Category: Religion

The Left Is Attacking Free Speech — and Helping ISIS Target Its Enemies

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Last week brought further attacks on free speech from the Left. Daily Beast reporter Taylor Lorenz doxxed the daughters of Pamela Geller. If you know Geller — and I’ve been her friend since 2007 — you know that it is a dishonest smear to call her “Muslim-hating.” She is a ferocious opponent of radical Islam, but she is also a defender of those innocent Muslims who are victims of radical Islam. This distinction doesn’t matter to leftist idiots like Taylor Lorenz, of course. Anyone who is identified as “right-wing” is considered fair game by the radical Left. Facts don’t matter, and neither does simple human decency:

The children of conservative commentator Pamela Geller have been harassed and their social media talk show has been canceled after the Daily Beast revealed Geller was their mother.
In her article titled, “The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller,” the Daily Beast’s Taylor Lorenz doxed the women as Pamela Geller’s daughters. They had not disclosed the family link, perhaps due to the recurring death threats from Muslim extremists that Geller receives.
Following the release of Lorenz’s article, which was heavily criticized on social media, Geller’s four children immediately began to receive harassment and violent messages.
Comments included: “Racist piece of shit!,” “Fuck you, racist,” “Racist bitch,” and “Swine,” the majority of which was sent to Geller’s most famous daughter, Claudia, who runs the popular Instagram account “girlwithnojob” which has 2.8 million followers.

Think about this for a minute: Claudia Oshry spent years building a massive online audience with a non-political message, entirely separate from and unrelated to her mother’s popular conservative blog. Yet the tie of kinship was used as an excuse to attack Claudia and her siblings, because of their mother’s alleged “Islamophobia.” My own children, incidentally, have at times been harassed by my various left-wing enemies. My general attitude toward evil trolls is “never let them see you sweat” — these monsters take sadistic pleasure in thinking they’ve inflicted suffering on their targets — but a few years ago, the FBI arrested one of my harassers who was sent to federal prison as a result.

Pamela Geller’s enemies are even more vicious:

A Massachusetts man was convicted [in October 2017] of plotting to behead conservative blogger Pamela Geller and kill other Americans on behalf of the Islamic State group.
Jurors found David Wright guilty of all charges, including conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries. . . .
Prosecutors said Wright, his uncle and a third man conspired to kill Geller because they were upset she organized Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas in 2015. During the contest, two other men opened fire outside and wounded a security guard before they were killed in a shootout with law enforcement assigned to guard the event.
Wright’s uncle, Ussamah Rahim, told Wright on a recorded phone call later that month that he couldn’t wait to attack Geller and decided instead to go after “those boys in blue,” referring to police. Wright told his uncle that was “beautiful” and encouraged him to delete all the data from his computer before carrying out his attack.
Hours later, Rahim was shot and killed by authorities after he lunged at them with a knife when they approached him in Boston. The attack on Geller, who has spearheaded scores of events across the nation to decry Islamic extremism, was never carried out.

If you know that ISIS wants Geller dead, is it so difficult to understand why Geller’s daughters deserve to have their privacy respected? The only purpose served by Taylor Lorenz’s disgusting “journalism” was harassment — to punish and attempt to silence Geller by attacking her daughters. Caroline Glick explains this succinctly:

The mainstream media are either stupid or evil — or both.
That is the only reasonable conclusion you can reach from the Daily Beast’s article [Feb. 28] that exposed the identities of Pamela Geller’s four daughters and the subsequent decision of major and minor newspapers and magazines throughout the Western world to re-run the story. . . .
It is possible that the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Cosmopolitan magazine, and all the rest have no idea that there is a direct link between the fatwa — or Islamic ruling — published by the Islamic State on May 5, 2015 calling for Geller to be “slaughtered,” and ISIS’s attempt the next month to behead her. . . .
For more than a decade, the media and leftist shock troops, operating in lock step with Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have tried to destroy Geller. . . .

You should read the whole thing, which recounts the history of the media’s complicity in the whitewashing of radical Islam. It is astonishing that Geller — a Jew targeted for death by an Islamic fatwa! — is being smeared as a proponent of “hate” by liberal journalists.

