In Sweden, a Big Step Forward for Islam
With the Nuance Party, European Muslims go to the next level.
Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Increasingly, the modern history of Sweden reads like something concocted by a stand-up comedian with a taste for black humor. Take, for example, the official claim that Sweden has “the first feminist government in the world,” complete with a distinctly “feminist foreign policy.” Yeah, it’s so feminist, as I noted in February 2019, that when a gaggle of Swedish diplomats traveled to Iran, the women all wore headscarves and refrained from shaking hands with their bearded hosts. Moreover, although violent Muslim immigrants are making more and more neighborhoods so dangerous that, as I quoted one woman saying in 2017, people “sleep with a hammer beside the bed,” Muslim immigration levels remain high, and while retired Swedes who spent their adult lives voting for this madness are, as I wrote last year, “warehoused in old shipping containers” - which sounds like a sick joke, but isn’t - new Muslim arrivals “get townhouses.” Last March some Ukrainian women and children were staying at a refugee hostel in Örebro when, at about 3 A.M., a gang of male Somali immigrants broke in, obviously up to no good. Thankfully, as I reported at the time, the Ukrainians were able to save themselves by running to their rooms and locking the doors, but some were so shaken that they wished they’d never left home. Why trade one war zone for another? And in May I wrote about the “Koran riots” - mass outbreaks of Muslim violence in several Swedish cities (car burnings, Molotov cocktails, etc.), all of it in furious response to thoroughly peacefully protests against, well, Muslim violence.
Now comes the latest chapter in this bleakly comic tale. On September 11, Sweden will hold parliamentary elections. This will represent the first national test for the Nuance Party (Partiet Nyans), which a fellow named Mikail Yüksel founded three years ago after being expelled from the Center Party for belonging to the Gray Wolves, a gang of Turkish neo-fascist jihadist types. Targeting Muslim voters, the Nuance Party has grown quickly - and why not? Where else will you find candidates who want to introduce harsh measures to fight Islamophobia, to anonymize housing applicants (so you can end up renting the spare room next to your daughter’s bedroom to one of those would-be Somali rapists mentioned above), to make the European Union less of a “Christian club” by admitting Turkey and Bosnia, to increase pressure on EU countries (such as Hungary) to take Muslim refugees, to compel proportional representation of ethnic groups in the police departments and counterterrorism services, to introduce blasphemy laws and limit free speech, to forbid the removal of Muslim children from their homes by child-protective services (which often remove them, mind you, because they’re being raped by members of their extended families), to build more mosques, to permit Muslim apparel absolutely everywhere, and to ban Koran burning and offensive commentary about Islam?
That’s not all. The Nuance Party wants Swedish school children to be taught about their country’s history of “Afrophobia and Islamophobia” (sound familiar?) and about Sweden's - yes, Sweden’s - role in the transatlantic slave trade. In a mind-boggling reversal of reality, the party’s website tells us that “Sweden's Muslims experience both physical and verbal personal attacks of a racist nature on a daily basis. Damage and vandalism of property are just a few examples of this horrific phenomenon.” The site also explains that Nuance “is a pro-Palestinian party” that seeks the dissolution of Israel, wants Sweden to sanction Israel as often as possible at the UN and in Brussels, and “does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” And then there’s this: “The Nuance Party does not take a stand for the Palestinian political government. The Nuance Party takes a stand for the Palestinian people.” In other words: we won’t criticize Hamas.
All in all, it’s “a clear Islamist agenda,” wrote Helena Edlund in Document - and therefore, in a country where at least 8% of the people are Muslims, most of them concentrated in enclaves, is electoral gold for the Nuance Party, whose leaders expect to win at least a few seats in the Riksdag (the national parliament) and to get voted on to city councils as representatives of some of the many neighborhoods where up to 90% of voters are “foreign-born” (or are the children of two “foreign-born” parents). The Social Democratic Party - whose leaders, living in the safest places in the country, have managed for decades not to get alarmed at all by the terrifying consequences of Islamization for more and more of their country’s people - is sure as hell alarmed now, because its years of catering to Muslims (and being rewarded in turn by their support at the polls) may now be at an end. “The Social Democrats have taken our votes for granted,” party secretary Rami Hussein said recently. “I would like to see other parties take our issues seriously, but they don't. That's why we have to get involved.” Translation: Muslims in Sweden have gotten everything they’re going to get out of the Social Democrats. Their numbers are now big enough to enable them to win power through their own Islamist-oriented party, and thereby take the process of stealth jihad to a new level. (This has already happened, by the way, in the Netherlands, where the Denk Party - denk is Dutch for “think” and Turkish for “equal” - has three seats in the Tweede Kamer, a.k.a. House of Representatives.)
Amusingly, the political, media, and academic elites that used to have nothing but pretty things to say about Islam have now changed their tune. Big time. “They claim not to be a Muslim party, but it is Muslims they are mainly trying to mobilize - above all Sunni Muslims,” Jonas Esaisson, a political scientist at Gothenburg University, told NRK. Tomas Morgan Johansson, Sweden’s Minister of Justice, warned that the Nuance Party will intensify division in Swedish society. Of course, division has been a fact of life in Sweden ever since Muslims began moving into the country in large numbers and forming their own enclaves in which, rejecting assimilation, they live according to Islamic law while bleeding the social-welfare system and committing heinous crimes against the people whose tax payments they live off of. Elites like Johansson used to celebrate this as “diversity.” Now it threatens them, and they call it division. In a recent article for Expressen, “Why We Should All Be Worried about the Nuance Party,” Gulan Avci, a Turkish-born Labor Party member of the Riksdag, wrote that she hadn’t “fled to Sweden in 1982 because of the fascist regime in Turkey” to live under a party that hates democracy and secular society.
It’s not only in Sweden that the elites are worried. In next-door Norway, where previous attempts to form a Muslim party have failed, Kamzy Gunaratham, a Labor Party member of Parliament who’s originally from Sri Lanka, told NRK: “I do not want Norway to be a country where individual groups have their own party.” Meanwhile, an investigation by the newspaper Sydsvenskan shows that several of the Nuance Party’s candidates have praised suicide bombers and spread Jew-hatred (and Shia-hatred) online; another paper, Dagens Nyheter, has reported that one out of seven of the Nuance Party’s candidates have been convicted of serious crimes, including assault. But so what? Among Muslim voters in Sweden, being arrested for transgressing secular law - the infidels’ law! - is probably a plus. The bottom line is that what we’re seeing here is the beginning of the inevitable next step in the modern history of a Western Europe whose political leaders have ignored - and even abetted - their countries’ gradual Islamization. In time, the Muslim parties in the Netherlands and Sweden will be joined by new Muslim parties in other Western European countries. As the Muslim population grows, those parties will gain strength. And over time, almost imperceptibly, power will change hands, and in Sweden, for example, a constitutional monarchy will turn into an “Islamic republic.” Don’t listen to me - take it from Basem Mahmoud, a Malmö imam who preached in February that “Sweden is ours. It's ours, whether they like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it will be ours.”
Yes, as they say in France (which, of course, has its own massive problems in this regard, and will undergo a similar transformation, more or less, perhaps, in the manner imagined by Michel Houllebecq in his 2015 novel Submission), “c'est à rire” - it is to laugh.
Salman Rushdie and the West’s Jihad Denial
Khomeini’s fatwa didn’t just mark Rushdie for assassination.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Recently an Iran-inspired jihadist attempted to murder author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed ten times and remains in critical condition. The origins of this crime go back to 1989, when the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa that promised millions of dollars (eventually $3.3 million), instant martyrdom, and a trip to paradise for anyone killed while murdering the apostate Rushdie, who allegedly insulted Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
The subsequent response of the West to this grotesque violation of free speech exemplified the willful blindness to jihad that would characterize the Nineties and continue even after the spectacular carnage of the 9/11attacks. Given the persistence of the EU and the Biden administration in offering appeasing concessions to Iran in their desperate attempt to restart the failed nuclear deal, our foreign policy establishment is still blind to the reality of the West’s oldest enemy.
Khomeini’s fatwa didn’t just mark Rushdie for assassination, but included the publishers of the novel and bookstores selling it: all “are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.”
Iran’s current leader, Ali Khamenei, in 2017 confirmed the fatwa: “The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued.”
The faithful responded to the fatwa’s call, initiating a series of deadly attacks across the globe. The same year as the fatwa, 12 people died in Mumbai, and 6 Pakistanis in riots over the book. The translator of the novel in Japan was murdered, and the Italian translator stabbed. The Turkish translator survived an arson attack on a hotel that killed 37 others, and the Norwegian publisher was shot and critically injured.
As Bari Weiss documents, there was some support for Rushdie in 1989, especially from PEN America, an organization of writers that advocates for persecuted or censored authors. But such courage was short-live. In 2015, when PEN gave an award to French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo––twelve of whose staff had been murdered by two jihadist terrorists over cartoons deemed offensive to Islam–– 200 authors protested the award, accusing PEN of “valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”
This cowardly cant was called out by Rushdie: “This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organized, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.”
But such cringing apologetics for Khomeini also appeared in 1989. Esteemed British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper declared that he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.” A UCLA professor said Khomeini was “completely within his rights” to condemn Rushdie to death. After riots in Pakistan, the U.S. embassy assured Muslims that “the U.S. in no way supports or associates itself with any activity that is [in] any sense offensive or insulting to Islam”––which was a de facto sacrifice of the right to free speech.
Indeed, such fear historically has been a tactic of jihad, in order “to strike terror into the enemies of Allah,” as the Koran puts it (8.60). The fatwa condemning Rushdie, and the subsequent violence and appeasement, created what Daniel Pipes has called the “Rushdie rules”: anything perceived as an insult to Islam would be met with riots, violence, murder and, in the case of women, rape. And it has worked for decades, with Western politicians, academics, media, and popular culture self-censoring to avoid such blowback, all the while they camouflage their cowardice as “tolerance” and “respect for diversity.”
From a broader perspective, this sorry affair bespeaks the widespread ignorance of Islamic history and doctrine that has damaged our response to modern jihadism. Partly this reflects the West’s relative lack of interest in Islam and the Muslim world apart from the region’s oil. As Hilaire Belloc pointed out in 1938, Westerners “have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.”
Moreover, in contrast to a secularizing West, “In Islam there has been no dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed —but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.”
When Belloc wrote those words, the Muslim Brotherhood, arguably the last century’s most significant promoter of restoring Islam’s global dominance, had been in existence for 10 years. Its founder Hassan al Bana, and chief publicist, Sayyid Qutb––“al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather,” as the Hudson Institute’s Lee Smith described him––had explicitly defined Islam’s global renewal in terms of violent jihad.
