In Defense Of The Constitution
News & Analysis
May 31, 2009
Why, Jew?
According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) world fact book, the State of Israel occupies a total of 20,770 square kilometers which includes 440 sq km of water. To put this in perspective, the entire country of Israel is smaller than the US state of New Jersey.
The total population of Israel is listed as 7,233,701; this includes non-Jewish Arabs whom are Israeli citizens. Israel is 76.4% Jewish with a minority of Muslims (16%), Arab Christians (1.7%) with “other Christians”, Druze, and unspecified making up the remaining religious groupings.
The government of Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a number of factions making up the Knesset, which includes members who are not only anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic as well.
In short, Israel, excepting its parliamentary form of government, is somewhat a microcosm of the United States; a multi-religious society with a participatory government that includes those dedicated to its destruction from within.
The US president is expected to present a “Peace Speech” in Egypt on June 4. President Obama is expected to announce his support for a “settlement of the Jewish question” by calling on Israel to accept the two state “solution” that will make it impossible for Israel to effectively defend itself. To be blunt, Israel is being asked to commit national suicide first by division into indefensible borders and secondly by massive immigration that will destroy the country from within.
Israel, a country occupying a fraction of the Middle East; a country re-born following the Holocaust; a country that makes a home even for those dedicated to its destruction; is being demanded of by the rest of the world to commit national suicide by dividing itself into two; one side that is expected to live with a false promise of peace and the other that is totally dedicated to destroying the other by any means necessary. Israel must win every war; her numerous enemies only one.
We shall not have peace by any division of Israel; nor will we “solve the Jewish question” by partnering with countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or any other Muslim-majority country in the Middle East. History has proven, time and time again, that political agreements with Muslim-majority countries are not worth the paper they are printed on and that all “agreements” are viewed by Muslim-majority governments as concessions to their religious ideology.
Let us ask the Saudi’s, the Syrians, and the rest of the Muslim world why they accept the presence of refugee camps housing multi-generations of Palestinians; why they refuse to take these refugee’s or provide them any meaningful assistance? Are not the Palestinians their Muslim brothers and sisters? Why do these Muslim countries turn their back on their brethren and demand of the Jews to destroy their country to accommodate those who have absolutely NO RIGHT to Israel?
The next time someone says “Why, Jew?” when the question of Israel arises, turn your back on him. For an American to pose such a question; given our own history with tyranny at our founding; clearly demonstrates a lack of appreciation for our own freedoms, it would be impossible for such a person to understand other people’s right to the same.
President Obama may get his wish for what could lead to the destruction of Israel; but this would only show the world, again, that the United States stands for what is expedient, not for what is right. How many of our allies will continue to trust us if we turn our backs on Israel?
As for me, I stand for a united Israel…from the river to the sea.
Andrew Whitehead
Director
Anti-CAIR
ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org
www.anti-cair-net.org
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Irans' Nuclear Shopping List
Irans' Nuclear Shopping List
Morgenthau: 'It's late in the game.'
Back when the Bush Administration was warning about Iran's nuclear progress, or its deadly meddling in Iraq, the typical Democratic and media response was to treat the Islamic Republic as innocent until proven guilty. This month, Democrat Robert Morgenthau supplied the proof.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was largely ignored by the media, the legendary Manhattan District Attorney opened a window on how Iran is secretly obtaining the ingredients for an arsenal of mass destruction. Mr. Morgenthau, whose recent cases have exposed illicit Iranian finance and procurement networks, has discovered what he calls "Iran's shopping list for materials related to weapons of mass destruction." They add up to "literally thousands of records."
Missile accuracy appears to be a key Iranian goal. In one of Mr. Morgenthau's cases -- the prosecution of Chinese citizen Li Fang Wei and his LIMMT company for allegedly scamming Manhattan banks to slip past sanctions on Iran -- the DA uncovered a list that included 400 sophisticated gyroscopes and 600 accelerometers. These are critical for developing accurate long-range missiles. He also found that Iran was acquiring a rare metal called tantalum, "used in those roadside bombs that are being used against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." So much for the media notion that Iran has played no part in killing American GIs.
Mr. Morgenthau also noted that the material shipped by LIMMT "included 15,000 kilograms of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production; 1,700 kilograms of graphite cylinders used for banned electrical discharge machines which are used in converting uranium; more than 30,000 kilograms of tungsten-copper plates; 200 pieces of tungsten-copper alloy hollow cylinders, all used for missiles; 19,000 kilograms of tungsten metal powder, and 24,500 kilograms of maraging steel rods . . . especially hardened steel suitable for long-range missiles."
Lest anyone think that these materials may have innocent uses, Mr. Morgenthau added that "we have consulted with top experts in the field from MIT and from private industry and from the CIA. . . . Frankly, some of the people we've consulted are shocked by the sophistication of the equipment they're buying."
Mr. Morgenthau's information is corroborated by a staff report for the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat John Kerry, which notes that Iran is making nuclear progress on all fronts, and that it "could produce enough weapons-grade material for a bomb within six months." The committee also notes that "Iran is operating a broad network of front organizations," and that authorities suspect "some purchases for Iran's nuclear and missile programs may have come through an elaborate ruse to avoid U.S. financial sanctions on dealing with Iranian banks."
As we've reported, Lloyds bank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in January with Mr. Morgenthau's office in which it admitted to a $300 million "stripping" scheme designed to hide the Iranian origin of banking transfers from 2001 to 2004. Several other banks are also in the crosshairs of Mr. Morgenthau and the Justice Department.
All this should put to rest any doubts about the Iranian regime's purposes and determination. As for what the U.S. should do about it, the committee report insists that "direct engagement" must be a part of American strategy, and so it seems fated to be under the Obama Administration. The least it can do is heed Mr. Morgenthau's central point about everything he's learned about Iran's nuclear progress: "It's late in the game, and we don't have a lot of time."
Morgenthau: 'It's late in the game.'
Back when the Bush Administration was warning about Iran's nuclear progress, or its deadly meddling in Iraq, the typical Democratic and media response was to treat the Islamic Republic as innocent until proven guilty. This month, Democrat Robert Morgenthau supplied the proof.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was largely ignored by the media, the legendary Manhattan District Attorney opened a window on how Iran is secretly obtaining the ingredients for an arsenal of mass destruction. Mr. Morgenthau, whose recent cases have exposed illicit Iranian finance and procurement networks, has discovered what he calls "Iran's shopping list for materials related to weapons of mass destruction." They add up to "literally thousands of records."
Missile accuracy appears to be a key Iranian goal. In one of Mr. Morgenthau's cases -- the prosecution of Chinese citizen Li Fang Wei and his LIMMT company for allegedly scamming Manhattan banks to slip past sanctions on Iran -- the DA uncovered a list that included 400 sophisticated gyroscopes and 600 accelerometers. These are critical for developing accurate long-range missiles. He also found that Iran was acquiring a rare metal called tantalum, "used in those roadside bombs that are being used against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." So much for the media notion that Iran has played no part in killing American GIs.
Mr. Morgenthau also noted that the material shipped by LIMMT "included 15,000 kilograms of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production; 1,700 kilograms of graphite cylinders used for banned electrical discharge machines which are used in converting uranium; more than 30,000 kilograms of tungsten-copper plates; 200 pieces of tungsten-copper alloy hollow cylinders, all used for missiles; 19,000 kilograms of tungsten metal powder, and 24,500 kilograms of maraging steel rods . . . especially hardened steel suitable for long-range missiles."
Lest anyone think that these materials may have innocent uses, Mr. Morgenthau added that "we have consulted with top experts in the field from MIT and from private industry and from the CIA. . . . Frankly, some of the people we've consulted are shocked by the sophistication of the equipment they're buying."
Mr. Morgenthau's information is corroborated by a staff report for the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat John Kerry, which notes that Iran is making nuclear progress on all fronts, and that it "could produce enough weapons-grade material for a bomb within six months." The committee also notes that "Iran is operating a broad network of front organizations," and that authorities suspect "some purchases for Iran's nuclear and missile programs may have come through an elaborate ruse to avoid U.S. financial sanctions on dealing with Iranian banks."
As we've reported, Lloyds bank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in January with Mr. Morgenthau's office in which it admitted to a $300 million "stripping" scheme designed to hide the Iranian origin of banking transfers from 2001 to 2004. Several other banks are also in the crosshairs of Mr. Morgenthau and the Justice Department.
All this should put to rest any doubts about the Iranian regime's purposes and determination. As for what the U.S. should do about it, the committee report insists that "direct engagement" must be a part of American strategy, and so it seems fated to be under the Obama Administration. The least it can do is heed Mr. Morgenthau's central point about everything he's learned about Iran's nuclear progress: "It's late in the game, and we don't have a lot of time."
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Being Muslim In America
State Department Continues Islamist Outreach
New booklet, "Being Muslim in America," taps the wrong messengers
IPT News
May 17, 2009
With the United States battling Islamist extremists, making America's case to Muslims around the world has never been more of a priority for policymakers. Unfortunately, the State Department continues to take a counterproductive approach: serving as a veritable infomercial promoting Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) while giving the back of the hand to the very anti-jihadist Muslims that Washington should be cultivating. The latest example is a State Department booklet issued in March titled "Being Muslim in America."
It is part of an outreach effort that began under President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and is moving forward under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The goal behind publication of the 64-page booklet is laudable: to arm consular officers and diplomats with information they can take to Muslims around the world to rebut slanders about U.S. "persecution" of Muslims. The booklet deluges readers with color pictures, statistical tables and individual profiles in an effort to show the world that American Muslims are a success story, noting that they have become entrepreneurs, professional athletes, entertainers, doctors, soldiers, firefighters, politicians, fashion designers, and pianists.
And as we'll show in more detail below, many slanders against the United States come from the same groups that are portrayed favorably in the State Department booklet. The front cover has a picture of two Muslim girls playing basketball at a school near Detroit: One is wearing traditional dress, the other more modern dress. It's no ordinary basketball game, because there's a deeper sociopolitical message that Foggy Bottom wants to send to the world: The girls "compete fiercely on the basketball court in a sport that blends individual skills and team effort. They -- along with the other men, women and children in the publication -- demonstrate every day what it is like to be Muslim in America." The booklet is replete with dozens of pictures of Muslims playing basketball, praying; talking about "diversity" at a mosque; attending interfaith gatherings "to celebrate diversity and tolerance," and "brainstorm[ing] ways to solve problems in their community." There is even a color-coded state-by-state map showing "Mosque Distribution in the United States."
The purpose of publishing "Being Muslim in America" is "to disabuse people of wildly false myths of the United States -- that 'Muslims are repressed, marginalized, fill in the blanks,' " according to Michael Friedman, division chief of print publications with the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs, which is overseeing distribution of the publication. Although State doesn't have a specific target number of copies that it is looking to sell or give away, Friedman said a similar 2002 State Department report titled "Muslim Life in America" had 400,000 print copies distributed worldwide and was translated into 28 languages. "It is conceivable that this one could reach that level," he told IPT News.
In addition, both "Muslim Life in America" and "Being Muslim in America" are featured on State Department web sites, here and here.
Asked whether similar booklets had been produced for other faiths, Friedman said no. With limited funding available, decision was made to produce a publication on American Muslims because "the struggle against Islamic terrorism is a struggle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world," he said.
Faulty Examples Showcased
Unfortunately, the substance of the booklet is so flawed that it could undermine the struggle against this form of radicalism. It perpetuates the mythology that American Muslims are united in the belief that law enforcement and the public are willing to flout innocent Muslims' civil rights post-September 11, describing American Muslim reactions to the attacks as follows:
"A new, truly American Islam is emerging, shaped by American freedoms, but also by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks -- planned and executed by non-Americans -- [which] raised suspicions among other Americans whose immediate responses, racial profiling among them, triggered in return a measure of Muslim-American alienation."
Then:
"Sadly, suspicions of this kind are not uncommon -- in the United States or in other nations – during wartime or when outside attack is feared. But 2008 is not 2002, when fears and suspicions were at their height. Context is also important: Every significant immigrant group has in the United States faced, and overcame, a degree of discrimination and resentment."
This is an extremely tendentious, even intellectually dishonest, description of September 11 and its aftermath. From reading it, one would have no idea that there have been numerous convictions and guilty pleas on terrorism-related charges since September 11 that involved Muslims living in the United States, including terrorist plots to attack the military base at Ft. Dix, N.J., to create a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon and to attack U.S. military and Jewish targets in California.
Also omitted from the booklet is the fact that organizations like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) were listed by the government as unindicted co-conspirators in the federal government's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) -- in which the Justice Department won convictions of five former HLF officials for providing money to the terrorist organization Hamas. But from reading this passage in "Being Muslim in America," one would get the impression that public concern about Islamist terror has no basis in reality and is merely the result of backward Americans' "discrimination and resentment."
One picture on page 15 of the booklet shows people marching under a CAIR banner and has a caption reading: "Muslims march to support volunteerism." The identical picture appeared at the top of CAIR's website when IPT News accessed it May 15.
In reality, CAIR was created as a front for Hamas and it has defended radical Islamists since 1994. See the IPT dossier on CAIR here.
CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad typifies this see-no-evil attitude toward jihadist terror. He has repeatedly defended the HLF. At a May 2003 forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, an audience member commented that the Justice Department has released reams of information showing that the HLF and another charity whose assets were frozen "have direct connections and in fact their leadership was the leadership of al Qaeda and Hamas." Awad replied: "I am sure if we…put under the microscope, every major civic or political organization in this country, including the Red Cross, you will see that some dollars went here and there in some country, but you don't shut down the entire operation of the Red Cross."
CAIR officials dismissed the verdict of 12 jurors in HLF's Hamas-financing trial as "based more on fear-mongering than on the facts" and predicted it would be overturned on appeal.
Awad has steadfastly defended Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) supporter Sami Al-Arian, despite evidence that Al-Arian served on the PIJ governing board. Al-Arian is fighting a criminal contempt charge, triggered by his refusal to testify before a federal grand jury investigating terror financing in Virginia despite a grant of immunity. He claims his 2006 plea agreement to conspiring to provide goods and services to the PIJ absolved him of any future testimony, be it voluntary or compelled by subpoena. The plea agreement itself contains no such language. U.S. District Judge James S. Moody blasted Al-Arian as a "master manipulator" at his sentencing in the PIJ support case, saying Al-Arian lied to the public about his PIJ support.
Yet, during an August 2008 forum on the contempt case, Awad argued it was motivated by bigotry against Muslims:
"And I believe he's being punished for this, belonging to a minority – Palestinian, Arab, Muslim in America is not like the best thing to be in America today. So he's being the victim of this malicious misunderstanding in this midst of increased Islamophobia in America."
Click here to continue reading this article.
New booklet, "Being Muslim in America," taps the wrong messengers
IPT News
May 17, 2009
With the United States battling Islamist extremists, making America's case to Muslims around the world has never been more of a priority for policymakers. Unfortunately, the State Department continues to take a counterproductive approach: serving as a veritable infomercial promoting Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) while giving the back of the hand to the very anti-jihadist Muslims that Washington should be cultivating. The latest example is a State Department booklet issued in March titled "Being Muslim in America."
It is part of an outreach effort that began under President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and is moving forward under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The goal behind publication of the 64-page booklet is laudable: to arm consular officers and diplomats with information they can take to Muslims around the world to rebut slanders about U.S. "persecution" of Muslims. The booklet deluges readers with color pictures, statistical tables and individual profiles in an effort to show the world that American Muslims are a success story, noting that they have become entrepreneurs, professional athletes, entertainers, doctors, soldiers, firefighters, politicians, fashion designers, and pianists.
And as we'll show in more detail below, many slanders against the United States come from the same groups that are portrayed favorably in the State Department booklet. The front cover has a picture of two Muslim girls playing basketball at a school near Detroit: One is wearing traditional dress, the other more modern dress. It's no ordinary basketball game, because there's a deeper sociopolitical message that Foggy Bottom wants to send to the world: The girls "compete fiercely on the basketball court in a sport that blends individual skills and team effort. They -- along with the other men, women and children in the publication -- demonstrate every day what it is like to be Muslim in America." The booklet is replete with dozens of pictures of Muslims playing basketball, praying; talking about "diversity" at a mosque; attending interfaith gatherings "to celebrate diversity and tolerance," and "brainstorm[ing] ways to solve problems in their community." There is even a color-coded state-by-state map showing "Mosque Distribution in the United States."
The purpose of publishing "Being Muslim in America" is "to disabuse people of wildly false myths of the United States -- that 'Muslims are repressed, marginalized, fill in the blanks,' " according to Michael Friedman, division chief of print publications with the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs, which is overseeing distribution of the publication. Although State doesn't have a specific target number of copies that it is looking to sell or give away, Friedman said a similar 2002 State Department report titled "Muslim Life in America" had 400,000 print copies distributed worldwide and was translated into 28 languages. "It is conceivable that this one could reach that level," he told IPT News.
In addition, both "Muslim Life in America" and "Being Muslim in America" are featured on State Department web sites, here and here.
Asked whether similar booklets had been produced for other faiths, Friedman said no. With limited funding available, decision was made to produce a publication on American Muslims because "the struggle against Islamic terrorism is a struggle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world," he said.
Faulty Examples Showcased
Unfortunately, the substance of the booklet is so flawed that it could undermine the struggle against this form of radicalism. It perpetuates the mythology that American Muslims are united in the belief that law enforcement and the public are willing to flout innocent Muslims' civil rights post-September 11, describing American Muslim reactions to the attacks as follows:
"A new, truly American Islam is emerging, shaped by American freedoms, but also by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks -- planned and executed by non-Americans -- [which] raised suspicions among other Americans whose immediate responses, racial profiling among them, triggered in return a measure of Muslim-American alienation."
