A prayer to Allah to “destroy the enemies of Islam, and annihilate the heretics and the atheists” is not just a request directed to the deity. The Qur’an explicitly says that Allah will punish people by the hands of the believers: “Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the breasts of a believing people, and remove the fury in the believers’ hearts.” (9:14-15) Thus Kathrada may be issuing a call to action to believers who think it incumbent upon themselves to heed this Qur’anic directive and become instruments of Allah’s wrath.
Former Miami Heat and Dwyane Wade Foundation Employee Embraces Muslim Extremism
Ancel Pratt working with Emgage, ICNA and radical mosques.
Joe Kaufman is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center; a writer for the Counter-Islamist Grid, a project of the Middle East Forum; and the Chairman of the Joe Kaufman Security Initiative. He was the 2014, 2016 and 2018 Republican Nominee for U.S. House of Representatives (Florida-CD23).
Ancel Pratt III has done much in his life. Through hard work, he was able to overcome a severe football injury; become the Student Body President of his university; land a job with the Miami Heat professional basketball team, eventually to take the position of team Community Affairs Coordinator; manage business operations and plan projects for Heat star Dwyane Wade’s foundation; and establish his own real estate company. However, Pratt has as well done much to ruin these accomplishments, by getting himself heavily involved with dangerous company, specifically radical Muslim groups associated with bigotry and overseas terrorism.
Since September, Pratt has been the Florida Director of Operations for Emgage, an Islamist organization attempting to disguise its sinister agenda as political advocacy. Emgage’s founder and Chairman is Khurrum Wahid, a South Florida attorney who built his name by providing legal representation to high-profile terrorists, including al-Qaeda operatives and Taliban financiers. According to the Miami New Times, Wahid himself was placed on a federal terrorist watch list in 2011. Prior to Pratt, one of the leaders of Emgage in Florida was Syed Ammar Ahmed. In February 2010, following a debate he participated in at a school, Ahmed wrote that he “hates white people” and joked that he “should have threatened to blow up the school.”
According to his Emgage bio, Pratt has been “working with” the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). ICNA is the US arm of South Asian Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). JI’s former militant wing, al-Badr, was responsible for many of the massacres that took place during the 1971 genocide against the citizens of what is now known as Bangladesh, where Pratt’s wife Tamanna is from. One of the death squad leaders of the genocide, Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, is currently affiliated with ICNA and has been for decades, serving in ICNA’s leadership. Though still alive, Khan was sentenced to death, himself, in absentia, in November 2013. ICNA has used the web to promote various terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.
In February 2014, Pratt spoke at an event for WhyIslam, the dawah (Islamic outreach) division of ICNA. Up until recently, WhyIslam featured a message board on its official website, where the forum moderators used it to post messages in favor of Hamas and the destruction of Israel. On the WhyIslam show, Islamic Perspective, Imam Isam Rajab justified the death sentence for an Iraqi Muslim who had converted to Christianity, saying “[O]nce you are a Muslim, you have to agree on the terms. You cannot come again and say, ‘Well, I’m changing now and I’m playing around.’” In the WhyIslam website text, titled Gender Equity in Islam, by Jamal Badawi, it states that, in the case of disobedient wives, if all else fails, their husbands can “beat them (lightly).”
Pratt has boasted that he has donated funds to both ICNA and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was created in June 1994 as a part of a terrorist umbrella group, the US Palestine Committee, headed by then-global leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. CAIR was named by the US government as a party to the financing of Hamas, during the two federal trials against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF); HLF, like CAIR, was a Palestine Committee member. A number of CAIR officials have been convicted of terror-related crimes. The CAIR fundraiser that Pratt promoted was initiated by CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, who infamously stated, in March 1994, “I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO.”
Pratt shares Facebook posts made by Abdur Rahman al-Ghani, the ex-Youth Director and Events Coordinator for the Islamic Foundation of South Florida (IFSF) and Pratt’s Facebook ‘Friend.’ Al-Ghani uses Facebook to post the worst of bigotry, including that Jews are “the children of Satan,” “demonic” and “the most evil on earth”; the US is the “Worlds Number One Terrorist Organization”; “Islam will dominate the world”; and gay Muslims are “stone cold kaffirs outside the fold of Islam.” In April 2014, IFSF hosted a talk by Mazen Mokhtar, a former admin for the now-defunct al-Qaeda recruitment site, qoqaz.net. This past September, representing Emgage, Pratt, who is a congregant at IFSF, partnered with IFSF to host a candidate forum.
