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
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
WHO ARE JOE BIDEN'S AFGHANS? - OF COURSE, THEY HAVE NO IDEA!
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration, which is mostly a replica of the Obama administration, “gifted” the Afghan radical Islamist Taliban that enabled al-Qaeda training-camps, whose “graduates” attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, at least $85 billion worth of weapons and piles of cash.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may issue work permits to the tens of thousands of Afghans arriving weekly to the United States before completing their vetting.
As part of Biden’s massive resettlement operation out of Afghanistan, he is hoping to resettle about 95,000 Afghans in total across the U.S. over the next 12 months. Already, more than 48,000 Afghans have been flown to the U.S. for permanent resettlement.
Washington, D.C. (September 14, 2021) – The crisis in Afghanistan and the decision to admit tens of thousands of people from that country, with plans to admit more, has raised interest in Afghan immigrants already in the United States. A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies examines their social-demographic characteristics. The findings show dramatic growth in the last decade, with the population concentrated in relatively few states and cities. The data also shows that Afghan men, but not women, have relatively high rates of work. However, reflecting their much lower levels of education, a large share of Afghans live in or near poverty. Although the share with low incomes has not worsened in recent years, their use of non-cash welfare has risen sharply.
“Many Afghan immigrants clearly struggle in the United States, creating significant challenges for them and the country,” said Dr. Steven Camarota, the Center’s director of research and lead author of the report. “Policymaker have to think about how we might better help those who come in the future adapt to life in this county or, alternatively, whether it makes more sense to help them resettle in countries in their own region.”
Among the findings:
The number of Afghan immigrants (also referred to as the foreign-born) in 2019 was 133,000, more than triple the 44,000 Afghans in 2000, and nearly 2.5 times the 55,000 Afghans in 2010.
The share of Afghan immigrants (ages 25-64) with at least a bachelor’s degree fell from 30 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2019, while increasing from 27 percent to 35 percent for native-born Americans.
The share of Afghan immigrants without a high school diploma has remained roughly constant and was 22 percent in 2019 – three times the 7 percent for the native-born.
In 2019, the share of all Afghan immigrants (18 to 64) employed was only 64 percent, compared to 75 percent for the native-born. This reflects low rates of work among Afghan women. Among Afghan men, 84 percent were employed, higher than the 78 percent for native-born men.
Many Afghans have low incomes. Of persons in households headed by Afghan immigrants, 25 percent live in poverty — twice the 12 percent for people in native-headed households.
Although the share of Afghan immigrants with low incomes has not worsened in recent years, their use of welfare has increased significantly. In 2019, 65 percent of Afghan households used at least one major program compared to 50 percent in 2010.
Food stamp use by Afghan households increased the most, from 19 percent to 35 percent between 2010 and 2019, while falling from 11 percent to 10 percent for native-born households.
The high rates of welfare use reflect the large share of Afghan immigrants who live in or near poverty and the success of refugee resettlement organizations in signing them up for programs, helping many assimilate into the welfare system.
While many Afghans are poor, a significant share also have high incomes. Of full-time Afghan-immigrant workers, one out of nine earned at least $100,000 a year in 2019.
At 35 percent, the share of children in households headed by Afghan immigrants who live in poverty is more than twice the 16 percent for children in native-born households.
The birth rate of Afghan women (ages 15-44) was 155 per thousand in 2019 — nearly three times the 56 per thousand for native-born women.
Afghan immigrants have high rates of citizenship, with 81 percent who have lived in the country for more than five years having naturalized, compared to 61 percent of all immigrants.
The states with the largest Afghan-immigrant populations are California (54,000), Virginia (24,000), and Texas (10,000). The metropolitan areas with the largest Afghan populations are Washington, D.C. (26,000), and San Francisco and Sacramento, both with 16,000.
Washington Post: Joe Biden Brings Afghans ‘Flagged for Suspected Associations with Terrorists’ to U.S.
President Joe Biden’s administration has brought Afghans to the United States who were later “flagged for suspected associations with terrorists,” the Washington Post reports.
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) vetting records reviewed by the Post, the Biden administration has flagged a total of 44 Afghans as “potential national security risks” after they were brought to the U.S.
A total of 13 of those Afghans are in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody as they undergo more vetting, which includes interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
About 15 of those Afghans have been flagged as “security concerns” and since been turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to be sent back to third safe countries. Some of those 15 Afghans, though, have been released back into the U.S.