Then:
"Sadly, suspicions of this kind are not uncommon -- in the United States or in other nations – during wartime or when outside attack is feared. But 2008 is not 2002, when fears and suspicions were at their height. Context is also important: Every significant immigrant group has in the United States faced, and overcame, a degree of discrimination and resentment."
This is an extremely tendentious, even intellectually dishonest, description of September 11 and its aftermath. From reading it, one would have no idea that there have been numerous convictions and guilty pleas on terrorism-related charges since September 11 that involved Muslims living in the United States, including terrorist plots to attack the military base at Ft. Dix, N.J., to create a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon and to attack U.S. military and Jewish targets in California.
Also omitted from the booklet is the fact that organizations like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) were listed by the government as unindicted co-conspirators in the federal government's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) -- in which the Justice Department won convictions of five former HLF officials for providing money to the terrorist organization Hamas. But from reading this passage in "Being Muslim in America," one would get the impression that public concern about Islamist terror has no basis in reality and is merely the result of backward Americans' "discrimination and resentment."
One picture on page 15 of the booklet shows people marching under a CAIR banner and has a caption reading: "Muslims march to support volunteerism." The identical picture appeared at the top of CAIR's website when IPT News accessed it May 15.
In reality, CAIR was created as a front for Hamas and it has defended radical Islamists since 1994. See the IPT dossier on CAIR here.
CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad typifies this see-no-evil attitude toward jihadist terror. He has repeatedly defended the HLF. At a May 2003 forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, an audience member commented that the Justice Department has released reams of information showing that the HLF and another charity whose assets were frozen "have direct connections and in fact their leadership was the leadership of al Qaeda and Hamas." Awad replied: "I am sure if we…put under the microscope, every major civic or political organization in this country, including the Red Cross, you will see that some dollars went here and there in some country, but you don't shut down the entire operation of the Red Cross."
CAIR officials dismissed the verdict of 12 jurors in HLF's Hamas-financing trial as "based more on fear-mongering than on the facts" and predicted it would be overturned on appeal.
Awad has steadfastly defended Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) supporter Sami Al-Arian, despite evidence that Al-Arian served on the PIJ governing board. Al-Arian is fighting a criminal contempt charge, triggered by his refusal to testify before a federal grand jury investigating terror financing in Virginia despite a grant of immunity. He claims his 2006 plea agreement to conspiring to provide goods and services to the PIJ absolved him of any future testimony, be it voluntary or compelled by subpoena. The plea agreement itself contains no such language. U.S. District Judge James S. Moody blasted Al-Arian as a "master manipulator" at his sentencing in the PIJ support case, saying Al-Arian lied to the public about his PIJ support.
Yet, during an August 2008 forum on the contempt case, Awad argued it was motivated by bigotry against Muslims:
"And I believe he's being punished for this, belonging to a minority – Palestinian, Arab, Muslim in America is not like the best thing to be in America today. So he's being the victim of this malicious misunderstanding in this midst of increased Islamophobia in America."
Click here to continue reading this article.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Radical Muslims Serve As Chaplains
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Steven Emerson warns: radical Muslims serving as chaplains in American prisons
[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: It should be noted that back in the Middle East,
the very troops U.S. General Dayton is training and arming could very well
end up in joint teams with Hamas gunmen if Egyptian-PA plans are
implemented.
General Dayton swears that these Palestinian recruits talk-the-talk and he
adamantly refuses to think through what might happen to this "moderate"
American trained fighting force when they are mixed with highly motivated
radical Hamas gunmen who talk-a-very-different-talk.
General Dayton may swear that by some miracle his "moderate" Fatah gunmen
will win over the hearts and minds of the Hamas gunmen. But anyone how has
eyes in his head and takes their blinders off for a minute knows that the
odds heavily favor that the opposite will take place, with Dayton's
"moderates" crossing over to support the Hamas terror program.
Can't happen? Already did.
The best Palestinian marksmen who murdered Israelis with deadly accuracy
learned their sniper skills from American trainers in earlier rounds of
American training of PA "moderate" forces.]
How to Stop the Muslim Extremists Recruiting Inmates to Terrorism
by Steven Emerson
Written for the New York Post
May 24, 2009
For annotated version including sound clip:
www.investigativeproject.org/1041/radicals-in-our-prisons
Amid all the shocking details in the disrupted plot to bomb Bronx synagogues
and fire missiles at American military aircraft, one component of the case
should come as no surprise - three of the alleged culprits converted to
radical Islam in prison.
Radical Islamists have targeted prison populations for recruitment for
years. That's where Jose Padilla, suspected of plotting to detonate a dirty
bomb and convicted of conspiracy to murder people overseas and of providing
material support to terrorists, converted and was radicalized.
That's where a California man, Kevin James, created his own cell, called the
Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS), and recruited other inmates to plot
attacks against military and Jewish targets in and around Los Angeles.
In New York, the man who was the head Muslim chaplain for state prisons
considered the 9/11 hijackers to be martyrs. Warith Deen Umar spent 20 years
working with New York prisons, overseeing the hiring of Muslim chaplains and
leading prayer services.
My organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, obtained an audio
tape of a speech Umar gave in 2004. In it, he told his audience that victory
for Islam would not come without loss:
"Brothers, be prepared to fight, be prepared to die, be prepared to kill.
It's a part of the deen, and this ain't your brother just saying this, this
is history, this is Quran, nobody can deny it. and we need to let the
enemies know."
And:
"Rise up and fight. And fight them until turmoil is no more and strike
terror into their hearts. You think there is no terror in Quran? It's called
[word unclear] read it in the 56th surah of the Quran. There's no lack of
translation, there's no mistranslation There's not one Sheikh says one
thing, no, it's very clear. "When you fight, you strike terror into the
heart of the disbeliever.'"
According to a 2003 column in the Wall Street Journal, a protégé of Umar's
was a man named Salahuddin M. Muhammad, hired by Umar to serve as chaplain
at the Fishkill Correctional Facility. Today, Muhammad is an imam at the
Masjid Al-Ikhlas in Newburg, NY, where the first conversation about
attacking American between defendant James Cromitie and the FBI informant
took place (Muhammad is not named in the criminal complaint).
Radicalism in prisons is a problem that has been festering for years. The
Department of Justice's Inspector General issued a report in 2004 with a
host of recommendations for tamping it down, but there's little sign any
action has been taken.
That President Obama now wants to transfer hundreds of hardened jihadists
into American prisons is a guarantee that they will serve as emissaries and
proselytizers of jihad to the thousands of prisoners they are exposed to. In
virtually no time, it is all but certain - based on past patterns of radical
Islamic growth in jails that we have investigated - that we will witness the
number of radical Islamic inmates multiply by thousands, maybe more.
The Guantanamo prisoners will be looked up as jihadi rock stars and each one
could potentially produce a hundred new ticking time bombs ultimately
walking the streets of America. Although the President tried to reassure us
that no inmate has ever escaped from a super maximum security prison, what
about the newly indoctrinated jihadists among the existing inmates who will
be certainly released after their terms are up? In light of the massive
damage and death that only four converts to Islam in prison could have
carried out as witnessed in the interdiction of the recent terror plot, one
cannot even begin to imagine the potential for damage and death a thousand
times greater were there to be a whole new generation of hardened jihadists
walking the streets of the US with an agenda of nothing but murder and
destruction. FBI agents with whom I have spoke say that the transfer of
prisoners to the US is insane, pure and simple.
Part of the problem is that there is no single agency which can change the
nation's prison system, since states are responsible for their own
penitentiaries and each has its own religious programming. Imams recruited
by the likes of Umar continue to work, library shelves are stocked with the
words of radical ideologues like Syyed Qutb and Sayyid Mawlana Abul Ala
Maududi. Some prison libraries include the Nobel Quran, an extreme
interpretation of Islam's holy book that includes a call for jihad.
These books are not reviewed by prison officials, perhaps due to language
differences or because they are perceived simply as religious texts. DOJ,
which has oversight over BOP, refuses to acknowledge the problem.
Meanwhile, federal records identified by the Investigative Project on
Terrorism and available on the Internet show a number of Muslim
Brotherhood-tied organizations receiving government contracts, including
contracts with the Bureau of Prisons, to perform work such as chaplain
services and Islamic studies.
Some, like the Muslim American Society, have dedicated prison projects in
which they specifically collect money to send religious dogma to prisoners
and underwrite volunteer chaplains. This effort is aimed not only at
existing Muslims convicts but to convert non-Muslim inmates.
In light of the 2004 IG report, these contractual relationships with radical
Islamic groups show that there still is very little oversight concerning the
messengers importing religion into U.S. prisons.
Wednesday night, we saw what happens when they leave prison and follow an
extremist path, buying into propaganda that the America is at war with Islam
and they mobilize to act. It is time someone paid attention.
The first thing that needs to be done is to get the Bureau of Prisons to
stop being able to stick its head in the sand. The Department of Justice,
which oversees the Bureau of Prisons, needs to immediately set national
vetting standards for all religious clergy - not just Muslim Imams but
Rabbis and Priests - and all religious texts and propaganda being allowed
into federal prisons. Congress needs to impose new rules that force BOP to
mandate and operate strict investigations of those who preach in the prisons
and the material they are allowed to import.
Wahhabist literature, Muslim Brotherhood tracts calling for Jihad, Saudi
produced Qurans that exude hatred for Jews and Christians - all of this
continues to flow into federal and local prisons unhampered.
To those who say this is a violation of the free practice of religion or
free speech, that is pure nonsense: Like government officials who are denied
clearances based on background checks, Islamic chaplains who do not pass
certain clearance standards can also be denied the right to enter prisons.
That does not stop them from practicing their religion; it only stops them
from spreading their ideology in government institutions. And, incidentally,
the Bureau of Prisons should not be allowed to set the criteria: We found
out that in 2004, the way the BOP determined whether an Imam was a radical
was to simply ask them if they supported terrorism. If they said no - and of
course they all all did - they were granted admission.
Another problem that needs to be fixed is that in jail, Islamist converts
generally avoid violence for fear of upsetting the prison authorities.
Therefore there is little if any incentive for the warden or prison
officials to keep tabs on the activities of the Islamist prisoners - or for
that matter Aryan nation prisoners - or what they are being taught or what
is in their libraries.
Unless prison authorities start collecting intelligence on those in prison
who belong to radical groups and who talk about carrying out violence once
they get out, law enforcement is faced with a total blank slate, critically
dependent upon confidential informants to help them thwart terrorist
attacks. If not for the serendipitous appearance of a confidential informant
in the current Bronx case, chances are that today we would be witness terror
and death in the Jewish Community Center of Riverdale.
--------------
Steven Emerson is head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism
(investigativeproject.org) a counter-terrorism organization that tracks and
investigates that threat of radical Islam on American soil.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
202-363-8602 - main
Steven Emerson warns: radical Muslims serving as chaplains in American prisons
[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: It should be noted that back in the Middle East,
the very troops U.S. General Dayton is training and arming could very well
end up in joint teams with Hamas gunmen if Egyptian-PA plans are
implemented.
General Dayton swears that these Palestinian recruits talk-the-talk and he
adamantly refuses to think through what might happen to this "moderate"
American trained fighting force when they are mixed with highly motivated
radical Hamas gunmen who talk-a-very-different-talk.
General Dayton may swear that by some miracle his "moderate" Fatah gunmen
will win over the hearts and minds of the Hamas gunmen. But anyone how has
eyes in his head and takes their blinders off for a minute knows that the
odds heavily favor that the opposite will take place, with Dayton's
"moderates" crossing over to support the Hamas terror program.
Can't happen? Already did.
The best Palestinian marksmen who murdered Israelis with deadly accuracy
learned their sniper skills from American trainers in earlier rounds of
American training of PA "moderate" forces.]
How to Stop the Muslim Extremists Recruiting Inmates to Terrorism
by Steven Emerson
Written for the New York Post
May 24, 2009
For annotated version including sound clip:
www.investigativeproject.org/1041/radicals-in-our-prisons
Amid all the shocking details in the disrupted plot to bomb Bronx synagogues
and fire missiles at American military aircraft, one component of the case
should come as no surprise - three of the alleged culprits converted to
radical Islam in prison.
Radical Islamists have targeted prison populations for recruitment for
years. That's where Jose Padilla, suspected of plotting to detonate a dirty
bomb and convicted of conspiracy to murder people overseas and of providing
material support to terrorists, converted and was radicalized.
That's where a California man, Kevin James, created his own cell, called the
Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS), and recruited other inmates to plot
attacks against military and Jewish targets in and around Los Angeles.
In New York, the man who was the head Muslim chaplain for state prisons
considered the 9/11 hijackers to be martyrs. Warith Deen Umar spent 20 years
working with New York prisons, overseeing the hiring of Muslim chaplains and
leading prayer services.
My organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, obtained an audio
tape of a speech Umar gave in 2004. In it, he told his audience that victory
for Islam would not come without loss:
"Brothers, be prepared to fight, be prepared to die, be prepared to kill.
It's a part of the deen, and this ain't your brother just saying this, this
is history, this is Quran, nobody can deny it. and we need to let the
enemies know."
And:
"Rise up and fight. And fight them until turmoil is no more and strike
terror into their hearts. You think there is no terror in Quran? It's called
[word unclear] read it in the 56th surah of the Quran. There's no lack of
translation, there's no mistranslation There's not one Sheikh says one
thing, no, it's very clear. "When you fight, you strike terror into the
heart of the disbeliever.'"
According to a 2003 column in the Wall Street Journal, a protégé of Umar's
was a man named Salahuddin M. Muhammad, hired by Umar to serve as chaplain
at the Fishkill Correctional Facility. Today, Muhammad is an imam at the
Masjid Al-Ikhlas in Newburg, NY, where the first conversation about
attacking American between defendant James Cromitie and the FBI informant
took place (Muhammad is not named in the criminal complaint).
Radicalism in prisons is a problem that has been festering for years. The
Department of Justice's Inspector General issued a report in 2004 with a
host of recommendations for tamping it down, but there's little sign any
action has been taken.
That President Obama now wants to transfer hundreds of hardened jihadists
into American prisons is a guarantee that they will serve as emissaries and
proselytizers of jihad to the thousands of prisoners they are exposed to. In
virtually no time, it is all but certain - based on past patterns of radical
Islamic growth in jails that we have investigated - that we will witness the
number of radical Islamic inmates multiply by thousands, maybe more.
The Guantanamo prisoners will be looked up as jihadi rock stars and each one
could potentially produce a hundred new ticking time bombs ultimately
walking the streets of America. Although the President tried to reassure us
that no inmate has ever escaped from a super maximum security prison, what
about the newly indoctrinated jihadists among the existing inmates who will
be certainly released after their terms are up? In light of the massive
damage and death that only four converts to Islam in prison could have
carried out as witnessed in the interdiction of the recent terror plot, one
cannot even begin to imagine the potential for damage and death a thousand
times greater were there to be a whole new generation of hardened jihadists
walking the streets of the US with an agenda of nothing but murder and
destruction. FBI agents with whom I have spoke say that the transfer of
prisoners to the US is insane, pure and simple.
Part of the problem is that there is no single agency which can change the
nation's prison system, since states are responsible for their own
penitentiaries and each has its own religious programming. Imams recruited
by the likes of Umar continue to work, library shelves are stocked with the
words of radical ideologues like Syyed Qutb and Sayyid Mawlana Abul Ala
Maududi. Some prison libraries include the Nobel Quran, an extreme
interpretation of Islam's holy book that includes a call for jihad.
These books are not reviewed by prison officials, perhaps due to language
differences or because they are perceived simply as religious texts. DOJ,
which has oversight over BOP, refuses to acknowledge the problem.
Meanwhile, federal records identified by the Investigative Project on
Terrorism and available on the Internet show a number of Muslim
Brotherhood-tied organizations receiving government contracts, including
contracts with the Bureau of Prisons, to perform work such as chaplain
services and Islamic studies.
Some, like the Muslim American Society, have dedicated prison projects in
which they specifically collect money to send religious dogma to prisoners
and underwrite volunteer chaplains. This effort is aimed not only at
existing Muslims convicts but to convert non-Muslim inmates.
In light of the 2004 IG report, these contractual relationships with radical
Islamic groups show that there still is very little oversight concerning the
messengers importing religion into U.S. prisons.
Wednesday night, we saw what happens when they leave prison and follow an
extremist path, buying into propaganda that the America is at war with Islam
and they mobilize to act. It is time someone paid attention.
The first thing that needs to be done is to get the Bureau of Prisons to
stop being able to stick its head in the sand. The Department of Justice,
which oversees the Bureau of Prisons, needs to immediately set national
vetting standards for all religious clergy - not just Muslim Imams but
Rabbis and Priests - and all religious texts and propaganda being allowed
into federal prisons. Congress needs to impose new rules that force BOP to
mandate and operate strict investigations of those who preach in the prisons
and the material they are allowed to import.
Wahhabist literature, Muslim Brotherhood tracts calling for Jihad, Saudi
produced Qurans that exude hatred for Jews and Christians - all of this
continues to flow into federal and local prisons unhampered.
To those who say this is a violation of the free practice of religion or
free speech, that is pure nonsense: Like government officials who are denied
clearances based on background checks, Islamic chaplains who do not pass
certain clearance standards can also be denied the right to enter prisons.
That does not stop them from practicing their religion; it only stops them
from spreading their ideology in government institutions. And, incidentally,
the Bureau of Prisons should not be allowed to set the criteria: We found
out that in 2004, the way the BOP determined whether an Imam was a radical
was to simply ask them if they supported terrorism. If they said no - and of
course they all all did - they were granted admission.
Another problem that needs to be fixed is that in jail, Islamist converts
generally avoid violence for fear of upsetting the prison authorities.