Ancel Pratt had much to be proud of in his life, but he has destroyed it all by surrounding himself with Muslim extremist groups and individuals. Instead of being known as the guy who worked his way up in the Miami Heat organization and the NBA – with two Championship rings to show for it – he will sadly be known as a guy who embraced those associated with terrorism and bigotry. Pratt is using his prestige and name recognition to promote an ideology which is antithetical to the society that enabled his fame and is quickly tearing down the very foundations on which his success was based upon.
Having involvement with Emgage, ICNA, CAIR and IFSF, like Pratt does, is nothing to be boastful about or honored for. To the contrary, it is something to be condemned and investigated for.
Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.
California
On December 21, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, a $2.3 trillion bill that pulled together a number of different pieces of legislation, including a $900 billion coronavirus relief bill and a $1.4 trillion appropriations bill (which included 12 separate annual appropriations bills). Today’s news is that Trump is refusing to sign the bill into law. Here’s what’s at stake: the bill provides $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits on top of state benefits, and without it, expanded unemployment benefits ran out today for millions of Americans. The bill increases the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food support program by $13 billion, and allocates $25 billion in assistance to help pay past-due rent. It also provides $20 billion to buy more vaccines and about $8 billion distribute them. The bill also calls for a one-time $600 direct payment to individuals. That’s the coronavirus relief piece of the measure. Another piece is the regular appropriations bill for the 2021 federal fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2021. This includes military spending, aid to foreign countries, and the money that keeps federal programs afloat. It has $1.4 billion allocated to the wall on our southern border. Congress should have passed this appropriations bill in time for the start of the 2021 fiscal year on October 1, 2020, but it didn’t, so it has kept the government funded through continuing resolutions. The one under which we are currently operating expires at midnight on Monday, December 28. Here’s the third piece of the measure. More than 3000 of the 5593 pages of this massive bill are additional measures that have nothing to do with the first two. They extend tax breaks from previous laws, amounting to tax cuts of about $200 billion. They include money for flood control and coastal protection. They fund community health centers and historically Black colleges and universities. They reauthorize intelligence programs for 2021. They establish the Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (although it appears they do not allocate money for them, but simply authorize their establishment, as required by law). The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 passed Congress by large bipartisan majorities. Trump has not called congressional Democratic leaders in more than a year, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was part of the negotiations, and spoke for the White House. Everyone expected that, after Congress had passed the bill, Trump would sign it into law. But he left for Mar-a-Lago on December 23 without signing it, and is threatening not to. In a surprise video on Tuesday, December 22, he called the legislation “a disgrace.” He complained about the $600 stimulus checks—it was Mnuchin who insisted on that amount—and demanded the amount be raised to $2000. He also complained about “wasteful spending and much more,” although some of the things he called out, including funds for Egypt and the Egyptian military and money for the Kennedy Center, were his own requests. Republicans were stunned by his sudden hostility. Democrats, who had wanted higher stimulus payments all along, promptly tried to pass a stand-alone $2000 payment measure through the House, but were stopped by Republicans. Trump’s sudden hostility to a bill that took months to hammer out is disastrous for millions of Americans whose expanded unemployment benefits ran out today and whose state benefits are long gone. It also threatens to force a government shutdown. So, what’s Trump up to? A couple of things. First, he is furious with Senate Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Majority Whip (the second most powerful Republican in the Senate, who enforces party discipline) John Thune (R-SD), both of whom have acknowledged that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Trump continues to insist that he won “by a landslide” and that the election was stolen. He is incensed by any Republican who has not signed on to his crusade, yet as he relies more and more on marginal figures like his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Biden’s victory becomes more and more secure, party leaders are distancing themselves from him. Tonight, he tweeted that it is “[t]ime for Republican Senators to step up and fight for the Presidency….” Now, though, Republican leadership needs him to sign this bill to help Republican Senate candidates in Georgia. Democrats in the House passed coronavirus relief back in May, but McConnell objected to anything of the sort until after the election, when it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on the outcome of a runoff for both Senate seats from Georgia. In that state, the