According to al Bana, for example, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its power to the entire planet.” His colleague Qutb made it clear that force would be necessary to achieve Islam’s restoration: “Those [Western infidels] who have usurped the power of Allah on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by words alone.”
The next major offensive in this battle came with the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Its architect was the Ayatollah Khomeini, a revered Shiite cleric. In 1941 he had defined the divine obligation of Muslims to expand Islam by force: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world,” for those conquered and converted “will be marked for everlasting salvation.”
After he came to power in 1979, Khomeini explicitly named violent jihad as the instrument of that transformation: “Islam is a religion of blood for the infidel but a religion of guidance for the other people,” i.e. Muslims. The purpose of the Iranian Revolution, then, was not “to lower the price of melons,” as Khomeini sneered at Western materialism. It was to wage jihad in order to restore Islam’s lost global dominance. Therefore, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be jihad.”
For over 40 years Iran has fulfilled Khomeini’s pledge, its proxies like Hezbollah inflicting terrorist violence on the enemies of Islam such as Salman Rushdie, just the most famous of Iran’s many victims. The citizens and armed force of America have been prominent casualties of Iran’s proxies, especially the 1983 murder of 243 military personnel in Beirut, a heinous attack that went unanswered by the Reagan administration.
Khomeini and the Iranian religious revolution were also potent influences on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. During the Nineties, al Qaeda carried out several attacks on U.S. soldiers and diplomats, none of which provoked serious retaliation from the Clinton administration. These terrorist acts culminated in the gruesome carnage of 9/11 that killed nearly 3000 Americans. Like the previous decade of attacks, 9/11 was another, more spectacular escalation in the war to fulfill the goal bin Laden set out at al Qaeda’s birth: “To lift the word of Allah to make His religion victorious.”
This consistency of motive grounded in traditional Muslim doctrines for such attacks still could not penetrate the fossilized narrative of our foreign policy and national security organizations. Despite this long explication of their religious motives for violence grounded in traditional Islamic precepts and practices, the Bush administration adopted a “nothing to do with Islam” stance, and transformed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into nation-building projects and democracy promotion, the mistaken lesson derived from the West’s victory in the Cold War. Few considered that those Western ideals would not attract many of the adherents of a militant faith that created one of history’s biggest empires, and that for a thousand years dominated Europe and the Mediterranean.
More dangerous was Bush’s naïve outreach to the Muslim world that distorted Islamic doctrine in order to appease the global umma of believers. In his address to the nation nine days after 9/11, Bush claimed that the al Qaeda terrorists “practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics,” and said of Islam in general, “Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”
Such misleading distortions of Islam would have astonished our ancestors who had endured a millennium of Islamic invasion, conquest, occupation, slaving, and slaughter, all predicated on the commands of the Koran and Mohammed: “I was ordered to fight people until they confess that there is no God but Allah and until they pray and pay alms” ––that is, convert to Islam, or if they are “people of the book,” Christians and Jews, pay the jizya tax to their Muslim overlords (Koran 9.22).
And how arrogant is it for a Western Christian who knows little of Islam and its history to imply of the Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the most revered of Muslim clerics, that he “blasphemes the name of Allah” when he says “Islam is the religion of blood for the infidel”?
Such are the wages of the ignorance Belloc talked about in 1938. The jihadists have told us over and over what their motives are, and how they are grounded in the Koran, the life and sayings of Mohammed, and in centuries of esteemed exegetes like the 14th century philosophers Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Taymiyyah, both of whom are not “fringe” authorities for modern Muslims. And today’s jihadists have backed their words with bloody deeds, including the murder of infidels or apostates who insult their religion, or stand in the way of their mission to restore Islam’s once-global influence.
Yet the Biden administration and the Europeans are still making concessions and promising to pay what amounts to jizya to the mullahs of Iran––according to Israel, a fiscal infusion worth $200 million a day––so that they rejoin the feckless nuclear deal, even though they are already on the brink of possessing nuclear weapons.
It is the height of moral idiocy for the U.S. to cater to a regime that murders and plots against American erstwhile government officials like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, and arrogantly makes clear their delight in the near-murder of Salman Rushdie––like the Iranian state broadcaster Jaam-e Jam, who said, on hearing that Rushdie might lose an eye, “an eye of the Satan has been blinded.” And as Reza Pahlavi reports in the Wall Street Journal, “After the attack on Mr. Rushdie, a regime-run newspaper heralded the often-cited quote of my country’s current dictator, Ali Khamenei, saying the ‘arrow’ shot by Khomeini ‘will one day hit the target.’” As Pahlavi warns, “Mr. Khamenei is sharpening more arrows.”
To continue negotiating with such a tyrannical regime, when we should be punishing them for their attacks on our citizens, is the epitome of willful blindness, not to mention a grievous blow to our global prestige and power of deterrence. Such myopic policies and their dangerous effects will continue until we accept the once-common knowledge of the reality of Islam and jihad.
HOW MANY MUSLIMS HAS JOE BIDEN ORCHESTRATED INTO AMERICA UNVETTED?
When a Muslim sheikh became suspicions that a woman in his village had converted to Christianity, he sent his wife to the apostate, instructing her to pretend to be interested in learning about Christianity. The trusting Christian woman eventually shared the Gospel with the feigning Muslim woman. After it was verified that the woman was Christian, the sheikh and other Muslims went to her house and shot her dead.
'His Face Was Severely Deformed Due to the Violence'
The persecution Christians experienced at the hands of Muslims during just one month.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article first appeared on the Gatestone Institute.
The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of June, 2022:
The Muslim Slaughter of Christians
Nigeria: On Pentecost Sunday, June 5, terrorists stormed the St. Francis Catholic Church in Ondo, and massacred about 50 Christians who were otherwise peacefully worshipping their God. Videos, according to one report, “showed church worshippers lying in pools of blood while people around them wailed.” Western media presented the attack as a baffling aberration for Nigeria, arguing, as the AP did, that “It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack on the church.” Not once did the AP even mention the words “Muslim,” “Islam,” or “Islamist,” in its determined attempt to ignore the fact that Islamic terrorists have routinely stormed churches and slaughtered many Christians over the years in Nigeria—here, here, and here for three notable examples.
In fact, exactly two weeks after the St. Francis Church attack, on Sunday, June 19, motorcycle-riding Muslims raided two other churches in Nigeria, the Maranatha Baptist Church and the St. Moses Catholic Church. According to one report,
“[T]hree worshippers were killed while several others were abducted when the attackers in large numbers swooped on the worship places…. [T]he terrorists shot indiscriminately as they approached the various churches, killing three while several others sustained injuries.”
The Christians of Nigeria are, in fact, being purged in a genocide, according to several NGOs (here and here, for instance). One Christian is killed every two hours in Nigeria. As a June 19 report notes, “Painfully, the attack on St. Francis Church was not the only one that jolted Christians in Nigeria. In fact, more than 100 worshippers were killed that week across the country.” Among these hundred other Christians to be killed, the report notes the killing of 32 Nigerian Christians inside their church “a few days before” the St. Francis attack.
The report adds that,
“Heavily armed bandits, many of whom are said to be ethnic Fulanis, are waging their own form of Jihad; killing, abducting and terrorizing worship centers and educational institutions owned by churches as well as impoverished communities in the North and Middle Belt regions.”
Such bandits and terrorists have further abducted/killed 35 pastors over the last 17 months. As one example, according to a June 26 report, “bandits” gunned down and murdered a Catholic priest. The Biden administration’s response to the jihadist onslaught against Christians in Nigeria—where 13 Christians are slaughtered every day—has been to remove Nigeria from the State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern, that is, nations which engage in, or tolerate violations of, religious freedom.
Democratic Republic of Congo: On June 24 and 25, Islamic terrorists targeted two Christian villages, where they slaughtered a total of thirteen Christians. The Muslims also torched many Christian homes and shops in both villages, and stole much of the residents’ property.
Burkina Faso: On June 27, “suspected jihadists” burst into and opened fire on a Christian baptismal, massacring at least eight Christians. According to the brief report,
“The landlocked Sahel state, one of the world’s poorest countries, is in the grip of a nearly seven-year-old jihadist insurgency. Thousands of people have died and nearly two million have been driven from their homes.”
Uganda: A Muslim man stabbed his daughter in the eyes and killed her for embracing Christ. Earlier that day, in the morning of Sunday, May 29, Hawa Amoti, aged 28, visited her Christian neighbor. “Amoti came to our home very early in the morning and needed to know more of Issa [Jesus], whom she had seen in a dream,” he said. “After explaining to her about eternal life and forgiveness of sin that comes from Jesus who came to take away the sins of the whole world, she willingly accepted Jesus for the salvation of her soul. I then prayed for her, and then together we went to church in Nansana.” After church, she joined the neighbor’s family for lunch at their home and stayed until about 5:45 p.m., when she left for her home. Her father, Haji Shariifu Agaba, and brothers were already aware of where she had been and what she had been doing. When she arrived home, her father “Agaba ordered his sons to seize and beat her, then took a sharp knife and pierced her eyes,” one of her brothers who had tried to defend her later said. “I want to remove these eyes so that you stop seeing churches forever—even if you die, we are not going to bury you,” her Muslim father said. Concludes the report:
“Amoti’s wailing and screaming drew neighbors who rushed over to rescue her... As more members of the community arrived, Agaba and his sons went inside their house. Neighbors arranged for a vehicle to rush Amoti to a nearby hospital, where she succumbed to profuse bleeding from her eye injuries…”
In a separate story in Uganda, a court sentenced Alias Mohammed Wamala, a Muslim man, to life in prison for killing Christians. According to a local pastor, “the accused confessed to having killed Zulaikha Mirembe and several other Christians to fulfill what was written in the Koran about supporting the cause of Allah by killing infidels.” The report adds that, “During the trial, Wamala and other Muslims were accused of ritual killings as part of an occult practice that involved a shrine where the bodies were buried, [an] area Christian said.”
Pakistan: Two Muslims hacked a Christian farm worker, Younis Masih, aged 50, to death, before dragging his body through the streets with a hose tied around his neck. According to the June 23 article,
“The men used farm sickles and scythes to inflict large gaping wounds to the head and body of the murder victim. They then threw bricks at his head smashing his skull—probably to make sure he was dead. A hose was then placed around the neck of the corpse which was dragged through the farm onto the streets nearby the home of the murder victim. His family were later awoken at 3.30 am by the terrified employer of the deceased Christian who had found his dead body between the farm and the victim’s home. A police investigation later uncovered that the two Muslim men, both of whom owned neighbouring farms, were involved in the murder. As of now neither murderer has revealed the motive for the killing.”