Therefore there is little if any incentive for the warden or prison
officials to keep tabs on the activities of the Islamist prisoners - or for
that matter Aryan nation prisoners - or what they are being taught or what
is in their libraries.
Unless prison authorities start collecting intelligence on those in prison
who belong to radical groups and who talk about carrying out violence once
they get out, law enforcement is faced with a total blank slate, critically
dependent upon confidential informants to help them thwart terrorist
attacks. If not for the serendipitous appearance of a confidential informant
in the current Bronx case, chances are that today we would be witness terror
and death in the Jewish Community Center of Riverdale.
--------------
Steven Emerson is head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism
(investigativeproject.org) a counter-terrorism organization that tracks and
investigates that threat of radical Islam on American soil.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
202-363-8602 - main
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Thai Insurgency Takes Toll
Insurgency takes toll on both Buddhists, Muslims
By DENIS D. GRAY – 8 hours ago
KO TO, Thailand (AP) — The young Muslim man says he watched helplessly as soldiers broke his father's bones and punctured his lungs with vicious kicks. After seven hours of relentless torture, the Muslim religious leader died cradled in his lap.
In a nearby village, a 7-year-old Buddhist girl still dials her father's mobile telephone number every evening. Then she readies his bed. But her father is never coming home. He and his brother were riddled with bullets and their bodies set afire as they motorcycled to a computer class.
A vicious Muslim insurgency in Thailand's deep south has spared few. On the roll call of 3,400 dead are monks and teachers, shopkeepers and rubber tappers, officials and innocents from every background.
Islamic radicals are fighting for a separate state in Buddhist-majority Thailand. And a rift is widening between Buddhists and Muslims — communities that had lived harmoniously for generations and now share equally in the suffering.
The separatist movement, which periodically erupts into violence, was born after 1902 when Thailand took over an independent sultanate in a region where some 70 percent of the 1.8 million people adhere to Islam. But past insurgency leaders restricted their attacks to Thai authorities. Violence seldom affected the ordinary people and thus did not embroil them in mutual suspicion and fear.
This changed dramatically in the wake of hardline government policies in the south coupled with the influence of international jihad. In recent years, the insurgency has spread into the fabric of society, creating tensions, suspicions and animosity between Buddhists and Muslims.
___
Perhaps it's the village and their father's role in it which brought on his death, his children say.
Like most communities in the southern, predominantly Muslim provinces, Ko To is deceptively idyllic: wooden houses shaded by lush vegetation, a simple, green-colored mosque, a tea shop for restful chatter, all ringed by the mainstay of the region's economy — rubber plantations.
But the village is within a government-designated "red zone" — an area of high insurgent activity — and subject to martial law. Soldiers patrol through it almost daily, villagers say, entering homes and wary if they find no young men around while often taking those who are for 20-30 days of detention.
Yapa Kaseng was a 57-year-old imam, much loved by some 200 villagers who came to him for religious guidance, his 25-year-old son Anan says.
His home was a center of community life. It may thus have been regarded as a breeding ground for the insurgency by authorities who find it hard to identify the rebels among the apolitical.
It was in this environment — tense and riddled with suspicion — that Anan says soldiers and police grabbed him, his father and several others at ablution before morning prayers. Taken to the Thai Army's 39th Task Force camp in Pattani Province, they were locked inside a truck for two nights before the torture began.
"I could feel the broken pieces of bone when I touched my father's chest. In the end, he could no longer walk so they had to drag him out of the truck by his feet for the final torture session," says Anan, who was detained for another 26 days.
Neither the imam nor his son were charged with any wrongdoing. Last December, eight months after his death, a provincial court ruled that he had been tortured to death by the military. But the court case continues, the soldiers have received no known punishment and Anan says he is still harassed at the omnipresent roadblocks when his name pops up from a computerized "black list" of suspected insurgents and sympathizers.
"The officials don't trust us and we don't trust them. Even if they don't have evidence against us they don't trust us. And this turns young men toward violence," says Anan, who must now work as a low-wage rubber tapper to help his widowed mother, six siblings and others of their close-knit family.
"I am still afraid and feel insecure, thinking that they can come and get me again at any time. Nobody can protect us," he says.
___
The deaths of Arun Sudmat and his brother Hiran, gunned down in March, has left similar scars on their families and the predominantly Buddhist village of Paa See.
"I just couldn't believe or accept what had happened because everyone loved them. They had no enemies. They were friends with the Muslims. "'Why? Why? Why?' I ask myself," says Arun's widow, Neng Kunvarit, tears flowing down her cheeks.
Paa See, a community of some 200 people including Muslims, had not witnessed a violent incident since the insurgency erupted in 2004. It even earned a "Peace Village" award from the government.
A brother of the slain men, Anek, bears no hatred for Muslims, taking a broader view of the conflict: "The government fights the insurgents, politicians fight each other and the villagers suffer."
In the past, he says, Buddhist families would go out in the evenings to visit friends in a neighboring Muslim community, but now both villages shut themselves in at sunset.
"We try to keep the same warm relations with Muslims but it is harder because if a Muslim is seen to be too close to a Buddhist he might be targeted by the insurgents. So they are afraid. This is a sad loss," Anek says, reflecting the fact that 55 percent of those killed have been Muslims.
Arun, a 42-year-old handyman, farmer and school janitor, and 36-year-old Hiran, the deputy village chief, were killed by suspected insurgents on a Saturday morning along a busy street as they headed for class in the provincial capital. Their bodies were stacked one on top of the other, doused with gasoline and torched. The gunmen left behind a note — "Thai officials continue to commit crimes. Malay Muslims are the innocents" — together with, inexplicably and bizarrely, a 20 baht (60 U.S. cents) note.
"They were inseparable from childhood. They died together and we cremated them together," Anek says.
He offers only one possible theory for the killings: The brothers liked to wear black jackets similar to uniforms of Thai Army Rangers. A rumor had spread outside the village that the two had enlisted in the force.
But the family can't quite buy this, unbelieving that such decent people could come to this end. The warmhearted, generous bachelor Hiran daily cared for his mother after her husband abandoned the family. The hardworking, loyal Arun was close to his two sons and especially his little daughter Mai, whom he accompanied each day home from school before going on to other jobs to sustain the poor family.
Mai still refuses to accept the loss. Each evening about 5 p.m., before making his bed, the little girl calls her father's canceled number.
She asks, "Daddy, when are you coming home?"
By DENIS D. GRAY – 8 hours ago
KO TO, Thailand (AP) — The young Muslim man says he watched helplessly as soldiers broke his father's bones and punctured his lungs with vicious kicks. After seven hours of relentless torture, the Muslim religious leader died cradled in his lap.
In a nearby village, a 7-year-old Buddhist girl still dials her father's mobile telephone number every evening. Then she readies his bed. But her father is never coming home. He and his brother were riddled with bullets and their bodies set afire as they motorcycled to a computer class.
A vicious Muslim insurgency in Thailand's deep south has spared few. On the roll call of 3,400 dead are monks and teachers, shopkeepers and rubber tappers, officials and innocents from every background.
Islamic radicals are fighting for a separate state in Buddhist-majority Thailand. And a rift is widening between Buddhists and Muslims — communities that had lived harmoniously for generations and now share equally in the suffering.
The separatist movement, which periodically erupts into violence, was born after 1902 when Thailand took over an independent sultanate in a region where some 70 percent of the 1.8 million people adhere to Islam. But past insurgency leaders restricted their attacks to Thai authorities. Violence seldom affected the ordinary people and thus did not embroil them in mutual suspicion and fear.
This changed dramatically in the wake of hardline government policies in the south coupled with the influence of international jihad. In recent years, the insurgency has spread into the fabric of society, creating tensions, suspicions and animosity between Buddhists and Muslims.
___
Perhaps it's the village and their father's role in it which brought on his death, his children say.
Like most communities in the southern, predominantly Muslim provinces, Ko To is deceptively idyllic: wooden houses shaded by lush vegetation, a simple, green-colored mosque, a tea shop for restful chatter, all ringed by the mainstay of the region's economy — rubber plantations.
But the village is within a government-designated "red zone" — an area of high insurgent activity — and subject to martial law. Soldiers patrol through it almost daily, villagers say, entering homes and wary if they find no young men around while often taking those who are for 20-30 days of detention.
Yapa Kaseng was a 57-year-old imam, much loved by some 200 villagers who came to him for religious guidance, his 25-year-old son Anan says.
His home was a center of community life. It may thus have been regarded as a breeding ground for the insurgency by authorities who find it hard to identify the rebels among the apolitical.
It was in this environment — tense and riddled with suspicion — that Anan says soldiers and police grabbed him, his father and several others at ablution before morning prayers. Taken to the Thai Army's 39th Task Force camp in Pattani Province, they were locked inside a truck for two nights before the torture began.
"I could feel the broken pieces of bone when I touched my father's chest. In the end, he could no longer walk so they had to drag him out of the truck by his feet for the final torture session," says Anan, who was detained for another 26 days.
Neither the imam nor his son were charged with any wrongdoing. Last December, eight months after his death, a provincial court ruled that he had been tortured to death by the military. But the court case continues, the soldiers have received no known punishment and Anan says he is still harassed at the omnipresent roadblocks when his name pops up from a computerized "black list" of suspected insurgents and sympathizers.
"The officials don't trust us and we don't trust them. Even if they don't have evidence against us they don't trust us. And this turns young men toward violence," says Anan, who must now work as a low-wage rubber tapper to help his widowed mother, six siblings and others of their close-knit family.
"I am still afraid and feel insecure, thinking that they can come and get me again at any time. Nobody can protect us," he says.
___
The deaths of Arun Sudmat and his brother Hiran, gunned down in March, has left similar scars on their families and the predominantly Buddhist village of Paa See.
"I just couldn't believe or accept what had happened because everyone loved them. They had no enemies. They were friends with the Muslims. "'Why? Why? Why?' I ask myself," says Arun's widow, Neng Kunvarit, tears flowing down her cheeks.
Paa See, a community of some 200 people including Muslims, had not witnessed a violent incident since the insurgency erupted in 2004. It even earned a "Peace Village" award from the government.
A brother of the slain men, Anek, bears no hatred for Muslims, taking a broader view of the conflict: "The government fights the insurgents, politicians fight each other and the villagers suffer."
In the past, he says, Buddhist families would go out in the evenings to visit friends in a neighboring Muslim community, but now both villages shut themselves in at sunset.
"We try to keep the same warm relations with Muslims but it is harder because if a Muslim is seen to be too close to a Buddhist he might be targeted by the insurgents. So they are afraid. This is a sad loss," Anek says, reflecting the fact that 55 percent of those killed have been Muslims.
Arun, a 42-year-old handyman, farmer and school janitor, and 36-year-old Hiran, the deputy village chief, were killed by suspected insurgents on a Saturday morning along a busy street as they headed for class in the provincial capital. Their bodies were stacked one on top of the other, doused with gasoline and torched. The gunmen left behind a note — "Thai officials continue to commit crimes. Malay Muslims are the innocents" — together with, inexplicably and bizarrely, a 20 baht (60 U.S. cents) note.
"They were inseparable from childhood. They died together and we cremated them together," Anek says.
He offers only one possible theory for the killings: The brothers liked to wear black jackets similar to uniforms of Thai Army Rangers. A rumor had spread outside the village that the two had enlisted in the force.
But the family can't quite buy this, unbelieving that such decent people could come to this end. The warmhearted, generous bachelor Hiran daily cared for his mother after her husband abandoned the family. The hardworking, loyal Arun was close to his two sons and especially his little daughter Mai, whom he accompanied each day home from school before going on to other jobs to sustain the poor family.
Mai still refuses to accept the loss. Each evening about 5 p.m., before making his bed, the little girl calls her father's canceled number.
She asks, "Daddy, when are you coming home?"
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Goodbye 37
GOODBYE 37
[“So Israel is on the skids” wrote one disgruntled reader. “I get that from lots of places. So you’re having toilet troubles. Why should I give a crap that you can’t give a crap? I only waste my time reading you because of the cats. So what’s with the cats?”
Okay…
Muffy-the-superannuated-Slut has a large, deep wound on her neck. How she got it is a mystery. The wound dries, she scratches, blood flows again. Rachel is concerned. I am not. Rachel wants us to take MuffSlut to a veterinarian. I wouldn’t mind taking her to a taxidermist.
Muffy has aged visibly. But that – given my predilection for older females – is not the reason I am less than enthusiastic about her. She travels with an entourage, three of her offspring courtesy of The Impregnator. Two have their father’s slits for eyes and fluffy tale. The third has Muffy’s beautiful large-eyed innocence. Unfortunately she howls endlessly. All three are larger than Muffy but the feline yiddishe mama hustles food for them constantly. She appears at the door, whining piteously, then saunters off as soon as I’ve put the food out. At which point The Unholy Three come out of hiding and eat.
The only one who gives me pleasure is Chaleria (Cholera) who follows me about and lets herself be petted. At one point I started feeding her by hand, but she clawed me so badly I’ve given it up. Still, there are moments close to ecstatic. I sat down on the lawn, extra-length cigar in hand, to listen to a broadcast of Brahms 4th. Chaleria appeared. I groaned inwardly at the thought that I would have to get up and feed her. But she lay down at my feet and didn’t utter a sound or move until the symphony and my cigar had ended. Was she listening? Probably not. But I could pretend that she was, and shed tears of contentment.]
[“You should have been a conductor, Moshe. Too bad the streetcars and trolleys don’t run anymore.”
Yes, I should have been a conductor. Among the many fantasies that have sustained me, this is near the top.
Of course, there are problems. The first is that I never learned to play an instrument or to read music. In retrospect, this is all to the good. Over the years my numerous contacts with musicians made me realize that their attitude to music is largely that of a mechanic to motors, or a butcher to meat. In my case, ignorance really is bliss. I have been able to maintain my awe of music, my belief that music starts where words leave off, my belief that music is holy.
I listen to a piece over and over and over, til I’ve memorized it, then indulge my fantasy that I’m attending a concert and the conductor suddenly drops dead/has a stroke/is whisked away by aliens. The concertmaster calls out, “Is there a conductor in the audience?” I make my way to the podium, close the score, conduct – brilliantly, of course – from memory.
The second problem is less easily solved, even in fantasy. When my right arm was sent to nose-picker’s Valhalla, I was merely inconvenienced. I was, after all, left handed. Then my left hand was turned into a claw, and I cannot hold the baton.
There is, of course, another appendage to which the baton could be attached. But even an egomaniac like myself cannot fantasize about conducting anything lengthier than an orchestration of Chopin’s minute waltz. Thus do dreams die.]
GOODBYE 37 MISERY HATES COMPANY
Though the windows are closed the house is permeated with the smell of burning wood and leafs and Lord knows what else. It is L’G B’Omer eve [11 May] and all the crypto-pyromaniacs, like the crypto-drunkards on Purim, are allowed to live out their fantasies. Bonfires large and small abound, as do barbecues and cookouts. Viewed from space, Israel must have disappeared under a thick cloud of smoke.
Rachel is out among the bonfires, cheerfully working the crowds in her own inimitable way, while Old Grouchy sits transfixed before the computer, inundated with articles mirroring his despair.
It does little to cheer me that so many are coming around to the conclusions I reached long ago. Misery does not love company. I have prayed for so long that I’ll be proven wrong, that flaws in my arguments will be pointed out, that the hopeless despair I feel will be shown to be a personal psychosis and not one based on fact. Instead, the ‘usual suspects’, loonies like myself, are being joined by mainstream commentators. I thought I had scraped the bottom of the Misery Barrel. Now I’ve been given a shovel with which to dig beneath the Barrel.
One of these mainstreamers is the estimable Naomi Ragen. One of her recent letters has intensified an ongoing disagreement between Rachel, ever optimistic, and yours truly who requires no effort to wallow in blackest despair.
“I write less because I have no words to express just how bad things are,” wrote Ragen, “how beyond imagination that the Jewish State has gotten to this point in its history.”
Rachel and I are battling over “the Jewish State”. I say there is no Jewish State, only a state with many Jews. Were we a genuinely Jewish State, a state of Jewish believers, we wouldn’t be facing extinction right now.
Rachel points out that it is L’g B’Omer, and most Jews are attending bonfires, just as most Israeli Jews attend a seder on Passover. Even those who participated in the expulsion are doing the Jewish thing.
These, I argue, are nominal Jews and not believing Jews. Their having a bonfire or a seder makes them no different from the millions of Americans who have a Christmas tree. They are nominal Christians and not believing Christians. And their activities don’t make America a Christian country any more than the activities of nominal Jews make Israel a Jewish country.
Some of you were offended by my characterization of Obama voters as collaborators in our destruction. I was watching a documentary about the Jewish singles scene in the States, all those wonderful, caring, concerned people. And not a McCain voter among them. It must have been wonderful, even liberating, to polish your liberal credentials by voting for one of the traditionally oppressed. I believe you had no intention of harming Israel. The interests of Israel probably weren’t even on your radar when, floating on a cloud of rhetoric-induced euphoria, you wafted into the polling station.
And when disaster strikes us you will weep genuine tears on our behalf. I tell you in advance that we appreciate your tears, because by the time they flow we won’t be able to thank you. We will have been slaughtered. Rachel, myself, our children, our grandchildren, the Zionists, the non-Zionists, the anti-Zionists, the committed few, the indifferent many.
When we were expelled from Gush Katif I, like many others, underwent a crisis of faith. Was the Creator simply a sadist, setting us up with five years of indisputable miracles only to abandon us when we needed Him most? The conclusion I came to was that He protected us from everything the gentiles threw at us, only leaving us to our own devices when our fellow Jews were the enemy.
