculing him for his inability to navigate stairs or stages.
His friends are abandoning him.
His nemesis Trump is poised to exact revenge in 11 short months.
If Biden were an adult, he might reflect on the last three years and wish that he’d simply exercised a bit of self-control. But that’s not who Joe Biden is. President “Man-Child” will spend his last year stamping his feet, denying any wrongdoing, and demanding more candy.
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary describes the word “phobia” as “an exaggerated, usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation.” In the wake of recent events, is fear of Muslims, labeled “Islamophobia,” really exaggerated, inexplicable, and/or illogical?
I’ve concluded that not only is fear of Muslims logical and explicable, but it is by no means exaggerated and, most probably, understated. The deliberately misleading term “Islamophobia” itself amounts to a cudgel used to silence critics of what Dutch Parliamentarian (and possible new Dutch Prime Minister) Geert Wilders has at times characterized as a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.
I could enumerate just some in the endless litany of recent (and even not-so-recent) violent attacks that radical Muslims have perpetrated in (delusional) Western societies that welcomed and unsuccessfully attempted to absorb and assimilate large numbers of Muslims. However, Raymond Ibrahim has already done so, writing extensively (and magnificently) about historical events that provide countless examples (here and here) of aggressive Muslim behaviors resulting in widespread slaughter. His writings elucidate numerous historical episodes consuming people of all ethnicities and religions, including their fellow Muslims, with particular cruelty reserved for Africans, Armenians, and, of course, Jews.
Image: Salman Rushdie (edited), a “lucky” victim of Muslim violence, for he survived the deadly attack against him. YouTube screen grab.
Why has
Geert Wilders been (in his own words) “deprived of a personal life” requiring constant police protection for more than a decade?
Salman Rushdie had to spend the last 35 years in fear? (And note that his fear was justified.)
Hoover Institute fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now a Christian, who was both abused and mutilated by “Imams” as a child, been living “with round-the-clock security due to her willingness to speak out and her abandonment of the Muslim faith?
If Islam is peaceful, why do these prominent critics need constant protection?
If we look around the world, Muslims are fighting in many places:
Numerous Indo (India)-Pakistani Wars have pitted Muslim Pakistan against majority Hindu India, while India’s Muslims regularly launch religious attacks.
Muslim Chechens fight Russian Orthodox Christians and send death squads into Europe.
Muslim Azeris fight those Armenians who remain from the genocide the Muslim Turks perpetrated against them in 1916.
Historical animosity between Turks and Greeks is well documented and continues to this day in Cyprus, split between the Turkish North and Greek South.
Orthodox Christian Serb and Muslim hostility dates back 600+ years to the Ottoman Wars.
And we have the ongoing Arab/Israeli wars as the most glaring current-day example, during which a fictitious Muslim ethnic group, the “Palestinians” (really, Arabs), perfect modern-day terrorism.
Even the incomparable “Islamophobes” in China, who view any religion as a threat, place particular focus on Islam, which could be why the government maintains a system of “re-education camps” for Uyghurs, containing (for the time being) any potential for Muslim violence.
There also are examples of persistent internecine warfare between Muslims themselves:
Hamas displaced the PLO in Gaza in 2007, fighting door to door. Ironically, few were concerned about civilian casualties then, as Muslims slaughtered each other with impunity.
The Syrian Civil War, pitting Alawite against Sunni, resulted in upward of a half million slaughtered, displacing more than 6 million people and creating the largest refugee crisis since WWII, perhaps forever changing the character of the European continent and society. It also led to the rise of ISIS, whose members cruelly tortured and killed thousands of “impure” Muslims and other ethnicities, most famously Yazidis, until eliminated by US forces under President Trump’s leadership.
The mostly Shia Houthis displaced the hapless Sunni leadership in Yemen following a decade of proxy civil war during which tens of thousands died.
If we go back to the 1980s, more than a million were killed in the Iran-Iraq War, after which, two years later, in a duplicitous show of gratitude for financial support, Saddam invaded his Muslim-Arab financiers in Kuwait to avoid repayment of Iraq’s accumulated war debt.
Muslim societies themselves lean heavily toward despotism, demanding ideological purity and groupthink through a culture that requires submission. Indeed, a Muslim is “one who submits.” All who live in Muslim society live in constant fear of violence from the government and their fellow citizens.