“I could not recognize the dead body of my father,” said one of his sons: “His face was severely deformed due to the violence.” From the start, police have been uncooperative, the slain man’s family says. After they called police, and “though a dead body involved in a murder crime was on the streets, Bambanwala Police Station officers did not arrive at the scene of the crime till 7am. A delay believed to be induced by the fact that a ritually impure Christian was killed. It should be noted that the police station itself is only 30-40 minutes away from the place the body of Mr. Masih was found.” Gulfam, another of Masih’s sons, said:
“We contact the police every day to learn of any development in their investigation, but police are not cooperating. Muhammad Abubakar Nawaz [one of the murderers] threatened me in the presence of the station house officer and they did nothing to stop him. He boldly told me that though he has confessed to murdering my father, there is nothing I can do to get justice. Though I am scared I will do all I can to seek justice.”
Irfan, his brother, added:
“The behaviour of the police is creating more agony. They have not explained why our father was murdered so brutally. We have no property or anything of value that could lead to such violence. We are poor people who labour to earn for our families. We demand to know why this despicable fate has befallen our father.”
Egypt: On Sunday, June 5, 2022—the same day Muslims attacked a packed church in Nigeria, massacring 50 Christians—Abdullah Hosni, a Muslim man attacked a Christian, Kirollos (Cyril) Megali, with a meat cleaver in a village in Sohag. According to an Arabic report, Kirollos, who was rushed to a hospital “drenched in blood and with multiple stab wounds,” spent three days in an intensive care unit before succumbing to his injuries, including hack wounds to his skull. According to the deceased’s brother, Abdullah was locally known for harassing Christians. He had relocated to Libya for a time but returned two days before assaulting Kirollos. The Christian himself had been working abroad (in Kuwait) and was visiting family, when Abdullah knocked him off his motorbike and started hacking at him. According to the report, “A state of anger prevailed among the village’s Copts, because the perpetrator, Abdullah Hosni, had previously assaulted and always harassed Copts, but no action was ever taken against him.” Mourning Christians attending Kirollos’s funeral were heard to chant “With our souls, with our blood, we will redeem you, O Cross. The rights of Kirollos must be returned—and where is the media?”
In a separate but similar incident in Egypt, another Muslim man attempted to slaughter a Christian woman with a sickle. According to a June 15 Arabic-language report, Qassim Falah Muhammad attacked Mona Wafdi Marzouk, 35, as she was walking to her family farm early in the morning to assist her sick and ailing father. Muhammad crept up behind her and began to strangle her; then, according to the report, “he grabbed a sickle and tried to slaughter her with it.” Luckily, the blade had dulled over the years and did not fully slice though the arteries of her neck. Muhammad then fled the scene, as reported by Mona’s cousin, Makari, who saw the incident from a distance and ran to the butchered woman’s aid. He and other family members quickly transferred her to the nearest medical center, where she received seven stitches to her neck. Although she survived, “Mona lives in a state of terror and panic after the harsh experience of this extremist person.” While it is unclear why Muhammad targeted Mona, it is clear and well established that he hates Christians and has targeted them before. Just the day earlier, he invaded the home of another Copt in the same village and robbed him of his money and possessions. In response to a police investigation, Muhammad’s family produced a certificate indicating that he is “mentally ill”—a tactic on regular display in Egypt whenever a Muslim is caught after attacking a Christian, to get him the most lenient sentencing. But as the report notes,
“If he is mentally ill, why does he exclusively target Copts? Is it sensible to promote the ‘psychopath’ narrative in every single incident against the Copts—as if the mentally ill only see and try to kill Copts?”
Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches
Egypt: On the evening of June, 23, 2022, Muslim mobs attacked the homes of Christians, including by hurling stones through their windows, in al-Hilla, a village in Luxor governate. This occurred soon after Muslims learned that the Church of Michael the Archangel, which was originally built in 2003, had finally received formal recognition to begin functioning as a church. Soon after this news spread, the angry mobs, which were augmented by others from neighboring villages, had grown very large and, “amidst hostile chants” began hurling stones through the windows of Christian homes. According to the report, “the security force charged with protecting the church tried to rebuff them, but the number of assailants was too large.” Before peace could be regained, many Christian homes had been damaged; several vehicles and motorcycles parked in front of Coptic homes were also “smashed” or set aflame, including the village priest’s vehicle. On the following day, Friday, June 24, Luxor police forces reinforced their presence in the village in anticipation of more Muslim anger following Friday mosque prayers—when imams habitually whip the faithful into a frenzy concerning the alleged sins of the “infidels” who need to be punished. Armed security and national forces, including several armored vehicles, were deployed all throughout the village, especially around the Church of Michael the Archangel, Christian homes, and surrounding mosques. Meanwhile, and as the report notes, the traumatized Christians maintain that their “only sin” was to have “obtained an official decision to legalize the church.”
Sudan: On June 14, police marched into a church Bible study class and arrested two Christian leaders, Pastor Kabashi Idris of the African Inland Church and Evangelist Yacoub Ishakh of the Independent Baptist Church, where the Bible class was being held. They were arrested for “violating public order,” under Article 77 of Sudan’s penal code. According to their lawyer,
“[The pastors] were accused by a radical Muslim neighbor who filed a case against them at the police station in the area, prompting the police to arrest the two church leaders. The radical Muslim told police his children were singing the songs of the Christians and feared they might convert to Christianity.”
Although the Christian leaders were released later that day on bail, a guilty verdict could result in a prison sentence of up to three months, a fine or both, and the court could issue an order for them to cease worship services. According to the report,
“Following two years of advances in religious freedom in Sudan after the end of the Islamist dictatorship under Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the specter of state-sponsored persecution returned with a military coup on Oct. 25, 2021. After Bashir was ousted from 30 years of power in April 2019, the transitional civilian-military government managed to undo some sharia (Islamic law) provisions. It outlawed the labeling of any religious group “infidels” and thus effectively rescinded apostasy laws that made leaving Islam punishable by death. With the Oct. 25 coup, Christians in Sudan fear the return of the most repressive and harsh aspects of Islamic law.”
Turkey: On Sunday, June 5, ceremonies for the reopening of a historic church were marred after a large Muslim mob attacked a Christian family that had planned on attending the re-opening service. According to one report,
“The Yilmaz family—the only Assyrian [Christian] family who live in the village—were attacked at their home by a group of around 50 Muslims. The family were at the time entertaining visiting clergy who had come to officiate at the service. The attackers were led by a Muslim family with whom the Yilmaz family have had a long-standing dispute over land. The mob attacked the home with stones, sticks and other weapons. They then set fire to wheat being grown by the Yilmaz family.”
“They threatened us,” said Cengiz, one of the Christian Yilmaz family, “saying that they would not let us live in the village … But we are not afraid. We will continue to stay here.” The Christian family “accused the attackers of specifically choosing the day of the church ceremony to re-open the land dispute” and thus spoil the long expected event. Adds the report:
“The tiny remnant Christian community in Turkey is mainly historic Christian ethnic groups such as Assyrians (like the Yilmaz family) and Armenians; they still bear the trauma of the Armenian, Assyrian, Syriac and Greek genocides of the early twentieth century. During these genocides, at least 3.75 million believers were killed by Ottoman Turks, with many attacks occurring in south-eastern Turkey…. In August 2021 an Assyrian Christian village in northern Syria was bombed by the Turkish air force in a campaign against Kurdish militants.”
General Attacks on and Abuse of Christians
Pakistan: On June 6, a 15-year-old Christian girl told a court how she was kidnapped and raped by a Muslim accused of abducting and forcibly converting her to Islam and marrying her. “While most girls facing captors’ threats to harm them or their families are pressured into making false statements that they voluntarily married and converted to Islam, Saba Nadeem Masih of Faisalabad showed great bravery in truthfully sharing her ordeal before a judge,” Lala Robin Daniel, a local human rights advocate said of the young girl: “Saba was in severe mental and physical trauma when the relatives of the accused produced her before police on May 31. The recovery was made possible due to the pressure built by church leaders and rights activists by holding a daily protest from 7 p.m. till midnight.” According to the young girl’s testimony against her abductor, 45-year-old Muhammad Yasir Hussain, who has since gone into hiding,
“We were heading to work when the accused forcibly put me in a rickshaw after pushing away my sister. He then put something on my mouth due to which I fell unconscious….. He raped me for two days. I kept crying and pleaded with him to let me talk to my parents, but he did not listen.”
Discussing this case, local human rights activist Lala said:
“Today’s development is very important because it exposes how these predators sexually exploit underage minority girls and then prepare forged documents of Islamic marriage and religious conversion to seek immunity for their crimes. Saba’s statement proves that the Islamic Nikah [marriage] and conversion certificates submitted by the accused to the police are fake. He should now be charged with statutory rape and related offenses and made an example for all those who target minority girls for their evil designs.”
Discussing this same case, Bishop Azad Marshall, president of the Anglican Church of Pakistan, said,
“It’s very sad and tragic that a large number of teenage girls from both the minority Christian and Hindu communities continue to suffer sexual exploitation at the hands of these predators, but very few are able to pull such courage and share their trauma in public…. Rape scars the victims for life, and in case of girls as young as 10, one cannot even imagine the pain and horror these children of God have suffered in the cover of religion. Enough is enough.”
In a separate incident in Pakistan, a June 14 report tells the story of Rehmat Masih, a Christian man who “has been in prison for five months in a new fabricated blasphemy case. He is accused of profaning and desecrating the pages of the Koran, but in reality he allegedly simply refused an offer to change religion. The police also threatened the family, warning them not to prosecute the case. As a result, he had to move to a safer location.” For the previous 20 years, Rehmat, a 44-year-old father of two teenagers, had worked as a cleaner at the Zam Zam publishing house, which prints Korans. There, the “owners and employees had offered him to convert to Islam, but he had repeatedly refused to change religion.” Shortly after Christmas, 2021, his employers asked him about some torn pages of a Koran found in the sewage drain; he replied that he knew nothing about that. A few days later, on January 3, “police arrested Rehmat Masih, accusing him of committing blasphemy and tortured him severely” in an effort to make him admit to desecrating the Koran, an offence punishable by life imprisonment under Section 295-B of the Pakistan Penal Code. On January 19, 2022, a bail application was filed for the defendant, but the judge rejected it. Rehmat has been in prison since, awaiting his trial. The report closes by quoting several human rights activists on this situation:
“Malook Samuel described it as unthinkable that—with no eyewitnesses to the alleged event and no evidence—the accused is behind bars, while the complainants and witnesses involved in making false allegations against the accused enjoy impunity, and are not instead prosecuted for charges of perjury under Section 182 of the Penal Code, which provides for sentences of five to seven years.