What bothers me about incidents like this is how liberals, because of their mindless loyalty to the Democrat Party, are willing to attack anyone who disrupts the propaganda narrative dictated by the Democrats’ narrow partisan interests. There was a time — and I’m old enough to remember it — when Democrats defended Israel against her enemies, but that has changed in the past 30 years. Democrats have increasingly pandered to constituencies (including our decadent academic elite) who are perversely sympathetic to the radical Muslims who are determine to see Israel wiped off the map. Liberals have turned against Israel because, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Republicans were identified as pro-Israel “neocons” and therefore anti-Muslim. Because the Bush administration was seen as the enemy of Muslims (despite the idiotic “religion of peace” rhetoric of some Republicans), Democrats apparently decided they must be pro-Islam, and began smearing the GOP as “Islamophobic.” This kind of simple-minded partisanship is the only possible explanation for such useful idiots as Taylor Lorenz.

 

Well, I am not always a Neutral Objective Journalist, because I have personal principles that sometimes obligate me to choose sides. One of these is Genesis 12:3 — an eternal promise of the eternal God, which no Christian should take lightly. More than once in my career, I’ve watched helplessly as right-wing acquaintances have let themselves be pulled into the gravitational orbit of anti-Semitism, which predictably resulted in their destruction. Even while I am willing to stipulate that so-called “neocons” have been responsible for foolish policies (e.g., the invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia, which almost every intelligent conservative now recognizes as a strategic blunder), it is a grievous error to blame such blunders on a “Zionist” conspiracy. However, just as some simple-minded liberals like Taylor Lorenz let themselves be fooled into attacking Pamela Geller as an “Islamophobe,” so also have some people on the Right gone drifting off into toxic Jew-hatred.

Cui bono? Who benefits if the Right allies itself with anti-Semitism, even if what is offered as “evidence” of such an alliance is a thin tissue of guilt-by-association smears fabricated by the Left? The direct beneficiary of this should be obvious — the Democrat Party. Meanwhile, however, we find that conservative Jews like Pamela Geller are libeled as “Islamophobes” by the same dishonest liberal media which would otherwise have us believe that all Republicans are Jew-haters!

No one should be deceived by the Left’s propaganda. Any conservative who is hesitant to defend Pamela Geller (they think she is “extremist” or whatever) is a fool. The reason Geller is under attack is because she is effective and influential, especially in exposing the Left’s sordid de facto alliance with radical Islam. Geller is a ferocious fighter, and we cannot afford to lose her. If we let the Left silence our most powerful voices, what shall become of the rest of us? Who will defend our right to free speech?

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

 

‘Europe’s Last Hope’

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The trumpet sounds in Hungary:

Hungary’s prime minister says that “Christianity is Europe’s last hope” and that politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris favoring migration have “opened the way to the decline of Christian culture and the advance of Islam.”
Viktor Orban said Sunday during his 20th annual state of the nation speech that his government will oppose efforts by the United Nations or the European Union to make migration acceptable to the world.
He conjured the image of a Western Europe overtaken by Muslims, saying that “born Germans are being forced back from most large German cities, as migrants always occupy big cities first.”
Orban claimed that Islam would soon “knock on Central Europe’s door” from the west as well as the south.

UPDATE: Turns out this was a timely warning:

ISIS has claimed responsibility for a gun rampage at an Orthodox church in Russia that left five women dead.
Khalil Khalilov screamed ‘Allahu akbar’ as he opened fire with a hunting rifle before he was shot dead by police in Kizlyar, a town in the mainly Muslim region of Dagestan.
Chilling footage shows the bearded 22-year-old attacker walking to the church on Sunday and a terrified woman fleeing the scene.
ISIS claimed one of its ‘soldiers of Islam’, who they referred to as Khalil Daghestan, carried out the attack using his gun to ‘kill five of them and wound four others’.

People need to wake up to this threat, and start praying.

 

‘A Reprobate Mind’

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Emperor Nero (left); Aziz Ansari (right).

The Greek word adokimon can be translated as “depraved,” “unacceptable” or “foolish.” It is used exactly once in New Testament, in the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the King James Version translates it as “reprobate”:

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient . . .”

In other words, those who reject God thereby bring upon themselves a curse of mental depravity which causes them to behave in ways harmful to themselves and others. The King James wording “things which are not convenient” is a translation of a Greek phrase that includes the word kathikonta. This word mean “duties,” and is significant in the Stoic tradition of philosophy:

From this view, man should live in accordance with one’s nature. Kathikonta are the appropriate or fitting actions and duties of our lives, in accordance with our nature, such as being kind to one’s parents, etc. When appropriate action is combined with genuine virtue and logic, such actions are viewed as perfect actions . . . the action of a wise man.