Note that refugees from Syria insisted on going to Europe, particularly Germany, not to another Muslim country where they might have been familiar with the customs. Why is that? No reasonable person believes that Algerians, Gazans, Iranians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, or Yemenis live carefree, unencumbered existences. African Haratine people in Mauritania remain enslaved by (of course) Muslim Arabs.
Facts show that Islam’s religio-political ideology and its adherents are anything but peaceful. Islam’s holy texts themselves incite violence, manifested against both non-believers and believers.
Islam’s teachings drive some Muslims to commit and condone evil. Muslims mutilate the genitalia of their subjugated women, whom they treat as children or second-class citizens. Family honor is tied to the sexual behavior of women, and honor killings often blame women, the victims, for being in situations they are unable to avoid or control.
Whenever women live under Muslim control, they exist in fear due to the primitive, dysfunctional “customs” enforced by a violent, patriarchal society that punishes differing opinions and free thought. Men, separated from women without the possibility for intimacy, turn to molesting young boys, a vile, hypocritical contradiction of their “faith”, which purports to prohibit homosexuality.
Considering its 1,500-year history of brutal, ruthless violence in pursuit of domination, it is logical for anybody to be afraid of Muslims and Islam. Fear of Islam is not, therefore, an exaggerated, inexplicable, or illogical fear. It is a reasonable, measured, and logical response to the repeated, ongoing violence that Muslims worldwide have committed for centuries. Winston Churchill, unencumbered by political correctness, said about Islam, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”
Churchill, Rushdie, and Wilders all “told it like it is.” Islamophobia is a canard. This is all TRUE. If Muslims do not like hearing this then they must change their behaviors.
Lt. Colonel Jeff Cooper, the father of modern handgun safety, advised: “Observe your cat. He moves well, using his senses fully. He is not preoccupied with irrelevancies. He’s not thinking about his job or his image or his income tax. He is putting first things first, principally his physical security. Do likewise.” This teaches us two things: (1) Be aware of your surroundings and take precautions to stay safe and, perhaps more importantly, (2) Don’t worry about your image.
Americans, however, refuse to act like cats. They live in fear because many have abandoned truth. This is why useful idiots can repeat nonsense such as “Islam is a religion of peace” while the USA has been fighting Muslims for 30 years.
Christ taught the world that “the truth will set you free.” We must re-embrace Judeo-Christian values and stop worrying about our “image” or having woke mobs rebuke us for speaking the truth they consider “politically incorrect.” This self-censorship erodes truth.
Cowards lie due to weakness. Psalm 34 tells us to “keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies.” Liars understand what awaits them at the gates of heaven.
Be courageous. Courage is needed in Joe Biden’s America, where nobody is punished for lying but only for telling the truth, which perpetuates deceit. We must flip the script and reacclimate society to truth, which will be difficult, especially for the “snowflakes.”
We must stop deceiving ourselves. We’ve been propagandized by academia and the media to self-censor, to believe that the truth (about everyone except Jews, apparently) is somehow offensive. It’s not. It’s reality. If something is true, say it loudly and repeatedly. While there are individual Muslims who are peaceful, Islam is not a “religion of peace,” and fear of Muslims is rational because of Islam’s violent history, medieval culture, and totalitarian tendencies. It is a ferocious political ideology masquerading as a religion. Don’t allow these tyrants, their useful idiots, nor their apologists to silence you any longer.
Jonathan Gault is a pseudonym.
Hamas Calls for Violence Against Americans — and So Does This Michigan Imam
Could the war in Israel spread to the United States?
Could the war in Israel spread to the United States? Sure. Some people want it to.
Hamas has never made a secret of the fact that its goal of destroying Israel is just part of a larger jihad to conquer the entire world for Islam. And so it was inevitable, both in light of that aspiration and the Biden regime’s shaky but still subsisting support for Israel’s defensive effort, that Hamas jihadis would call for violence against Americans. What is more surprising, at least for those who have bought into the comforting establishment fictions that have been circulating since 9/11, is that one such call came from right here at home.
Hamas operative Sami Abu Zuhri recently proclaimed that Biden regime Secretary of State Antony Blinken, despite pressuring Israel to go easy on the warriors of jihad, was just as bad as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “When Blinken is justifying the killing of women and children, the sons of our nation should say to him: You are the enemy, just like Netanyahu, and you must pay the price, just like Netanyahu. We should keep this in mind.” Yes, we should indeed.
