WATCHING N.A.F.T.A. DEMS DESTROY HOMELAND SECURITY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR JOE'S CRONIES - Pro-migration Democrat politicians in Maryland are denouncing their support group for illegal migrants — Casa de Maryland — because it tweeted woke-style support for the Hamas war against Jews.

 

Hamas War Splits Democrats’ Pro-Migration Alliance in Maryland

Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

18 Nov 2023

13:37

Pro-migration Democrat politicians in Maryland are denouncing their support group for illegal migrants — Casa de Maryland — because it tweeted woke-style support for the Hamas war against Jews.

MarylandMatters reported the split between the Democrats and the Hamas-backing CASA group:

CASA is now under intense scrutiny for its tactics, priorities and governing structure. A statement released Wednesday night by all nine of Montgomery County’s senators … was particularly unforgiving, and came with suggestions that the organization’s state funding could be in jeopardy. That’s a potential existential threat for CASA, which receives about two-thirds of its money from local, state and federal governments.

CASA’s November 6 tweets used woke themes about colonization and relative power to blame Israel for Hamas’s feral massacres, rapes, and burning of Jewish settlements alongside the Gaza Strip. One tweet said:

We support the struggle for decolonization, affirming the rights of indigenous peoples & historically colonized nations to reclaim their land. The Palestinian struggle mirrors our own; w/CASA members fleeing govts & countries wrecked by the damage of US econ & poli. intervention.

The tweet also showed CASA’s director at the pro-Hamas demonstration wearing a blue mask and displaying a clenched fist while surrounded by symbols of hostility to Israel and to Jews.

Source: CASAforall/X

The director, Gustavo Torres, is a college-trained radical Colombian immigrant who arrived in 1991. He issued CASA’s formal statement of support for Hamas, which said:

[W]e deeply acknowledge the interconnectedness of the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people and Black and brown communities in the United States. Our shared and unwavering commitment is to foster humanity, safety, and lasting peace throughout the entire region while confronting the historical oppression that demands urgent redress.

Since roughly 2010, woke language used by CASA — interconnectedness, decolonization, oppression — has gradually replaced the Democrats’ 1930s solidarity-themed politics about Americans’ rights to decent wages and government support.

Woke Replaces Wages

The older 1930s politics of solidarity had endorsed a meritocratic elite in exchange for prosperity among the middle class and working class.

But that two-way civic bargain was ditched by the federal government in 1990. Instead, it pushed a top-down, anti-solidarity combination of affirmative action in colleges, enforced diversity in culture, Wall Street dominance in trade and business, and a mass inflow of migrant workers, consumers, and renters.

Over the next 30 years, that pro-libertarian switch simultaneously inflated Wall Street and fractured ordinary people’s wealth and communities. It also shrank the meritocratic elite’s willingness to support ordinary Americans — or the “irredeemable … deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s language.

In 2016, the public tried to revive the old bargain by electing real-estate developer Donald Trump in place of elite champion Clinton. But that traditionalist revival has been blocked — so far — by massive, quasi-legal, and emotional resistance from the post-1990s meritocratic elites.

In 2023, the elite’s continued refusal to bargain with civic-minded voters has revived populist right-wing support for Trump.

On the left side of politics, millions of young, left-leaning people hate Trump and his populist movement. Yet they cannot get decent wages, buy homes, get married, or enjoy the middle-class prosperity that they glimpsed in their childhood.

Many of those alienated left-wing activists blame the meritocratic establishment for their failing circumstances. Now, the Hamas war has suddenly created a shared cause and common language for left-wing activists and foreign students in politics, sexual politics, minorities, racial identity groups, colleges, and the pro-migration movements.

Source: CASAforall/X

That outburst has surprised many comfortable progressives who expected young people, college students, migrants, and racial minorities to compliantly accept their meritocratic leadership.

The anti-meritocratic outburst has also shocked many Democrat-affiliated professionals and business leaders because antisemitic chants often accompany the anti-meritocratic rhetoric amid the wild campaign by Hamas to kill any Jews it can reach.

The New York Times reported on November 17:

Representative Jamaal Bowman, whose [New York] district encompasses several affluent Westchester County suburbs as well as a small part of the Bronx, last week planned a “healing breakfast” with Jewish constituents pained by his pro-Palestinian politics … now, with the conflict in the Middle East inflaming American politics, he seemed likely to face his own primary challenge in June, one that will test the coalition between liberal Jews and people of color that is key to the progressive movement both in his district and in the country more broadly.

