Afghan Refugees in US Indicted on Assault Charges
Afghan refugees indicted for child molestation, spousal abuse
Two Afghan refugees have been indicted on assault charges stemming from incidents at a military base in Wisconsin that houses thousands of recently evacuated Afghan nationals.
A federal grand jury indicted Bahrullah Noori, 20, on charges that he tried to molest two underage boys. The grand jury issued a separate indictment against Mohammad Haroom Imaad, 32, on charges that he strangled and suffocated his wife. Noori and Imaad were among 12,500 refugees airlifted from Afghanistan to Fort McCoy during the U.S. military withdrawal last month.
The cases are likely to stoke concerns about the government's vetting process for the 100,000 refugees brought to the United States during the airlift. Gov. Tony Evers (D., Wis.) accused conservatives last month of engaging in "dog whistle crap" for questioning the screening process. Republicans have cast doubt on the Biden administration's ability to screen for suspected terrorists and other criminals. Speaking at an event at Fort McCoy on Aug. 31, Evers said that Republicans were "vastly uninformed" about the screening process.
Days earlier, Evers welcomed the refugees to Wisconsin, saying that "a lot of families, a lot of women, a lot of kids" were being housed at Fort McCoy. "They were vetted when they were in Europe. They were vetted when they were in the U.S. So I feel very confident what's happening is the right thing," Evers said.
According to an FBI affidavit, Noori was caught molesting a 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old boy in a bathroom at Fort McCoy. A witness caught Noori trying to have sex with the 14-year-old and later trying to kiss the younger boy.
The boys told investigators that Noori fondled them repeatedly and pressured them to have sex, according to the affidavit.
Imaad was arrested days after his wife said he beat and choked her during an incident on Sept. 7. The woman said that Imaad had abused their children, and that he had raped her and threatened to kill her while they were at Fort McCoy. She said that Imaad told her that 9 Afghan women had been killed at Fort McCoy and that she would be the 10th. She also said that Imaad threatened to send her back to Afghanistan, where she would fall into the hands of the Taliban.
It is unclear what qualified Noori and Imaad for refugee status. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for details on their qualification as refugees. Evers's office also did not respond to a request for comment about the cases.
Noori and Imaad appeared in federal court on Sept. 16 and are being held at the Dane County Jail, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.
Noori faces a minimum of 30 years in prison if convicted. Imaad faces up to 10 years in prison.
Published under: Afghanistan, Refugees, Tony Evers
Given that the constitution also contained the proviso that nothing in it can be construed to contradict sharia law, how were Muslim men and women, 99% of whom support sharia, make sense of this imperialist cultural hubris?
Hilton: Biden is an 'utterly mediocre machine-politician, surrounded by amateurs'
Biden Administration Blocks Rescue of Persecuted Christians from Afghanistan
Just as the Obama administration did to the Christians of Syria.
[Order David Horowitz's 'Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America': HERE.]
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Biden administration is preventing the rescue of persecuted Christian minorities from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, where they face certain and likely gruesome death.
This information surfaced on August 26, 2021, during an interview between Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Through his charity, the Nazarene Fund, Beck had managed to charter planes to airlift 5,100 Christians out of Afghanistan and into neighboring nations. Before long, however, U.S. officials intervened and prevented the escape of a batch of 500 Christians, mostly women and children, who were ordered outside of the airport’s protection zone: “I have pictures of them pleading to get back through the gate,” Beck continued:
And then I have pictures of blood and body parts and nothing but death in that same area [where they were confined]. We believe that our State Department is directly responsible… I don’t know how many [of these 500 Christians] survived. The State Department has blocked us every step of the way. The State Department and the White House have been the biggest problem. Everyone else, everyone else, has been working together, putting aside differences and trying to get these people to safety. The State Department and the White House have blocked us every single step of the way. In fact, an ambassador was called in Macedonia last night and told not to accept any of these people, as we were trying to get them off of the tarmac here, to keep the airport flowing, and getting these Christians out. We haven’t really been able to move anybody for about 12 hours. Our mission is now changing greatly. We have to send people into even greater danger to try to smuggle these Christians out, who are marked not just for death, but to be set on fire alive because they’re converted Christians.
