Category: Religion

TERROR IN TEXAS: Garland Gunman Elton Simpson Was Muslim Convert

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Sunday night’s terrorist attack on the American Freedom Defensive Initiative “Draw Mohammed” event in Texas was apparently committed by an Arizona man who converted to Islam:

The father of one of the suspected gunman in the Garland, Texas shooting told ABC News today that his son “made a bad choice.”
“We are Americans and we believe in America,” Dunston Simpson said. “What my son did reflects very badly on my family.”
Simpson’s son, Elton, was identified earlier today to ABC News by a senior FBI official as one of the suspects in Sunday’s failed attack on a Texas community center that was hosting an event displaying cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Elton Simpson and another man were killed by a police officer after they opened fire on the officer and a security guard, local police said.
Today FBI agents and a bomb squad were at Simpson’s home in an apartment complex in north Phoenix conducting searches of the apartment. Officials believe Simpson is the person who sent out several Twitter messages prior to the attack on Sunday, in the last one using the hashtag #TexasAttack about half an hour before the shooting. Prior to that, the Twitter account holder had published messages sympathetic to Islamic terror groups such as ISIS.

Kristinn Taylor at Gateway Pundit has an excellent roundup, including this report from the Los Angeles Times:

Two social media accounts tweeted messages about the attack apparently before it happened.
A Twitter account titled “Shariah is Light” — bearing the image of extremist Islamic propagandist Anwar Awlaki, who was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen in 2011 — posted an allusion to the attack just minutes before it happened.
Before the shooting, the “Shariah is Light” account also tweeted a command to follow another account, titled “AbuHussainAlBritani,” which also tweeted before and after the attack. . . .
“The knives have been sharpened, soon we will come to your streets with death and slaughter!” tweeted the “AbuHussainAlBritani” account before the attack.
After the attack, the “AbuHussainAlBritani” account began tweeting praise of the Texas shooting, and linked the attack to the militant group Islamic State.
“Allahu Akbar!!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire at the … art exhibition in texas!” the account tweeted. “Kill Those That Insult The Prophet.”
“They Thought They Was Safe In Texas From The Soldiers of The Islamic State,” the account tweeted.
The accounts have since been suspended.

The second shooter has just been identified:

Law enforcement officials said Monday afternoon that the second shooter in the Texas attack was Nadir Soofi, 34, Simpson’s roommate.
FBI agents searched a Phoenix apartment Monday as part of the investigation into the shooting, which occurred Sunday evening in Garland, a city near Dallas.
The FBI had begun monitoring Simpson again recently. Authorities said Monday that they were still working to determine details about the two men and who may have instigated the plan. The FBI does not believe the shooting was directed by an international terrorist group, but is still investigating.

UPDATE: Today I’ve had my office TV on CNN all day and it was insulting to watch the network go out of its way to depict Pamela Geller as an irresponsible hatemonger. They had on two different guests (Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich) from the SPLC, as well as a professor who has written a book about “Islamophobia.” Noah Rothman at Hot Air discusses the liberal media’s smears against Geller and observes:

This isn’t the first time an organization listed as a “hate group” by the SPLC was attacked by gun-wielding maniacs, but you don’t see many media outlets looking into the climate of murderous violence inspired by this liberal advocacy group.

The SPLC is a dangerous totalitarian propaganda outfit.

UPDATE II: More information about Nadir Soofi:

According to his Facebook page, Soofi spent a considerable amount of time with his little brother. He’s a graduate of the University of Utah and the International School of Islamabad in Pakistan. His page also shows multiple posts featuring Palestinian and anti-police propaganda. Frequently, he posts the phrase “Eid Mubarak” meaning celebration to the blessed. Soofi was the owner of Effinity Solutions, a carpet cleaning business in Phoenix. In July 2013, he called himself a “newbie to the carpet cleaning industry.”

Just another law-abiding adherent of the Religion of Peace.





 

TERROR IN TEXAS: Gunmen Attack @PamelaGeller Event in Garland UPDATED: ISIS Takes Credit? ‘May Allah Accept Us as Mujahideen’

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Two gunmen opened fire at a “Draw Mohammed” art context in Texas, and the story is now being updated continually. Pamela Geller remains as courageously outspoken as ever:

This is a war. This is war on free speech. What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?
Two men with rifles and backpacks attacked police outside our event. A cop was shot; his injuries are not life-threatening, thank Gd. Please keep him in your prayers.
The bomb squad has been called to the event site to investigate a backpack left at the event site.
The war is here.

UPDATE: Brandon Darby reports at Breitbart.com:

GARLAND, Texas — Shots rang out this evening at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas during the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest. A law enforcement officer was shot and both suspects have been killed. Officers on the scene said that it is possible that explosives are in the area.
Attendees were immediately forced into lockdown by police, including three Breitbart News reporters. Sources say event organizer Pamela Geller and keynote speaker Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, are safe. Breitbart Texas was conducting a live video interview with Geller at the moment of the attack.

UPDATE II: This is shocking news:

Just before the time of the attacks, at 7:35 EST, well before news agencies had reported the attacks, an Islamic twitter account reported that an attack was about to take place.

UPDATE III: Headline at the Dallas Morning News:

Gunmen open fire outside ‘Muhammad Art
Exhibit’ at Garland ISD facility, police say

Headline at WFAA-TV:

Two shot near Garland events center

Via Memeorandum with more blog commentary from Moe Lane, Jawa Report, The Gateway Pundit and Scared Monkeys.