….

“People like me are not being given much to work with when we go to some of our beleaguered, anxious and frightened Jewish friends, and they are saying that the left is so infested with antisemitism that they can no longer be part of it,” said Lisa Genn, a local progressive activist who is part of a group called Jews for Jamaal.

“There are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel,” the New York Times wrote:

According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”

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CASA’s Defection

CASA’s staffers were part of the young progressives’ drift into the woke movement.

One CASA tweet showed a Spanish-language placard saying, “Your Fight is My Fight.”

Source: CASAforall/X

As a group, CASA has grown by balancing its relationships with ordinary illegal migrants, other advocacy groups, Democrat legislators, progressive donors, and the top corporate groups that fund much pro-migration political activity.

For example, CASA has worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us migration advocacy group for Wall Street investors. In 2021, FWD.us touted CASA’s membership in the “We Are Home” campaign for more migration:

For decades, immigrant communities have upheld American society, feeding our families, caring for our children, building our homes. Well overdue is the dignity and respect that our communities are owed for doing all of the work – with none of the recognition,” said Gustavo Torres, CASA Executive Director.

It has also closely allied with Maryland’s Democrat establishment, which wants to pull more migrants into the state’s economy and community. A November 14 letter by 19 Democrat politicians in the legislature said:

CASA’s primary mission is to provide services to immigrant communities in this country and to help address their struggles in obtaining housing, healthcare, financial services, and more. Many of us have worked closely with CASA in their advocacy for services and we wholeheartedly support its mission of making Maryland a welcoming state for immigrants … The struggles of being a new immigrant to this country are real and personal to us. That is why have each worked so closely with CSASA over the years.

The hard-earned political support has delivered much government funding and subsidies to CASA, including a favorable lease of a government building.

But CASA also echoes the concerns of the migrants as they service the county’s prosperous — and sometimes condescending — employers and upper-middle-class population. CASA’s website says:

CASA has come a long way from the church basement it started in. CASA was established by activists opposing U.S. interference in Latin America and the funding of military and paramilitary assaults on the communities of Central America. As the US continued to invest in the destabilization of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador in particular, refugees began flooding into the DC region escaping torture and death. Since those humble beginnings, CASA has grown, lifted by waves of activism led by day laborers and domestic workers, students and parents, co-conspirators for justice in labor, faith, and civil rights organizations.

So when slammed by its Democrat allies for apparently backing Hamas, CASA did not apologize. Instead, it zig-zagged:

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“It’s a different organization than it was 15 or 20 years ago,” griped Andrew Friedson, one of several Jewish members of the Montgomery County Council. “People are grappling with that and I think it’s bigger than the moment,” he told MarylandMatters.org for a November 10 article.

But CASA’s anticolonialism language was invited into the United States by U.S. immigration laws.

In 2002, Torres was profiled in the Washington Post and described his 1991 arrival in the United States:

Torres said he believes that wars in Central America have been nurtured by the U.S. government investing money in conflicts rather than the economy. In Maryland, he said, he wants to use the system to level the playing field for immigrants who fled their countries only to find inequities in the United States.

“This is my passion – always,” he told the Post.

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In mid-November, the Post ignored the state-wide scandal about CASA’s support for Hamas. CASA did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.

The Response to CASA

The elite split with CASA is exacerbated because many of the Democrat politicians in the district and state are part of the Jewish community. They valued CASA because of its ability to help migrants settle in Maryland but were shocked by its support for Hamas.

“The recent statement by the immigrant rights group CASA regarding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict has made an already emotional and horrific situation in our community worse,” said a November 7 statement from the two Latino members of the nine-member council:

CASA is an organization that we deeply respect and have both supported and worked with for decades to advance social justice and build bridges in our community. That’s why we denounce the statement and are so hurt by their recent divisive and ill-informed comments and actions.

The two Latino council members are Gabe Albornoz and Natali Fani-González.

Nineteen Jewish members of the Maryland General Assembly released a letter, saying, “We were deeply disappointed and hurt by the recent social media posts of CASA de Maryland … They displayed a profound misunderstanding of Middle East history, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and antisemitism.”