If you’re wondering when exactly Blinken justified the killing of women and children, the answer, of course, is never. Blinken has actually parroted Hamas propaganda in warning Israel that it must do more to reduce civilian deaths, when in reality the number of civilians killed in Gaza compares favorably to the death toll of civilians in other recent conflicts, notably the battle of Mosul against ISIS in Iraq.
Nevertheless, Abu Zuhri wants to see American blood: “Now it is our nation’s turn to pressure the Americans to stop this war. We need violent acts against American and British interests everywhere, as well as the interests of all the countries that support the occupation.”
It’s hard to see how those who call for violence against people who have nothing to do with the conflict have the moral high ground, and those who are doing all they can to limit civilian casualties deserve the opprobrium of the entire world; we’d need an American university student to explain that.
Meanwhile, an echo of this call for jihad terror attacks against Americans came from a Muslim cleric, Ahmad Musa Jibril. Jibril, “whose hate-filled sermons,” according to a Friday report in the New York Post, “were said to have inspired the London Bridge terrorist attack,” is not in Britain, or in Baghdad or Balochistan. Jibril was born in Dearborn, Michigan, and while his current whereabouts are murky, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) identifies him as a “Michigan Islamic scholar,” and the Twitter/X account that posted his call for jihad in America states that it is operating out of Chicago and is “managed by students.” Jibril, who did hard time in the Terre Haute Federal Correctional Complex for fraud, money laundering, unlawful possession of firearms and more, clearly has considerable influence among Muslims in the United States.
Contradicting the false narrative Americans have been fed for two decades now, Jibril declared: “Yes, there is holy war in Islam, it is jihad. This may be a surprise to many who grew up in the West, especially those who were born or grew up post 9/11, because of the growing number of hypocrites, who are spreading the American-Zionist Islam, and it has nothing to do with Islam, that version of Islam is and Islam that suits the enemies.” He added that “the one who has been spreading that there is no holy war in Islam, has been defecating heresy out of his mouth for the past 20 years, downplaying the legislation of Allah and the Islamic punishments.”
That would include virtually all of the prominent Islamic spokesmen in the U.S. As far as Jibril is concerned, the only people who had it right about jihad and Islam were the ones who were (and still are) vilified, marginalized, and silenced as “Islamophobes.” And now he wants Muslims in the U.S. to start taking this holy war seriously: “The Muslims in the West, especially the youth in the West, especially the youth in America, need to wake up. The current events are a wake-up call for Muslims to start normalizing mentioning jihad’s proper meaning, and putting it back into their vocabulary. Jihad must be a common, normal term on your tongues, on your social media, and in the mosques and elsewhere.
This should, he said, be a matter of lifelong indoctrination: “It’s time the mothers nurse their infants with the love of jihad and the ambition to become a mujahid and a martyr.” A martyr in the Islamic sense is one who acts upon Allah’s promise of paradise in the Qur’an to those who “kill and are killed.” America said Jibril, is “a vicious enemy of Muslims.” And so the import of his words was clear: Muslims need to wage jihad against America. While the Biden regime’s FBI hunts for “white supremacist terrorists” and Jan. 6 “insurrectionists,” some young men in America right now are heeding the words of Ahmed Musa Jibril.
In December 2015, after a husband and wife pair of Islamic terrorists shot up a Christmas party in San Bernardino, Kamala Harris, then the Attorney General of California, convened a session on “Islamophobia” that included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Muslim Student Association: all of which had defended Islamic terrorists.
With 130 dead in France and 13 murdered in her own state, Kamala gathered a group that included Islamic terror supporters to argue that even after “the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino”, it was wrong “to stoke fear and cast aspersions against an entire faith and the millions of law-abiding American Muslims”.
After the Islamic mass murders of over 1,000 Israelis, Kamala returned to pushing “Islamophobia”. In the speech that he delivered three days after the massacres, she urged Biden to include a line about “Islamophobia” because of the way that Muslims had supposedly ‘suffered’ from it after the Islamic terrorist attacks killed thousands on September 11.