The Post reports:
The DHS lists show several Afghans were flagged for suspected associations with terrorists, or whose phones and electronic devices contained information that raised concern among the CBP officers who screen them upon arrival in the United States. CBP and its National Targeting Center are checking Afghan passengers as they land at the two designated arrival sites, Dulles International Airport in Virginia and Philadelphia International Airport. [Emphasis added]
This week, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged that there have been Afghans who failed the federal agencies’ vetting standards but would not give a specific number.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden has brought more than 48,000 Afghans to the U.S. over a 21-day period — indicating that the administration is flying about 2,300 Afghans every day into Philadelphia International Airport in Pennsylvania and Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Already, the population of Afghans brought to the U.S. by Biden in less than a month is more than four times the population of Jackson, Wyoming.
National Public Radio (NPR) reported days ago that Afghans are arriving in the U.S. sometimes with “no paperwork” to prove their identities or with “just scraps of paper.” Likewise, the Associated Press reported that Afghans have been caught lying about their identities or destroying their passports to conceal their true identities.
Meanwhile, the Post previously reported that the Biden administration has brought Afghans to the U.S. who were later “flagged for security concerns.” Likewise, administration officials told CNN that Afghans are arriving in the U.S. who do not have any “documents whatsoever.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby has said he does not know the number of Afghans who have sought resettlement in the U.S. but subsequently were found to have been on terrorist watch lists.
Pentagon officials have told Defense One that “up to 100 of the 7,000 Afghans evacuated as prospective recipients” of Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) seeking permanent resettlement in the U.S. have been “flagged” as “potential matches to intelligence agency watch lists.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Report: Biden’s DHS May Give Work Permits to Afghans Before Vetting Them
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may issue work permits to the tens of thousands of Afghans arriving weekly to the United States before completing their vetting.
As part of Biden’s massive resettlement operation out of Afghanistan, he is hoping to resettle about 95,000 Afghans in total across the U.S. over the next 12 months. Already, more than 48,000 Afghans have been flown to the U.S. for permanent resettlement.
The overwhelming majority of Afghans arriving in the U.S. every day do not qualify for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) or even refugee status. Instead, Afghans are arriving in the hopes of getting “humanitarian parole” and are allowed to land in the U.S. without having completed their immigration processing.
Robert Law with the Center for Immigration Studies writes this week that sources inside the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency have said that top DHS officials are reviewing plans to issue work permits to Afghans before their vetting process is completed.
“Multiple [USCIS] sources tell me that agency leadership (i.e., Biden political appointees) are on the verge of ordering adjudicators to issue work permits first and ‘resolve’ vetting issues later,” Law writes:
Admin Imports Potential Afghan Terrorists, Predators Into U.S.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a committee on which I serve.
The secretary has a lot of explaining to do. In the past month, we have seen a catastrophic failure of policy in Afghanistan by the Biden administration. Over and over and over again, President Biden and top officials in his administration made policy decisions that demonstrated their radical ideology and manifest incompetence.
They allowed military vehicles and weapons, and key infrastructure such as Bagram Air Force Base, to fall into Taliban hands. They left stranded hundreds of Americans and Afghans who risked their lives to support the American military mission.
Further, they loaded tens of thousands of unknown and unvetted Afghans on flights to the United States without sufficient concern for security, public health, or human rights.
Two weeks ago, I toured housing that’s being built at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The camp will house up to 10,000 Afghan evacuees. At the time, there were flights coming in with evacuees every couple of hours. I asked the commanding general what they were doing to ensure each arriving Afghan evacuee had been properly vetted, and he told me that vetting was being done in Afghanistan.
We now know, in fact, that in many cases vetting was inadequate and, worse, in other cases checks weren’t even attempted until they arrived in the United States.
Afghanistan is an exceptionally dangerous place where radical Islam is pervasive. We saw that just two weeks ago when a suicide bombing took the lives of 13 servicemen and women.
Of the roughly 30,000 Afghans already brought to the United States, about one-third had not been sufficiently screened and had to be rescreened. One hundred Afghans triggered security alerts — one of whom had previously been deported after committing rape while in the United States. If even just one or two people among the evacuees are seeking to commit acts of terrorism, we could see a suicide bombing in an American mall, restaurant, or other public venue.
The failure goes beyond security. Afghanistan is also awash in horrific crimes against and abuse of women. According to the World Health Organization, 59% of women are married as child brides and 90% of women are subject to domestic abuse. That behavior is rightly both shunned and criminal in the United States. The Biden administration had a responsibility to ensure that the Afghans being brought to the United States share our values.
We also know that, instead, President Biden imported a potential humanitarian crisis into America. According to documents from the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, there have been numerous incidents at intake centers of sexual abuse in which much older Afghan men have presented young girls as their “wives.” Some of these Afghan men reportedly exploited the withdrawal process itself, and more specifically their access to the United States provided by the Biden administration, to facilitate their abuse.