“I don’t think this can be forgiven. There’s no apology that’s sufficient,” said State Sen. Cheryl Kagan (D-Montgomery).

The Hamas attack “was a systematic slaughter of Jews,” Friedson said in a November 6 statement posted by MontgomeryPerspective.com, adding, “In the past, a pogrom of this magnitude would have likely begun an inevitable genocide of Jews. That’s why it has shaken virtually all of us to our core, regardless of religious observance, affiliation, or political views.”

CASA is also losing large charitable donations. For example, a donor group wrote to Torres at CASA, saying it would cut off donations. “As executive director, your decision to align CASA with the objective of those who promote the murder of the Jewish people, and the eradication of the State of Israel, is indefensible.”

Outside Maryland, a growing number of Democrats and their supporters are stepping back from their support for the diversity and migration policies that have helped to fuel antisemitism.

Jewish groups should unite against the establishment’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” woke policies that wreck the American ideals of merit, science, and debate, wrote Bari Weiss, a journalist who quit the New York Times because of woke policies.

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In October, a poll for the New York Times showed that a majority of Jews in the state consider migration to be more of a burden than a benefit.

After the attack, Henry Kissinger told a reporter, “It was a grave mistake [for Europe] to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country.”

Former President Donald Trump — and his top aide, Stephen Miller — also connected the dots between migration and antisemitism. “The same people that attacked Israel are coming into our country, and there are a lot of them,” Trump told the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in October. “You know where they’re coming in from also … all over the Middle East.”

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Still, there is no evidence that Democrats in Maryland are willing to roll back CASA’s woke project to import more migrants into the county’s jobs, schools, homes, and voter rolls.

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“CASA is a notable provider of services that no one, at least among Democratic elected officials, wants to discontinue,”  MontgomeryPerspective.com wrote on November 14.

Still Delusional After All These Years

Obama, Hamas and the venerable doctrine of Islam.

November 15, 2023 by Bruce Thornton 80 Comments

Newsletter

Recently Barack Obama opined on Israel’s war with Hamas, and predictably reprised all the received wisdom that our politicians on both sides of the aisles have indulged since 9/11. One comment in particular evoked one of the more dangerous takes on the conflict with modern jihadism––that this venerable doctrine of Islam is some sort of heresy or extremism that doesn’t represent Muslims worldwide.

In the context of the current war with Hamas, according to ABC news, Obama said of Israel’s campaign,  “‘There are people right now who are dying who have nothing to do with what Hamas did,’ Obama said, making the distinction between Palestinians who live in Gaza and the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.”

We’ll pass over the mendacious euphemism “the militant group Hamas,” and the implication that the accurate description “terrorist organization” is merely a prejudiced slur by U.S. security agencies. More important is Obama’s variation on the cringing and dishonest phrase “nothing to do with what Islam,” an echo of the Western apologists after 9/11 who regularly chanted this lie.

The use of this duplicitous formula transcends political party. After 9/11, the Bush administration no doubt thought that such rhetorical distortions would pacify Muslims and show them that we’re “not at war with Islam.”  Verbal preemptive cringes abounded in Bush’s speeches, such as the following: “Our enemy [al Qaeda] doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion . . . All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true face of Islam . . . It’s a faith based upon love not hate.”

Anybody even vaguely familiar with traditional Islamic doctrine and history knows that this flabby ecumenicalism is at best well-meaning wishful thinking, at worst a talking-point for malignant apologists. Listen to Ibn Khaldun (d.1406), one of Islam’s most significant and revered historians and philosophers: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” So too, Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), another important Muslim theorist of jihad: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” Are these titans of Islamic thought “hijackers” or “heretics”?

In the current crisis, such distortions of jihad like Obama’s serve to cast Hamas as victims, and to demonize Israel for its alleged callous disregard of innocent lives, as Obama implies. But “innocence” is not so simple, not when the enemy is utterly indifferent to their own peoples’ security and lives, and hide their weapons in schools, tunnels under hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, and other civilian infrastructure. Moreover, Hamas has the support of about half of Gazans, who voted Hamas into power in 2006. Nor was there any mystery about Hamas’s genocidal violence, which is codified in its founding covenant.