Pastor Tariq George added that it is regrettable that innocent people are being targeted to settle personal scores, and that this story was created to punish religious minorities who do not want to change their faith.”
Egypt: A June 19 report argues that “institutionalized discrimination against Copts in Egypt” is even evident in that nation’s diplomatic corps, based on an evaluation of 155 diplomats:
“Copts, the indigenous Christian inhabitants of Egypt, account for, at the very least, 10 percent of Egypt’s population, and should, therefore, account for, at the very least, 10 percent of Egypt’s diplomatic corps [though they are nowhere near that amount]. Nor is such discrimination limited to diplomatic corps; it permeates every state institution. As one recent example, on March 3, 98 female judges took the legal oath in preparation for assuming judicial roles in Egypt’s State Council. This was considered a major and unprecedented development; since its inception 75 years earlier, not a single woman had sat on the podium of the State Council court—and now 98 will. And yet, not one of them is a Christian—again, despite the fact that the Copts account for at least 10 percent of the nation’s population, suggesting that at least 10 of the 98 should have, for proper representation, been Copts.”
Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Ban All Taliban Travel, Say Afghan Women’s Advocates As UN Council Tussles Over Travel Waivers
(CNSNews.com) – U.N. Security Council members are wrestling over extending exemptions from a travel ban for selected Taliban leaders, with Russia and China pushing for the waivers to be renewed, and Western members resisting, citing the fundamentalist militia’s violation of women’s rights.
Afghan women’s rights advocates are calling on the council to enforce the travel ban completely, in response to the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls.
Waivers allowing 13 Taliban officials to travel internationally expired on Friday but the sides failed to reach agreement, and leaks from private discussions indicate the deadlock persists, despite various proposed compromises.
At one point, the U.S. and allies proposed that seven of the 13 officials should no longer be allowed to travel, and that the remaining six have their waivers extended, but for travel limited to Qatar. The small Gulf state has played a prominent role in diplomacy between the Taliban and international community over the last decade.
Russia and China reportedly demanded that all 13 Taliban officials be allowed to continue traveling, conceded only that travel destinations be limited to Russia, China, Qatar, and other countries in the region (a likely reference to Pakistan, a longstanding Taliban ally).
Western members disagreed, and a U.S. counteroffer then reportedly agreed to lift the Qatar-only stipulation for the six, while holding firm on ending the waivers for the other seven.
That failed to satisfy Russia and China, and the bargaining continued on Monday.
Afghan diplomats who were appointed by the government that was toppled by the Taliban last summer urged the council to end the concession entirely, given the regime’s conduct.
“Taliban’s actions in the last 1 year leave little room for extending ‘the benefit of the doubt,’” tweeted Nasir Ahmad Andisha, the still-in-place Afghan ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva.
Afghan ambassador to Sri Lanka M. Ashraf Haidari called for an end to all exemptions. He said on Twitter it was unfortunate some were pushing to even half of the waivers in place, “granting sanctioned terrorist leaders the freedom of movement they’ve denied Afghans, esp. women.”
Haidari also argued that banning Taliban travel would help prevent it “from raising funds from regional charities to fuel their war machine in Afghanistan.”
The Afghan Women’s Advocacy Group (AWAG), which says it represents women in Afghanistan and in exile, called on council members to ban travel for all Taliban representatives “for what they are doing to women and girls in Afghanistan.”
In a letter to council members earlier this month, AWAG wrote, “Despite Council members condemning the Taliban’s increasingly draconian actions, almost nothing has been done to hold them to account.”
It cited dozens of Taliban policies that “strip women and girls of their rights and eliminate them from society,” the humanitarian crisis, starvation, and violence targeting women and girls and ethnic minority Hazaras and Tajiks, and “the Taliban’s collaboration with al-Qaeda, false promises, and gestures designed to mislead international community members who wish to believe in a moderate Taliban.”
“We strongly urge the Security Council to stand with the people of Afghanistan and begin to hold these internationally recognized terrorists to account by ending the exemptions to the travel ban.”
After seizing power violently last year, the regime began curtailing freedoms women had come to enjoy over the years since the Islamist militia’s rule was brought to an end by U.S.-led invasion after 9/11.
It has refused to allow girls above grade six to return to school, enforces strict dress codes, bans women from most employment, and has ordered women not to leave home unless necessary.
For many Afghan women the notion that the Security Council would allow travel to leaders of a regime that that has prohibited women to fly domestically or internationally unless accompanied by a male “guardian” is disgraceful.
‘Bigoted western circles’
Under a 2011 Security Council resolution, more than 130 Taliban representatives are sanctioned.
In 2019 the Security Council at the request of the U.S. exempted specified Taliban representatives from the travel ban, to facilitate negotiations with the Trump administration that led in early 2020 to the signing of the Doha Agreement.
The Taliban’s violent seizure of power a year ago was a blatant violation of the Doha Agreement, which linked a U.S. troop withdrawal with a political transition based on intra-Afghan negotiations. The regime rejects that interpretation, while demanding that the U.S. keep to its commitments in the deal, including a lifting of U.S. and U.N. sanctions.
As Security Council members now wrangle over extending the waivers, the Taliban foreign ministry complained in a series of tweets that the agreement was not being met, and warned of a “stern” response.
Spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi said the ministry “calls on UNSC not to use sanctions as pressure tool.”
“It was agreed in the Doha Agreement that all sanctions shall be removed from IEA leadership, a clause that should be implemented in full,” he said, using an acronym for the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
“If the travel ban is extended, it will create distance instead of promoting dialogue and engagement, an outcome that must be prevented,” Balkhi said.
“UNSC member states should know that some bigoted western circles are deliberately trying to create distance between Afghanistan and the world, and are provoking Afghans to take a stern stance in response which is not in the interest of anyone.”
The 13 officials whose freedom to travel abroad is now being weighed include the regime’s deputy prime minister Abdul Ghani Baradar, foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, director of intelligence Abdul Haq Wasiq, and mines and petroleum minister Shahabuddin Delawar,
Until last June, the exemption list comprised 15 individuals, but the Security Council removed two education ministers, in response to the regime’s restrictions on schooling for women.
The Great Lengths Some Muslims Go to Deceive Infidels
Hindus are becoming more and more familiar with the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya.
A recent article reports that, on two separate occasions, Muslims murdered two Hindu men by first deceiving them in an effort to get close enough to murder them.
In one incident, Muslims entered the shop of their targeted Hindu victim and pretended to be customers -- before attacking and beheading him (on the accusation that he had somehow “insulted” their prophet).
In the other incident, a Muslim man “befriended” his targeted victim on Facebook. The murderer pretended to be himself a Hindu that wanted to join his intended victim’s organization. When they eventually met, the trap was triggered and the Hindu man slaughtered, also on the charge of “blaspheming” against Muhammad.
After giving more incidents of Muslims deceiving Hindus in order to subjugate or kill them, the article highlights and blames the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya:
Al-Taqiyya… means to lie, mislead, manipulate and create illusions for an ‘enemy of Islam’ when being persecuted. Except, in today’s day and age, it has been used by Islamists and their apologists to deceive ‘kafirs’ (non-believers of Islam) into believing they are a well-wisher only to stab them in the back (figuratively) or behead them (literally). We’ve seen in [the] above two cases how the Islamists have used deception as a tool (posing as customer and Hindu on Facebook to befriend Hindutva leader) to come close to the victim and then eventually kill them.
While it’s good that this article is connecting the dots, the fact is, entering a store and posing as a customer, or pretending to be a Facebook friend, is child’s play compared to what other Muslims have done and are willing to do to get close enough to slaughter their victims.
Consider the assassination plot against a Christian pastor in Turkey that was thwarted: Police arrested 14 Muslim suspects; two of them had been members of the pastor’s congregation for over a year; three of them were women.
“These people had infiltrated our church and collected information about me, my family and the church and were preparing an attack against us,” said the pastor in question, Emre Karaali: “Two of them attended our church for over a year and they were like family.”
And their subversive tactics worked: “The 14 [suspects] had collected personal information, copies of personal documents, created maps of the church and the pastor’s home, and had photos of those who had come to Izmit [church] to preach.”
Consider the great lengths these Muslims went to in their efforts to murder this Christian pastor: wholesale deception, attending non-Islamic places of worship and rites, to the point that “they were like family” to the Christian they sought to betray and kill. While some may think such acts are indicative of un-Islamic behavior, they are, in fact, doctrinally permissible and historically demonstrative. (For an in-depth examination, read about the doctrines of taqiyya, tawriya, and taysir.)
Thus, feigning interest in Christianity, attending church for over a year, participating in Christian baptisms, and becoming “like family” to an infidel -- all things forbidden according to Islamic Sharia -- become permissible in the service of the jihad on Christianity.
Nor is this Turkish example an aberration. In Somalia, a nation that has nothing in common with Turkey -- neither race, language, nor culture, only Islam -- this same story of betrayal took place. When a Muslim sheikh became suspicions that a woman in his village had converted to Christianity, he sent his wife to the apostate, instructing her to pretend to be interested in learning about Christianity. The trusting Christian woman eventually shared the Gospel with the feigning Muslim woman. After it was verified that the woman was Christian, the sheikh and other Muslims went to her house and shot her dead.
Worming one’s way into an infidel’s confidences only to betray and slaughter them traces back to the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. Once, when a Jewish poet, Ka‘b ibn Ashraf, offended Muhammad, the prophet exclaimed: “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that, to get close enough to Ka‘b to assassinate him, he be allowed to deceive the poet. The prophet agreed. Ibn Maslama went to Ka‘b feigning friendship; the poet trusted his sincerity and took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, the Muslim youth returned with a friend and, while the trusting poet’s guard was down, they beheaded him.
In another similar incident, Muhammad commanded a convert from an adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity and go back to his tribe -- which he cajoled with a perfidious “You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me” -- only to betray them to Islam.
Such are the lengths some Muslims -- past and present -- are willing to go to in order to win the trust of those infidels whom they mean to betray.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
Image: Public Domain
‘Death to Blasphemers!’ Islam’s Ancient War on Critics of Muhammad
Killing those who “blaspheme” against Muhammad is as old as Islam.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article first appeared on The Stream.
On August 12, a Muslim man lunged at and repeatedly stabbed Salman Rushdie as he was preparing to deliver a speech on a New York stage. Prosecutors said the author was stabbed 10 times, suffering a neck wound, liver damage, a severed nerve in his arm, and may well lose an eye. Thankfully, reports Sunday morning indicate Rushdie is off a ventilator and able to speak.
Rushdie became internationally recognizable in 1988, following the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. Because it portrayed the Muslim prophet of Islam irreverently, the book provoked ire throughout the Muslim world, culminating with a 1989 fatwa calling for his execution as a blasphemer by Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
In other words, the recent assassination attempt against Rushdie has been nearly 35 years in the making and should surprise no one.