The administration has so far refused to acknowledge that risk of bringing in thousands of Afghans who haven’t been through adequate vetting, including savages who beat and rape girls they’ve forced into child marriages.
Not only did President Biden surrender to the Taliban, which is right now flying the Taliban flag over the former U.S. Embassy in Kabul, flying Black Hawk helicopters and parading advanced weapons from the U.S. military, he brought potential terrorists and predators onto U.S. soil. That is inexcusable. America needs answers, and we need them now.
Ted Cruz is a United States Senator for the state of Texas.
Exclusive–Tragesser: Is President Biden Leading Us Towards Another 9/11?
This month marks the 20th anniversary of America’s largest terrorist attack and yet many of the 9/11 Commission’s national security recommendations remain unimplemented.
In many cases, the Biden administration has blatantly ignored those suggested and urgent reforms. The evidence for that is proven by the mounting crisis at the southern border, the wholesale gutting of interior immigration enforcement, and the inadequate vetting of Afghan refugees seeking resettlement. The administration’s reckless approach jeopardizes national security and it must reverse course in order to avoid another catastrophe like September 11, 2001.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the federal government issued a security framework to protect the United States from another attack. Key parts of this framework addressed dangerous deficiencies in our immigration system including securing and managing our borders, and enforcing and administering immigration laws.
And yet the Biden administration categorically weakened all of these defenses through executive orders and memorandums. On his first day in the Oval Office, President Biden signed executive orders to halt border wall construction, to terminate the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, and to freeze asylum cooperation agreements with the Northern Triangle countries.
As a result of these actions, the southern border remains porous as ever. Apprehension totals have climbed to figures not seen in two decades. Individuals are arriving from extra-continental, terror-prone nations with some listed on the nation’s terror watch list and others having serious criminal backgrounds. Our newly triumphant enemies—including the Taliban, ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda—recognize that our nation’s borders are more vulnerable than ever.
The administration’s dangerous and politically driven immigration actions and policies over the past nine months ignore or defy nearly every one of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.
The administration refuses to enforce and administer immigration laws—a second crucial priority recommended by the Commission. Biden’s moves exempt virtually all illegal aliens from arrest and deportation. In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations fell to the lowest totals on record. In May, the agency’s 6,000 officers were averaging one arrest every two months.
Some 14 million illegal aliens reside in the United States today—many of whom the government knows nothing about. While the vast majority do not pose security risks, the events of 9/11 demonstrate that it only takes a handful of bad actors to lead to tragedy.
Aside from the illegal immigration crisis, the administration’s handling of the Afghan refugee crisis also does little to prevent terrorism and enhance national security—the third pillar of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.
The administration’s resettlement strategy of Afghan refugees is a colossal disaster. It evacuated at least 41,000 Afghans to the U.S. But only a fraction of these individuals are Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders who helped the U.S. military in some capacity. The rest are unknown individuals who made it to the airport tarmac before the evacuation deadline on August 31.
A recent report revealed that at a Washington D.C. area-based processing center, evacuees carried scraps of paper for identification or no paperwork at all. Another report revealed that out of a group of more than 30,000 evacuees from Afghanistan to the U.S., about 10,000 required additional screening and authorities flagged 100 for possible ties to the Taliban or terror groups. A previously-deported convicted rapist was among those who arrived in an evacuee flight to the U.S.
It is difficult to determine with any certainty who many of these individuals are. No U.S. embassy remains in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is in complete control of most records.
Despite these troubling ambiguities, the administration wants to resettle these unvetted Afghan evacuees as quickly as possible into American communities. It pushed to authorize drivers licenses for evacuees—which proved to be critical in the 9/11 terrorists’ ability to commit terror on the nation. It requested $6.4 billion in relief money from Congress for Afghans. Some evacuees can leave military bases unsupervised, according to first-hand experience from a Wisconsin lawmaker.
The Biden administration has had numerous opportunities to address and fulfill many of the 9/11 Commission’s national security recommendations. Instead, it has done the opposite. It has created a porous southern border that is attracting unvetted migrants from extra-continental and terror-prone nations. Its lax enforcement of immigration laws shields dangerous criminal aliens from arrest and deportation. Its Afghan refugee resettlement approach has brought in thousands of unvetted refugees from the highest-ranked terror-prone country in the world. And now, many terror groups are looking to capitalize and exploit these vulnerabilities. This is a bad combination, to the say the least.