Also, support for “armed struggle” against Israel and its people is shared by most Gazans.  As Andrew McCarthy recently reported, a poll “from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research tells us that, by a margin of 58 percent to 20 percent, Palestinians would prefer a renewal of the intifada (the ‘armed struggle’) to peaceful negotiations aimed at ending ‘the occupation.’ That’s consistent with last year’s polling, as is the finding that about seven in ten Palestinians oppose the two-state solution.”

Other recent polls from the Washington Institute similarly report that “there is widespread popular appeal for competing armed Palestinian factions, including those involved in the attack. Overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas—along with similar percentages of Palestinians in the West Bank (52%) and East Jerusalem (64%).”

Moreover, smaller but more fanatic outfits like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lion’s Den have “receive the most widespread popular support in Gaza. About three quarters of Gazans express support for both groups, including 40% who see the Lion’s Den in a ‘very positive’ light, an attitude shared by a similar percentage of West Bank residents.” Given that the Palestinian Arabs have no formal military, “armed struggle” means terrorism.

No surprise, then, that many “civilians” took part in the massacre on 10/7. Photographers embedded with Hamas terrorists have publicized the carnage with photos that appeared in Western media like AP, the New York Times, Reuters, and CNN. The media watchdog website HonestReporting wondered, “Is it conceivable to assume that ‘journalists’ just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?” And wouldn’t that make those reporters and media outlets “accomplices in crime,” as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said?

Indeed, according to the Coalition for Jewish Values managing director Rabbi Yaakov Menken, “What we now know is that ‘civilians’ drew maps for Hamas, guiding them to each house, to each child, to each pet . . .  ‘Civilians’ came after the terrorists to murder and kidnap those who had been spared,’” and “‘civilians’ were embedded with the terrorists to report on the atrocities committed. Also, ‘civilians’ deliberately gather around the terrorists, even, barbarically, bringing their children.”

These delusions about the doctrines of Islam have vitiated our response to jihadist terror since before 9/11. There was the misinterpretation of the Iranian revolution by our national security and intelligence agencies, who seemingly knew little of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s religious motives in the 1978-79 revolution that created the Islamic [N.B.] Republic of Iran. More egregious was the similar failure in the Nineties to understand the origins and motives of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

And it’s not like we weren’t warned before then. In 1993, a group of jihadists associated with Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik,” bombed the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, leaving a 100-foot crater and killing six. Federal Prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted Rahman and his accomplices, laid out during the trial the jihadist doctrines that also would motivate Osama bin Laden.

Nor was Abdel Rahman a nutty cult leader, a Muslim “beard from the fringe” similar to David Koresh or Jim Jones, both of whose beliefs were obviously bizarre interpretations of Christian doctrine. In contrast, Abdel Rahman had a doctorate, with distinction, in Koranic studies from Cairo’s famed al-Azhar University, the Islamic equivalent of Harvard or Oxford. As McCarthy’s analysis of jihadist doctrine showed, Abdel Rahman’s preaching on jihad was completely consistent with traditional Islamic orthodoxy as set out in the Koran, the Hadith, the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and later theorists like the traditionalist Ibn Taymiyyah mentioned earlier.

Yet nobody in our security and defense agencies seemed to take seriously McCarthy’s explanation of jihadist doctrine during Rahman’s trial. Throughout the Nineties, scores of our citizens and service members were murdered, and our national security and interests damaged by al Qaeda’s string of terrorist attacks against our embassies in East Africa and military housing in Saudi Arabia.

All these attacks were treated by the Clinton administration as crimes rather than battles in Osama bin Laden’s declared war against the infidels’ greatest power and challenger to Islam’s religiously sanctioned dreams of global domination.  And as we saw earlier in Bush’s remarks, not even the gruesome finale on 9/11 and the 2996 dead could awake our foreign policy mavens from their dogmatic slumbers.

Finally, this willful blindness, as McCarthy titled his important book on the first World Trade Center bombing, serves the therapeutic, self-loathing narrative that makes our jihadist enemies the victims of Western historical depredations abetted by Israel, particularly colonialism. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this dubious received wisdom about the West’s guilt.

Just like today’s Western supporters of Hamas and their ahistorical chatter about “settler colonialism,” Obama blamed “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Obama neglected to point out that Islam created one of history’s greatest colonial empires, and those Muslim nations were paid billions of dollars in foreign aid to align with the U.S..