And yet, those most charged with explaining events to the rest of us, the so-called “mainstream media,” are still and rather predictably searching for a “motive”—not least since reporting the full truth may make Islam look “bad.”
Back in the real world, Muslim attacks on those perceived to “blaspheme” against Islam’s prophet have a long and unvaried history that stretches straight back to Muhammad himself. Yes, the prophet of Islam was the first Muslim to call for and therefore legitimize the assassination of those who mocked him, saying doing so was “God’s work.”
Thus, when Ka‘b ibn Ashraf, an elderly Jewish leader, mocked Muhammad, the prophet exclaimed, “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his messenger?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that he be allowed to deceive Ka‘b to gain his trust in order to get close enough and kill him. Muhammad agreed, and the rest — Ibn Maslama dragged the Jew’s head back to Muhammad to triumphant cries of “Allahu akbar!” — is history.
In another example, after Muhammad learned that Asma bint Marwan, an Arab poetess, was making verse that portrayed him as nothing more than a murdering bandit, he called for her assassination, exclaiming: “Will no one rid me of this woman?” That very night, Umayr, a zealous Muslim, crept into Asma’s home while she lay sleeping surrounded by her young children. After removing one of her suckling babes from her breast, Umayr plunged his sword into the poetess. The next morning at mosque, Muhammad, who was aware of the assassination, said, “You have helped Allah and his Apostle.” Apparently feeling some remorse, Umayr responded, “She had five sons; should I feel guilty?” “No,” the prophet answered. “Killing her was as meaningless as two goats butting heads” (from Muhammad’s earliest biography, Sirat Rasul Allah, p.676).
From here, it becomes clear — except, of course, to the disingenuous and narrative driven media — why, past and present, Muslims have attacked and slaughtered countless people accused of speaking (or writing) against Muhammad. Validating this assertion is almost futile, as blasphemy-related stories surface with extreme regularity (very recent examples come from nations as varied as Greece, India, Afghanistan, and Malaysia). In my monthly Muslim Persecution of Christians series, of which there are some 130 reports stretching back to 2011, virtually every month features several anecdotes of Muslims attacking, possibly murdering, Christians on the mere accusation of blasphemy.
As a recent example, a throng of Muslims stoned and burned to death Deborah Emmanuel, a Christian college student in Nigeria, on the unsubstantiated rumor that she had offended Muhammad. In support of her murder, one Muslim cleric enthusiastically declared, “When you touch the prophet we become mad people…. Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment — just kill!”
In another especially warped example from earlier this year, a Muslim woman and her two nieces slaughtered a Christian woman in Pakistan, after a relative of the three murderers merely dreamt that the Christian had blasphemed against Muhammad. Between just 1990 and 2012 alone, to say nothing of the last decade, “fifty-two people have been extra-judicially murdered on charges of blasphemy” in Pakistan.
Nor is this matter limited to “vigilante” or overzealous Muslims. Several Islamic nations criminalize any criticism of Muhammad. According to Section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code, for example,
Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.
What explains this phenomenon? Why don’t the followers of other religions respond similarly to those who “blaspheme”? The answer is that few modern religions are as fragile as Islam. Built atop a flimsy and easily collapsed pack of cards, silencing any criticism against its founder — whose words and deeds so easily lend themselves to constant criticism — has always been and remains pivotal to Islam’s survival. Discussing Koran 5:33, which calls for the crucifixion and/or mutilation of “those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] mischief,” the highly revered Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) — the “Sheikh of Islam” — once wrote:
Muharaba [waging war] is of two types: physical and verbal. Waging war verbally against Islam may be worse than waging war physically — hence the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) used to kill those who waged war against Islam verbally, while letting off some of those who waged war against Islam physically. This ruling is to be applied more strictly after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). Mischief may be caused by physical action or by words, but the damage caused by words is many times greater than that caused by physical action; and the goodness achieved by words in reforming may be many times greater than that achieved by physical action. It is proven that waging war against Allah and His Messenger (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) verbally is worse and the efforts on earth to undermine religion by verbal means is more effective (Crucified Again, p. 100).
This is not merely a medieval interpretation or limited to “radical Muslims.” Indeed, returning to the recent Rushdie stabbing, Dr. Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, an Islamic studies academic who teaches at Oberlin College, Ohio, endorsed the fatwa in 1989, because “all Islamic nations and countries agree with Iran that any blasphemous statement against sacred figures should be condemned.”
Considering that Dr. Mahallati is popularly known on Oberlin campus as “the Professor of Peace” should dispel any doubts as to how ironclad the penalty for those who criticize Muhammad is among even his ostensibly “moderate” followers.
Rushdie Stabber's Mom Says Islam Changed Him
A familiar story from previous Islamic terrorist attacks.
Silvana Fardos, the mother of suspect Hadi Matar, 24, added to the Daily Mail on Sunday that she is disowning her son over his alleged crime and hopes Rushdie gets well.
The mom said she was born Muslim but is not religious. She said she hadn’t even heard of Rushdie until after the famed “Satanic Verses” author was attacked in western New York and the FBI began contacting her family.
“I didn’t push my kids into religion or force anything on my son,” Fardos told the Mail. “I don’t know anyone in Iran, all my family are here. I’m living a simple life as a single mom, trying to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table for my kids.”
But Fardos, who also has twin 14-year-olds, said her eldest child grew more religious as he got older.
She noted that her son’s demeanor particularly changed in 2018 after he returned from a trip to Lebanon, her home country, where he was visiting his father.
“One time he argued with me, asking why I encouraged him to get an education instead of focusing on religion. He was angry that I did not introduce him to Islam from a young age,” she said.
The authorities are still searching for the motive, but the story is a familiar one. It's also a warning about the so-called "secular Muslim" immigrants who in the second generation start searching for their roots and their identity.
And turn to Islam.
A number of years ago, I wrote, "Integration is Not the Answer."
There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall “Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.
Some of the worst Jihadists are culturally integrated and religiously disintegrated. They speak the native language fluently. They are intimately familiar with popular culture. They move easily among the native population. It’s their belief system that is fundamentally disintegrated and whose demands cannot be integrated without a civil war.
Cultural integration won’t transform Muslims into non-Muslims. All it does is make them conflicted and insecure. And that is why it is those second-generation culturally integrated Muslims who go to bars, call themselves Andy or Mo, sell drugs, go to university, who take a detour into Syria and come back with bomb plans and big plans for transforming Europe into an Islamic state.
Cultural integration builds up a conflict with Islam. Some Muslims respond to it by abandoning Islam, others by embracing it. If we fail to recognize this, then integration becomes a ticking time bomb.
And the bombs keep going off.
Fewer Americans are buying what our culture is selling anymore. Why would we think that Muslims would? Faced with a choice between Starbucks, TikTok, green everything, LGBTQAIOUP=, #MeToo, #Thatsnotfunny and Marvel comics as the defining cultural narrative, Hadi Matar went back to his roots in Lebanon. And went on a mission for Allah.
We're going to need something better to counter it with than social justice hashtag and the latest Disney+ programming.
The Rushdie Stabbing and the World's Leading Terror State
The real point of the Islamic Republic's fatwa.
Last week, a man stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed British author Salman Rushdie in the neck as he was being introduced. The topic under discussion was "the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression." Chances are exceptionally high that this was the work of a jihadi.
The story attracted shamefully fleeting attention. For those too young to remember, "The Satanic Verses" was published back in September 1988. And because of the book's purportedly impertinent treatment of the prophet Muhammad, it was banned in Rushdie's native India and dozens of other nations -- including virtually every Muslim-majority country in the world. Though Rushdie would later become a powerful advocate of free expression, he initially turned on his own book, apologizing numerous times for its contents. "I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam," he said in one statement, asking his publisher to hold back release of the paperback edition of the book. As a matter of self-preservation, his position was understandable.
And, still, it was all to no avail. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, contending that even if the author "became the most pious man of all time" it was the duty of every Muslim to "employ everything he has got" to murder the writer.
For the first time in postwar history, terrorism was aimed at suppressing free expression in the liberal Western world. In the United States, two bookstores in Berkeley, California, were attacked. The Riverdale Press in New York was firebombed after publishing an editorial defending the right to read the novel and criticizing the bookstores that pulled it from their shelves. Rushdie's Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was fatally stabbed. In Europe, the Italian translator of "The Satanic Verses," Ettore Capriolo, was also stabbed in his apartment in Milan, and the Norwegian publisher of Rushdie's book, William Nygaard, was shot three times, but both survived. In Belgium, an imam and his aide were murdered after expressing moderate positions on the affair. Big booksellers in London were firebombed in April 1989, and there were two more explosions connected to the selling of the book and a handful of unexploded devices in other bookstores. Rushdie, author of the masterpiece "Midnight's Children" among many other fantastic works, was forced to employ round-the-clock protection by bodyguards, compelled to spend the next decade in hiding.
The point of the fatwa was not only to punish Rushdie for blasphemy but to intimidate others from daring to engage. It worked. As I note in detail in my recent book, Europe -- and to a lesser extent, the United States -- began to self-censor any topic that might offend Islamic theocrats. No one should be guaranteed a job or a book, of course, but folding to illiberal pressure only incentivizes more threats and violence, as we saw with Charlie Hebdo and the numerous other attacks that followed. More recently, the left has simply begun smearing anyone who noted the illiberalism of political Islam as an Islamophobe. As author Kenan Malik noted, the legacy of the Rushdie fatwa was that Western Europe had "internalized" censorship. "Rushdie's critics lost the battle -- The Satanic Verses continues to be published," he wrote. "But they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case -- that it is morally unacceptable to cause offense to other cultures -- is now widely accepted." Rushdie has rightly called this capitulation "censorship by fear."
We should not forget, even as the Biden administration is trying to strike another sweetheart deal that would ultimately give the mullahs nuclear weapons, that this is the work of the theocratic terror state of Iran. Even if this attacker is non-jihadi, the fact is that the fatwa still stands today. In 2016, Iran raised it to nearly $4 million. When Iran isn't destabilizing the Middle East through proxies or blowing up Jewish centers in Argentina or intimidating American voters or plotting to kill former American officials or murdering over 600 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, they are funding bounties against innocent writers.
WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE PIG SAUDIS DID FOR BIDEN AND THE PRICE OF OIL, THEY RUBBED HIS NOSE IN IT AND THEN PEED ON OL' JOE!
Just a few weeks after US President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, aimed at shoring up relations with the murderous regime, his administration has approved two massive arms sales worth more than $5 billion to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS GO WOKE FOR MUSLIMS. JOE WANTS TO KNOW HOW MUCH IS IN IT FOR HIS PARASITE GAMER LAWYER BROTHER JAMES BIDEN?