And it is about to happen again. Most of my fellow believers don’t see it. “The Almighty won’t allow it to happen,” is what I hear most often. “Even if you are right about Gush Katif, the Almighty won’t allow it because we face destruction by the gentiles, not the Jews.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Our physical destruction may be carried out by gentiles but it is the Jews who have empowered them, the Jews who have legitimized them, the Jews who provide their justification, the Jews who everywhere – especially Israel – lead the charge against us. Who, after the Holocaust, would call the Jews ‘Nazis’ unless the Jews themselves were using the term?
Is there another people anywhere, at any time, whose cultural and intellectual elite is so filled with self-hatred? Is there another people anywhere, at any time, whose cultural and intellectual elite is so desperate to rid itself of the religious burden placed upon it at birth that it will do anything – anything! – to be ‘free’?
The examples of their self-destructive actions are so numerous that I will not list them. You are aware of them, or you aren’t. As to motive…
There was a ‘joke’ I heard many years ago. It is Christmas Eve in the Ukraine and a band of Cossacks ride into a Jewish village. Fueled by vodka and native stupidity and a desire to avenge their crucified Lord they are determined to slaughter the inhabitants. A rabbi runs out to confront them. “Stop!” he shouts. “We have just learned that it was the Jews from the next village who killed Christ!” The Cossacks turn and ride away, to slaughter the Jews in the next village.
moshe
[“So Israel is on the skids” wrote one disgruntled reader. “I get that from lots of places. So you’re having toilet troubles. Why should I give a crap that you can’t give a crap? I only waste my time reading you because of the cats. So what’s with the cats?”
Okay…
Muffy-the-superannuated-Slut has a large, deep wound on her neck. How she got it is a mystery. The wound dries, she scratches, blood flows again. Rachel is concerned. I am not. Rachel wants us to take MuffSlut to a veterinarian. I wouldn’t mind taking her to a taxidermist.
Muffy has aged visibly. But that – given my predilection for older females – is not the reason I am less than enthusiastic about her. She travels with an entourage, three of her offspring courtesy of The Impregnator. Two have their father’s slits for eyes and fluffy tale. The third has Muffy’s beautiful large-eyed innocence. Unfortunately she howls endlessly. All three are larger than Muffy but the feline yiddishe mama hustles food for them constantly. She appears at the door, whining piteously, then saunters off as soon as I’ve put the food out. At which point The Unholy Three come out of hiding and eat.
The only one who gives me pleasure is Chaleria (Cholera) who follows me about and lets herself be petted. At one point I started feeding her by hand, but she clawed me so badly I’ve given it up. Still, there are moments close to ecstatic. I sat down on the lawn, extra-length cigar in hand, to listen to a broadcast of Brahms 4th. Chaleria appeared. I groaned inwardly at the thought that I would have to get up and feed her. But she lay down at my feet and didn’t utter a sound or move until the symphony and my cigar had ended. Was she listening? Probably not. But I could pretend that she was, and shed tears of contentment.]
[“You should have been a conductor, Moshe. Too bad the streetcars and trolleys don’t run anymore.”
Yes, I should have been a conductor. Among the many fantasies that have sustained me, this is near the top.
Of course, there are problems. The first is that I never learned to play an instrument or to read music. In retrospect, this is all to the good. Over the years my numerous contacts with musicians made me realize that their attitude to music is largely that of a mechanic to motors, or a butcher to meat. In my case, ignorance really is bliss. I have been able to maintain my awe of music, my belief that music starts where words leave off, my belief that music is holy.
I listen to a piece over and over and over, til I’ve memorized it, then indulge my fantasy that I’m attending a concert and the conductor suddenly drops dead/has a stroke/is whisked away by aliens. The concertmaster calls out, “Is there a conductor in the audience?” I make my way to the podium, close the score, conduct – brilliantly, of course – from memory.
The second problem is less easily solved, even in fantasy. When my right arm was sent to nose-picker’s Valhalla, I was merely inconvenienced. I was, after all, left handed. Then my left hand was turned into a claw, and I cannot hold the baton.
There is, of course, another appendage to which the baton could be attached. But even an egomaniac like myself cannot fantasize about conducting anything lengthier than an orchestration of Chopin’s minute waltz. Thus do dreams die.]
GOODBYE 37 MISERY HATES COMPANY
Though the windows are closed the house is permeated with the smell of burning wood and leafs and Lord knows what else. It is L’G B’Omer eve [11 May] and all the crypto-pyromaniacs, like the crypto-drunkards on Purim, are allowed to live out their fantasies. Bonfires large and small abound, as do barbecues and cookouts. Viewed from space, Israel must have disappeared under a thick cloud of smoke.
Rachel is out among the bonfires, cheerfully working the crowds in her own inimitable way, while Old Grouchy sits transfixed before the computer, inundated with articles mirroring his despair.
It does little to cheer me that so many are coming around to the conclusions I reached long ago. Misery does not love company. I have prayed for so long that I’ll be proven wrong, that flaws in my arguments will be pointed out, that the hopeless despair I feel will be shown to be a personal psychosis and not one based on fact. Instead, the ‘usual suspects’, loonies like myself, are being joined by mainstream commentators. I thought I had scraped the bottom of the Misery Barrel. Now I’ve been given a shovel with which to dig beneath the Barrel.
One of these mainstreamers is the estimable Naomi Ragen. One of her recent letters has intensified an ongoing disagreement between Rachel, ever optimistic, and yours truly who requires no effort to wallow in blackest despair.
“I write less because I have no words to express just how bad things are,” wrote Ragen, “how beyond imagination that the Jewish State has gotten to this point in its history.”
Rachel and I are battling over “the Jewish State”. I say there is no Jewish State, only a state with many Jews. Were we a genuinely Jewish State, a state of Jewish believers, we wouldn’t be facing extinction right now.
Rachel points out that it is L’g B’Omer, and most Jews are attending bonfires, just as most Israeli Jews attend a seder on Passover. Even those who participated in the expulsion are doing the Jewish thing.
These, I argue, are nominal Jews and not believing Jews. Their having a bonfire or a seder makes them no different from the millions of Americans who have a Christmas tree. They are nominal Christians and not believing Christians. And their activities don’t make America a Christian country any more than the activities of nominal Jews make Israel a Jewish country.
Some of you were offended by my characterization of Obama voters as collaborators in our destruction. I was watching a documentary about the Jewish singles scene in the States, all those wonderful, caring, concerned people. And not a McCain voter among them. It must have been wonderful, even liberating, to polish your liberal credentials by voting for one of the traditionally oppressed. I believe you had no intention of harming Israel. The interests of Israel probably weren’t even on your radar when, floating on a cloud of rhetoric-induced euphoria, you wafted into the polling station.
And when disaster strikes us you will weep genuine tears on our behalf. I tell you in advance that we appreciate your tears, because by the time they flow we won’t be able to thank you. We will have been slaughtered. Rachel, myself, our children, our grandchildren, the Zionists, the non-Zionists, the anti-Zionists, the committed few, the indifferent many.
When we were expelled from Gush Katif I, like many others, underwent a crisis of faith. Was the Creator simply a sadist, setting us up with five years of indisputable miracles only to abandon us when we needed Him most? The conclusion I came to was that He protected us from everything the gentiles threw at us, only leaving us to our own devices when our fellow Jews were the enemy.
And it is about to happen again. Most of my fellow believers don’t see it. “The Almighty won’t allow it to happen,” is what I hear most often. “Even if you are right about Gush Katif, the Almighty won’t allow it because we face destruction by the gentiles, not the Jews.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Our physical destruction may be carried out by gentiles but it is the Jews who have empowered them, the Jews who have legitimized them, the Jews who provide their justification, the Jews who everywhere – especially Israel – lead the charge against us. Who, after the Holocaust, would call the Jews ‘Nazis’ unless the Jews themselves were using the term?
Is there another people anywhere, at any time, whose cultural and intellectual elite is so filled with self-hatred? Is there another people anywhere, at any time, whose cultural and intellectual elite is so desperate to rid itself of the religious burden placed upon it at birth that it will do anything – anything! – to be ‘free’?
The examples of their self-destructive actions are so numerous that I will not list them. You are aware of them, or you aren’t. As to motive…
There was a ‘joke’ I heard many years ago. It is Christmas Eve in the Ukraine and a band of Cossacks ride into a Jewish village. Fueled by vodka and native stupidity and a desire to avenge their crucified Lord they are determined to slaughter the inhabitants. A rabbi runs out to confront them. “Stop!” he shouts. “We have just learned that it was the Jews from the next village who killed Christ!” The Cossacks turn and ride away, to slaughter the Jews in the next village.
moshe
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Muslim Campus Club
Islamist's Campus Club: The Muslim Students' Association
by Jonathan Dowd-Gailey
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2004
The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students' Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious group. It promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing college students a healthy venue to develop their faith and engage in philanthropy. Along these lines, its constitution declares the MSA's mission as serving "the best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada so as to enable them to practice Islam as a complete way of life."[1]
Today, over 150 MSA chapters exist on American college campuses (divided into five regional chapters), easily establishing this organization as the most extensive Muslim student organization in North America. A Washington, D.C.-based national office assists in the establishment of constituent chapters and oversees fundraising and conferences while steering a plethora of special committees and "Political Action Task Forces."
Yet consider some of these recent activities of the MSA:
This is only the tip of the iceberg. There is overwhelming evidence that the MSA, far from being a benign student society, is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses—a voice espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, agitating aggressively against U.S. Middle East policy, and expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.
A Saudi Creation
On its website, the MSA describes its emergence as spontaneous and disavows any link to foreign governments.[5] In fact, the creation of the MSA resulted from Saudi-backed efforts to found Islamic bodies internationally in the 1960s. Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy states,
The Saudis over the years set up a number of large front organizations, such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Al Haramain Foundation, and a great number of Islamic "charities." While invariably claiming that they were private, all of these groups were tightly controlled and financed by the Saudi government and the Wahhabi clergy.[6]
In the United States, two leading Saudi-backed organizations were the MSA and the Islamic Society of North America (the MSA's adult counterpart), both of which received major funding, direction, and influence from Riyadh.
Personnel, money, and institutional linkages bound these organizations together from their inception, and all roads led eventually to Riyadh. Ahmad Totonji, an MSA co-founder, later served as vice-president for the notorious Saudi SAAR Foundation (a network of charities named after Saudi benefactor Sulayman ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ar-Rajhi), which closed down in 2001 after federal agents discovered links to terrorist groups.[7] Another MSA co-founder, Ahmad Sakr, served on a number of Saudi-affiliated organizations, such as the World Council of Mosques. The MSA is very much a result of Saudi "petro-Islam" diplomacy.
Current estimates suggest that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spends $4 billion annually on international aid, with two-thirds of that sum devoted to strictly Islamic development. Much of this largesse has ended up at Islamist organizations like MSA. Funded through private donations or through foundations and charities (only some of which the MSA officially reports),[8] MSA offers its Saudi benefactors a powerful tool. However, until the MSA's tax records are made public (on January 14, 2004, the Senate Finance Committee publicized a list of Islamic organizations whose financial records are sought, including the MSA),[9] the exact extent of foreign funding for the organization cannot be known.
But even without the tax records, there is plenty of evidence for the MSA's strident advocacy of the Saudi-style Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In "Wahhabism: A Critical Essay," Hamid Algar of the University of California-Berkeley writes,
Some Muslim student organizations have functioned at times as Saudi-supported channels for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad, especially in the United States … Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, no criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at the annual conventions of the MSA. The organization has, in fact, consistently advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaati Islam.[10]
The MSA has played a major role in spreading Wahhabism. "Its numerous local chapters," Algar explains, "would make available at every Friday prayer large stacks of the [Mecca-based] World Muslim League's publications, in both English and Arabic. Although the MSA progressively diversified its connections with Arab states, official approval of Wahhabism remained strong."[11]
Stephen Schwartz goes further, stating in his June 2003 testimony to the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,
Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 are under Wahhabi control … Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational and charitable solicitation … The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).[12]
The MSA reflects a prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA's Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics:
It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more "In-your-face" association.[13]
All of this, the guide explains, results from the MSA's duty "to bring morality back into the campus" and to convince students to practice Islam "as a complete way of life."
In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of "special treatment" and "self-segregation" that sounds reminiscent of, and may actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding that universities be more "Muslim-friendly," the MSA's newly established National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims only.[14]
The politics of segregation practiced by the MSA have included blanket marginalization of its own female members. Shabana Mir, writing for the American Muslim, summarizes the plight of Muslim women on campus:
It is particularly important to know what is happening with Muslim women pursuing higher education. Many Muslim women in MSAs are working toward the justice and the equality that Islam ordains for humankind. A survey of sisters' participation in MSAs conducted in 1994 shows that women's activism in MSAs is at an abysmally low level due in large part to "brother domination." A related problem is "there is a common attitude that strict segregation should exist between the genders and that sisters should not appear in public!" On an MSA mailing list, a popular article gives a long list of conditions that women must fulfill to gain access to the mosque. These include obtaining permission from her male guardian, wearing hijab [veil], not wearing "fancy clothes" or perfume, not mixing with men, leaving immediately after the prayer, and so on![15]
Political Monopoly
Just as the MSA promotes a single theology, it similarly projects a monolithic political voice, one openly antagonistic to Muslim American diversity and in complete opposition to existing U.S. foreign policy. Although Muslim students in the United States exhibit the full range of political views found in America today, the MSA invariably adopts lopsided adversarial positions, as in these three cases:
Patriot Act: The MSA categorically opposes this legislation, describing it as "infamous." Chapters across the country have agitated against it, as well as against virtually every other security initiative since 9/11. At an MSA rally at the University of Pennsylvania, the co-chair of Muslims for Justice declared, "the Patriot Act is sending us in a backwards spiral, where the destination is chaos."[16]
Afghanistan: The MSA opposed the military intervention against the Taliban regime, instead calling for a "police investigation." MSA National further advised that the entire matter would be best addressed at the International Criminal Tribunal. MSA chapters organized rallies demanding a ceasefire and held "Solidarity Fasts" to honor Afghans who, the MSA charged, would face massive starvation as a result of the war.
Iraq: Even before the crisis of 2003, the MSA opposed every U.S. policy towards Iraq over the last twelve years. It strongly opposed the United Nations (U.N.)-authorized sanctions, claiming that the sanctions were "nothing short of a systematic genocide being carried out against civilian people."[17] The MSA condemned former president Clinton's 1998 strike against Iraq following Saddam Hussein's ouster of U.N. weapons inspectors, declaring that its "brothers and sisters in Iraq are once again being terrorized by the self-appointed champions of democracy."[18]
MSA National consistently pledges support for the war on terror and claims to merely "represent" student views. But it maintains control of the political agenda, leaving the chapters simply to mobilize support. Its chapters pointedly ignored the New York Shi‘ites who held vigils for their Iraqi brethren and the Michigan Kurds who rallied for Hussein's ouster. The MSA's decision to mobilize against the Bush administration took place without public debate and with no attempt at representing diverse views within the MSA. This approach is in keeping with the MSA's goal, as its official literature states, that the student body "be convinced that there is such a thing as a Muslim-bloc."[19]
Muslim students who refuse to submit to the MSA's position often find themselves harassed by their MSA peers. Oubai Shahbandar, an Arizona State University (ASU) student, expressed support for the Iraqi invasion and suffered condemnation from MSA members. Shahbandar states,
When I, a proud American of Arab descent and Muslim faith, took a stand on behalf of the liberation of my oppressed Iraqi brethren, the ASU Muslim Students' Association personally attacked me for not being a real Muslim and announced to the ASU student body in editorials in the student paper that I, Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar, was a hater of Arabs and Muslims.
Shahbandar also explains what the MSA preaches on his campus:
We are told America's foreign policy is based on racist neo-imperialism; we are taught that national security is a foul epithet to be reviled; we are told the Jews and Israel are to blame for the hatred against us.[20]
Playing the Victim
The MSA's adoption of the politics of victimization is reminiscent of wider campus trends of the 1990s. In the days immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the MSA stated,
In light of the Bush administration's casting blame for the attack on Osama Bin Laden, MSA National recognizes that Muslim students on college campuses will be subject to backlash.
Ominously, an "awareness" document describes post 9/11 Homeland Security policies in the same terms as do extremist Muslims abroad—that is, as an assault explicitly against Islam. America: Post 9/11, an MSA document, states,
Soon after [9/11], the attacks against our religion began at the hands of the media and the political establishment.[21]
Not surprisingly, the MSA has expressed resistance, outrage, and cynicism with virtually every high-profile arrest of Muslim Americans charged with conspiring with terrorists. When former University of South Florida (USF) professor Sami al-Arian was arrested for directing U.S. operations for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Florida campus MSA chapter held a press conference and stated:
We come before you today on behalf of the Muslim Student Association at USF as well as the National Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada to express our shock, deep concern, and plea for justice regarding the recent arrests of two USF professors, Dr. Sami al-Arian and Sameeh Hammoudeh … we are concerned that the USF professors were arrested for their political views.
The problem is that the MSA has been unable or unwilling to recognize that some Muslims, including its members, have crossed the line between political advocacy and material support for jihadist activities. In fact, MSA members and activities have repeatedly surfaced in police investigations. Some of these arrests received national media coverage, including the following:
Extreme Friends
In 2002, when the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe hit a twelve-year high, French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman observed a peculiar phenomenon on the European street —a loose fusing of extreme Left, Right, and Muslim political forces—what Cukierman terms the "brown-green-red alliance."[24] The three disparate constituencies have incompatible ideologies, but all three have a shared hatred for the pluralized world order, globalized market economies, U.S. preponderance, and the state of Israel. Cukierman has observed these forces forming an alliance of convenience in the post-9/11 world with potentially dangerous results.