We cannot solve all our national security threats by fixing our immigration system. However, starting there would be one of the most effective, practical, and inexpensive ways to reduce the risks of terrorism. Without reversing course, the administration poses unacceptable risks of future attacks to the United States.
Sunni Group Claiming to Represent Hundreds of Millions of Muslims Endorses Taliban Regime
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader who founded the International Union of Muslim Scholars. (Photo bny Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) – On the day America marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack, an international group of Islamist scholars founded by a Muslim Brotherhood theologian endorsed the Taliban regime that seized power last month, urging all Afghans to support it.
The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) congratulated Muhammad Hassan Akhund, “prime minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” on the trust which it said the Taliban “and other Afghan parties” had assigned to him to head the new government.
“The Union asked Allah almighty to guide him in leading the brotherly Afghan people to achieve all their aspirations and wishes for security, stability, unity and prosperity,” it said, adding its hopes “that the new government would present an Islamic model of good governance.”
The Arabic statement ended with an appeal to all Afghans to support, advise, and cooperate with the regime, and by affirming its own “keenness to cooperate fully and to provide everything that can be presented to the new government.”
With its headquarters in Qatar, the IUMS claims to represent “90,000 scholars and hundreds of millions of Muslims.” Its Arabic Twitter feed has almost half a million followers.
The IUMS was founded 2004 by the Qatar-based Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader who has stoked controversy with support for Palestinian suicide bombings, and who was listed as a terrorist supporter by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain in 2017.
Qaradawi chaired IUMS until stepping down, aged about 93, in 2018, succeeded by Islamist Moroccan cleric Ahmed al-Raissouni. Qaradawi contracted COVID-19 last spring but the IUMS denied rumors that he had died, and he appears to continue to play a prominent role, with his messages continue to appear in its social media feeds, as recently as Saturday.
The IUMS’ endorsement of the Taliban regime was touted on Twitter by Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem, who noted that, “in addition to congratulations, the message called on all the people of Afghanistan to stand by and support the new government.”
Taliban members pray in Kandahar at a gathering celebrating the U.S. troop withdrawal. Photo by Javed Tanveer/AFP via Getty Images)
The IUMS statement of support comes at a time when no government has yet to formally recognize the regime in Kabul, although Pakistani and Chinese government officials have hinted that eventual recognition could be on the cards, and Uzbekistan last week welcomed the formation of the new government.
Qatar sent its foreign minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani to Kabul on Sunday for talks with Akhund and key members of his cabinet, including interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, a U.S.-wanted terrorist.
“The Foreign Minister of Qatar congratulated the IEA [Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan] leadership and all Afghan people on the Victory and emphasized on boosting bilateral relations and attracting more international humanitarian assistance,” said Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen.
Qatar, whose sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists have caused serious rifts with its Gulf neighbors, has long played an outsized role in Afghan affairs.
It has hosted a Taliban political office in Doha since 2013 and facilitated talks between the fundamentalist group and U.S. officials that led to the Feb. 2020 Doha agreement, as well as “intra-Afghan” talks that failed to prevent the Taliban’s violent takeover of the country.
Qatar is viewed by the Biden administration as a key partner in efforts to manage the crisis moving forward, including in efforts to bring out U.S. citizens and allies left behind when the Kabul evacuation mission ended.
Qatar is home to the Al-Udeid Air Base, a key hub for U.S. Central Command, and is also now housing the U.S. diplomatic effort focused on Afghanistan, led by Ian McCary, who was the deputy chief of mission in Kabul before the evacuation.
Joe Biden Marks 20th Anniversary of 9/11 Criticizing ‘Dark Forces’ in America Against ‘Peaceful Religion’ of Islam
President Joe Biden marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by criticizing Americans for the anti-Muslim anger that occurred in the United States after the attacks took place.
“We also witnessed the dark forces of human nature. Fear and anger. Resentment and violence against Muslim-Americans — true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion,” Biden said in a prerecorded video published for the occasion.
The president said that the principle of “unity” in the country was endangered by the attacks but ultimately prevailed.
“We also saw something all too rare, a true sense of national unity,” he recalled. “Unity and resilience – the capacity to recover and repair in the face of trauma, unity in service.”
Biden released his pre-recorded video, as the White House confirmed Friday he had no plans to address the nation on the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
He began by recalling a friend of his who lost their son in the attacks in New York City and sympathized with the families who lost loved ones in the attacks.
“America and the world commemorate you and your loved ones, the pieces of your soul,” he said.
Biden also recognized the fallen first responders and members of the military who lost their lives in subsequent years.
“It’s so hard, whether it’s the first year or the 20th,” he said.
Biden concluded by citing one of his favorite poets, Ernest Hemingway.