Next month in November, she unveiled a push to fight “Islamophobia”, not antisemitism. It was Kamala who pressed Biden to be more open to Islamist groups and their complaints, driving him to profusely apologize for questioning the civilian casualty numbers coming out of Hamas.
And it was she who voiced the highest level criticisms of Israel’s war on Hamas.
In Dubai, Kamala claimed that, “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.”
This was the rhetoric that Biden would shortly adopt.
In her Dubai speech, Kamala set limits on what Israel could do. There would be no permanent return of Israeli forces to Gaza and no “siege or blockade”. Instead, Gaza would be reconstructed and the terrorist forces of the Palestinian Authority strengthened to take it over.
Kamala’s hostility came as a surprise to some Jewish Democrats who had been sold on the idea of her as an AIPAC supporter and who had mostly seen pictures of her with her Jewish husband, Douglas Emhoff, who has taken the lead in holding conversations about antisemitism.
But whatever Emhoff’s beliefs are, he does not make policy anymore than Jill Biden did under Obama. It’s his wife who actually does make policy and whose biases are becoming clearer.
Kamala has a history of enabling ugly views by Islamic terrorist supporters against Israel.
In 2021, Kamala nodded along at George Mason University as a student ranted that funding for Israel’s anti-missile defense system, the Iron Dome, “hurts my heart because it’s an ethnic genocide”. Then the vice president responded with, “your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth, should not be suppressed.”
After Rep. Ilhan Omar’s antisemitic “benjamins” comment, Kamala, then a senator, defended Omar, touting the threat of “Islamophobia” and expressing concern that “the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk.”
Kamala went on to say that, “there is a difference between criticism of policy or political leaders, and anti-Semitism.”
Most people tended to ignore these remarks because Kamala had a history of inept and clumsy responses, but her reaction to the Hamas attacks shows that they were not accidental.
Since the Oct 7 Hamas atrocities, Kamala has expressed sympathy for Israel, but has also become the administration’s highest profile internal critic, pressuring Biden to be less pro-Israel. A Politico report described how “a person close to the vice president’s office said she believes the United States should be ‘tougher’ on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
The problem with Kamala is the same one that manifested after the San Bernardino Christmas Party massacre. Kamala is close to Islamist groups and leftists and sympathetic to their views.
Those views are hostile to Israel and to America, and supportive of Islamic terrorism.
During her time in the California political establishment, Kamala developed a relationship with CAIR and MPAC. And through her sister, Maya Harris, formerly of the ACLU, she may have developed further connections with other leftist and Islamist activists. While Kamala does not have the same Islamic family background as Obama, like him she has closer ties to people from the Muslim world. And, much like Obama, her sympathy leans more toward Islam than Israel.
Like Obama, Kamala tends to speak of Jews in terms of sitcom stereotypes and cliches. She mimics meeting her future mother-in-law in a routine that could have come from SNL’s ‘Verklempt’ sketch, but she has no meaningful connections beyond her marriage to a man whose own daughter raises money for Gaza and identifies as not being Jewish.
Kamala claims that she has a Muslim friend who lost someone in Gaza, but no mention of any Jewish friends who did. After Islamic terrorist attacks, whether in California, France or Israel, Kamala worries more about “Islamophobia” toward Muslims than the suffering of their victims.
In July 2016, Kamala appeared at a Ramadan event at the Islamic Center of Southern California, which spun off the previously mentioned Muslim Public Affairs Council, and whose founders had expressed support for Islamic terrorism, to denounce “Islamophobia”.
A month earlier, an Islamic terrorist had killed 49 people at a nightclub in Florida. Kamala, who was running for the Senate, mentioned this attack among others, including those in San Bernardino and Paris, and blamed them on “mental illness and violent extremism”.
And she claimed that Muslims were suffering from a rash of “Islamophobia” caused by hate.
Kamala’s criticism of Israel for defending itself against Islamic terrorism is just a repetition of the rhetoric that her not especially long political career has trained her to deploy after terror attacks. It doesn’t matter whether the attacks are in America, Israel or anywhere else in the world, instead of siding with the victims, she will claim that the real problem is “Islamophobia”.