Beck, it should be noted, is not exaggerating. According to one recent report, “Taliban militants are even pulling people off public transport and killing them on the spot if they're Christians.” Similarly, any Afghan caught with a Bible app on their phone is executed. “How we survive daily only God knows,” a Christian Afghani said earlier this year on condition of anonymity. “But we are tired of all the death around us.”
According to the World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith, Afghanistan is the worst Muslim nation in the world in which to be Christian. This is saying much, considering that nearly 80 percent of all persecution Christians experience around the globe is committed by Muslims and/or in the Islamic world. Afghanistan is, moreover, considered the second-worst nation in the entire world, just after North Korea:
It is impossible to live openly as a Christian in Afghanistan. Leaving Islam is considered shameful, and Christian converts face dire consequences if their new faith is discovered. Either they have to flee the country or they will be killed…. Afghanistan remains the second highest country on the World Watch List, and persecution is only very slightly less oppressive than in North Korea. The Islamic State group and the Taliban continue to have a strong, violent presence in Afghanistan, with the Taliban controlling large regions…. All Christians in Afghanistan are extremely vulnerable to persecution. Areas controlled by the Taliban are particularly oppressive, but there is no safe way to express any form of Christian faith in the country.
The above excerpt was published nine months ago—when a U.S.-supported government ran Afghanistan. Since then, matters have only significantly worsened for Christians, now that the Taliban—whose views and modus operandi is similar to ISIS—has become the official master of Afghanistan.
Ironically, while Afghanistan was always bad for Christians, it became significantly worse in direct response to U.S. intervention Because in many non-Christian majority countries, Christians tend to be conflated with the West in general, and America in particular—based on the popular but erroneous belief in the Muslim world that the West and America are Christian—Afghan Christians were especially targeted after the 2001 U.S. invasion as a form of “collective punishment.”
Indeed, even Christians in neighboring Pakistan got attacked; according a 2011 report:
Life on any given day for Pakistani Christians is difficult. But members of Pakistan’s Christian community say now they’re being persecuted for U.S. drone attacks on Islamic militants hiding on the border with Afghanistan. The minority, which accounts for an estimated one percent of the country’s 170 million [mostly Muslim] population, says because its faith is strongly associated with America, it is targeted by Muslims.
“When America does a drone strike, they come and blame us,” explained one Christian. “They think we belong to America. It’s a simple mentality.”
On the other hand, because U.S. and Western leadership are very careful not to show interest in Christian minorities—a sentiment that goes hand in hand with Western acquiescence to Islamic sensibilities—they are more prone to turn a blind eye to the persecution of Christians than even some Muslim governments.
Worst of all, not only has the U.S. exacerbated and then totally ignored the plight of Christians in Afghanistan, it is now going out of its way to prevent others, as noted by Beck, from helping to evacuate Christians to other nations willing to accept them.
Beck, it should be noted, is not alone in his accusation: “I’ve heard similar reports,” said Senator Tom Cotton:
I know that our people on the ground inside the airport, both the Department of Defense and intelligence agents and our State Department officials are trying to move heaven and Earth to get people into the airport and out of the country, but the senior leadership at the State Department is a different kettle of fish.
At one point in his interview with Carlson, Beck mentioned two nations that were being cooperative in helping him rescue Christians—though he was anxious to add, “I don’t even want to say who they are, because I’m afraid our State Department will call them and threaten them!”
“I don't know why we have open borders and closed airports,” Beck concluded his interview. While it is easy for all sorts of illegals to cross over the porous US/Mexico border, “one group of people”— he said referring to persecuted Christians—is not even allowed to enter airports, and are abandoned to be “raped, exploited and crucified or set on fire by terrorists,” said Beck, before adding, “There seems to be a pattern with the Biden administration.”
In fact, this is a pattern begun by the Obama administration. Biden—who it bears recalling was for eight years Obama’s vice president—is merely continuing it. Under Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency, the White House and State Department engaged in all sorts discriminatory measures against Christians, particularly during the refugee crisis that occurred during the rise of ISIS under Obama’s watch.
The Obama administration's discrimination against Christians was so obvious, in fact, that in late 2016, a federal appellate court filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, in which Judge Daniel expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country”:
Perhaps 10 percent of the population of Syria is Christian, and yet less than one-half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.... To date, there has not been a good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy.