“We find strength in its broken places, as Hemingway wrote. We find light in the darkness, we find purpose to repair, renew, and rebuild,” he said.
What are the 27 Things that the Taliban of Afghanistan Really Want?
It is possible to waste many hours, if not days, reading the world press and listening to pundits go on and on about what it is precisely that the Taliban wants.
You will not find the answer listening to those fast-talking, talk show hosts on either Fox News or CNN.
That is because few from these media organizations have taken the time to do the appropriate research that answers the question, “What do the Taliban want?”
The answer is simple. They want a society of Sunni Muslims ruled according to the principles of Shariah law.
In order to understand Shariah law, from an academic point of view, one has to have read the Quran in Arabic, as well as understand the history of the many sayings of Muhammad (the Hadith in Arabic). One must know how the Quran and these sayings have been interpreted by Muslim judges and jurisprudence for at least the last thousand years, and recognize how the five major Islamic legal systems (four Sunni and one Shia) have ordered and ruled the daily lives of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.
It is a tall order and few Western scholars are up to the mark. But there have been a few who have managed to distill this legal tradition down to its 27 basic principles.
In 2009 researcher Sam Solomon, at the request of British Parliamentarian, the Right Honorable Lord M. Pearson of Rannoch, created a simple chart comparing and contrasting Shariah law with that of British law.
It is an easy read with a ponderous title, “A Comparison Table of Shari’ah Law and English Law prepared by Sam Solomon and Kathryn Wakeling of CCFON for the Debate on 4th June 2009 Regarding the Oral Question Posed by The Right Honourable Lord M. Pearson of Rannoch.”
Here is a direct link to the full document which can be accessed online. It takes no more than a half-hour to read it carefully and the rest is, as some scholars would say, commentary.
The twenty-seven principles outlined in this paper cover issues such as the legal basis upon which a court system is established, the system of governance, the nature of law, the scope of the law, access to justice, the purpose of the court system, the relationships between religion and the state, categories of crimes and punishments, the nature of treason, and that beloved topic of the woke establishment, gender rights and obligations.
Here are some of the most dramatic contrasts between the two legal systems, quoted from the document, comparing Shariah principles and practice with those underlying the British tradition (and in most cases Anglo American common law).
According to Islamic courts:
Inheritance must be apportioned as per Islamic jurisprudence based on the Qu’ran and the Sunnah in which a male’s portion is double that of a female’s, and none is to be given to an unbeliever (kaffir) even if she or he would otherwise be the most legitimately entitled.
In the Anglo legal tradition:
The deceased estate is divided in accordance with the last valid will of the deceased; otherwise in accordance with statutory rules that do not discriminate on grounds of sex or religion.
In the Shariah legal tradition:
Polygamy is expected. Men may marry up to 4 free women with no limit on the number of concubines or sex slaves.
In the Anglo tradition:
Polygamy is the crime of bigamy. The ownership of slaves is a crime. Sexual activity with a person who does not consent involves either rape or sexual assault…
In the Shariah tradition:
Women need written permission to travel and/or a male relative to accompany them.
In the Anglo tradition:
All citizens are free to come and go as they please unless arrested, imprisoned or excluded from private or Government property.
In the Islamic Shariah legal system the following punishments are indicated for the associated crimes:
Adultery: 100 lashes and capital punishment (stoning or beheading by the sword or being hanged or shot)
False allegation of adultery: 80 lashes, loss of the right of being an upright witness
Alcohol consumption of liquor: minimum 80 lashes-may vary but never less than 40
Theft; chopping off the right hand from the wrist
Apostasy: capital punishment
In the Anglo version of this legal tradition.
Life imprisonment is the most serious punishment that is meted out and then only for the most serous crimes such as murder and rape. No corporal punishment is permissible. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that:
No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman and degrading punishment …Adultery and the consumption of alcohol may be regarded as sins but they are not crimes. At most they may be grounds for divorce. Apostasy may be regarded as a sin by the religion against which a person has turned but it is not a crime.
(One must point out that in the U.S., capital punishment is still legal.)
The authority from which Shariah emerges is “revealed by Allah, revealed to Muhammad via the Quran and Sunnah…applied by the Shariah courts.”
The most integrated and complete functioning of a modern Shariah system has been that of Saudi Arabia where these 27 principles have been in place and practice since the 1920s when the Saudis conquered most of Arabia and gave it their tribal name.
Not all Muslim countries implement all aspects of Muslim law. Some like formerly British-occupied Egypt and French-occupied Tunisia have been influenced by European legal models, largely resulting from their pre-independence colonization, where for example Britain tried to modify Shariah by imposing aspects of British common law.