two Republican candidates are having a hard time because voters are disgusted that there has been so little help coming from the Republicans for people hurt by the economic crisis that came in on the heels of the pandemic. If those Senate seats go the Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the Senate will be balanced 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. In the case of such a tie, the position of the Senate Majority Leader goes to the top member of the party of the U.S. President, meaning that a Democrat would replace McConnell. McConnell assured the Georgia Republican Senate candidates that there would be a coronavirus relief package before Christmas, and they ran on that promise. Now Trump has them over a barrel. That’s one reason he’s suddenly stalling. The other is quite likely that he is angry and frustrated at his impending loss of power, and is lashing out to hurt people. It seems of a piece with the fact that he and then-Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions in July 2019, and that he has sped up the executions of federal prisoners since his November defeat. During his administration, the federal government has executed ten prisoners, more than any president since Grover Cleveland in 1896. This includes executions during the transition to the next administration. Traditionally, presidents stop executions during this period, leaving life-and-death decisions to their successors. One person in conversation with White House officials talked with Jeff Stein of the Washington Post about Trump’s scuttling of the bill and said, “He’s just angry at everybody and wants to inflict as much pain on Congress as possible.” Trump’s supporters are urging him to “pocket veto” the Consolidated Appropriations Act, taking advantage of a weird option at the end of a congressional session. Normally, a president has ten days, not including Sunday, to review and sign a bill. During a congressional session, if the president doesn’t sign a bill within ten days, it becomes a law. But if the congressional session ends within ten days, the bill does not become a law. This is known as a pocket veto. The 116th Congress—this one—officially ends at noon on January 3. If Trump got the bill on December 24, and all indications are that he did, the ten-day window ends on January 4. So, he could, in fact, run out the clock in such a way that Congress could not override his veto. For his part, President-Elect Joe Biden is scathing of the machinations that could leave him inheriting an epic disaster. “[M]illions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of… Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority,” his transition team wrote today. “This abdication of responsibility has devasting consequences.” Biden pointed out that about 10 million Americans will lose their unemployment insurance benefits, paychecks for military personnel will be at risk, a moratorium on evictions expires, small businesses will fail, and distribution of vaccines will falter. “This bill is critical,” he wrote. It needs to be signed into law now. But it is also a first step and down payment on more action that we’ll need to take early in the new year to revive the economy and contain the pandemic….” Biden noted that “In November, the American people spoke clearly that now is a time for bipartisan action and compromise.” Congress has stepped up to the plate with this appropriations bill, Biden said, and added that “Trump should join them, and make sure millions of American can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads in this holiday season.” California Jihadi Planned to Kill People, Then Read Qur’an Until Police ArrivedNot that this has anything to do with Islam. Mon Nov 23, 2020
Yet another blow to the establishment media narrative came Wednesday. The Associated Press reported that Faisal Mohammad, who in 2015 stabbed four people in a classroom at the University of California, Merced, where he was a freshman, “planned to praise Allah while slitting the throats of classmates and use a gun taken from an ambushed officer to kill more.” Then he planned to call 911 to report the killings, “read the Quran until he heard sirens, and then ‘take calm shot after shot’ with the gun” when the police arrived. All this happened while the U.S. government was institutionally and thoroughgoingly committed to the proposition that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. And even after four years of President Trump, that institutional culture hasn’t changed. The detailed plan that Mohammad sketched out for his attack has just been released; it “included putting on a balaclava at 7:45 a.m. and saying ‘in the name of Allah’ before stepping into his classroom and ordering students to use zip-ties he provided to bind their hands. Mohammad also planned to make a fake 911 distress call to report a suicidal guy [sic; this is how they write at AP these days] and wait for police outside the classroom before ambushing from behind ‘and slit calmly yet forcefully one of the officers with guns.’” It was during that wait that he planned to sit down and spend some time in spiritual reading. Yet Mohammad’s attack, as The College Fix reported back in November 2015, was characterized as “revenge for being kicked out of a study group.” The establishment media gave scant attention to the fact that “Mohammad was found to have an image of the ISIS flag, a handwritten manifesto with instructions on how to behead someone, and reminders to pray to Allah.” The university where this jihad attack took place was even worse. The College