The same pattern is also emerging in the United States with groups of the extreme Left forging bonds with specific Muslim organizations, and here again we find the MSA figures prominently. Given the MSA's propensity for radical politics in a campus environment, it is no surprise that it has become arguably the Muslim organization most enmeshed with American leftists. Consider the following:
As these examples suggest, the MSA boasts institutional ties with a host of radical issue-specific activist groups, all of them vehemently opposed to U.S. policy, and many of them openly anti-American.
The Center for Security Policy's Alex Alexiev argues,
The majority of Muslim Student Associations at U.S. colleges are dominated by Islamist and anti-American agendas, as are most of the numerous Islamic centers and schools financed by the Saudis. Intolerance and outright rejection of American values and democratic ideals are often taught also in the growing number of Deobandi schools that are frequently subsidized by the Saudis.[26]
The following examples illustrate both the degree and pervasiveness of hate-America vitriol that characterize the MSA:
When we hear someone refer to the great mujahideen Osama bin Laden as a ‘terrorist,' we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter; someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah's cause and speak out against oppressors. [28]
When you fight [the U.S.] you are fighting someone that is superior in criminality and Nazism … the American criminalizer is the most skillful oppressor the world has ever known …They beat the British at everything, isn't that right? They are a better colonizer, a better murderer, a better killer, a better liar, a better thief, a better infiltrator than old British.[30]
This anti-Americanism blends together almost seamlessly with a virulent discourse against the Jews and Israel. Consider the following:
Self-Defeating
Ironically, although one of the founding missions of the MSA is to increase favorable awareness of Muslim life among non-Muslims, the effect of the MSA's activities is the opposite: they confirm the worst suspicions of American society at large. The MSA's refusal to identify jihadists and jihadist sympathizers within its ranks, its indiscriminate opposition to U.S. policies following the September 11 attacks, its vitriolic anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric, and its solidarity with "Leftover Left" radical activist organizations, together reinforce an image that the MSA, and by extension, Muslim college students, are a divisive, angry, and potentially violent group on our campuses. By monopolizing the Muslim student voice in America with "radical chic" to create a "single Muslim bloc," an opportunity to forge a healthy discourse on the diverse attitudes of Muslim students is lost to the confrontational language of radical dissent and resistance.
Universities that host student organizations have an obligation to enforce basic standards of conduct, standards that the MSA has clearly breached. At the very least, MSA's most egregious behavior must face censure from those responsible for monitoring student conduct. University administrators must unchain themselves from cultural relativism and the ideology of "validation" and deal squarely with such misdeeds.
More importantly, however, the problem of the Muslim Students' Association illustrates the great question that confronts the West today: how does it cultivate liberalism in Muslim communities living at home and abroad? Just as the U.S. policy of détente with the Arab world collapsed after September 11, to be replaced by a "forward strategy of democracy," it may be time to adopt a "forward strategy" within U.S. borders, focused on promoting moderate voices in mosques and campuses. To improve campus life for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, universities should work with moderate students to inaugurate a new Muslim students' organization, one that eschews the radical politics of the "old world" in favor of authenticity, diversity, and integration. A new Muslim student organization would return to the primary mission of religiously-based campus groups—to celebrate and share in the fellowship of faith.
Jonathan Dowd-Gailey is a writer in Washington State.
[1] "The Constitution of the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/about/constitution.html.
[2] WorldNetDaily, Mar. 18, 2003, at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31571.
[3] Frontpage Magazine, Apr. 4, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7098.
[4] Sakeena Mirza and Ameena Qazi, "Robbing the Poor," al-Talib, vol. 12, no. 3, at http://www.al-talib.com/articles/v12_i3_a04.htm.
[5] "A Little Taste of History," Muslim Students' Association of U.S. and Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/about/history.html.
[6] Alex Alexiev, "The Missing Link in the War on Terror: Confronting Saudi Subversion," Center for Security Policy, at http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=alexiev.
[7] FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 23, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7395.
[8] "List of Organizations that Donate Islamic Books and Da'wah Materials," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-natl.org/resources/Donation_Books.html.
[9] "Senators Request Tax Information on Muslim Charities for Probe," Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, Jan. 14, 2003, at http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2004&m=January&x=20040114155543zemogb0.8868524&t=usinfo/wf-latest.html. For details, see http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/164.
[10] Hamid Algar, "Wahhabism: A Critical Essay," in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Adair T. Lummis, eds., Islamic Values in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 124.
[11] Ibid..
[12] Stephen Schwartz, "Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States," testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, June 26, 2003, at http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/2003_h/030626-schwartz.htm.
[13] MSA Starter's Guide: A Guide on How to Run a Successful MSA, 1st ed. (Washington, D.C.: Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Mar. 1996), at http://www.msa-natl.org/publications/startersguide.html.
[14] "Religious Accommodations Task Force," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/taskforces/religious.html.
[15] Shabana Mir, "Gender-based Exclusionism at a Muslim Student Association, Part I," The American Muslim, July/Aug. 2003, at http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/2003jul_comments.php?id=347_0_21_0_C.
[16] "Rally against the Patriot Act," University of Pennsylvania Muslim Students' Association, at http://www.upenn-msa.org/subcommittees/pmj/patriotact.html.
[17] "MSA National Demands an Immediate End to the Inhumane U.N. Sanctions," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., Apr. 6, 2001, at http://www.msa-national.org/media/pressreleases/040601.html.
[18] "Muslim Students Condemn U.S. Attack on Iraq," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., Dec. 17, 1998 at http://www.msa-national.org/media/pressreleases/121798.html.
[19] MSA Starter's Guide, at http://www.msa-natl.org/publications/startersguide.html.
[20] Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar, "Open Letter from an Arab-American Student," FrontPage Magazine, June 2, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=8143.
[21] "MSA National Political Action Task Force, America: Post 9/11," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/media/actionalerts/political.pdf.
[22] The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2003.
[23] Oubai Shahbandar, "U.S. Muslims as Patriots," The Arizona Republic, Oct. 11, 2003.
[24] Quoted by Mark Strauss, "Anti-Globalism's Jewish Problem," Foreign Policy, Nov./Dec. 2003.
[25] "National Conference against War, Colonial Occupation and Imperialism, May 17-18, New York City," ANSWER, at http://www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/041203m17conf.html.
[26] Alexiev, "This Missing Link on the War on Terror," at http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=alexiev.
[27] Syed Rahmatullah Hashimi, "Taliban in Afghanistan," University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Mar. 10, 2001, at http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/Taliban/talebanlec.html.
[28] Al-Talib, July 1999, quoted in FrontPageMagazine.com, Apr. 23, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7113. Al-Talib is listed as an official MSA Project by the UCLA chapter of MSA, at http://www.msa-ucla.com/projects.htm.
[29] Ghaith Mahmood, "Americanization: Solutions for a Small Planet?" al-Talib, vol. 12, no. 3, at http://www.al-talib.com/articles/v12_i3_a05.htm.
[30] Erick Stakelbeck, "Islamic Radicals on Campus," FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 23, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7395.
[31]"UCLA Sponsors of Terrorism," FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 4, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7098.
[32] Atlantiz Miztery, "Palestine in War," South Seattle Community College Muslim Students' Association, at http://sscc.msanw.org/forum.htm.
by Jonathan Dowd-Gailey
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2004
The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students' Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious group. It promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing college students a healthy venue to develop their faith and engage in philanthropy. Along these lines, its constitution declares the MSA's mission as serving "the best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada so as to enable them to practice Islam as a complete way of life."[1]
Today, over 150 MSA chapters exist on American college campuses (divided into five regional chapters), easily establishing this organization as the most extensive Muslim student organization in North America. A Washington, D.C.-based national office assists in the establishment of constituent chapters and oversees fundraising and conferences while steering a plethora of special committees and "Political Action Task Forces."
Yet consider some of these recent activities of the MSA:
•At a meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York in March 2003, a guest speaker named Faheed declared, "We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it … Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah."[2]
•During an October 2000 anti-Israeli protest, former MSA president Ahmed Shama at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) stood before the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, shouting "Victory to Islam! Death to the Jews!" MSA West president Sohail Shakr declared at the same rally, "the biggest impediment to peace [in the Middle East] has been the existence of the Zionist entity in the middle of the Muslim world."[3]
•Prior to September 11, 2001, the MSA formally assisted three Islamic charities in fundraising: the Holy Land Foundation, Global Relief, and Benevolence Foundation. After that date, all three were accused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of having serious links to terrorism and were ordered closed. The MSA issued a formal statement of protest: "How three of the nation's largest Muslim charities could be made inoperable at the peak of the giving season of Ramadan seemed unbelievable."[4]
This is only the tip of the iceberg. There is overwhelming evidence that the MSA, far from being a benign student society, is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses—a voice espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, agitating aggressively against U.S. Middle East policy, and expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.
A Saudi Creation
On its website, the MSA describes its emergence as spontaneous and disavows any link to foreign governments.[5] In fact, the creation of the MSA resulted from Saudi-backed efforts to found Islamic bodies internationally in the 1960s. Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy states,
The Saudis over the years set up a number of large front organizations, such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Al Haramain Foundation, and a great number of Islamic "charities." While invariably claiming that they were private, all of these groups were tightly controlled and financed by the Saudi government and the Wahhabi clergy.[6]
In the United States, two leading Saudi-backed organizations were the MSA and the Islamic Society of North America (the MSA's adult counterpart), both of which received major funding, direction, and influence from Riyadh.
Personnel, money, and institutional linkages bound these organizations together from their inception, and all roads led eventually to Riyadh. Ahmad Totonji, an MSA co-founder, later served as vice-president for the notorious Saudi SAAR Foundation (a network of charities named after Saudi benefactor Sulayman ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ar-Rajhi), which closed down in 2001 after federal agents discovered links to terrorist groups.[7] Another MSA co-founder, Ahmad Sakr, served on a number of Saudi-affiliated organizations, such as the World Council of Mosques. The MSA is very much a result of Saudi "petro-Islam" diplomacy.
Current estimates suggest that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spends $4 billion annually on international aid, with two-thirds of that sum devoted to strictly Islamic development. Much of this largesse has ended up at Islamist organizations like MSA. Funded through private donations or through foundations and charities (only some of which the MSA officially reports),[8] MSA offers its Saudi benefactors a powerful tool. However, until the MSA's tax records are made public (on January 14, 2004, the Senate Finance Committee publicized a list of Islamic organizations whose financial records are sought, including the MSA),[9] the exact extent of foreign funding for the organization cannot be known.
But even without the tax records, there is plenty of evidence for the MSA's strident advocacy of the Saudi-style Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In "Wahhabism: A Critical Essay," Hamid Algar of the University of California-Berkeley writes,
Some Muslim student organizations have functioned at times as Saudi-supported channels for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad, especially in the United States … Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, no criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at the annual conventions of the MSA. The organization has, in fact, consistently advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaati Islam.[10]
The MSA has played a major role in spreading Wahhabism. "Its numerous local chapters," Algar explains, "would make available at every Friday prayer large stacks of the [Mecca-based] World Muslim League's publications, in both English and Arabic. Although the MSA progressively diversified its connections with Arab states, official approval of Wahhabism remained strong."[11]
Stephen Schwartz goes further, stating in his June 2003 testimony to the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,
Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 are under Wahhabi control … Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational and charitable solicitation … The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).[12]
The MSA reflects a prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA's Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics:
It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more "In-your-face" association.[13]
All of this, the guide explains, results from the MSA's duty "to bring morality back into the campus" and to convince students to practice Islam "as a complete way of life."
In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of "special treatment" and "self-segregation" that sounds reminiscent of, and may actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding that universities be more "Muslim-friendly," the MSA's newly established National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims only.[14]
The politics of segregation practiced by the MSA have included blanket marginalization of its own female members. Shabana Mir, writing for the American Muslim, summarizes the plight of Muslim women on campus:
It is particularly important to know what is happening with Muslim women pursuing higher education. Many Muslim women in MSAs are working toward the justice and the equality that Islam ordains for humankind. A survey of sisters' participation in MSAs conducted in 1994 shows that women's activism in MSAs is at an abysmally low level due in large part to "brother domination." A related problem is "there is a common attitude that strict segregation should exist between the genders and that sisters should not appear in public!" On an MSA mailing list, a popular article gives a long list of conditions that women must fulfill to gain access to the mosque. These include obtaining permission from her male guardian, wearing hijab [veil], not wearing "fancy clothes" or perfume, not mixing with men, leaving immediately after the prayer, and so on![15]
Political Monopoly
Just as the MSA promotes a single theology, it similarly projects a monolithic political voice, one openly antagonistic to Muslim American diversity and in complete opposition to existing U.S. foreign policy. Although Muslim students in the United States exhibit the full range of political views found in America today, the MSA invariably adopts lopsided adversarial positions, as in these three cases:
Patriot Act: The MSA categorically opposes this legislation, describing it as "infamous." Chapters across the country have agitated against it, as well as against virtually every other security initiative since 9/11. At an MSA rally at the University of Pennsylvania, the co-chair of Muslims for Justice declared, "the Patriot Act is sending us in a backwards spiral, where the destination is chaos."[16]
Afghanistan: The MSA opposed the military intervention against the Taliban regime, instead calling for a "police investigation." MSA National further advised that the entire matter would be best addressed at the International Criminal Tribunal. MSA chapters organized rallies demanding a ceasefire and held "Solidarity Fasts" to honor Afghans who, the MSA charged, would face massive starvation as a result of the war.
Iraq: Even before the crisis of 2003, the MSA opposed every U.S. policy towards Iraq over the last twelve years. It strongly opposed the United Nations (U.N.)-authorized sanctions, claiming that the sanctions were "nothing short of a systematic genocide being carried out against civilian people."[17] The MSA condemned former president Clinton's 1998 strike against Iraq following Saddam Hussein's ouster of U.N. weapons inspectors, declaring that its "brothers and sisters in Iraq are once again being terrorized by the self-appointed champions of democracy."[18]
MSA National consistently pledges support for the war on terror and claims to merely "represent" student views. But it maintains control of the political agenda, leaving the chapters simply to mobilize support. Its chapters pointedly ignored the New York Shi‘ites who held vigils for their Iraqi brethren and the Michigan Kurds who rallied for Hussein's ouster. The MSA's decision to mobilize against the Bush administration took place without public debate and with no attempt at representing diverse views within the MSA. This approach is in keeping with the MSA's goal, as its official literature states, that the student body "be convinced that there is such a thing as a Muslim-bloc."[19]
Muslim students who refuse to submit to the MSA's position often find themselves harassed by their MSA peers. Oubai Shahbandar, an Arizona State University (ASU) student, expressed support for the Iraqi invasion and suffered condemnation from MSA members. Shahbandar states,
When I, a proud American of Arab descent and Muslim faith, took a stand on behalf of the liberation of my oppressed Iraqi brethren, the ASU Muslim Students' Association personally attacked me for not being a real Muslim and announced to the ASU student body in editorials in the student paper that I, Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar, was a hater of Arabs and Muslims.
Shahbandar also explains what the MSA preaches on his campus:
We are told America's foreign policy is based on racist neo-imperialism; we are taught that national security is a foul epithet to be reviled; we are told the Jews and Israel are to blame for the hatred against us.[20]
Playing the Victim
The MSA's adoption of the politics of victimization is reminiscent of wider campus trends of the 1990s. In the days immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the MSA stated,
In light of the Bush administration's casting blame for the attack on Osama Bin Laden, MSA National recognizes that Muslim students on college campuses will be subject to backlash.
Ominously, an "awareness" document describes post 9/11 Homeland Security policies in the same terms as do extremist Muslims abroad—that is, as an assault explicitly against Islam. America: Post 9/11, an MSA document, states,
Soon after [9/11], the attacks against our religion began at the hands of the media and the political establishment.[21]
Not surprisingly, the MSA has expressed resistance, outrage, and cynicism with virtually every high-profile arrest of Muslim Americans charged with conspiring with terrorists. When former University of South Florida (USF) professor Sami al-Arian was arrested for directing U.S. operations for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Florida campus MSA chapter held a press conference and stated:
We come before you today on behalf of the Muslim Student Association at USF as well as the National Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada to express our shock, deep concern, and plea for justice regarding the recent arrests of two USF professors, Dr. Sami al-Arian and Sameeh Hammoudeh … we are concerned that the USF professors were arrested for their political views.
The problem is that the MSA has been unable or unwilling to recognize that some Muslims, including its members, have crossed the line between political advocacy and material support for jihadist activities. In fact, MSA members and activities have repeatedly surfaced in police investigations. Some of these arrests received national media coverage, including the following:
•In February 2003, former head of the MSA chapter at the University of Idaho, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was arrested with an indictment that he raised over $300,000 for the Islamic Assembly of North America, a group under federal investigation for funding terrorist groups. FBI agents believed Hussayen was communicating with two radical clerics, nicknamed the "awakening sheikhs," known for inspiring young Muslims to pursue the path of jihad and credited as major ideological mentors to Osama bin Laden.[22]
•In April 2003, the home of Arizona State University MSA president Hassan Alrafea was raided by the FBI, whose agents confiscated his computer and unspecified documents.[23]
Extreme Friends
In 2002, when the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe hit a twelve-year high, French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman observed a peculiar phenomenon on the European street —a loose fusing of extreme Left, Right, and Muslim political forces—what Cukierman terms the "brown-green-red alliance."[24] The three disparate constituencies have incompatible ideologies, but all three have a shared hatred for the pluralized world order, globalized market economies, U.S. preponderance, and the state of Israel. Cukierman has observed these forces forming an alliance of convenience in the post-9/11 world with potentially dangerous results.