This is not just theory. Today Shariah law is alive and well in the Islamic world and perhaps in its most pristine form in Saudi Arabia, exemplified in this most recent excerpt from the website of the House of Saud itself:
Saudi Royals to abolish public flogging but keep amputation for theft
April 24, 2020
The Saudi Royal Family are planning to abolish flogging as a form of punishment, as part of an effort to improve the Kingdom’s image and human rights record.
When the directive from the Gulf kingdom’s Supreme Court is introduced flogging will be replaced by other non-corporal punishments, possibly imprisonment or fines.
The decision comes as the latest in a series of changes to “outdated” laws introduced since Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power. Reforming the Saudi Royal Family’s reputation is considered a key factor in attracting investment and tourism, and has become even more of an uphill task since the Khashoggi assassination.
The Saudi Royal Family have landed in the headlines a number of times for flogging their subjects, most recently in 2015 when young blogger Raif Badawi was subjected to a public flogging.
He was sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes in weekly public whippings, but a global outrage put a stop to his sentence part way through.
Some other punishments meted out by the Saudis are viewed as human rights concerns and may also be jeopardised, however at this stage hand amputations as a punishment for theft is likely to be kept and is described as a fair punishment under Islamic law.
While Saudi Arabia, which is now threatened by an ever-emboldened Shariah-based theocracy of the Shia variety from Iran, it is trying to show the West that it is “evolving.” You can be sure that the Taliban in Afghanistan will be establishing a Shariah-based state that makes the Saudis look soft by comparison.
As recently as August 19, 2021, The Hindu (a major Indian newspaper) quoted a Taliban leader that the movement is dedicated to imposing Shariah law and does not believe in democracy. Full stop.
None of this is news. It is well documented and after having read Solomon’s report you can go to any good university library and read up on the details of Shariah law and its application in the Islamic world.
As we contemplate the failure of the West after 9/11 to label its enemy as Jihad in the service of Shariah, we must listen carefully to the now victorious Taliban for the goal of the Taliban today is the same as it was twenty years ago; not only the creation of an Islamic state in Afghanistan but a world dominated by Shariah. Jihad is their means towards that end and it will not stop at their national borders.
That is the real meaning of 9/11. Most Americans have yet to wake up to this simple fact.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden has brought more than 48,000 Afghans to the U.S. over a 21-day period — indicating that the administration is flying about 2,300 Afghans every day into Philadelphia International Airport in Pennsylvania and Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
“A thorough review of the historical records provides startling indications that much, if not all, of what we know about Muhammad is legend, not historical fact,” writes Robert Spencer in his new edition of Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins. Therein this bestselling author, scholar, and world-renowned “Islamophobe” details numerous factual, fatal objections to the received faith-based narrative of Islam’s founding by a prophet named Muhammad.
Spencer surveys the historical record of various of various societies like the Byzantine Empire that bore the brunt of Arab invasions in the Middle East and North Africa following Muhammad’s supposed death in 632. The surprising documentary result:
No one who interacted with those who conquered the Middle East in the middle of the seventh century ever seems to have gotten the impression that a prophet named Muhammad, whose followers burst from Arabia bearing a new holy book and a new creed, was behind the conquests.
Spencer notes that “this silence is extremely strange. Islam, in its canonical texts, is an unapologetically supremacist religion.” Tellingly, “coins minted in the 650s and possibly as late as the 670s” by early Islamic caliphs like the Damascus-based Umayyads make no “reference to Muhammad as Allah’s prophet or to any other distinctive element of Islam.” Some of these coins even feature crosses, but “it is hard to imagine that such a coin would have been minted at all had the dogmatic Islamic abhorrence of the cross been in place at the time.”
Muhammad’s normative biography raises grave doubts for Spencer, based as it is largely on the hadith, or canonical narratives about Muhammad’s words and actions. Spencer observes that Islamic orthodoxy holds that the hadith passed from Muhammad’s lifetime to the ninth century in an uncorrupted oral tradition before Islamic scholars verified and transcribed hadith. “Seldom, if ever, has such a feat of memory been documented,” Spencer skeptically comments.
While theologically the short Quran’s sparse content is Islam’s primary document, “functionally, if not officially, the Hadith are the primary authority in Islam,” Spencer notes. This particularly results from the doctrine in Quran 33:21 and other verses that Muslims should emulate Muhammad, whose biography the hadith minutely chronicles in “dizzyingly voluminous collections.” Additionally, to a large extent, even the “Muslim holy book—not just its Arabic neologisms and turns of phrase -- would be incomprehensible without the Hadith,” Spencer analyzes, which “detail the occasions for the revelation of every passage in the Qur’an.”