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/08/two-sociopath-lawyers-joe-biden-and-his.html
The Saudis know where to pitch their bribes. They've always been in bed with the Bush crime family (Amazon book House of Bush, House of Saud). We may never know how much the Saudis dictators pumped into building the Bush, Clinton or Obama (all gamer parasite lawyers) presidential libraries, but we know the dictators,in fact, numerous Muslim dictatorships were very generous with the (gamer parasite lawyers) Clinton Foundation Family Slush Fund just as Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, under closet Muslim Barack Hussien Obama, was very genrou$ with the Muslim dictators. For all these filthy pols, just follow the money. They have and will sell us out to anyone!
For Hollywood, China and various Islamic nations mean hundreds of billions of dollars in profit to corporate enterprises, so human rights concerns are placed in the back seat. RAJAN LAAD
It is difficult to say, given the facts, which famous father has raised the better boy. Perhaps the most notable difference between Joe Biden and King Salman is that the elderly and infirm Saudi royal knew when it was time to call it quits and hand power to a younger generation. Biden does not appear to share this outlook. This is not to suggest that he should anoint Hunter as his heir apparent, although there's no question the whore-loving crackhead scion would get more votes than Kamala Harris. ANDREW STILES
GROWING ISLAMIC FASCISM IN AMERICA… will it be as bad as we witness is happening to Europe?
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-islamic-fascism-in-america.html
For Hollywood, China and various Islamic nations mean hundreds of billions of dollars in profit to corporate enterprises, so human rights concerns are placed in the back seat. RAJAN LAAD
Biden administration agrees arms sales to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to counter China’s growing influence
Just a few weeks after US President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, aimed at shoring up relations with the murderous regime, his administration has approved two massive arms sales worth more than $5 billion to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It follows $650 million in air-to-air missiles sent to Riyadh in November 2021 for its criminal war against the civilian population in Yemen.
Included in the sales are Patriot missiles costing $3 billion for Saudi Arabia and a high-altitude missile system costing $2.2 billion for the UAE aimed at protecting the venal petro-monarchs from rocket attacks by Yemen’s Houthi-led rebel movement.
The US State Department, seeking Congress’s approval for the deal, said the proposed sale would “support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of an important regional partner. The UAE is a vital US partner for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.”
Biden had pledged during his election campaign to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah state” due to its appalling human rights record and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s signing off on Saudi insider turned dissident Jamal Khashoggi’s gruesome assassination in 2018. He also promised to cut off or cut back on the sale of “offensive” weapons to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, citing their attacks on civilians in Yemen. But this has counted for nothing next to the more pressing needs of Washington’s geostrategic interests.
Last month, Reuters reported that the Biden administration was discussing lifting the ban on US sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Ever since Saudi and the UAE-led coalition invaded Yemen in April 2015, international human rights groups—including the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the London-based Campaign Against the Arms Trade—have documented the coalition’s use of US and UK weapons in unlawful airstrikes, including undoubted war crimes, breaching Washington and London’s own policies on arms sales. These two imperialist warmongers, which lose no opportunity to justify their bellicosity in the name of human rights, have also provided the Saudis and Emiratis with political and diplomatic cover at the UN, even as their blockade of the impoverished country has put millions at risk of famine.
The Guardian reported that the Biden administration is also exploring the setting up of a new international committee to document and report on human rights violations in Yemen that would include representatives from the Saudi and UAE puppet government in the country. An intensive lobbying campaign by Riyadh put a stop to an earlier United Nations Human Rights Council investigation into possible war crimes. One can only imagine the uproar that would follow if President Vladimir Putin were to be included in a panel to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The political reasons Washington supports two of the most repressive regimes on the planet are clear. They are a key market for US arms and play a vital role on behalf of US imperialism in suppressing the working class in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and throughout the region and supporting Washington’s domination in the resource-rich Middle East. They have allied with Israel in a US-led anti-Iranian axis that threatens to push the region into another catastrophic war.
The economic reasons are less well-known. As the US became increasingly self-sufficient in oil, the petro-monarchs turned elsewhere for customers. By 2020, the Gulf countries were supplying 40 percent of China’s oil imports, with 16 percent of that coming from Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom’s trade with China has soared from $3 billion in 2000 to $67 billion in 2021, while its trade with the US rose from $20.5 billion to $24.8 billion in the same period. While much has been made of China’s 25-year $400 billion trade and investment agreement with Iran, even if it were actualized at some $16 billion a year this is still much less than Beijing’s trade with Riyadh.
Merchandise trade between the Middle East and China has increased significantly, totaling $272 billion in 2020. Furthermore, despite heavy pressure from Washington, no Middle Eastern country has banned the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s 5G networks. Beijing is now the largest single regional investor and trading partner of 11 countries in the Middle East. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aimed at placing China at the centre of global trade, is the basis of agreements with 21 countries in the region.
Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all have “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with China, while Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman and Qatar are “strategic partners.” Turkey has a “strategic cooperative relationship and Israel a “comprehensive innovation partnership” with China. Tel Aviv’s extensive links with China’s defence technology has on occasions put it at odds with Washington.
A critical element in China’s BRI has been its development and expansion of ports and industrial parks in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Djibouti, China’s only overseas military base, to secure its shipment of goods to Africa, Europe and beyond.
Of even greater significance are the talks, reported in the Wall Street Journal last March, between Beijing and Riyadh over pricing some oil sales to China in yuan. Such a move that would undermine the dollar’s role in the global petroleum market. Under a 1970s agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia, all oil sales anywhere in the world are conducted in dollars, recycled back to the US and to a lesser extent Britain as sovereign reserve holdings in return for military support and security.
The petrodollar system has underpinned the US financial system, allowing it to finance its soaring debts—the US is the world’s largest creditor nation—and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. While the US accounts for around 20 percent of global GDP, nearly 90 percent of international currency transactions and 60 percent of foreign exchange reserves are in dollars.
But foreign investment no longer finances US debt to the same extent as it once did. Since the 2008 financial crisis and more recently the pandemic crisis, the Federal reserve has sought to protect financial markets with quantitative easing and bought up US debt itself. As a result, foreign central banks’ and foreign investors’ holdings of US treasury bonds as a proportion of total US public debt have fallen by about 50 percent.
The prospect of Riyadh accepting payment in yuan is totally unacceptable to Washington. It would further and significantly undermine the dollar-based system, following on from Russia and Iran’s attempts to strike payments in different currencies under the pressure of US sanctions. Iraq’s efforts to avoid sanctions by selling its oil for euros was one of the factors that led the Bush administration to declare war on Iraq in 2003, despite opposition from the European powers.
Biden declared quite openly that his trip to Saudi Arabia last month was to bolster America’s position in the region, which had waned under his watch, against its rivals: “I want to make clear that we can continue to lead in the region and not create a vacuum, a vacuum that is filled by China and/or Russia.”
Relations with the Gulf States began to cool after President Barack Obama’s refusal to back Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak during the mass protests that were to bring down his government in 2011 and threaten Saudi clients in Bahrain and Yemen. They became more strained after Washington signed the 2015 nuclear accords with Iran—whom Riyadh and Abu Dhabi accuse of supporting the Houthi rebels who ousted Riyadh’s puppet government in Yemen in 2015—and did little to counter the Houthis’ missile attacks.
Russia’s successful thwarting of the attempted overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, orchestrated by Washington and heavily backed by Riyadh in particular, and of the US-organised coup against Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have also caused disquiet.
Biden’s billion-dollar arms sales are intended as a down payment on a renewed partnership. They were announced as China’s President Xi Jinping prepares to visit Saudi Arabia as early as this week—his first overseas visit since the COVID pandemic—where he is expected to be given an extravagant welcome, in contrast to its low-key reception of Biden in July. They follow shortly after Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s state-owned Sinopec for cooperation in areas, including “carbon capture and hydrogen processes.”
It is difficult to say, given the facts, which famous father has raised the better boy. Perhaps the most notable difference between Joe Biden and King Salman is that the elderly and infirm Saudi royal knew when it was time to call it quits and hand power to a younger generation. Biden does not appear to share this outlook. This is not to suggest that he should anoint Hunter as his heir apparent, although there's no question the whore-loving crackhead scion would get more votes than Kamala Harris. ANDREW STILES
GROWING ISLAMIC FASCISM IN AMERICA… will it be as bad as we witness is happening to Europe?
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-islamic-fascism-in-america.html
For Hollywood, China and various Islamic nations mean hundreds of billions of dollars in profit to corporate enterprises, so human rights concerns are placed in the back seat. RAJAN LAAD
Inside the Horror of Islamic Sex Slavery - and the Real War on Women
Last week marked the seventh annual commemoration of the Yazidi genocide, though you wouldn’t know it from watching establishment media. Nor would you know that there is an ongoing genocide of Christians taking place in Nigeria, nor that throughout the Islamic world countless women and girls are enduring kidnapping, forced marriages, forced conversions of Christians to Islam, genocidal rape, and/or widespread sex trafficking even in countries that are supposedly our allies in the War on Terror.
HILLARY AND OBOMB’S DIRTY SAUDIS DICTATORS…. the Saudis know where to pitch their birbes. They've always been in bed with the Bush crime family (Amazon book House of Bush, House of Saud). We may never know how much the Saudis dictators pumped into building the Bush, Clinton or Obama presidential libraries, but we know the dictators,in fact, numerous Muslim dictatorships were very generous with the Clinton Foundation Family Slush Fund just as Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, under closet Muslim Barack Hussien Obama, was very genrou$ with the Muslim dictators. For all these filthy pols, just follow the money. They have and will sell us out to anyone!.... DO A SEARCH FOR BARACK OBAMA AND SAUDIS!
How much as she sucked in?
DANCING WITH DICTATORS.... BOTH THE CLINTONS ARE EXPERT DANCERS!
Hillary’s Russian connection
“Facilitating strategic technology transfer in return for money is an old Clinton game. The Chinese bought their way to access of considerable space technology when Bill Clinton was president. Remember Charlie Trie, Loral, and the rest of the crew?”
TWO AMORAL SOCIOPAITHS!
The “Islamophobia” narrative that Muslims are particular victims of large-scale discrimination and harassment in the U.S. needed shoring up. But when the killer was identified, the whole thing blew up on the putative president and vice president. Not that they’ll ever admit that.
Biden and Harris Rush to Condemn ‘Hate Crime,’ But ‘Islamophobic’ Killer is…A Muslim
The Left sticks to its narrative, no matter how often it blows up in its face.