The same pattern is also emerging in the United States with groups of the extreme Left forging bonds with specific Muslim organizations, and here again we find the MSA figures prominently. Given the MSA's propensity for radical politics in a campus environment, it is no surprise that it has become arguably the Muslim organization most enmeshed with American leftists. Consider the following:
•Perhaps as a reward for its total opposition to every U.S. policy since the September 2001 attacks, the MSA has been given a seat on the steering committee for International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). ANSWER is an organization dedicated to defending rogue states and fighting "U.S. imperialism," and has been distinguished by its ability to organize the largest peace demonstrations in North America. ANSWER was formed by International Action Center, a communist organization that supports Stalinist regimes worldwide, including North Korea and Hussein's Iraq. [25]
•In its aggressive protest activities against recent Middle East wars, the MSA has developed strong working ties with numerous activist groups of the extreme Left. Among them: Free Palestine Alliance, Nicaragua Network, Kensington Welfare Rights Union, Mexico Solidarity Network, Korea Truth Commission, Young Communist League, Young Peoples' Socialist League, and Black Radical Congress.
As these examples suggest, the MSA boasts institutional ties with a host of radical issue-specific activist groups, all of them vehemently opposed to U.S. policy, and many of them openly anti-American.
The Center for Security Policy's Alex Alexiev argues,
The majority of Muslim Student Associations at U.S. colleges are dominated by Islamist and anti-American agendas, as are most of the numerous Islamic centers and schools financed by the Saudis. Intolerance and outright rejection of American values and democratic ideals are often taught also in the growing number of Deobandi schools that are frequently subsidized by the Saudis.[26]
The following examples illustrate both the degree and pervasiveness of hate-America vitriol that characterize the MSA:
•Taliban propaganda is featured on the website of the University of Southern California MSA chapter.[27]
•One featured article in Al-Talib (a magazine developed by the UCLA chapter of the MSA and not affiliated with the Taliban of Afghanistan) entitled, "The Spirit of Jihad," praised Osama bin Laden as a "prominent Muslim activist." The article goes on to say,
When we hear someone refer to the great mujahideen Osama bin Laden as a ‘terrorist,' we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter; someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah's cause and speak out against oppressors. [28]
•Another Al-Talib article entitled "Americanization" states,
A dangerous weapon has once again been unfurled by the U.S. military in this War on Terrorism … This weapon comes in the form of cultural warfare … In this new War on Terrorism, the colossal brunt of this production machine is now squarely targeted at the Muslim population.[29]
•At an Al-Talib event to offer support for Imam Jamil al-Amin, convicted of killing a policeman, guest speaker Imam Abdul-Alim Musa said,
When you fight [the U.S.] you are fighting someone that is superior in criminality and Nazism … the American criminalizer is the most skillful oppressor the world has ever known …They beat the British at everything, isn't that right? They are a better colonizer, a better murderer, a better killer, a better liar, a better thief, a better infiltrator than old British.[30]
This anti-Americanism blends together almost seamlessly with a virulent discourse against the Jews and Israel. Consider the following:
•At the 2001 MSA West conference, hosted by UCLA, cleric Imam Muhammad al-Asi stated,
Israel is as racist as apartheid could ever be … you can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew.[31]
•The MSA continues to celebrate violence against Israel on its websites. At the MSA Northwest site, for example, images of Hamas suicide squads and child soldiers are proudly displayed above jihadist poetry, whose verse (erratically capitalized) celebrates violence:
two soldiers spotted me in their sight … i had to blast 4 shots hitting each one in the face and waist. a trace of blood drips from my arm as i make my away thru streets with an injured zionist as a hostage … seen a group of israeli soldiers run out and began pulling the trigger when sounds of rounds began playing a deadly melody. Each gun dropped two …[32]
•In 2002, the MSA at the University of Michigan helped host the Second National Student Conference for Palestine Solidarity Movement. At that conference, one of the guest speakers was ex-University of Florida professor Sami al-Arian, who is now awaiting trial on terrorism-related charges.
Self-Defeating
Ironically, although one of the founding missions of the MSA is to increase favorable awareness of Muslim life among non-Muslims, the effect of the MSA's activities is the opposite: they confirm the worst suspicions of American society at large. The MSA's refusal to identify jihadists and jihadist sympathizers within its ranks, its indiscriminate opposition to U.S. policies following the September 11 attacks, its vitriolic anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric, and its solidarity with "Leftover Left" radical activist organizations, together reinforce an image that the MSA, and by extension, Muslim college students, are a divisive, angry, and potentially violent group on our campuses. By monopolizing the Muslim student voice in America with "radical chic" to create a "single Muslim bloc," an opportunity to forge a healthy discourse on the diverse attitudes of Muslim students is lost to the confrontational language of radical dissent and resistance.
Universities that host student organizations have an obligation to enforce basic standards of conduct, standards that the MSA has clearly breached. At the very least, MSA's most egregious behavior must face censure from those responsible for monitoring student conduct. University administrators must unchain themselves from cultural relativism and the ideology of "validation" and deal squarely with such misdeeds.
More importantly, however, the problem of the Muslim Students' Association illustrates the great question that confronts the West today: how does it cultivate liberalism in Muslim communities living at home and abroad? Just as the U.S. policy of détente with the Arab world collapsed after September 11, to be replaced by a "forward strategy of democracy," it may be time to adopt a "forward strategy" within U.S. borders, focused on promoting moderate voices in mosques and campuses. To improve campus life for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, universities should work with moderate students to inaugurate a new Muslim students' organization, one that eschews the radical politics of the "old world" in favor of authenticity, diversity, and integration. A new Muslim student organization would return to the primary mission of religiously-based campus groups—to celebrate and share in the fellowship of faith.
Jonathan Dowd-Gailey is a writer in Washington State.
[1] "The Constitution of the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/about/constitution.html.
[2] WorldNetDaily, Mar. 18, 2003, at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31571.
[3] Frontpage Magazine, Apr. 4, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7098.
[4] Sakeena Mirza and Ameena Qazi, "Robbing the Poor," al-Talib, vol. 12, no. 3, at http://www.al-talib.com/articles/v12_i3_a04.htm.
[5] "A Little Taste of History," Muslim Students' Association of U.S. and Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/about/history.html.
[6] Alex Alexiev, "The Missing Link in the War on Terror: Confronting Saudi Subversion," Center for Security Policy, at http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=alexiev.
[7] FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 23, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7395.
[8] "List of Organizations that Donate Islamic Books and Da'wah Materials," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-natl.org/resources/Donation_Books.html.
[9] "Senators Request Tax Information on Muslim Charities for Probe," Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, Jan. 14, 2003, at http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2004&m=January&x=20040114155543zemogb0.8868524&t=usinfo/wf-latest.html. For details, see http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/164.
[10] Hamid Algar, "Wahhabism: A Critical Essay," in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Adair T. Lummis, eds., Islamic Values in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 124.
[11] Ibid..
[12] Stephen Schwartz, "Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States," testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, June 26, 2003, at http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/2003_h/030626-schwartz.htm.
[13] MSA Starter's Guide: A Guide on How to Run a Successful MSA, 1st ed. (Washington, D.C.: Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Mar. 1996), at http://www.msa-natl.org/publications/startersguide.html.
[14] "Religious Accommodations Task Force," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/taskforces/religious.html.
[15] Shabana Mir, "Gender-based Exclusionism at a Muslim Student Association, Part I," The American Muslim, July/Aug. 2003, at http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/2003jul_comments.php?id=347_0_21_0_C.
[16] "Rally against the Patriot Act," University of Pennsylvania Muslim Students' Association, at http://www.upenn-msa.org/subcommittees/pmj/patriotact.html.
[17] "MSA National Demands an Immediate End to the Inhumane U.N. Sanctions," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., Apr. 6, 2001, at http://www.msa-national.org/media/pressreleases/040601.html.
[18] "Muslim Students Condemn U.S. Attack on Iraq," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., Dec. 17, 1998 at http://www.msa-national.org/media/pressreleases/121798.html.
[19] MSA Starter's Guide, at http://www.msa-natl.org/publications/startersguide.html.
[20] Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar, "Open Letter from an Arab-American Student," FrontPage Magazine, June 2, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=8143.
[21] "MSA National Political Action Task Force, America: Post 9/11," Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, Washington, D.C., at http://www.msa-national.org/media/actionalerts/political.pdf.
[22] The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2003.
[23] Oubai Shahbandar, "U.S. Muslims as Patriots," The Arizona Republic, Oct. 11, 2003.
[24] Quoted by Mark Strauss, "Anti-Globalism's Jewish Problem," Foreign Policy, Nov./Dec. 2003.
[25] "National Conference against War, Colonial Occupation and Imperialism, May 17-18, New York City," ANSWER, at http://www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/041203m17conf.html.
[26] Alexiev, "This Missing Link on the War on Terror," at http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=alexiev.
[27] Syed Rahmatullah Hashimi, "Taliban in Afghanistan," University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Mar. 10, 2001, at http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/Taliban/talebanlec.html.
[28] Al-Talib, July 1999, quoted in FrontPageMagazine.com, Apr. 23, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7113. Al-Talib is listed as an official MSA Project by the UCLA chapter of MSA, at http://www.msa-ucla.com/projects.htm.
[29] Ghaith Mahmood, "Americanization: Solutions for a Small Planet?" al-Talib, vol. 12, no. 3, at http://www.al-talib.com/articles/v12_i3_a05.htm.
[30] Erick Stakelbeck, "Islamic Radicals on Campus," FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 23, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7395.
[31]"UCLA Sponsors of Terrorism," FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 4, 2003, at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7098.
[32] Atlantiz Miztery, "Palestine in War," South Seattle Community College Muslim Students' Association, at http://sscc.msanw.org/forum.htm.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Obama Signals Israel To Submit
Obama's Signal to Israel: Submit
By Mona Charen
May 12, 2009 / 18 Iyar 5769
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/charen051209.php3
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | In early April, Vice President Biden was asked if the administration was concerned that Israel might strike at Iran's nuclear facilities. "I don't believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that," Mr. Biden replied. "I think he would be ill advised to do that."
A few weeks later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the administration's solution to the threat of an Iranian bomb: "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it's looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can't stay on the sideline with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts … they go hand in hand."
And on May 10, National Security Adviser James Jones spelled it out further: "We understand Israel's preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that. … By the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution."
By what reasoning has the administration decided that pushing Israel to permit a new Palestinian state would — in any way — diminish the threat from Iran? Do they believe that Iran's (or I should say the Iranian leadership's) genocidal hostility toward Israel is the result of lack of progress toward an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza? Will the Iranian leadership, which has characterized Israel as a "cancerous tumor," declared that "Israel must we wiped off the map," and promised that "Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear" is going to change its mind if Israel enters into negotiations with the Palestinians?
"Obama will be a great friend to Israel." So said a Jewish Democrat in a pre-election debate with me. I asked her whether she had any hesitations about someone who had been steeped in academic pieties and Hyde Park leftwing intellectual fashions, and who had tamely absorbed the Rev. Wright's sermons for 20 years? Her response was to mouth some of the platitudes about support for Israel that were to be found on the Obama campaign's website. I wonder if she is having doubts now.
Does it give her pause that Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state and America's chief nuclear arms negotiator, has called on Israel (along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea) to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? By including Israel on a list of nations known to either have nuclear weapons or be close to acquiring them, the Obama administration is introducing a sinister note of moral equivalence to the problem of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. All previous U.S. governments have implicitly accepted that Israel's nuclear weapons pose a threat to no nation and are maintained only to deter Israel's enemies from genocidal attacks.
Like other liberals, my debate opponent probably believes that Obama's apology tour of global capitals was pitch perfect. Of course, it's one thing for the United States, still the world's superpower, to delude itself that winning international popularity contests will make us safer (though it's a dangerous delusion), but Israel, which always sits inches from the precipice of destruction, cannot afford such fantasies at all.
We have recent history to guide us. In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security corridor it had established in southern Lebanon. The world had long been clamoring for Israel to do this. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement immediately seized the area — trumpeting its triumph in driving out the enemy. In 2006, southern Lebanon became the launching pad for Hezbollah's missile campaign against northern Israel.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Iranian-backed Hamas movement moved quickly and took control there (not without significant internecine bloodshed with Fatah), and again used the territory not to build a peaceful Palestinian enclave but to launch 10,000 missiles against southern Israel.
Fatah (which is called moderate because it wants to destroy Israel on the installment plan rather than all at once) retains tenuous control of the West Bank. But even Mahmoud Abbas admits that if Israel were to withdraw completely from the area, Hamas would gain control in a heartbeat.
Next week, Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington. It is hard to see how this relationship can go well. President Obama has sent abundant signals that his foreign policy is 50 percent wishful thinking and 50 percent leftwing mush. There may not be any easy answers to the problem of a nuclear Iran. But pressuring Israel to take suicidal risks is clearly the worst possible approach. Iran will conclude, as its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas at various times concluded, that force and the threat of force work.
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. –Sir Karl Popper
By Mona Charen
May 12, 2009 / 18 Iyar 5769
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/charen051209.php3
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | In early April, Vice President Biden was asked if the administration was concerned that Israel might strike at Iran's nuclear facilities. "I don't believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that," Mr. Biden replied. "I think he would be ill advised to do that."
A few weeks later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the administration's solution to the threat of an Iranian bomb: "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it's looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can't stay on the sideline with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts … they go hand in hand."
And on May 10, National Security Adviser James Jones spelled it out further: "We understand Israel's preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that. … By the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution."
By what reasoning has the administration decided that pushing Israel to permit a new Palestinian state would — in any way — diminish the threat from Iran? Do they believe that Iran's (or I should say the Iranian leadership's) genocidal hostility toward Israel is the result of lack of progress toward an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza? Will the Iranian leadership, which has characterized Israel as a "cancerous tumor," declared that "Israel must we wiped off the map," and promised that "Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear" is going to change its mind if Israel enters into negotiations with the Palestinians?
"Obama will be a great friend to Israel." So said a Jewish Democrat in a pre-election debate with me. I asked her whether she had any hesitations about someone who had been steeped in academic pieties and Hyde Park leftwing intellectual fashions, and who had tamely absorbed the Rev. Wright's sermons for 20 years? Her response was to mouth some of the platitudes about support for Israel that were to be found on the Obama campaign's website. I wonder if she is having doubts now.
Does it give her pause that Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state and America's chief nuclear arms negotiator, has called on Israel (along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea) to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? By including Israel on a list of nations known to either have nuclear weapons or be close to acquiring them, the Obama administration is introducing a sinister note of moral equivalence to the problem of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. All previous U.S. governments have implicitly accepted that Israel's nuclear weapons pose a threat to no nation and are maintained only to deter Israel's enemies from genocidal attacks.
Like other liberals, my debate opponent probably believes that Obama's apology tour of global capitals was pitch perfect. Of course, it's one thing for the United States, still the world's superpower, to delude itself that winning international popularity contests will make us safer (though it's a dangerous delusion), but Israel, which always sits inches from the precipice of destruction, cannot afford such fantasies at all.
We have recent history to guide us. In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security corridor it had established in southern Lebanon. The world had long been clamoring for Israel to do this. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement immediately seized the area — trumpeting its triumph in driving out the enemy. In 2006, southern Lebanon became the launching pad for Hezbollah's missile campaign against northern Israel.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Iranian-backed Hamas movement moved quickly and took control there (not without significant internecine bloodshed with Fatah), and again used the territory not to build a peaceful Palestinian enclave but to launch 10,000 missiles against southern Israel.
Fatah (which is called moderate because it wants to destroy Israel on the installment plan rather than all at once) retains tenuous control of the West Bank. But even Mahmoud Abbas admits that if Israel were to withdraw completely from the area, Hamas would gain control in a heartbeat.
Next week, Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington. It is hard to see how this relationship can go well. President Obama has sent abundant signals that his foreign policy is 50 percent wishful thinking and 50 percent leftwing mush. There may not be any easy answers to the problem of a nuclear Iran. But pressuring Israel to take suicidal risks is clearly the worst possible approach. Iran will conclude, as its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas at various times concluded, that force and the threat of force work.
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. –Sir Karl Popper
CAIR Nixes Invitation ...
CAIR nixes invitation to Washington, DC Premiere of “The Third Jihad”
By Jerry Gordon | 05/11/09 |
The Clarion Fund production of “The Third Jihad” (trailer below) has a Washington, DC premier on Wednesday, May 13th at the National Press Club. Clarion had produced the award winning “Obsession: Islam’s War Against the West” that portrayed the global threat posed by radical Islam. “The Third Jihad,” narrated by Dr. M. Zhudi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and vigorous opponent of Political Islam, “portrays the growth of radical Islam on American soil via “Cultural Jihad,” the use of our democratic system to transform the American way of life from within to a society governed by Sharia Law (Islamic religious law).” The communication of the goals of Cultural Jihad is an objective of the Clarion Fund’s grass roots website; radicalislam.org.
“Clarion Fund recognizes the propagation of radical Islam and the promulgation of Sharia Law within our borders as a clear and present crisis affecting the Muslim American community and the American public at large,” said Peter Connors, Executive Director of Clarion. “Our educational tools and media properties will serve as a platform for the American public – including Muslims – to embrace Western liberties and speak out in a meaningful way to silence radical elements in our midst.”
We are focused on educating the American public about this eminent threat to their rights and freedoms, with the goal of bringing ‘Creeping Sharia’ to a screeching halt,” explained Raphael Shore, producer of both The Third Jihad and Obsession and the founder of Clarion. “We want to expose the true intent of radical Islam in order to secure the future of the American public at large, including its Muslim community.