The resulting potential for hadith fraud surrounding a holy lawgiver Muhammad is enormous, Spencer observes. Thus, “with Muhammad held up as an exemplar, the Hadith became political weapons in the hands of warring factions within the Islamic world. And as is always the case with weapons in wartime, they began to be manufactured wholesale.” “The consequence of all this was inevitable: utter confusion,” Spencer concludes; the “Hadith is riddled with contradictions.”
Parallel problems plague the Sira or Islamic biography of Muhammad that canonically supplements the hadith in Islamic Sunna or tradition. All accounts of Muhammad ultimately derive from a biography written by Ibn Hisham, who died in 833 almost exactly two centuries after Muhammad, a historian who in turn edited portions of a Muhammad history compiled by Ibn Ishaq, who died in 773. As Spencer notes, “there is simply no alternative to Ibn Ishaq/Ibn Hisham if one wishes to record what the earliest available Islamic sources say about Muhammad.”
This evidentiary record is obviously deficient, Spencer assesses. “Material that circulated orally for as many as 125 years, amid an environment in which forgery of such material was rampant, is extremely unlikely to have maintained any significant degree of historical reliability.” Yet “if Ibn Hisham is not a historically trustworthy source, what is left of the life of Muhammad?” Spencer questions.
Moreover, Muhammad’s orthodox biography is hardly flattering. “The Muhammad of Ibn Ishaq/Ibn Hisham is not a peaceful teacher of the love of God and the brotherhood of man but rather a warlord who fought numerous battles and ordered the assassination of his enemies,” Spencer reviews. Muhammad is “more of a cutthroat than a holy man.”
Muhammad’s biography is not holy writ by any standard, yet his supposed revelation, the Quran, is no better. “For Muslims, the Qur’an is a perfect copy of the perfect, eternal book -- the Mother of the Book (umm al-kitab) -- that has existed forever with Allah in Paradise,” Spencer observes. “This perfect and miraculous book is, however, decidedly imperfect, as even some Muslims have begun to note publicly,” he caveats.
“The Qur’an is, like the Hadith, riddled with contradictions,” Spencer writes, as the example of alcohol across several Quran verses demonstrates. “Alcohol started out as permitted, and then containing some benefit but also leading the believer into sin, with the sin outweighing the benefit, and finally alcohol is the work of Satan,” he notes. This suggests that the Quran was “written by committee, the product of the combination of numerous divergent traditions.”
Even more critically, the “earliest manuscripts of the Qur’an do not contain most diacritical marks,” Spencer notes. He insightfully explains:
Many Arabic letters are identical to one another in appearance except for their diacritical marks -- that is, the dots that appear above or below the character. In fact, twenty-two of the twenty-eight letters in the Arabic alphabet depend entirely on diacritical marks to distinguish them from at least one other letter.
Early Quran manuscripts are not even “consistent in the sets of identical letters they choose to distinguish from one another,” Spencer observes. “The implications of this confusion are enormous,” he correctly concludes. “It is entirely possible that what is taken for one word in that canonical text may originally have been another word altogether.”
Diacritical marks are even more essential for the Qur’an “insists on its Arabic character so often that Islamic theologians have quite understandably understood Arabic to be part of the Qur’an’s very essence,” Spencer notes. In reality, the “Qur’an contains numerous indications of a non-Arabic derivation, or at very least considerable non-Arabic influence.” As the Islamic scholar Christoph Luxenberg, many of the Quran’s notable “oddities become clear when the text is reread in light of the Syriac language and other possible substrata,” Spencer observes. “Many words in this self-proclaimed clear Arabic book are neither clear nor Arabic,” he summarizes.
Reviewing Islam’s canonical farrago, Spencer surmises that the “realm of political theology, then, offers the most plausible explanation for the creation of Islam, Muhammad, and the Qur’an.” “Every empire of the day was anchored in a political theology. The Romans conquered many nations and unified them by means of the worship of the Greco-Roman gods. This Greco-Roman paganism was later supplanted by Christianity,” Spencer notes. Similarly, the “Arab empire controlled, and needed to unify, huge expanses of territory in which different religions predominated.”
Spencer’s analysis easily “explains why Islam developed as such a profoundly political religion.” Likewise, Muhammad “had to be a warrior prophet, for the new empire was aggressively expansionistic.” This clearly found “theological justification” in “Muhammad’s teachings and example.”
Spencer has provided indispensable insight on Islam. As Islamic scholar Volker Popp noted in the book preface, the “material culture of an Islamic past is never judged on its own merits, but only by its usefulness for validating the Islamic myth.” Yet Spencer realized “it was time to get back to real scholarship unhampered by political correctness and the corruption of Saudi money,” stated his colleague Ibn Warraq.