While Doug Emhoff reassures the Jews, his wife empathizes with their killers.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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AMERICA WOULD BE IN A MUCH GREATER POSTURE IF JOE BIDEN WOULD STOP KISSING DICTATOR ASS! BUT THEN JAMES BIDEN HAS BEEN SUCKING THE SAUDI$ FOR SOME TIME. THAT IS ALWAYS JOE'S PRIORITY! SHOW ME THE MONEY!
Republicans have focused on Hunter Biden, largely because of the laptops, the flagrant activities in Ukraine and China, the obscene criminality of his rampages, and the sheer amount of information, but the linkage between Hunter’s business affairs and his father remains much less documented than the more extended ties between Joe’s brother, James.
‘Coalition of the Unwilling’: U.S. Won’t Attack Houthis, Can’t Get Major Arab Countries to Join Effort Openly
The “coalition” of countries formed by the U.S. to deter Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait excludes Israel. It also omits Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two of the other countries directly affected by the threat.
The list of participants in “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” as Time magazine notes, includes “Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom.” A few are involved in shipping. A few barely have a navy.
Israel has the capability — and the legal justification — to strike back at the Houthis. Not only have the Iranian-backed rebels tried to seize and destroy Israel-linked and Israel-bound vessels; they have also fired missiles and drones directly at southern Israel.
Fighters loyal to Yemen’s Huthi rebels raise their fists and chant slogans as they visit the grave of slain Huthi political leader Saleh al-Sammad at al-Sabeen square in the capital Sanaa, on January 11, 2021. – In April 2018, al-Sammad, who was on the Saudi-led coalition’s wanted list, was killed in what the insurgents said was an air strike by the coalition. (Photo by Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP) (Photo by MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images)
But the U.S. — which could also easily attack the Houthis and destroy their ballistic and naval capabilities — has restrained Israel and itself. Instead, it has put together a list of countries so underwhelming that even White House reporters asked questions.
At the White House press briefing on Tuesday, reporters asked national security aide John Kirby about the curiously empty list:
Q And one more question. There are some unnamed countries that are currently involved in the Red Sea initiative. Can you say more about why those countries don’t want to be named? And is it a sign that, you know, countries don’t want to be seen standing with the United States at this moment, you know, in the region?
MR. KIRBY: There are some nations that have agreed to participate and to be a part of this, but they get to decide — they’re sovereign nations — they get to decide how public they want that to be. And I’ll leave it up to them to be able to describe it one way or another since — because not all want to become public. I doubt you’re going to get much — much more out of them.
Kirby cited a “joint statement” that was signed by 44 countries as proof that the U.S. was not “isolated” on the issue. But while the U.S. could summon its allies to sign a piece of paper, it could not convince them to send forces to protect Red Sea shipping. Nor could it muster the will to take out a primitive militia from one of the world’s poorest countries with long supply lines to Iran.
Kirby also said that the U.S. is now conducting a “review” about whether to re-designate the Houthis as a terror group, after President Joe Biden delisted them within days of taking office in 2021. Meanwhile, it leads a “coalition of the unwilling.”
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). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
As we approach the last year of Joe Biden’s term, it’s an opportune moment to reflect back on January of 2021. Our new President had been inaugurated (though we still don’t know that he was elected). Democrats believed the evil Trump had been vanquished from the body politic forever. We were assured that blue-collar Joe from Scranton was going to return normalcy to Washington -- as if that were a good thing.
Biden was riding high in the polls. His “wingmen” were in control of the executive branch. His allies were in power in Congress and his media lapdogs would guarantee that all news was good news. It was a heady time for team Biden.
The Left was giddy too. In Joe Biden, they had found that one kid in the gang who would act on any suggestion and accept any dare. Nothing could stop them now. This would be their opportunity complete the “fundamental change” that Barack Obama had started, but not finished -- because he had a sense of self-preservation that Joe lacks.
So, the Left unleashed their man-child in the candy store without adult supervision. Joe did what any spoiled child would do. He indulged his every wish -- and he wished to play king. He plundered the candy store like a Viking raider, with complete disregard that the sugar-high would be followed by a stomachache. The man-child was oblivious to the notion that in the adult world, choices come with consequences. That’s a lack of wisdom universal to immaturity regardless of whether one is 8 or 80.
Biden’s first year in office was a time of historic action -- and not in a good way.
Goaded by the Left, Joe unleashed his inner id, using his pen and phone to fulfill his lusts, and those of his radical toadies. With every action he considered, his gallery of sycophants remained behind him chanting: Go ahead Joey. Do it. We double dog dare you. And Joe did it -- consequences be damned.