Prominent in the film is the FBI discovery of a Grand Jihad Manifesto for overturning our Constitution and replacing it strict Islamic Sharia law. The document was presented in evidence at the successful re-trial of the Holy Land Foundation trial. Among prominent Muslim Advocacy figures identified in that trial were the leaders of several Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America, CAIR among them. These Muslim Brotherhood groups had been identified as “unindicted co-conspirators” by Federal Prosecutors in the Dallas Holy Land Foundation trial. The FBI following the Holy Land Foundation trial formally distanced itself from any further interaction with CAIR and its chapters. A number of American Muslim groups, including Jasser’s AFID, issued a press release condoning the FBI decision. The Center for Islamic Pluralism release noted this about CAIR:
So, it is ironic, that CAIR was invited by the producers of “The Third Jihad” to a post film round table discussion. According to Clarion, CAIR rejected the opportunity to provide ‘balance’ in the form of rebuttal views. In a news release, Clarion noted:
CAIR’s response is indicative of the hateful regard for Jasser of the AFID. They hold him to be a murtadd or apostate for his views on Islam. In April, 2008, Dr. Jasser debated a Muslim Imam at an Edison College forum in Naples Florida. sponsored by the Florida Security Council . We had discussed that exchange in a New English Review article on a Debate of the film “Obsession” at the University of South Florida at another FSC event. In an alleged expose of Dr. Jasser, a normative Muslim present at the Naples, Florida debate had this criticism of Jasser
Dr. Jasser is a pioneer and at the forefront of a new age of McCarthyism. His rants and use of erroneous labels such as Islamist, Political Islam, Radical Islamist, Political Imam, and countless other names mimic that of Senator Joseph McCarthy who “cried wolf" time and time again.
But it is CAIR who is using McCarthyite tactics, when it and a another front Group, United Voices for America, founded by former CAIR Tampa chapter leader, Ahmed Bedier, called for the resignation of Florida House Majority leader, Rep. Adam Hasner. Note this blog comment about why CAIR and fellow traveling groups are out to get Rep. Hasner:
CAIR has been after Florida House leader Rep Adam Hasner (R). Yesterday, during the opening prayer in the house, which was Islamic, Hasner left the chamber and then returned after it was over.
Rep. Hasner represents the Boca Raton area. In 2005, when a Muslim physician from Boca Raton was arrested for supporting Al-Qaeda it was CAIR Florida who came to his defense . The physician was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
CAIR questioned his co-hosting of the recent Free Speech Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, an event honoring courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a critic of normative Islam as a thinly disguised totalitarian system. Here’s what CAIR demanded in a news release:
The Clarion Fund’s invitation to CAIR to attend the Washington Premiere of “The Third Jihad” was simply brushed aside as an opportunity they didn’t need to attend. After all, CAIR is using all the tools of “cultural jihad’ Lawfare, media manipulation, intimidation of public officials and critics to supplant our Constitution with Sharia, as revealed in the film
By Jerry Gordon | 05/11/09 |
The Clarion Fund production of “The Third Jihad” (trailer below) has a Washington, DC premier on Wednesday, May 13th at the National Press Club. Clarion had produced the award winning “Obsession: Islam’s War Against the West” that portrayed the global threat posed by radical Islam. “The Third Jihad,” narrated by Dr. M. Zhudi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and vigorous opponent of Political Islam, “portrays the growth of radical Islam on American soil via “Cultural Jihad,” the use of our democratic system to transform the American way of life from within to a society governed by Sharia Law (Islamic religious law).” The communication of the goals of Cultural Jihad is an objective of the Clarion Fund’s grass roots website; radicalislam.org.
“Clarion Fund recognizes the propagation of radical Islam and the promulgation of Sharia Law within our borders as a clear and present crisis affecting the Muslim American community and the American public at large,” said Peter Connors, Executive Director of Clarion. “Our educational tools and media properties will serve as a platform for the American public – including Muslims – to embrace Western liberties and speak out in a meaningful way to silence radical elements in our midst.”
We are focused on educating the American public about this eminent threat to their rights and freedoms, with the goal of bringing ‘Creeping Sharia’ to a screeching halt,” explained Raphael Shore, producer of both The Third Jihad and Obsession and the founder of Clarion. “We want to expose the true intent of radical Islam in order to secure the future of the American public at large, including its Muslim community.
Prominent in the film is the FBI discovery of a Grand Jihad Manifesto for overturning our Constitution and replacing it strict Islamic Sharia law. The document was presented in evidence at the successful re-trial of the Holy Land Foundation trial. Among prominent Muslim Advocacy figures identified in that trial were the leaders of several Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America, CAIR among them. These Muslim Brotherhood groups had been identified as “unindicted co-conspirators” by Federal Prosecutors in the Dallas Holy Land Foundation trial. The FBI following the Holy Land Foundation trial formally distanced itself from any further interaction with CAIR and its chapters. A number of American Muslim groups, including Jasser’s AFID, issued a press release condoning the FBI decision. The Center for Islamic Pluralism release noted this about CAIR:
•We observe that they denounce "terrorism" in general terms but not the specific actions of Islamist groups like Hamas or Hezbollah. They denounce violence but not the ideologies behind it.
•We observe their commitment to radical aims, their attempts to chill free speech by calling critics of radical Islam "Islamophobes," and their false, ugly accusations against moderate American Muslims who disagree with their agenda.
•We reject any claim that CAIR and its supporters are legitimate civil liberties advocates or appropriate partners between the U.S. government and American Muslims.
•We congratulate the FBI for adopting a firmer attitude toward CAIR, as a defense of Americans of all faiths from the menace of radical Islam, including Muslims of all backgrounds - Sunni, Shia, Sufi, secular, etc.
•We call on the U.S. Department of Justice to affirm and continue this decision.
•We call on the entire United States government to follow suit in rejecting relations with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
So, it is ironic, that CAIR was invited by the producers of “The Third Jihad” to a post film round table discussion. According to Clarion, CAIR rejected the opportunity to provide ‘balance’ in the form of rebuttal views. In a news release, Clarion noted:
Among those organizations invited to participate in the roundtable discussion is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). However, CAIR has declined the invitation, a surprising turn of events considering the group’s usual insistence that a representative of their “mainstream Muslim” staff be present at such events to offer a “balanced perspective.” In fact, since the beginning of 2009, CAIR has requested such representation in at least three U.S. events focused on radical Islam.
We invited CAIR and they said they wanted nothing to do with this film, said Connors. CAIR’s response is unfortunate, as The Clarion Fund believes that the only way to address this issue is to discuss it openly and honestly with those who agree with us and those who disagree. Then, based on that education, the American public can decide for itself.
CAIR’s response is indicative of the hateful regard for Jasser of the AFID. They hold him to be a murtadd or apostate for his views on Islam. In April, 2008, Dr. Jasser debated a Muslim Imam at an Edison College forum in Naples Florida. sponsored by the Florida Security Council . We had discussed that exchange in a New English Review article on a Debate of the film “Obsession” at the University of South Florida at another FSC event. In an alleged expose of Dr. Jasser, a normative Muslim present at the Naples, Florida debate had this criticism of Jasser
Dr. Jasser is a pioneer and at the forefront of a new age of McCarthyism. His rants and use of erroneous labels such as Islamist, Political Islam, Radical Islamist, Political Imam, and countless other names mimic that of Senator Joseph McCarthy who “cried wolf" time and time again.
But it is CAIR who is using McCarthyite tactics, when it and a another front Group, United Voices for America, founded by former CAIR Tampa chapter leader, Ahmed Bedier, called for the resignation of Florida House Majority leader, Rep. Adam Hasner. Note this blog comment about why CAIR and fellow traveling groups are out to get Rep. Hasner:
CAIR has been after Florida House leader Rep Adam Hasner (R). Yesterday, during the opening prayer in the house, which was Islamic, Hasner left the chamber and then returned after it was over.
Rep. Hasner represents the Boca Raton area. In 2005, when a Muslim physician from Boca Raton was arrested for supporting Al-Qaeda it was CAIR Florida who came to his defense . The physician was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
CAIR questioned his co-hosting of the recent Free Speech Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, an event honoring courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a critic of normative Islam as a thinly disguised totalitarian system. Here’s what CAIR demanded in a news release:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on GOP leaders to demand that Rep. Adam Hasner, the head of Florida's House Republicans, step down from his leadership post for co-hosting an event at which the speaker [Geert Wilders] said Islam should not be recognized as a legitimate faith and Muslims should not have religious freedom.
The Clarion Fund’s invitation to CAIR to attend the Washington Premiere of “The Third Jihad” was simply brushed aside as an opportunity they didn’t need to attend. After all, CAIR is using all the tools of “cultural jihad’ Lawfare, media manipulation, intimidation of public officials and critics to supplant our Constitution with Sharia, as revealed in the film
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Hamas Peace Gambit
The Hamas 'Peace' Gambit
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 08, 2009
"Apart from the time restriction (a truce that lapses after 10 years) and the refusal to accept Israel's existence, Mr. Meshal's terms approximate the Arab League peace plan ... "
-- Hamas peace plan, as explained by The New York Times
"Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
-- Tom Lehrer, satirist WASHINGTON -- The Times conducted a five-hour interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal at his Damascus headquarters. Mirabile dictu, they're offering a peace plan with a two-state solution. Except. The offer is not a peace but a truce that expires after 10 years. Meaning that after Israel has fatally weakened itself by settling millions of hostile Arab refugees in its midst, and after a decade of Hamas arming itself within a Palestinian state that narrows Israel to eight miles wide -- Hamas restarts the war against a country it remains pledged to eradicate.
There is a phrase for such a peace: the peace of the grave.
Westerners may be stupid, but Hamas is not. It sees the new American administration making overtures to Iran and Syria. It sees Europe, led by Britain, beginning to accept Hezbollah. It sees itself as next in line. And it knows what to do. Yasser Arafat wrote the playbook.
With the 1993 Oslo accords, he showed what can be achieved with a fake peace treaty with Israel -- universal diplomatic recognition, billions of dollars of aid, and control of Gaza and the West Bank, which Arafat turned into an armed camp. In return for a signature, he created in the Palestinian territories the capacity to carry on the war against Israel that the Arab states had begun in 1948 but had given up after the bloody hell of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Meshal sees the opportunity. Not only is the Obama administration reaching out to its erstwhile enemies in the region, but it begins its term by wagging an angry finger at Israel over the Netanyahu government's ostensible refusal to accept a two-state solution.
Of all the phony fights to pick with Israel. No Israeli government would turn down a two-state solution in which the Palestinians accepted territorial compromise and genuine peace with a Jewish state. (And any government that did would be voted out in a day.) Netanyahu's own defense minister, Ehud Barak, offered precisely such a deal in 2000. He even offered to divide Jerusalem and expel every Jew from every settlement remaining in the new Palestine.
The Palestinian response (for those who have forgotten) was: No. And no counteroffer. Instead, nine weeks later, Arafat unleashed a savage terror war that killed 1,000 Israelis.
Netanyahu is reluctant to agree to a Palestinian state before he knows what kind of state it will be. That elementary prudence should be shared by anyone who's been sentient the last three years. The Palestinians already have a state, an independent territory with not an Israeli settler or soldier living on it. It's called Gaza. And what is it? A terror base, Islamist in nature, Iranian-allied, militant and aggressive, that has fired more than 10,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians.
If this is what a West Bank state is going to be, it would be madness for Israel or America or Jordan or Egypt or any other moderate Arab country to accept such a two-state solution. Which is why Netanyahu insists that the Palestinian Authority first build institutions -- social, economic and military -- to anchor a state that could actually carry out its responsibilities to keep the peace.
Apart from being reasonable, Netanyahu's two-state skepticism is beside the point. His predecessor, Ehud Olmert, worshiped at the shrine of a two-state solution. He made endless offers of a two-state peace to the Palestinian Authority -- and got nowhere.
Why? Because the Palestinians -- going back to the U.N. partition resolution of 1947 -- have never accepted the idea of living side by side with a Jewish state. Those like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who might want to entertain such a solution, have no authority to do it. And those like Hamas' Meshal, who have authority, have no intention of ever doing it.
Meshal's gambit to dress up perpetual war as a two-state peace is yet another iteration of the Palestinian rejectionist tragedy. In its previous incarnation, Arafat lulled Israel and the Clinton administration with talk of peace while he methodically prepared his people for war.
Arafat waited seven years to tear up his phony peace. Meshal's innovation? Ten -- then blood.
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 08, 2009
"Apart from the time restriction (a truce that lapses after 10 years) and the refusal to accept Israel's existence, Mr. Meshal's terms approximate the Arab League peace plan ... "
-- Hamas peace plan, as explained by The New York Times
"Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
-- Tom Lehrer, satirist WASHINGTON -- The Times conducted a five-hour interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal at his Damascus headquarters. Mirabile dictu, they're offering a peace plan with a two-state solution. Except. The offer is not a peace but a truce that expires after 10 years. Meaning that after Israel has fatally weakened itself by settling millions of hostile Arab refugees in its midst, and after a decade of Hamas arming itself within a Palestinian state that narrows Israel to eight miles wide -- Hamas restarts the war against a country it remains pledged to eradicate.
There is a phrase for such a peace: the peace of the grave.
Westerners may be stupid, but Hamas is not. It sees the new American administration making overtures to Iran and Syria. It sees Europe, led by Britain, beginning to accept Hezbollah. It sees itself as next in line. And it knows what to do. Yasser Arafat wrote the playbook.
With the 1993 Oslo accords, he showed what can be achieved with a fake peace treaty with Israel -- universal diplomatic recognition, billions of dollars of aid, and control of Gaza and the West Bank, which Arafat turned into an armed camp. In return for a signature, he created in the Palestinian territories the capacity to carry on the war against Israel that the Arab states had begun in 1948 but had given up after the bloody hell of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Meshal sees the opportunity. Not only is the Obama administration reaching out to its erstwhile enemies in the region, but it begins its term by wagging an angry finger at Israel over the Netanyahu government's ostensible refusal to accept a two-state solution.
Of all the phony fights to pick with Israel. No Israeli government would turn down a two-state solution in which the Palestinians accepted territorial compromise and genuine peace with a Jewish state. (And any government that did would be voted out in a day.) Netanyahu's own defense minister, Ehud Barak, offered precisely such a deal in 2000. He even offered to divide Jerusalem and expel every Jew from every settlement remaining in the new Palestine.
The Palestinian response (for those who have forgotten) was: No. And no counteroffer. Instead, nine weeks later, Arafat unleashed a savage terror war that killed 1,000 Israelis.
Netanyahu is reluctant to agree to a Palestinian state before he knows what kind of state it will be. That elementary prudence should be shared by anyone who's been sentient the last three years. The Palestinians already have a state, an independent territory with not an Israeli settler or soldier living on it. It's called Gaza. And what is it? A terror base, Islamist in nature, Iranian-allied, militant and aggressive, that has fired more than 10,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians.
If this is what a West Bank state is going to be, it would be madness for Israel or America or Jordan or Egypt or any other moderate Arab country to accept such a two-state solution. Which is why Netanyahu insists that the Palestinian Authority first build institutions -- social, economic and military -- to anchor a state that could actually carry out its responsibilities to keep the peace.
Apart from being reasonable, Netanyahu's two-state skepticism is beside the point. His predecessor, Ehud Olmert, worshiped at the shrine of a two-state solution. He made endless offers of a two-state peace to the Palestinian Authority -- and got nowhere.
Why? Because the Palestinians -- going back to the U.N. partition resolution of 1947 -- have never accepted the idea of living side by side with a Jewish state. Those like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who might want to entertain such a solution, have no authority to do it. And those like Hamas' Meshal, who have authority, have no intention of ever doing it.
Meshal's gambit to dress up perpetual war as a two-state peace is yet another iteration of the Palestinian rejectionist tragedy. In its previous incarnation, Arafat lulled Israel and the Clinton administration with talk of peace while he methodically prepared his people for war.
Arafat waited seven years to tear up his phony peace. Meshal's innovation? Ten -- then blood.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Immigration Program Subject To Bribery And Fraud
May 7, 2009
Obama reinstating immigration program that has brought 24 suspected jihadists into the US
Here is today's Which-Side-Is-Obama-On Alert: "U.S. Importing Somali 'Pirate-Jihadists,'" by David A. Patten for Newsmax, May 6:
The Obama administration is preparing to reinstate a fraud-riddled immigration program that has brought over 36,000 Somalis into the United States under questionable circumstances, including two dozen Minneapolis men that the FBI fears may be planning a terrorist attack.
The FBI has launched an “aggressive” manhunt for the men, who have “gone to ground” and have mysteriously disappeared, terrorism experts tell Newsmax. Authorities fear the men may have been recruited by extremists to carry out suicide attacks inside the United States, or abroad.
Critics of the State Department programs that brought the Somalis to America express grave concerns about the practice of admitting refugees from failed nation-states known to harbor extremists. It can be difficult or impossible to verify a person’s identity in such a country, let alone obtain knowledge of their past associations, several experts tell Newsmax.
One Somali refugee who vanished in early November, Shirwa Ahmed, re-emerged in northern Somalia in February behind the wheel of a truck packed with explosives.
Ahmed, whose family immigrated to the Minneapolis area in the mid-1990s, drove his truck into a crowd and triggered a massive explosion that left some 30 persons dead. Ahmed’s case marked the first known suicide bombing conducted by an American citizen, according to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III.
“It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota,” Mueller told the Council on Foreign Relations, warning that in the past two years, about two dozen Somali men have disappeared from their residences near Minneapolis.
Authorities say the men may have been recruited by al-Shabab, a terrorist group believed to have ties to al-Qaida. There has been speculation the men were radicalized at mosques in the area....
Conservative foreign-policy expert Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, is among those who perceives a definite link between Somali’s pirates and its violent Islamic extremists.
“Shariah-adherent Somali pirates are a threat to the world's shipping,” Gaffney tells Newsmax. “Their refugee counterparts being dumped into American communities are a threat to our country and its people. It adds insult to potentially enormous injury that, as the State Department has acknowledged, 80 percent of those refugees are here on the basis of fraudulent family-reunification grounds.”