There is a “long scholarly tradition of inquiry into the historical Jesus,” Ibn Warraq noted, but equivalent investigations into Muhammad are far more fraught. “Some of the bold scholars who have investigated the history of early Islam have even received death threats. As a result, some publish under pseudonyms, including scholars of the first rank” like Warraq and Luxenberg, Spencer noted. May more brave individuals follow in his footsteps in uninhibited examination of Islam.
At 8:45 A.M. on September 11, I was on the phone with the editor at the European Wall Street Journal. We were discussing the op-ed about financing terrorism I had written for the paper, which was to run the next day. The TV’s regular morning chatter in the background suddenly changed, and an anxious voice announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We hung up and I rushed to my window, which has a clear view of downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center. At first, I saw smoke rising in the distance; before long a thick, black cloud had engulfed the Twin Towers. Later the sky turned black, and the buildings disappeared altogether. I called the editor back—it was still possible to get a connection to Europe—and after describing the horrors outside my window, I suggested a new lead for the op-ed; I knew instinctively that this was no accident, but a terror attack.
This is how my op-ed titled Evil’s Unwitting Helper appeared on the morning of September 12, 2001. I wrote that “terrorism does not happen in a political vacuum. The policies pursued by Western nations impact directly on both the means available to terrorists and the motivations driving their evil agendas. It is imperative that we assess what has gone wrong and begin to set those policies right."
This is when the idea for writing my book: Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It, which demanded to stop those who make terrorists’ activities possible—the paymasters, so that horror like September 11 never happen again.
It took some time for the U.S. government to confirmed that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations have been raising money through charitable organizations, fundraisers in mosques, illegal and sometimes legal businesses, from used-cars sales to honey manufacturing to mining, to drug-trafficking, arms, and people smuggling, to mention but a few. They often are also the beneficiaries of states that provide money, arms, training camps, and safe haven. Since radical Islamists terrorists’ goal is to harm America, in 2001, the idea that any U.S. administration would fund such groups seemed preposterous
But years of investigations into radical Islamist terrorist financing offered many examples of different U.S. administrations’ -- mostly Democrats’ -- complicity. Funding Palestinian terrorist groups began in 1993, with the Clinton administration legitimizing and funding Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO -- an umbrella group – including Fatah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state, in place of Israel), which until then were on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
The alleged reason for the funding was Arafat’s promise to stop the PLO’s terrorist activities. This promise, which he and the PLO have been repeatedly violating, gifted the Palestinian terrorist with land in Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, which the Palestinians have used ever since not to create a functioning state, but to lunch attacks against Israel. Despite this, the U.S., joined by the U.N., the European Union and nations, Arab states, the World Bank, and other international organizations never stopped sending billions of dollars to the Palestinians who killed Americans and continue their terrorism against Israel.
In May 2011, after the radical Muslim Brotherhood won the Egyptian election, President Obama stated that the participation of Egypt’s “religious” parties would create “the best foundation for lasting stability in Egypt… democratic political order.” Obama promised $1 billion “to support Egypt’s democratic revolution.”
But the Muslim Brotherhood’s creed is anything but democratic. They, like the Taliban, and the Mullahs in Iran, rule by enforcing sharia. Despite the growing opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood’s government oppression of civil rights and devastation of the country’s economy, the U.S. seemed determined to assist the Brotherhood. On March 3, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry visited Morsi and gifted him $250 million in U.S. aid, and an additional $250 million for “climate projects” from the World Bank.
Muslim Brotherhood logo with the word "prepare" in Arabic
On April 30, 2013, in Cairo, Morsi was given the opportunity to flaunt the latest “advances” “in Egypt’s process of democratic transition,” to a Congressional delegation, headed by Chairperson of Intelligence Committee Senator Dianne Feinstein (D- CA). Instead of calling his bluff, the delegation reiterated the “strength and depth of Egyptian-American relations.” The Americans further ensured Muslim Brother Morsi that the U.S. will not let him down, because “Egypt’s stability is key to the stability of the region.”
In 2015, the Obama administration, as part of its negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was supposed to stop Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, gave at least $150 billion to Tehran, of which at least $1.8 billion was in cash. Then-secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that some of the money “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration, which is mostly a replica of the Obama administration, “gifted” the Afghan radical Islamist Taliban that enabled al-Qaeda training-camps, whose “graduates” attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, at least $85 billion worth of weapons and piles of cash.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Democrat-led administrations are bent on funding U.S. enemies.