Paul’s use of kathikonta in his letter to the Romans suggests not only his own familiarity with Hellenistic philosophy, but also shows how he appealed to the sensibility of his readership, by employing terms they would understand. Thus, he told the Romans, those who reject God are cursed with a “reprobate” (adokimon) mind, and behave in “inconvenient” ways, i.e., contrary to moral duties (kathikonta).

Who was the Apostle describing here? Paul was not only a missionary evangelist and teacher, but also a prophet, and students of Roman history may find in this famous passage of his letter to the Romans a remarkably accurate description of the Emperor Nero. At the time Paul wrote this letter in about 55 A.D., he was in the Greek city of Corinth and had never been to Rome, so it would have been impossible for him to know anything about the character of Nero, who had become emperor a year earlier, at age 16. Yet when Paul writes of people so wicked that “God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts” (Romans 1:24) and “God gave them up unto vile affections” (Romans 1:26), this is a near-perfect description of the immoral decadence of Nero’s reign. This famous passage of the Bible came to mind when I was pondering a more recent example of immoral decadence:

“I hate men. . . . He wanted sex.”
Those two brief sentences were texted by a 22-year-old girl during an Uber ride home from a date with 34-year-old TV star Aziz Ansari. Her account of their September 2017 date as “the worst night of my life” went viral last week, generating an enormous amount of commentary. Using the pseudonym “Grace,” she told her story to a website, Babe.net (motto: “for girls who don’t give a f–k”) where it was presented as part of the #MeToo feminist narrative about sexual assault and “rape culture.” Immediately, Grace’s story came under fire because her own behavior was so irresponsible. . . .
The breathless “worst night of my life” emotionalism of the story obscures the objective reality, which is that Ansari’s behavior, while crude and selfish, was neither violent nor criminal. He never forced her to do anything, and the real question is, what did Grace expect when she went to back to his apartment? It is clear from her story that Ansari presumed she wanted to have sex with him, but just as clear that she was offended by his presumption. . . .

Please read the whole thing. It’s more than 4,000 words long, and I spent an entire day writing it, so if you find it in any way useful or entertaining, I hope you’ll throw a few bucks in the tip jar.



 

A Jihad in Minnesota

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Tnuza Jamal Hassan is charged with first-degree arson.

An Islamic terrorist has attacked a university in St. Paul:

A former St. Catherine University student charged with setting fires on the college’s St. Paul campus told police she did it because she’d “been reading about the U.S. military destroying schools in Iraq or Afghanistan and she felt that she should do exactly the same thing,” according to a criminal complaint filed Friday.
“You guys are lucky that l don’t know how to build a bomb because l would have done that,” Tnuza Jamal Hassan, 19, of Minneapolis allegedly told investigators after being arrested Wednesday afternoon in a campus dorm lounge.
Hassan was charged in Ramsey County District Court with a single count of first-degree arson. No injuries or major damage were reported in the fires, all of which occurred in the middle of the day Wednesday.
Ramsey County prosecutor Margaret Galvin said in court Friday that Hassan had “substantial ties” to the local community and added that authorities were investigating whether she had any international ties as well.
A spokesman for the FBI’s Minneapolis office said he could not comment on whether federal authorities also were investigating the incident. A call to the United States District Attorney’s Minnesota Office to inquire about whether Hassan might face federal charges was not returned. . . .
Hassan, appearing in court in a black and white hijab, gave only brief, one-word answers to questions from the judge.
According to the complaint, she told investigators she set six fires on the private Catholic university’s campus, though university and fire officials said there were eight.
The most serious fire started in Saint Mary Hall, a residential dormitory that also houses a day care. Police said there were 33 children and eight adults in the building when a chair was set ablaze — triggering the building’s sprinkler system, which prevented it from spreading. . . .
Hassan told investigators she was a student at St. Catherine but dropped out last fall because she and her family were planning a vacation to Ethiopia.
She told them, according to the complaint, that “her fire-starting was not as successful as she had wanted,” and “she wanted the school to burn to the ground and that her intent was to hurt people.
“Hassan said this was the same thing that happened in ‘Muslim land’ and nobody cares if they get hurt, so why not do this?” the complaint added.
Hassan told investigators she wrote a letter to her roommates about “bringing back the Caliphate,” an Islamic state. The letter scared Hassan’s roommates, who turned it over to campus security, the complaint stated.