Gaffney says the State Department “imports pirate/jihadist types into this country.”
One major concern: The pirates’ statements following the freeing of Phillips appeared to be couched in jihadist terms. They identified America as their “No. 1 enemy,” and one pirate leader told The Associated Press: “In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying.”...
There are three State Department programs that vet and process refugees for admittance:...
# The Priority Three (P-3) program awards refugee status specifically for the purpose of family reunification with other refugees already legally residing in the United States....
The P-3 program was suspended in October, after reports of fraud led the State Department and DHS to conduct DNA testing on 3,000 applicants. Those tests revealed that as many as 80 percent of the family-reunification claims were false and did not involve relatives....
Barnett tells Newsmax that the State Department is prepared to resume the troubled P-3 program in June. He also criticizes the P-1 program, due to U.N. refugee programs he describes as “one big long running fraud.” He adds: “The U.N. referral program itself has been subject to bribery and fraud.”
The State Department spokesman tells Newsmax it is unclear if the P-3 program will be reinstated by June, adding, “We do anticipate that the program will restart. A little later this year, we will have this program reinstated.”...
Obama reinstating immigration program that has brought 24 suspected jihadists into the US
Here is today's Which-Side-Is-Obama-On Alert: "U.S. Importing Somali 'Pirate-Jihadists,'" by David A. Patten for Newsmax, May 6:
The Obama administration is preparing to reinstate a fraud-riddled immigration program that has brought over 36,000 Somalis into the United States under questionable circumstances, including two dozen Minneapolis men that the FBI fears may be planning a terrorist attack.
The FBI has launched an “aggressive” manhunt for the men, who have “gone to ground” and have mysteriously disappeared, terrorism experts tell Newsmax. Authorities fear the men may have been recruited by extremists to carry out suicide attacks inside the United States, or abroad.
Critics of the State Department programs that brought the Somalis to America express grave concerns about the practice of admitting refugees from failed nation-states known to harbor extremists. It can be difficult or impossible to verify a person’s identity in such a country, let alone obtain knowledge of their past associations, several experts tell Newsmax.
One Somali refugee who vanished in early November, Shirwa Ahmed, re-emerged in northern Somalia in February behind the wheel of a truck packed with explosives.
Ahmed, whose family immigrated to the Minneapolis area in the mid-1990s, drove his truck into a crowd and triggered a massive explosion that left some 30 persons dead. Ahmed’s case marked the first known suicide bombing conducted by an American citizen, according to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III.
“It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota,” Mueller told the Council on Foreign Relations, warning that in the past two years, about two dozen Somali men have disappeared from their residences near Minneapolis.
Authorities say the men may have been recruited by al-Shabab, a terrorist group believed to have ties to al-Qaida. There has been speculation the men were radicalized at mosques in the area....
Conservative foreign-policy expert Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, is among those who perceives a definite link between Somali’s pirates and its violent Islamic extremists.
“Shariah-adherent Somali pirates are a threat to the world's shipping,” Gaffney tells Newsmax. “Their refugee counterparts being dumped into American communities are a threat to our country and its people. It adds insult to potentially enormous injury that, as the State Department has acknowledged, 80 percent of those refugees are here on the basis of fraudulent family-reunification grounds.”
Gaffney says the State Department “imports pirate/jihadist types into this country.”
One major concern: The pirates’ statements following the freeing of Phillips appeared to be couched in jihadist terms. They identified America as their “No. 1 enemy,” and one pirate leader told The Associated Press: “In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying.”...
There are three State Department programs that vet and process refugees for admittance:...
# The Priority Three (P-3) program awards refugee status specifically for the purpose of family reunification with other refugees already legally residing in the United States....
The P-3 program was suspended in October, after reports of fraud led the State Department and DHS to conduct DNA testing on 3,000 applicants. Those tests revealed that as many as 80 percent of the family-reunification claims were false and did not involve relatives....
Barnett tells Newsmax that the State Department is prepared to resume the troubled P-3 program in June. He also criticizes the P-1 program, due to U.N. refugee programs he describes as “one big long running fraud.” He adds: “The U.N. referral program itself has been subject to bribery and fraud.”
The State Department spokesman tells Newsmax it is unclear if the P-3 program will be reinstated by June, adding, “We do anticipate that the program will restart. A little later this year, we will have this program reinstated.”...
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Census GPS-Tagging Your Front Door
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Census GPS-tagging your home's front door
Coordinates being taken for every residence in nation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: May 05, 2009
8:32 pm Eastern
By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
According to an online Yahoo program, the Global Position System coordinates for the White House, probably one of the best-known publicly owned buildings in the world, are 38.898590 Latitude and -77.035971 Longitude. And since you know that, it's no big deal for the White House to know the coordinates for your front door, is it?
Some people think it is, and are upset over an army of some 140,000 workers hired in part with a $700 million taxpayer-funded contract to collect GPS readings for every front door in the nation.
The data collection, presented as preparation for the 2010 Census, is pinpointing with computer accuracy the locations and has raised considerable concern from privacy advocates who have questioned why the information is needed. The privacy advocates also are more than a little worried over what could be done with that information.
Enhancing the concerns is the Obama administration's recent decision to put White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in an oversight role over the census, which will be used to determine a reapportionment of congressional seats and could be used to solidify a single political party's control over the nation, its budget, military and future.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently told the Washington Post: "The census director reports to me, and, of course, I serve at the pleasure of the president." He added the White House told him "it has no interest in politicizing [the census]."
But at American Daily Review, blogger Douglas Gibbs had more than a few doubts.
"GPS coordinates of your front door will make it easier for the government to monitor you," he said. "The U.S. Census Bureau is simply an excuse – a harmless looking means of obtaining the front door coordinates. The creation of GPS coordinates for front doors has nothing to do with the census, in all honesty, no matter how much the United States government tries to convince you that it does."
He recalled wondering why, just weeks ago, the Obama administration announced its oversight of the census, "literally taking control of the census away from the Commerce Department."
He put that together with Obama's longtime push for national service.
"The Obamites, thirsty to serve their new messianic figure, have lost enough of their objectivity to be willingly recruited into such an insidious program like gaining these coordinates for the U.S. government. … I ask again, what would be the purpose of shooting the GPS coordinates of American doorways?" he wrote.
The answer he provided was alarming.
"Imagine, if you will, that there are a number of people in a neighborhood that could not find the addresses they are tasked with finding. They are not locals, maybe are unable to read a map, or perhaps do not have the time to pull out a map, and they need to find you with specific GPS coordinates. Their devices would lead them to your front door with these coordinates. Imagine a crisis is afoot, and martial law is put into place. U.S. troops need to round up particular folks," he wrote.
"Let's take this a step further. After all, with Barack Obama desiring to decrease the number of folks in the military, and with forces committed worldwide, we may not have sufficient military forces at home to deal with a rising national emergency. If the government decided to rely on foreign troops, perhaps United Nations personnel, most of which may not understand the street signs, much less know the lay of the land, they could use GPS devices to direct them to your front door," he wrote.
According to the Census Bureau's website, the GPS technology "allows us to reduce the amount of time spent by census workers in locating addresses. … Most importantly, by adding a GPS coordinate to each housing unit, the Census Bureau is able to ensure that residents are counted in the right location."
At Canada Free Press, commentator J.B. Williams said, "I can't resist the urge to question the authority and purpose behind such a BIG BROTHER initiative, when the official census itself is not due to be taken until 2010…
"No imagination is required to think up a whole laundry list of evil that could be done with a nationwide GPS grid of coordinate's markers painted on every private home across the country. But I was having trouble thinking up one good reason for it, even one legitimate use that would justify what must be a very expensive undertaking," he said.
"Why does the Obama administration need or want the latitude and longitude coordinates for every home in America? Why the rush to GPS paint every home in the next 90 days? Why must the marker be within 40 feet of every front door? For what possible purpose does the Fed need GPS coordinates for every home, and under what authority do they have the right? Census workers, whom I asked, had the same holy-crap look on their faces that I had by then," he wrote.
Then he cited the cooperative effort that the U.S. Census Bureau has reached with ACORN, the organization of community activists with which Obama worked.
"Obama's interest in an ACORN-controlled 2010 Census, for the purpose of redistricting to the advantage of Democrats before the 2010 mid-term elections, comes as NO shock from a regime known for their heavy handed Rules for Radicals political strategies. But what does this have to do with GPS marking every home in the country?" he questioned.
Ask those who have served military duty, he said. They are very familiar with the most common use of GPS target painting, and the rest might want to read books such as "The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare."
Online sources noted that Google Maps already probably has listed most homes in the nation.
"But the front door? Sounds like a jackboot convenience to me," said RightSoup.com.
Added Williams, "What I do know is this … Coincidences of this number and magnitude don't happen. … I also know that people had better start asking the right people the right questions and demanding answers fast. Begin with asking the mainstream press why there has been no public notification of the federal governments GPS marking your front door?"
A number of concerned citizens have contacted WND about the program, and repeatedly have cited warnings delivered by the GPS squad members that their failure to allow the readings would result in fines and possibly imprisonment under Title 13, which allows the census to be taken.
But repeatedly they've gotten no answers when asked what a GPS reading has to do with the number of people living at the home – which isn't supposed to be subject to questions until 2010 anyway.
One WND reader raised these questions to a local census office.
"What authority does the U.S. Census Bureau have for sending anyone to my front door in April of 2009 to mark it with GPS coordinates? This is unacceptable. The census is not due until 2010, and the usurpation of the census by the White House is unconstitutional. … This citizen will not answer census questions until the year they are due, and demands that my GPS coordinates be removed from all government records."
The census response?
"Address canvassing should conclude by mid-July. The operation will use new hand-held computers equipped with GPS to increase geographic accuracy. The ability to capture GPS coordinates for most of the nation's housing units will greatly reduce the number of geographic coding errors caused by using paper maps in previous counts. … During the address canvassing operation, census workers may ask to verify a housing structure's address and whether there are additional living quarters on the property. All census workers carry official government badges marked with just their name. You also may ask them for a picture ID from another source to confirm their identity. In addition, some census workers might carry a 'U. S. Census Workers' bag."
Another WND reader, from Washington state, reported he is having his attorney look into the legality of the GPS data collection and hopes to have enough support for a legal challenge.
The reader, whose name was withheld because of his concerns over repercussions, said a government home data collector ignored his no trespassing sign, and he was threatened by the collector for wanting to refuse to provide "census" information.
He said GPS mapping nowhere is authorized for census workers.
Census spokesman Stephen Buckner told WND the activity is, in fact, proper, and even necessary. There are homes being built and torn down constantly, and the census needs such information. Local building records and other government databases such as tax records would not suffice, he said.
"There are 140,000 workers walking every street of America," he told WND, in order to document 145 million addresses with GPS coordinates.
He assured WND that all such personal information is confidential, because employees of contractors doing the work are subject to a $250,000 fine or imprisonment for five years for revealing personal information. He also confirmed that the last case that was prosecuted under the law was nearly 50 years ago.
"We have to verify every single address," he said.
LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Census GPS-tagging your home's front door
Coordinates being taken for every residence in nation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: May 05, 2009
8:32 pm Eastern
By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
According to an online Yahoo program, the Global Position System coordinates for the White House, probably one of the best-known publicly owned buildings in the world, are 38.898590 Latitude and -77.035971 Longitude. And since you know that, it's no big deal for the White House to know the coordinates for your front door, is it?
Some people think it is, and are upset over an army of some 140,000 workers hired in part with a $700 million taxpayer-funded contract to collect GPS readings for every front door in the nation.
The data collection, presented as preparation for the 2010 Census, is pinpointing with computer accuracy the locations and has raised considerable concern from privacy advocates who have questioned why the information is needed. The privacy advocates also are more than a little worried over what could be done with that information.
Enhancing the concerns is the Obama administration's recent decision to put White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in an oversight role over the census, which will be used to determine a reapportionment of congressional seats and could be used to solidify a single political party's control over the nation, its budget, military and future.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently told the Washington Post: "The census director reports to me, and, of course, I serve at the pleasure of the president." He added the White House told him "it has no interest in politicizing [the census]."
But at American Daily Review, blogger Douglas Gibbs had more than a few doubts.
"GPS coordinates of your front door will make it easier for the government to monitor you," he said. "The U.S. Census Bureau is simply an excuse – a harmless looking means of obtaining the front door coordinates. The creation of GPS coordinates for front doors has nothing to do with the census, in all honesty, no matter how much the United States government tries to convince you that it does."
He recalled wondering why, just weeks ago, the Obama administration announced its oversight of the census, "literally taking control of the census away from the Commerce Department."
He put that together with Obama's longtime push for national service.
"The Obamites, thirsty to serve their new messianic figure, have lost enough of their objectivity to be willingly recruited into such an insidious program like gaining these coordinates for the U.S. government. … I ask again, what would be the purpose of shooting the GPS coordinates of American doorways?" he wrote.
The answer he provided was alarming.
"Imagine, if you will, that there are a number of people in a neighborhood that could not find the addresses they are tasked with finding. They are not locals, maybe are unable to read a map, or perhaps do not have the time to pull out a map, and they need to find you with specific GPS coordinates. Their devices would lead them to your front door with these coordinates. Imagine a crisis is afoot, and martial law is put into place. U.S. troops need to round up particular folks," he wrote.
"Let's take this a step further. After all, with Barack Obama desiring to decrease the number of folks in the military, and with forces committed worldwide, we may not have sufficient military forces at home to deal with a rising national emergency. If the government decided to rely on foreign troops, perhaps United Nations personnel, most of which may not understand the street signs, much less know the lay of the land, they could use GPS devices to direct them to your front door," he wrote.
According to the Census Bureau's website, the GPS technology "allows us to reduce the amount of time spent by census workers in locating addresses. … Most importantly, by adding a GPS coordinate to each housing unit, the Census Bureau is able to ensure that residents are counted in the right location."
At Canada Free Press, commentator J.B. Williams said, "I can't resist the urge to question the authority and purpose behind such a BIG BROTHER initiative, when the official census itself is not due to be taken until 2010…
"No imagination is required to think up a whole laundry list of evil that could be done with a nationwide GPS grid of coordinate's markers painted on every private home across the country. But I was having trouble thinking up one good reason for it, even one legitimate use that would justify what must be a very expensive undertaking," he said.
"Why does the Obama administration need or want the latitude and longitude coordinates for every home in America? Why the rush to GPS paint every home in the next 90 days? Why must the marker be within 40 feet of every front door? For what possible purpose does the Fed need GPS coordinates for every home, and under what authority do they have the right? Census workers, whom I asked, had the same holy-crap look on their faces that I had by then," he wrote.
Then he cited the cooperative effort that the U.S. Census Bureau has reached with ACORN, the organization of community activists with which Obama worked.
"Obama's interest in an ACORN-controlled 2010 Census, for the purpose of redistricting to the advantage of Democrats before the 2010 mid-term elections, comes as NO shock from a regime known for their heavy handed Rules for Radicals political strategies. But what does this have to do with GPS marking every home in the country?" he questioned.
Ask those who have served military duty, he said. They are very familiar with the most common use of GPS target painting, and the rest might want to read books such as "The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare."
Online sources noted that Google Maps already probably has listed most homes in the nation.
"But the front door? Sounds like a jackboot convenience to me," said RightSoup.com.
Added Williams, "What I do know is this … Coincidences of this number and magnitude don't happen. … I also know that people had better start asking the right people the right questions and demanding answers fast. Begin with asking the mainstream press why there has been no public notification of the federal governments GPS marking your front door?"
A number of concerned citizens have contacted WND about the program, and repeatedly have cited warnings delivered by the GPS squad members that their failure to allow the readings would result in fines and possibly imprisonment under Title 13, which allows the census to be taken.
But repeatedly they've gotten no answers when asked what a GPS reading has to do with the number of people living at the home – which isn't supposed to be subject to questions until 2010 anyway.
One WND reader raised these questions to a local census office.
"What authority does the U.S. Census Bureau have for sending anyone to my front door in April of 2009 to mark it with GPS coordinates? This is unacceptable. The census is not due until 2010, and the usurpation of the census by the White House is unconstitutional. … This citizen will not answer census questions until the year they are due, and demands that my GPS coordinates be removed from all government records."
The census response?
"Address canvassing should conclude by mid-July. The operation will use new hand-held computers equipped with GPS to increase geographic accuracy. The ability to capture GPS coordinates for most of the nation's housing units will greatly reduce the number of geographic coding errors caused by using paper maps in previous counts. … During the address canvassing operation, census workers may ask to verify a housing structure's address and whether there are additional living quarters on the property. All census workers carry official government badges marked with just their name. You also may ask them for a picture ID from another source to confirm their identity. In addition, some census workers might carry a 'U. S. Census Workers' bag."
Another WND reader, from Washington state, reported he is having his attorney look into the legality of the GPS data collection and hopes to have enough support for a legal challenge.
The reader, whose name was withheld because of his concerns over repercussions, said a government home data collector ignored his no trespassing sign, and he was threatened by the collector for wanting to refuse to provide "census" information.
He said GPS mapping nowhere is authorized for census workers.
Census spokesman Stephen Buckner told WND the activity is, in fact, proper, and even necessary. There are homes being built and torn down constantly, and the census needs such information. Local building records and other government databases such as tax records would not suffice, he said.
"There are 140,000 workers walking every street of America," he told WND, in order to document 145 million addresses with GPS coordinates.
He assured WND that all such personal information is confidential, because employees of contractors doing the work are subject to a $250,000 fine or imprisonment for five years for revealing personal information. He also confirmed that the last case that was prosecuted under the law was nearly 50 years ago.
"We have to verify every single address," he said.
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