So now, due to our decades of delusions, we are facing a more dangerous Middle East dominated by Iran and its terrorist proxies, an Iran partnering with Russia and China to compromise our national interests and security. Yet still we disregard the facts of history, and more important continue to indulge our own moral idiocy.

For the moral truth is, if a man stands behind his family and shoots at yours, and you return fire in self-defense, killing members of his family, then the moral culpability is his for putting them in danger in the first place. We need to stop pressuring Israel to value the enemy’s civilians more than their own, and speaking the truth about jihad is a good place to start.

Bruce Thornton

Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.

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Lifestyles of the Rich and Terrorists

Hamas billionaires getting the attention their riches deserve.

November 16, 2023 by Hugh Fitzgerald 17 Comments

Newsletter

I have for years drawn attention here to the billions of dollars that the leaders of Hamas have stolen from the sums provided by foreign donors, money that was meant to support the people of Gaza. Now I am delighted that The Daily Mail (UK), The National Post (Canada), the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News have all given the story of the three Hamas billionaires extensive coverage. The coverage by Fox News can be found here: “Hamas billionaires: Lifestyles of the rich and terrorists,” by Eric Shawn, Fox News, November 8, 2023:

They are living the Hamas high life.

While the people of Gaza live in poverty and have suffered under the horrors of Hamas, the terror group’s leaders apparently are living high on the hog.

Israeli officials say Hamas leaders are billionaires, amassing an overwhelming jackpot of terror money for themselves….

Hamas bosses Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are worth an estimated $4 billion each, and political bureau leader Mousa Abu Marzouk is worth $3 billion….

Photos show Hamas leader Mashaal playing table tennis, as well as squeezing in a workout on a treadmill in what appears to be a hotel gym.

Reports have long claimed that one of the Hamas leaders’ bases of operations has been the Four Seasons Hotel in Doha, Qatar. In 2015, Mashaal held a press conference in the hotel’s ballroom, where he attacked Israel. And it was said he spent a lot of his time at the property. Four Seasons touts its property as being “reimagined with modern grandeur and sparkling with sunlight and sea views. From the elegant lobby to energetic restaurants and lounges, our beachfront urban retreat has been transformed into a vibrant hotspot.”

In a statement to Fox News, the company says the “Four Seasons confirms that Ismail Haniyeh is not living at or staying at Four Seasons Hotel Doha. Information circulating on social media suggesting otherwise is not true.” Requests for comment from Fox News about other Hamas leaders have not yet been answered.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has introduced legislation, “The Hamas Sanctions Act,” that would block Hamas’ ability to find safe havens abroad, including in Qatar or Turkey. The legislation would impose sanctions on “hotels, landlords, banks, and similar businesses in allied countries that provide services to Hamas leaders,” and would potentially classify countries, like Qatar and Turkey, “as state sponsors of terrorism for hosting Hamas.”…

“The United States has targeted nearly 1,000 individuals and entities connected to terrorism and terrorist financing by the Iranian regime and its proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iran-aligned terrorist groups in the region.”…

The three Hamas billionaires have stolen, from the people of Gaza, eleven billion dollars. They luxuriate in their residences, and luxury suites, in Doha, as well as in their villas in Beirut and Istanbul, where they have been photographed lolling on beds, working out in private gyms, flying about in their private planes, eating at the most expensive restaurants, completely indifferent to the conditions in which the people of Gaza live. Think of how many apartments, electricity plants, water purification plants could have been built in Gaza with those eleven billion dollars. The only people trying to help the Gazans directly — thus avoiding sending aid through the thieving Hamas rulers — are the Israelis, who until October 7 had been providing jobs to 20,000 people from Gaza, who earned between three and five times as much working in Israel than they could have earned at home, even assuming there were jobs to be had in the Strip.

The monstrous theft by Hamas leaders of aid meant for all Gazans is likely to arouse more indignation in the outside world than their record of supporting terrorism. For their vast wealth, stolen from the people of Gaza, and their living the high life while leaving the Gazans to wallow in their misery — a misery made much worse by the atrocities those leaders set loose on October 7 — is an outrage easy to grasp.

There should be posters, with the faces of these Hamas leaders, and the amounts they have stolen from fellow Arabs in Gaza, held up by pro-Israeli counter-protesters everywhere. Those will get attention in a certain segment of the population in the West that, I regret to say, posters of kidnapped Israelis will not.

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