This is radical Islamic terrorism. We ought to ask why St. Catherine University, an allegedly Catholic school, has failed at its institutional mission. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch asks other questions:

Where did Tnuza Hassan learn Islam? Where does she attend mosque? What does that mosque teach about violence against unbelievers? Is that mosque being investigated? Why not? Is it being assumed that Tnuza J. Hassan was “radicalized on the Internet”? If so, why was the supposedly twisted, hijacked, violent version of Islam she supposedly learned on the Internet so easily able to overcome the supposedly peaceful, benign, tolerant version that everyone assumes that she learned at home and at her local mosque?

(Via Memeorandum, with more at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Powerline and Gateway Pundit.)



 

Of Course: Islamic Terrorist’s Wife Knew About His Orlando Massacre Plans

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Noor Salman (left) and her terrorist husband Omar Mateen (right).

This isn’t actually news — the blogger True Pundit broke the story in 2016 — but the detailed confirmation is nevertheless welcome:

The wife of Omar Mateen, who committed a massacre in the Pulse nightclub in 2016, reportedly told the FBI that she knew about his plot beforehand — and did nothing to stop it.
Noor Salman — whose husband gunned down 49 people in the club — told investigators that she “knew that her husband was going to attack the Pulse nightclub” when he left the house on the night of June 11 [2016], according to documents obtained by USA Today.
“My fears had come true and he did what he said he was going to do,” Salman said, according to the newspaper. “I was in denial and I could not believe that the father of my child was going to hurt other people.”
The wife also said she was warned repeatedly about the specific location and timing of the attack.
“How upset are people going to be when it gets attacked?” Mateen asked his wife at one point while they were driving by the club, according to her statement.
Salman also witnessed her husband browsing the Pulse website and declaring “this is my target.”
On the night before one of the most devastating mass shootings in US history, Salman said her husband loaded up on firearms and ammunition.
“This was the time that he was going to do something bad,” she said.
Before leaving the house Mateen told his wife, “This is the one day.”
Mateen opened fire at around 2 a.m. on June 12 in the Orlando night spot, killing 48 and wounding 58 others.

Mateen was inspired by ISIS. The Orlando Massacre was an act of Islamic terrorism. Omar Mateen — the child of Afghan immigrants — hated Americans and wanted to kill them all, and his wife — the child of Palestinian immigrants — did nothing to hinder his terrorist plot. Gosh, I wonder what possible policy changes we could make that might help prevent future terrorist attacks by Muslims who want to kill us all?



 

 

New Study: Middle Easterners 34 Times More Likely to Fake Hate Incidents

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HATE HOAXERS: (left to right) Darren Beach, Aisha Ismail, Cainin Milton.

Most fake “hate crimes” are committed by members of the group targeted by such hoaxes, according to a new study. The most likely perpetrators are black or of Middle Eastern ancestry, an analysis of more than 100 such incidents from July 2015 to December 2017 found that “by far the largest number (44) fabricated acts of bias against blacks”:

The next most common “victim” categories of fake bias crimes were Middle Easterners/Muslims (17), non-whites in general (13), and LGBT people (10). Sixty-four percent of the hoaxers are male.
In the FBI’s latest hate crimes report, blacks are overrepresented as offenders. They account for 26.1 percent of those cases in which the race of the perpetrator was known, meaning that they were 2.4 times more likely than non-blacks to commit hate crimes. . . .
In the case of hate-crime hoaxes, black overrepresentation is much greater. . . . [O]ver the last two-and­-a-half years, on a per capita basis, blacks were 13.3 times more likely than whites to commit hate-crime hoaxes, and Middle Easterners were 34.7 times more likely.
For the most part, it is correct to assume that bias-crime hoaxes are committed by a member of the group that was falsely targeted: gays commit anti-gay hate hoaxes, and blacks commit anti-black hate hoaxes.
Of cases with whites perpetrators, only 3 of the 18 committed hoaxes in which whites, as a race, were the targets of fake hate; the rest meant to draw sympathy to LGBT people, other non-white groups, or women. A few “progressives,” for example, have drawn swastikas or written racial slurs in the hope of evoking sympathy for non-whites or to justify increased anti-racist activity.