He bragged about beating the tyrant Trump, and signed executive orders at a rate of dozens per day -- to cancel any accomplishment of Trump. It was irrelevant to him if Trump’s achievements were beneficial to Americans. If Donald did it, Joe undid it because… well, just because.
He threw our borders open to foreign invasion, simply because Trump had closed them. Joe’s policies added an additional 3.8 million criminals to our society. That’s enough people to populate Los Angeles -- admitted with no vetting, no control, and no apology.
Joe added $5 trillion to our national debt -- enough $100 bills to reach the Moon and back 10 times. The spending drove inflation to a 40-year high. Interest rates reached a 20-year high, as the Federal Reserve struggled to tame the mess. In so doing, Joe placed home mortgages out of reach for many Americans.
He choked domestic energy production, making us again dependent on foreign oil. Prices for gas and electricity skyrocketed. In the process, he enriched Russia (a producer of oil) and China (a producer of solar and wind technology). We’re expected to pay no attention to the little issue that the Biden family received millions of dollars from Russia and China, for no apparent service.
Joe surrendered unconditionally to the Taliban in Afghanistan. As we fled, 13 soldiers were killed, Joe broke our word to our allies, and he armed a global threat. It was done because he wanted a talking point on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center.
Joe shipped billions of dollars of our war material to Ukraine -- which coincidentally was another multi-million-dollar benefactor of the Biden family. While he armed Ukraine, our own military has fallen to its lowest level of preparedness since before WWII. But our soldiers do get their pronouns correct now.
Joe funded Hamas, using Iran as a financial cutout. Hamas then committed the single largest one-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas’ Bidenbucks facilitated murder, gang rape, kidnapping, and infanticide. While the world watched in horror, Joe went on another beach vacation.
Joe used the power of the executive branch to infringe on our rights of assembly, religion, speech, property, due process, and self-defense. When stopped by the courts, he didn’t comply but pursued workarounds -- showing utter contempt for the Constitution that he is sworn to defend.
He weaponized our criminal justice system, breaking all legal precedents in a childish tantrum to punish anyone whom he disliked. Actual criminal wrongdoing was irrelevant. Political adversaries, pro-life protesters, election deniers, and non-compliant members of the press had their homes raided and faced criminal prosecution via creative application of laws, for purposes that were never intended.
Biden gave a national address standing before a satanic red backdrop with symbols of his military power standing at attention. He dehumanized half of the Americans whom he is sworn to represent, calling them semi-fascists. In other comments he has repeatedly threatened military force against anyone who challenges his government.
Joe Biden’s first year in office was a time of great hubris, for which I’m sure he felt entitled, given his 46 years of “government service.” But Greek philosophy frowns on hubris for a reason:
Hubris was not something you wanted to be accused of if you were in ancient Greece. It was thought to be behavior outside the norm. Most specifically, that behavior in which one would attempt to defy -- or challenge -- the gods. To display such arrogance meant that you became a target of Nemesis and she is inescapable.
So, has Joe:
Acted outside the norm in weaponizing the government against its people? Check.
Defied God by infringing on God-given rights? Check.
Displayed arrogance by ignoring his oath and the courts? Check.
Joe dared Nemesis, the Greek Goddess of Divine Retribution, to pay him a visit. It seems that Nemesis has now arrived, signaling that the party has ended, and the hangover has begun.
As we near the end of Joe’s first term, his last year looks very different from the first.
Biden’s approval is down to 34 percent, and that doesn’t appear to be the floor.
The party he leads is losing the minority vote, and tearing itself apart over its hatred of Jews.
His son is facing felony charges for being the collections guy in the family bribery business.
The House of Representatives has opened an impeachment investigation, because the corruption became too great to ignore.
Biden faces the possibility that his legacy will be as America’s most corrupt President.
The public is ridiculing him for his inability to navigate stairs or stages.
His friends are abandoning him.
His nemesis Trump is poised to exact revenge in 11 short months.
If Biden were an adult, he might reflect on the last three years and wish that he’d simply exercised a bit of self-control. But that’s not who Joe Biden is. President “Man-Child” will spend his last year stamping his feet, denying any wrongdoing, and demanding more candy.
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