The numbers were even more perplexing when examined in full context. Although the U.S. government had acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians in Syria due solely to their religious identity, it brought into the United States only those who by definition were not in any way being targeted by ISIS — Sunni Muslims, of whom ISIS, a Sunni organization, identifies with and does not attack. Despite these two all-important facts — and despite the fact that Sunnis were about 75% of Syria's population, and Christians about 10% — 99% of those brought to America were Sunni Muslims and under 0.5% were Christian. As CNS news noted in 2016, “Record 499 Syrian Refugees Admitted to US So Far in May Includes No Christians.”
In other words, even if one were to operate under the assumption that refugee status should have been made available to all Syrians, regardless of who was and was not being persecuted, there should have been 20 times more Christians and about one-quarter fewer Sunnis granted refugee status under Obama.
This, of course, leads to another pattern established by Obama and continued by Biden: while preventing true victims of Islamic terror from escape or entry into the US, the Biden administration is granting refugee status to countless, un-vetted male Muslims from Afghanistan—not a few of whom share in the same worldview as ISIS and the Taliban.
This article was first published by the Gatestone Institute.
Tragedy, Therapy, and the Challenge of Jihad
The cost of our therapeutic delusions and cultural arrogance.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
After a year of righteous anger and renewed patriotism, post-9/11 America returned to many of the dysfunctional orthodoxies and bad received wisdom that had helped pave the way for al Qaeda’s success. Foreign policy in particular quickly shifted from punitive kinetic realism to enhance our prestige and create deterrence, to nation-building idealism and cringing “diplomatic outreach.” But this “rules-based international order” foreign-policy thinking itself was a consequence of a long shift in Western culture from tragic realism to therapeutic idealism that permeates our culture and accounts for many of its utopian fantasies.
Twenty years later, the debacle in Afghanistan shows that when it comes to Islam, we are still crippled by our therapeutic delusions.
The tragic view of human life derives from both our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. It can be summed up in a line from Euripides: “To suffer is necessity for mortals.” We are beings driven by destructive passions and impulses, yet possessing as well conscious minds and free will. We live in a hostile natural world indifferent to our pain and suffering. We are bound by time and vulnerable to change and the consequence of choices that we can’t foresee. Our world is defined by those limits, and no human effort, no philosophy, no social or political order we create can transcend them or our destructive passions.
Modernity is defined by its claims to correct this tragic world through human knowledge, technology, and the progressive improvement of humanity by eliminating those tragic constants that create our misery and suffering. Educate people to know their true best interests, remove or reform tyrannical governments, provide adequate nutrition and health-care, and create freedom and prosperity, then people will become peaceful, free, and tolerant. Pain, suffering, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” injustice, bigotry, cruelty, hunger, and even emotional pain caused by our own bad choices––remove these tragic conditions of human existence and we can create heaven on earth.
Or as Dr. Joyce Brothers, for 50 years a celebrity psychologist and popular advice columnist, put it, “Love, power, riches, success, a good marriage, exciting sex, fulfillment are not impossible dreams. They can be yours if you want them.” That is the therapeutic sensibility: failure, misery, and suffering are not the tragic constants of human existence, but anomalies that can be corrected by modern “human sciences.” Utopia, “no-place” in Greek, can become a reality.
The West has been seeking this utopia for over a century, influencing how we conduct foreign affairs. Idealistic internationalism began to shape our thinking about conflict and war. Rather than see war, as Plato did, as the “natural state” of relations among nations, and peace as “just a name,” we made war and conflict the anomalies to be corrected by privileging non-lethal diplomatic outreach, supranational institutions, international courts and laws, foreign aid, and multinational treaties and covenants.
Two world wars, serial ethnic cleansing, and gruesome genocides that slaughtered over 200 million people in the last century were the grim, tragic challenge to that optimism. Yet from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, this foreign policy idealism came to define how we conduct international relations––as the therapeutic mechanism for creating a “new world order,” as George H.W. Bush called it, “where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”
These dubious assertions of a universal human longing for political goods and principles that developed in the West, but were applied to a complexly diverse global population, were seconded by George W. Bush, and influenced the “war on terror” we have been waging against Islamic jihad. How we viewed that enemy, moreover, also reflected the therapeutic imperative not to say anything that hurt anybody’s feelings, even our enemies’. Our defense and national security establishments were further limited by the West’s reflexive guilt over colonialism and imperialism, and its unwillingness to “blame the victim” because environmental, social, and political forces, along with historical injustices like colonialism, have determined his bad behavior. Hence our foreign policy establishments refused to confront the reality of historical Islam and its doctrines, and their role in jihadist terror.