Fix reported that instead of waking up to the reality of Islamic jihad, many at the University of California-Merced mourned for the attacker, with a Facebook “R.I.P” tribute to Faisal Mohammad “gaining massive support among the campus community.” Even worse, UC Merced faculty hosted a “teach in” that about 200 students attented, entitled “Don’t Turn Our Tragedy Into Hate” that was “conspicuously devoid of discussions of radical Islam, and instead delved into topics such as how society’s notions of masculinity pressure men.” Among the topics discussed at this “teach in” were “What does mental health have to do with this?”; “Why are men more likely to be perpetrators of violence?”; “How do we define our community – what lives are grievable?”; and “What do race and religion have to do with this?” One speaker suggested that the attack was all about men not being allowed to be weak, self-centered, weepy narcissists: “Anger, that is really what we think about when we think about emotional men. They are subject to social sanctions if they deviate from masculinity. If you are perceived as failing at it, you are subject to being called a fag, a pussy, a wimp, pretty much what women are, right? So when you have this limited ability to sort of express your emotions and possible feelings of emasculation, of low self esteem, how do you really [deal with] that? A lot of times they … engage in violence. They need to compensate for their loss of masculinity in the most manly way they have access to, and unfortunately, a lot of times that’s violence.” Yes, you see? Faisal Mohammad stabbed four people just because he was a sensitive soul in a world that was too harsh for him. Why, what other explanation could there possibly be? According to one student who attended the teach in, “‘Islamophobia’ was cited as the reason people want to call it a terrorist attack….‘People were quick to sympathize with the attacker and assume anyone who thought this was related to radical Islam was a xenophobic racist.’” The University of California Merced is no different from any other campus all over the country today: full of indoctrinated bots who have been thoroughly imbued with the notion that when Islamic jihadists attack us, it is our fault. All too many even among law enforcement and counterterrorism officials assume the same thing. No number of Faisal Mohammads, and there will be many more, will convince them otherwise. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate but true that eventually all this denial and willful ignorance is going to blow up in everyone’s face. We can only hope that this doesn’t happen literally. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Egypt: Muslims Kill, Wound Christians in Stabbing SpreeAnd Egypt’s authorities conclude it was a “generic” crime that has nothing to do with religious hate. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article first appeared on Coptic Solidarity. Two Muslim brothers recently went on a stabbing spree targeting Egypt’s indigenous Christian minority, the Copts, in Alexandria, Egypt; one man was killed and two others were severely injured and hospitalized during the rampage. Last reported on Dec. 13, the brothers had been arrested and were to be detained for four days, pending an investigation. According to authorities, they went on their murderous stabbing spree because they were “upset” that their mother had died earlier that day, on Dec. 10. Even the state appointed prosecution denied that their actions had any “religious or sectarian” motivation. However, Fr. Michael Gamil, of the local Coptic Church, witnessed the crime and offered a different account. He said that the two brothers—Nasser Ahmed Muhammad and Ali Ahmed Muhammad—specifically targeted and attacked Christian shopkeepers, whom they referred to as “infidels” (or kuffar), on the street directly behind his church. “The matter began with insults and curses to the shopkeepers for being Christians and Copts,” explained the clergyman. The Copts present in the area responded with patience. Then, when one of them, Ramses, quietly went to close and lock his shop door, the Muslim brothers lunged at and stabbed him with knives. Ramses’ brother, Adel, who ran a grocery store nearby, saw what was happening, rushed to his brother’s aid, and was also stabbed for his efforts. The Muslim brothers then barged into the clothing shop of another Christian, Tariq Fawzi Shenouda, and stabbed him in the torso, near his heart. All three men were hospitalized with serious injuries in intensive care; Ramses died of his wounds. Not content, the two Muslim brothers then entered the same church that Fr. Michael serves in and insulted and cursed another priest, the partially blind Fr. Paul. Fr. Michael continued by asking the all-important question: “They say they started cursing the Copts because their mother died; and two years earlier, they cursed the Copts because their brother died: what do [familial] deaths and the Copts have to do with each other??” He underscored that the two brothers have for years been in the habit of verbally harassing and insulting Christians—though clearly they have taken their hate to another level with this latest stabbing spree. The authorities know full well that this murderous incident was motivated by religious hate, concluded Fr. Michael, but, as usual, are reluctant to admit it, as doing so would damage Egypt’s reputation. “Copts were peacefully working in their stores, and these brothers barged in saying ‘you infidel Copts.’ That is clearly sectarian.” |
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