The study from American Renaissance was accompanied by an online database spreadsheet, as well as detailed case-by-case reports, including:

  • Darren William Beach Jr., a 26-year-old gay man who was charged with setting fire to a community center for LGBT youth after he became too old to participate in the program when he turned 25.
  • Aisha Ismail, a 22-year-old Muslim woman who was arrested and charged with starting a fire at the Islamic Center of Des Moines, Iowa.
  • Cainin Hakeem Milton, a 19-year-old black man who was arrested and charged for a spree of anti-black graffiti in South Carolina.

American Renaissance (AR) is a publication founded by Jared Taylor, author of the 1992 book Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. AR has been listed as a “hate group” by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

 

God and Man in the Information Age

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“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”
— Daniel 12:4 (KJV)

One of the basic proofs of the Bible’s truth is the accuracy of prophecy. As every Christian knows, Jesus was the Messiah foretold by Old Testament prophecy, His atoning sacrifice prefigured in the story of Genesis 22, where God requires Abraham to prove his obedience by the sacrifice of Isaac, only to spare the boy at the last minute. The ultimate significance of this was understood by Jesus, of course, in a way that the scribes and Pharisees did not. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, he came to fulfill the law of the Old Testament, not to destroy it (Matthew 5:17) and by delivering Him up to be crucified by the Roman authorities, the Jewish leaders unwittingly brought about that fulfillment.

Before His death, Jesus prophetically foretold the coming destruction of Herod’s Temple at Jerusalem, which was fulfilled in 70 A.D. His disciples responded to this prophecy by asking Him about the future. Jesus then warned them not to be deceived by false prophets and referring to the Second Coming said, “of that day and hour knoweth no man.”

Not even Jesus could predict to His disciples when the final Judgment Day would come, because this was known by “my Father only” (Matthew 24:36), yet speculation has flourished. Many have offered their own interpretations of the Apostle John’s Book of Revelation, which baffles every attempt to translate its mysterious symbolism into definite meaning. Especially since the the 1960s, various doomsday prophets (including dangerous cult leaders like Charles Manson and David Koresh) have claimed to possess the secret meaning of Revelation.

Continue reading God and Man in the Information Age →

NYC Terrorist Got ‘Diversity’ Visa in Program That Democrats Still Support

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How does an Islamic terrorist get to New York City?

29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the immigrant from Uzbekistan who murdered at least eight people in Manhattan on Tuesday, arrived in the United States seven years ago under what is called the Diversity Visa Program, a program that President Trump and the GOP have been trying to eliminate.

More details on the Halloween truck jihadi:

The man who allegedly ran down cyclists and pedestrians along 17 Manhattan blocks pledged his allegiance to ISIS before his attack, it has emerged.
Police sources say Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, 29, entered a bicycle path at Houston Street at 3.05pm and drove downtown, knocking down victims before smashing into a school bus at Chambers Street, exiting and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’.
He then waved a paintball gun in one hand and a pellet gun in the other, and was shot in the abdomen by a police officer. He has now come out of surgery and police are waiting for him to wake up before they question him.
Images of ISIS flags were found in his truck, as well as a handwritten note pledging his allegiance to the terrorist group.
An official said that the note read in part ‘ISIS lives forever,’ according to NBC Philadelphia.
CNN said it was one note, written in English, found inside the car. But the New York Times reports that it was multiple notes, written in Arabic, found outside the car.
As the horrific toll — currently at eight dead and at least 15 injured, including one child in critical condition — climbed up, details began to emerge about Saipov’s life.
He was an Uzbekistan native who had lived in the US for seven years and ran two trucking companies located in Ohio, sources claim.
The ride-hailing company Uber said Saipov passed its background check and drove for the service for six months, making more than 1,400 trips.
Documents reveal how he got married on April 12, 2013 to Nozima Odilova, who was 19 at the time. Both list Tashkent, Uzbekistan, as their hometown.

President Trump blamed Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for the diversity visa program, which Ed Morrissey at Hot Air explains is inaccurate, but the Washington Post says it’s not entirely inaccurate:

The diversity visa program has been around for more than 20 years, offering a limited number of visas to people from parts of the world that have relatively few immigrants in the United States.
Schumer did play a key role in drawing up the program in 1990. His proposals eventually became part of a broader immigration package that was passed by Congress in a bipartisan vote and signed into law by a Republican president, George H.W Bush.

The blame-game about who did what on a bill passed in 1990 is irrelevant to what we need to do in 2017 — end this program, period.