So too our universities and media. Right after 9/11 many in our universities attributed the attacks to our own historical crimes. Typical were the comments of the dean of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He advised Americans to “think about our own history” such as the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. A Brown University English professor equated the attacks to the first Gulf War, which was “also terrorism.” A University of North Carolina teach-in demanded that the President apologize to “all the millions of victims of American imperialism.”
Such comments set the pattern for subsequent interpretations of the attacks, all of which reduced the followers of a 14-centuries-old faith to passive victims lacking agency or their own motivations. In 2007, the Society of Professional Journalists promulgated guidelines for covering Muslims that included rules such as “when writing about terrorism, remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity,” an egregiously false comparison. Phrases like “Muslim terrorism,” “Islamic terrorist,” or “Muslim extremists” were also proscribed.
Writer Bruce Bawer, analyzing a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times puff-piece about a Brooklyn Imam, in 2009 wrote that the “article was a prime example of the way the mainstream media cover Islam today: emphasize personal and superficial details that are likely to generate sympathy while side-stepping or whitewashing core beliefs, domestic arrangements, social rules, and long-term political goals that might actually inform––enlighten, and therefore alarm–– readers.”
In other words, approach the topic of Islamic jihad from the therapeutic angle focused on the personal and emotional, while ignoring the tragic truth about jihad documented in word and deed for 14 centuries.
Such avoidance of fact shaped the federal government’s responses as well. An assistant to the Secretary of State from the Clinton administration announced that there was no conflict between Islam and “such Western ideal as personal freedom or individual choice”––sheer ignorance about the tenets of sharia law that big majorities of global Muslims believe is “the revealed word of God,” and hence cannot be revised or altered.
Similarly, a “fact sheet” from the State Department claimed, “Most Americans and most Muslims share fundamental values such as peace, justice, economic security, and good governance.” Apparently, the author missed Koran 5:51, “O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends,” for “whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them,” i.e. an apostate who must be killed.
And George W. Bush continued this bad habit, proclaiming that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.” The President seemed unfamiliar with this Koranic verse: “I [Allah] will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads,” or Mohammed’s farewell address, “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’”
This willful blindness explains the attempt to redefine “jihad” to mean not holy war, but “to strive in the path of god,” as the National Counterterrorism Center put it; or “a quest to find one’s faith or an external fight for justice,” as the New York Times opined, begging the question of what exactly “justice” means to pious Muslims. Or as Obama’s assistant for Homeland Security, John Brennan scolded, the fight against terrorism is not “against ‘jihadists,” for ‘“jihad’ means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.”
In fact, Danish linguist Tina Magaard’s study of the word’s root in the Koran concludes that only a single reference “explicitly presents the struggle as an inner, spiritual phenomenon . . . But this sole reference does not carry much weight against the more than 50 references to actual armed struggle,” with “even more in the Hadith.”
These distortions of traditional Muslim beliefs continues to dominate official understandings of Islamic jihad. They serve the therapeutic idea that our alleged historical colonial and imperial sins, along with the lack of economic development and liberal democratic governments, accounts for the thousands of terrorist attacks by self-proclaimed Muslim jihadists traumatized by those crimes. This assumption that secular Westerners know Islam better than Muslims who are willing to kill and die for their faith bespeaks the arrogance and cultural centrism of the West. Since we have banished faith to the ghetto of the private, we cannot imagine that there exists a faith that sanctions intolerance and sacralizes violence. Thus external forces and Western crimes and bigotry must have driven Muslims to “hijack” their faith and distort it for evil ends.
This interpretation would have astonished most Western peoples before World War II, when the historical memory of centuries of Islamic conquest, occupation, raiding, and slaving had not yet faded. Take, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1838 assessment of Islam:
Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. . . . The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels . . . . [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran . . . . The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.