The Left’s view of the world is a series of fictions, fantasies, and delusions. Like all propaganda, this house of cards would collapse in a second if it weren’t constantly shored up with what Leftists claim is “evidence” or “proof” that their insanity — men can be women, Jan. 6 was an insurrection, and the rest — is actually real. And so when four Muslims were shot dead in New Mexico, Old Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rushed to condemn the killings and declare piously that “hate” has no place in America. The “Islamophobia” narrative that Muslims are particular victims of large-scale discrimination and harassment in the U.S. needed shoring up. But when the killer was identified, the whole thing blew up on the putative president and vice president. Not that they’ll ever admit that.
Biden’s Twitter wonk tweeted Sunday: “I am angered and saddened by the horrific killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque. While we await a full investigation, my prayers are with the victims’ families, and my Administration stands strongly with the Muslim community. These hateful attacks have no place in America.” Not to be outdone, on the same day, Harris tweeted: “I am deeply disturbed by the killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque. As law enforcement continues to investigate these heinous attacks, we remain clear that we stand with the Muslim community in New Mexico and around our country. Hate has no place in America.”
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich (a Democrat, of course) started the ball rolling on Friday when he tweeted: “Muhammad Afzaal Hussain was a pillar in the UNM community and an incredible force for good. I’m very concerned by law enforcement reports that his murder may be linked to two other murders of Muslim men in Albuquerque. Racist, hate-fueled violence has no place in New Mexico.” Another Twitter user responded to Heinrich: “You misspelled christian white supremacist terrorism.”
There was actually no indication at that point or ever that these killings were racially motivated. Even the Washington Post reported on Monday that “the police have not determined a motive for the killings,” but that didn’t stop the Left’s propaganda machine from rolling onward. CJ Werleman, an “activist against Islamophobia” with 316,000 followers on Twitter, tweeted late Monday night: “Muslims, particularly Pakistani Muslims, are being targeted for assassination in New Mexico. The perpetrator is most likely a white supremacist but would not be surprised if we learn he/she is a Hindu nationalist.”
Of course, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had to get in the act. On Friday, it offered a $5,000 reward for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the possibly bias-motivated shooting deaths of three Muslim men in New Mexico.” CAIR raised the reward to $10,000 the next day. (Police suspected that the same killer had also murdered a fourth Muslim last November.) CAIR also “called on the Biden administration to take a direct role in responding to the shooting spree” and got the tweets from Biden and Harris in response. CAIR reps appeared on CNN three times and MSNBC once (only once? What’s wrong with you, MSNBC?) to discuss the killings.
But then a suspect was caught. CBS News reported Tuesday that “Muhammed Syed, 51, was identified as the ‘primary suspect in the recent murders of Muslim men,’ police said Tuesday, and charged with murdering Aftab Hussein on July 26 and Muhammad Afzaal Hussian on Aug. 1. Detectives connected the two cases using bullet casings found at the two scenes. They are still investigating Syed’s possible involvement in the murders of Naeem Hussain on Aug. 5 and Mohammed Zaher Ahmadi on Nov. 7.”
Syed “appears to have known his victims,” and CAIR revealed that there are “early indications that the alleged killer may have been targeting particular members of the Shia community.” So the killings weren’t “Islamophobia,” but may have been another instance of the Sunni-Shi’ite jihad coming to America.
Biden and Harris were so anxious for some confirmation of the Left’s bogus “Islamophobia” narrative that they condemned these murders as hate crimes before any suspect had been located. They wanted people to think an “Islamophobe” was the murderer, no matter what the facts turned out to be. Will Biden and Harris now apologize for reinforcing a spurious victimhood narrative? Will CAIR run an information feature on the Sunni-Shi’ite jihad, which has claimed far more lives than “Islamophobia” ever has? Not on your life. The Left sticks to its narrative, no matter how often it blows up in their faces, as it did this time.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 25 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Biden’s Handlers Released 324 Unvetted Afghan Evacuees on Terror Watchlist Into the U.S.
It's all going according to plan.
Biden’s catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was bad enough in itself, diminishing America’s standing in the world and projecting an image of weakness that has encouraged and emboldened enemies of our nation worldwide. The fallout from it, however, could be incalculably worse. A Defense Department (DoD) whistleblower has revealed that 324 of the Afghans whom U.S. forces brought to the United States as the disaster in Afghanistan was unfolding appeared on the department’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist (BEWL), which includes terrorists, and yet were admitted into the country without being vetted. No one who has been watching the spreading dumpster fire that is the Biden administration could possibly be surprised.
Senators Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) have called upon the DoD to investigate. On Thursday, they wrote to DoD Acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell about their “concern over new allegations raised by a Department of Defense (DoD) whistleblower. This information may show the Biden Administration’s failure to vet those evacuated from Afghanistan was even worse than the public was led to believe. The following allegations demand an immediate investigation by your office.” There should indeed be an investigation, but in these days of the hyper-politicization of everything and concomitant wokeification of the government bureaucracy, a genuinely illuminating investigation is about as likely to happen as Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis getting the Democrat nomination for president in 2024.
Epoch Times reported Friday that “the BEWL identifies individuals whose biometrics have been collected and determined by analysts to be threats or potential threats to national security, including known suspected terrorists.” But instead of stopping those who appeared on this watchlist, the whistleblower contents that “White House and DoD officials instructed agency personnel to ‘cut corners’ and not conduct full fingerprint tests on the evacuees at staging bases in Europe, ‘in order to promote the rushed evacuation from Afghanistan.’”
The whistleblower also charges that “Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff were authorized to delete old biometric data at their discretion.” Really, what could possibly go wrong? Hawley and Johnson point out, with admirable understatement, that this is a “troubling development that could threaten national security and public safety.”
Yeah, it could. And as it was all initially unfolding, Joe Biden was doing what he does best: lying. Sensitive to criticism arising from the importation of unvetted Afghans in the U.S., Biden declared in September 2021 that “planes taking off from Kabul are not flying directly to the United States. They’re landing at U.S. military bases and transit centers around the world. At these sites where they are landing, we are conducting thorough scrutiny — security screenings for everyone who is not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident.” State Department spokesman Ned Price added: “Before anyone who is evacuated from Afghanistan comes to this country, they undergo a rigorous vet. Unless and until they complete that vet they will not be in a position to come to the U.S.”
In reality, however, there appeared to be a concerted effort to bring unvetted Afghans into the United States. At least 82,000 Afghans were brought to the U.S. without being vetted. In October 2021, Senate Republicans noted in a memo, accordingto the Washington Examiner, “senior officials across the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, and Justice described a disastrous screening and vetting process.” Immigration officials accepted uncritically what Afghans said about who they were, without making any effort to check their stories. According to the Examiner, “the large majority of people, approximately 75%, evacuated were not American citizens, green card holders, Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders, or applicants for the visa.”
Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) had been given to Afghans who aided U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In September 2021, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed that “of the 60,000 Afghans who have entered the U.S., nearly 8,000 are either U.S. citizens or residents, while about 1,800 are SIV holders, having obtained visas after assisting the U.S. military.” That meant that 52,000 of the 60,000 Afghans who had come into the country were not U.S. citizens or SIV holders. In November 2021, Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) stated that only 700 of the 82,000 Afghans now in the U.S. were SIV holders.
The Examiner noted that Biden’s reception of these Afghans “violated long-standing U.S. government policies for handling refugees.” This was a deliberate decision: “Refugees are to be screened and vetted before being admitted to the U.S. through an extensive process that includes multiple interrogations. Rather than follow the protocol, the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement and military officials handling the evacuations and processing to adhere to less stringent standards.”
Hawley confronted FBI director Christopher Wray about all this Thursday. According to Epoch Times, “Wray wasn’t able to give a clear answer about the FBI’s efforts to track down and interview the 324 Afghan evacuees.” Once again, no one should be surprised. Clearly this is all going the way the Leftist elites want it to go.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a ShillmanFellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 25 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Afghan Migrant Suspected of Killing Four over Islamic Religious Dispute
A Muslim migrant from Afghanistan has been charged in the killings of two other immigrants and is the suspect in yet two more killings, which are thought to be motivated by an Islamic religious dispute.
Muhammad Syed, 51, had been living in Alberqerque, New Mexico for roughly five years before the killings.
He had previously faced multiple domestic violence charges that were ultimately dismissed.
Police have found that Syed, a Sunni Muslim, was motivated at least in part by an “interpersonal conflict,” thought to be related to his daughter’s marriage to a Shiite Muslim.
Ahmad Assed, president of the Islamic Center of New Mexico, left, speaks at a news conference to announce the arrest of Muhammad Syed, a suspect in the recent murders of Muslim men in Albuquerque, N.M., as Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller listens, at right, Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2022. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/The Albuquerque Journal via AP)
Three of the four victims all attended the Islamic Center of New Mexico, a Shiite Mosque.
President of the Mosque Ahmad Assed said that he was aware that the religious dispute might have been a motivating factor in the killings but noted that one of the four victims was a Sunni Muslim.
The New York Times reported that “police found several guns at Mr. Syed’s home and one in the car he was driving, and believed two of the weapons were connected to the killings of one man on July 26 and another on Aug. 1.”
A young man bows during the Dhuhr afternoon prayer at the Islamic Center of New Mexico, Sunday Aug. 7, 2022, after the fourth Muslim man was murdered in Albuquerque. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/The Albuquerque Journal via AP)
Tahir Gauba, a director of the Mosque, said that “the last two weeks have been nothing but nightmares,” commenting on the arrest of the suspect when he commented “Tonight the Muslim community will sleep in peace.”
Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com
GROWING ISLAMIC FASCISM IN AMERICA… will it be as bad as we witness is happening to Europe?
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-islamic-fascism-in-america.html
One Year Later, Inspectors Still Want to Know What Ex-President Did with Afghanistan’s Money
The office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has published its final report on the “theft of funds from Afghanistan,” with particular attention to “allegations concerning President Ghani and former senior Afghan officials.”
SIGAR concluded reports of Ghani fleeing Kabul with hundreds of millions of dollars were exaggerated, but a good deal of U.S. taxpayer money is still missing and Ghani was not eager to talk about where it went.
Ghani fled Kabul on August 15, 2021, ostensibly because he feared for his life as Taliban forces surrounded the capital. His critics, including some U.S. officials, said his sudden departure by helicopter made the Taliban takeover much worse because the triumphant insurgents expected Ghani to manage the transition of power after President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal.
Within hours of Ghani’s hasty exit from Kabul, the Russian embassy began spreading rumors that the deposed president looted the Afghan treasury on his way out, packing hundreds of millions of dollars into ground vehicles and his escape helicopter.
“Four cars were packed with money, and they tried to cram another bag of cash into the helicopter. Not all the cash managed to squeeze in, and some of the money was left lying on the airfield,” snorted an embassy employee, as quoted by Russia’s state-run Tass news service. This source also spoke to Western media, claiming eyewitnesses could verify his claims.
File/A man reads a newspaper displaying front page news about Afghanistan, at a stall in Islamabad on August 16, 2021 as the Taliban were in control of Afghanistan after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and conceded the insurgents had won the 20-year war. (AAMIR QURESHI/AFP via Getty)
Ghani released a statement from his refuge in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) denying the rumors he fled Afghanistan with bags full of cash.
“I was forced to leave Afghanistan with one set of traditional clothes, a vest and the sandals I was wearing,” he insisted, three days after fleeing Kabul.
At roughly the same time, Afghan Ambassador to Tajikistan Mohammad Zahir Aghbar was accusing Ghani of absconding with $169 million.
In its final report last week, SIGAR criticized Ghani for refusing to answer its questions directly, instead releasing statements through his attorney. The attorneys answered only six of the 56 questions SIGAR asked about stolen funds.
SIGAR noted that a great deal of money is missing from Afghanistan, but the wilder tales of Ghani escaping with a greater volume of cash than most helicopters would be capable of lifting are dramatic exaggerations:
The allegations that former President Ghani and his senior advisors fled Afghanistan aboard helicopters with millions in cash are unlikely to be true. The hurried nature of their departure, the emphasis on passengers over cargo, the payload and performance limitations of the helicopters, and the consistent alignment in detailed accounts from witnesses on the ground and in the air all suggest that there was little more than $500,000 in cash on board the helicopters.
That being said, it remains a strong possibility that significant amounts of U.S. currency disappeared from Afghan government property in the chaos of the Taliban takeover—including millions from the presidential palace and the National Directorate of Security vault. Attempts to loot other government funds appear to have been common. Yet with Afghan government records and surveillance videos from those final days likely in Taliban hands, SIGAR is unable to determine how much money was ultimately stolen, and by whom.
U.S. inspectors were deeply skeptical of Ghani’s claims that some of the cash he was apparently hoarding in his presidential palace was earmarked for charitable endeavors:
Multiple former senior officials were told that the $5 million found on the palace grounds was the president’s personal money and was declared in his assets. In response to questions from SIGAR about this large sum of cash, Ghani’s attorney said that “President Ghani had publicly announced his commitment to using his personal cash assets to establish a foundation in his ancestral village including a Presidential Library, an Islamic Studies Center, and an agricultural center.” However, this does not seem plausible even to the president’s own former staff. One former senior official said that “$5 million is a lot of money, and no one keeps that in their house.” Although such a scenario is possible, in our view, Ghani’s response explains why he would keep these assets liquid, but not why he would keep them as cash under the proverbial mattress for nearly 6 years.
SIGAR suspected Ghani did try to leave the country with a sizable bankroll, but based on messages between senior Afghan officials, the fabled bags of cash were left behind during Ghani’s hasty evacuation. The precise amount of money involved, and if it should all have been considered Ghani’s rightful personal property, was difficult to establish.
SIGAR also noted that Ghani and other top officials fled to Uzbekistan by helicopter, then spent about $120,000 chartering a flight to the UAE. The Uzbeks searched all of the fleeing officials and their staffers thoroughly, so it was unlikely they could have smuggled large amounts of cash through Uzbekistan. Eyewitness accounts from Uzbekistan suggested the charter flight consumed a great deal of the cash carried by the fleeing officials.
The Inspector General’s report hastened to add that while Ghani might not have departed Afghanistan with eight figures of cash tucked in his luggage, a huge amount of money was stolen. Ghani appears to have been sitting on a few million dollars’ worth of currency that was probably looted by the Taliban when it occupied his presidential palace in Kabul. A vastly larger sum vanished from the coffers of the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS).
Former senior officials of the NDS testified that its budget was about $225 million when the Taliban took over. Some accounts said the NDS had at least $70 million in its operating reserve.
This immense sum of cash was supposedly necessary because the NDS threw a lot of money at “anti-Taliban militias” and “local power brokers and communities.”
File/Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani (3L) gestures as he arrives ahead of a meeting at the Afghan Parliament house in Kabul on August 2, 2021. (WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)
Cash payments to these local forces “soared as the country’s provinces fell one by one” to the Taliban blitzkrieg in the summer of 2021, “reaching a crescendo in the government’s final two weeks.”
“We used a lot of money to send and buy weapons at the end. The governors told us to push the people to help them protect different areas. NDS was the last organization to support them and work with them. We carried a lot of money to different people, like tribal leaders,” one former senior official explained.
SIGAR determined that on the day before Kabul fell, the huge NDS reserve of U.S. dollars “disappeared.” When the Taliban seized control of the NDS vault on August 15, “only a small reserve of Afghanis [local currency] remained.”
The fate of those missing millions remains murky. Some Afghan officials told SIGAR the money was seized by the Taliban, but those accounts could not be confirmed. The chain of custody for the literal keys to the money vault could not be nailed down. SIGAR noted that the manager who oversaw cash disbursements from the vault was replaced two weeks before the Taliban takeover; a former senior official said such personnel turnovers were a “common method to discretely steal funds amid the chaos,” and testified he himself was pressured to loot his agency’s treasury, with promises of a $20 million payoff if he complied.
“It remains a strong possibility that significant amounts of U.S. currency disappeared from
Afghan government property in the chaos of the Taliban takeover – including millions from the presidential palace and the NDS vault. Attempts to loot other government funds appear to have been common,” SIGAR concluded.
“With Afghan government records and surveillance videos from those final days likely in Taliban hands, SIGAR is unable to determine how much money was ultimately stolen, and by whom,” the inspectors glumly conceded.
A Year After Conquering Afghanistan, the Taliban Are Done Pretending to Be ‘Inclusive’
GROWING ISLAMIC FASCISM IN AMERICA… will it be as bad as we witness is happening to Europe?
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-islamic-fascism-in-america.html
Dad of Three Jumps Into Action as 'Allahu Akbar' Rings Out on Plane
A father of three prevented a potential tragedy with his quick action on a flight last week.
According to the U.K.’s Mirror, 35-year-old Phillip O’Brien was on a Jet2 flight from Cyprus to Manchester, England, when a passenger allegedly stripped to her underwear.
The passenger attempted to storm the cockpit twice and screamed, “Allahu Akbar,” a phrase meaning “Allah is the greatest” that has been used by Muslim terrorists during violent attacks.
She had alleged there were explosives on board, and she asked children who were with her whether they were “ready to die.”
O’Brien was able to get the woman in a hold, and crew members eventually helped secure her in a chair, the Mirror reported.
“Everything was normal and then shortly after take-off a woman walked up the aisle naked and banged on the cockpit door shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,'” O’Brien said.
“As you can imagine everyone was s***ing themselves.”
O’Brien said he first questioned why the staff on board the plane had not stopped the woman.
“I spoke to staff and said, ‘Why have you not put her to the floor?'” O’Brien said.
The staff reportedly told O’Brien they were not able to restrain the woman. O’Brien, who has worked in security in the past, said he could.
“So when the woman went to the cockpit again I took control, took her to the ground and at that point the pilot did an emergency landing to Paris,” O’Brien said.
The woman allegedly said her parents were members of the terror group ISIS. Her behavior suggested she may have been suffering from a mental illness.
After restraining her, O’Brien asked her why she was trying to storm the cockpit. He said she told him, “If I didn’t there’s going to be an explosion, and everybody is going to die.”
Jet2 confirmed the flight landed in Paris so a “disruptive passenger could be offloaded,” the Mirror reported.
A woman who was a passenger on the flight spoke to the U.K.’s Daily Mail about her experience.
“I was more worried about my daughter — she was so scared, she had a massive panic attack,” the woman said. “You were just terrified of what she was going to do when you closed your eyes.”
She said the woman’s strange behavior began just 10-15 minutes after the flight took off and lasted for hours.
“It was just crazy,” the passenger told the Mail. “At first it looked like she was drunk — she had the suitcase on her head. The cabin crew said she wasn’t drunk as they had smelt her breath. I don’t know how she got through security.”
Saudi Aramco Reports Record $48.4 Billion Quarterly Profits
Aug. 14 (UPI) — Aramco, the largely state-owned Saudi oil company, reported a 90% surge in second-quarter profits on Sunday.
Aramco reported $48.4 billion net income for the three-month period ending in June, thought to be one of the largest quarterly profits in history.
The quarterly earnings were up nearly double from its $25.5 net income during the same period last year and above analysts’ expectations of $46.2 billion.
It also reported half-year net income of $87.9 billion, widely surpassing other major oil companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP.
The Saudi Arabian government holds a 95% stake in Aramco and will take the majority of an $18.8 billion dividend set to be distributed before the end of October.
The company cited strong market conditions as a driving factor behind the earnings boom as oil prices rose as high as $130 per barrel earlier this year.
“Our record second-quarter results reflect increasing demand for our products — particularly as a low-cost producer with one of the lowest upstream carbon intensities in the industry,” Aramco President and CEO Amin Nasser said.
Gas prices, however, have begun to recede some, with the national average in the United States falling to $3.99 per gallon last week, falling below $4 for the first time since March. It went as high as $5.02 onJune 14.
Nasser added Aramco expects post-pandemic recovery in oil demand to continue for the remainder of the decade despite “downward economic pressures on short-term global forecasts.”
“While global market volatility and economic uncertainty remain, events during the first half of this year support our view that ongoing investment in our industry is essential — both to help ensure markets remain well supplied and to facilitate an orderly energy transition,” he said.
The record profits for Aramco come after U.S. President Joe Biden faced criticism for being photographed fist-bumping Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during a visit to the Middle East last month.
Lawmakers said Biden’s actions indicated efforts to warm up to the oil-rich government despite Western intelligence indicating Mohammed was directly responsible for the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in 2018.
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Author Salman Rushdie Attacked on Stage in New York
Famed author Salman Rushdie, whose writings prompted the Supreme Leader of Iran to put a bounty on his head in 1989, was attacked ahead of a planned speech in New York on Friday, the Associated Press reports.
A man was witnessed storming the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and “punching or stabbing” Rushdie in the midst of the author being introduced, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene. Rushdie suffered an “apparent stab wound to the neck,” reports ABC News.
The Sun U.S. reports: “According to images from the scene, there were splatters of blood on the walls in the Chautauqua Institute after the attack on author Salman Rushdie just before his lecture.”
Rushdie was transported to hospital via helicopter. His condition is currently unknown. The man who is believed to have attacked the author has reportedly been detained.
New York State Police has launched a swift investigation into the attack
Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” has been banned in Iran since 1988, as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. A year later, Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
A bounty of over $3 million has also been offered for anyone who kills Rushdie.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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