Just a judgement from a bigoted Westerner? Consider the response of the representative of the Pasha of Tripoli in 1785 to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who were protesting against Barbary States’ privateers preying on American and European ships and kidnapping their crews: It was “written in the Koran that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find.” Are we to believe that John Brennan and other specious apologists know Islamic doctrine better than a believer?
Finally, these bad therapeutic habits of distorting Islam in order to placate Muslims characterized the doomed attempts to bring liberal democracy and our notion of equal rights to a Muslim nation like Afghanistan. One example of our efforts can stand in for the whole misbegotten effort predicated on arrogance and an ignorance of Islamic doctrines and sharia law. As the columnist “Cockburn” reported of “nation-building” in Afghanistan, “Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance,’ so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’”
Moreover, “Under the U.S.’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house—higher than the actual figure in America!” The bill for that folly, by the way, was nearly a billion taxpayer dollars. Given that the constitution also contained the proviso that nothing in it can be construed to contradict sharia law, how were Muslim men and women, 99% of whom support sharia, make sense of this imperialist cultural hubris?
Historian Robert Conquest once wrote about “the absolutely crucial problem of making the intellectual and imaginative effort not to project our own ideas of common sense or natural motivation onto the products of totally different cultures.” Those who fail to make that effort “assume that the light of their own parochial common sense is enough. And they frame policies based on illusions.”
For twenty years we have willfully refused to make that effort, and made “policies based on illusions.” As a consequence, committed jihadists who sheltered the 9/11 attackers are on the brink of creating a globally recognized nation that will harbor other jihadist outfits. Such is the price of our therapeutic delusions and cultural arrogance.
Pakistan: Armed Muslims Abduct, Forcibly Convert, Rape Hindu Girl for Three Months
Why did this horror story not make headlines across the world?
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A story of horror that should have made headlines on news portals across the world has been masterfully swept under the rug. Is this how media outlets deal from Islamic barbarity?
The incident has been reported from Pakistan’s Sindh province. A young Hindu girl named Tamana Meghwad was allegedly abducted by a group of armed Muslims in the province and was gang-raped for over three months. They also forced Tamana to convert to Islam. There are no records of Pakistan’s administration making any arrangement to rescue this girl or extend any kind of assistance to her family to locate her. After months of assault and molestation, the girl somehow managed to escape and return to her parents.
While the shocking incident was astutely kept quiet by Pakistan’s domestic media, Rahat Austin shared a video of Tamana Meghwad on Twitter and presented her story to the world at large. Austin, a Christian born in Pakistan, is a human rights activist who had to flee his home country and has been staying in South Korea with his family.
In the video, Tamana seems to be naming her perpetrators as Ghulam Rasool, Allah Baig, and Rasool Baig. She accuses them of kidnapping her, forcing themselves on her, and holding her captive for over three months. Now that she has escaped the captivity, they continue to intimidate her.
Returning home doesn’t guarantee safety for Tamana, as now “she is a Muslim” and she must live like one, and with her kind. Muslims are constantly threatening Tamana and her family.
Apostasy from Islam is not permissible, as per the Sharia law. Islamic law prescribes the death penalty for the crime of apostasy. Though Pakistan claims to be a republic, faith in the supremacy of the Sharia wields an enormous influence on the country’s judicial system. Hence, the toothless administration that showed itself incapable of rescuing an abducted girl continues to demonstrate its powerlessness and stands as a silent spectator while the Muslim hoodlums torment the beleaguered family from the minority community.
Tamana was captured from the Kunri area, which is located in the Umerkot district of the Sindh province. More than 90% of Pakistan’s total Hindu demography, comprising 2-4% of Pakistan’s total population, lives in Sindh. They are mostly scattered across border districts including Umerkot, Mirpurkhas, Tharparkar, Sanghar, and, Ghotki.
Thousands of Hindu girls have been abducted from these regions; these girls either end up as sex slaves or are pushed into forced marriages after religious conversions. Hindu families in this region are economically backward, and hail from the marginalized Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe. It is easy to exploit them, and that is exactly what Pakistan is doing as a country. Bonded labor is still a thing in Pakistan, and in most cases, it is the subjugated Hindus from Sindh who are taken in as bonded laborers by feudal landlords. Shamefully, its government has not introduced any reforms to protect these families. The administration has essentially thrown them to the mercy of feudal landlords and hardline Muslims.
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