UPDATE IV: Headline at American Power:

Two Suspects Open Fire, Shot Dead at AFDI
‘Draw Muhammad’ Event in Garland, Texas

 

Teaching Literary Feminism

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“Why invite the potential headaches of teaching a lesbian graphic novel in a religious institution?” asks Professor Scott A. Dimowitz in an essay published in an academic anthology this month. “In the course of several iterations of a class on Literary Feminism that I teach at Regis University, a Jesuit school in Denver, Colorado, I have used Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and selections from her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For to explain postmodern life narratives that incorporate nontraditional matter and a nodding acquaintance with Roman Catholic Church doctrine.”

Perhaps the disclosure of Professor Dimowitz’s curriculum is shocking to some alumni of Regis University and to Catholics who don’t realize how “postmodern life narratives,” including feminist gender theory, now pervade academia. As I previously explained (“Introduction to Feminist Theory”), “there are very good reasons why the proceedings in Women’s Studies courses are generally not discussed outside the classroom.” If parents and alumni were aware of what was being taught in these programs, and if voters understood how taxpayer subsidies to higher education are helping fund such ideological indoctrination on campus, we might expect a political firestorm to erupt. One can easily imagine a congressional committee hearing on what Professor Glenn Reynolds has called The Higher Education Bubble, where the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” aspect of this nonsense could be exposed to public scrutiny.

There are now Women’s Studies programs at some 700 U.S. colleges and universities, enrolling more than 90,000 students annually, and these programs are the intellectual command centers of the Feminist-Industrial Complex. Many thousands of professors are employed to teach courses in this interdisciplinary field. Carmen Rios, the self-described “raging lesbian feminist” who is Communications Coordinator at the Feminist Majority Foundation, has explained:

Is it Gender Studies? Women’s Studies? Women’s And Gender Studies? Sexuality Studies? Gender and Sexuality Studies? LGBT Studies? Queer Studies? Feminist Studies? . . . Women’s Studies remains an interdisciplinary field, making its name all the more difficult to decide on. Is it Women’s History and Theory, or is the program really Lesbo Recruitment 101?

She said that, not me. Regis University describes its program:

Women’s and Gender Studies examines the intersections of gender, race, and class, and also considers how gender roles are constructed in different global cultures and historical periods. Women have made important contributions in traditionally defined “male pursuits” (politics, science, art, etc.) Although traditionally understudied, women’s experiences and participation have led to the reexamination of long-held interpretations and conventional wisdoms in a wide variety of academic fields. Uniting all women and gender studies inquiries is the effort to understand and explain inequality between men and women, and to envision the possibility of new social practices that could bring about greater equality, mutual understanding, and human flourishing.

And also, lesbian comic books. Professor Dimowitz explains that he teaches Bechdel’s cartoons because this helps “defamiliarize traditional linguistic life narratives and form a uniquely productive site of tension and destabilization of students’ assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the very nature of what constitutes aesthetic merit, which few of the other traditional texts were able to achieve to the same extent.”

Exactly how does all this relate to the aims of a Catholic university? Professor Dimowitz is eager to explain:

To be clear about my own position . . . I was raised in a particularly strict form of Pennsylvanian, Croatian-immigrant Roman Catholicisim. . . . Years later I find myself teaching Catholic students, although Regis is a Jesuit university and Jesuits have always been more of a distinctly unconventional form of Catholicism. . . . As a specialist in postmodern literature and gender studies, I have an investment in engaging students in open discussions about representations of gender and sexuality in contemporary literature and culture.

Hmmm. So now the professor talks about his Literary Feminism class:

The course is offered as part of Regis University’s Integrative Core Curriculum, which was established in 2009, seeking to integrate juniors’ and seniors’ understanding of four key areas: (1) Diversity and Cultural Tradition, (2) Global Environmental Awareness, (3) Justice and the Common Good, and (4) The Search for Meaning. As a Diversity and Cultural Tradition course, Literary Feminism has two pragmatic goals, among others: (1) to introduce students to the idea of gender as a performative act, and (2) to understand the complexities and varieties of human sexual expression and representation. These goals reflect an overall tolerant approach to the study of gender and sexuality. . . .

So here we find the postmodern “idea of gender as a performative act,” i.e., the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix. One wonders what would be the reaction to Professor Dimowitz’s recitation of all this academic jargon, if you could present it to the devout priests who established this university, originally called Sacred Heart College, in the 19th century? One wonders, indeed, what the Pope must think of this, considering how he has twice in recent months condemned gender theory. In an interview with Italian journalists Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi, Pope Francis compared gender theory to the doctrines of the Hitler Youth and, on April 15, Pope Francis described “so-called gender theory” as “an expression of frustration and resignation that aims to erase sexual differentiation because it no longer knows how to come to terms with it.” Anyone who expects Catholic institutions of higher education to heed the Pope and fight against the nihilistic doctrine of gender theory, however, will be disappointed to discover what Professor Dimowitz is teaching at Regis University:

This graphic nature of the form is clear throughout Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a darkly humorous coming-of-age memoir of Bechdel’s childhood growing up in a funeral home run by her father, a closeted homsexual who was also a high school English teacher with a penchant for seducing some of his male students.

(Feminist Literature is so wholesome and inspiring!)

The book cycles its meditations around the event of Bechdel’s father’s death, which she believes may have been a suicide. Juxtaposing her own coming out story as a lesbian against her father’s inability to lead an authentic existence. Bechdel in Fun Home metanarratively meditates on the nature of life writing. . . . The book is frank about sexuality and blunt about her father’s statutory rapes of high school boys, and the text even includes several panels in which Bechdel recreated imagined scenes of seduction of these students. Bechdel struggles to understand her ambivalent responses to her father’s death while trying to unify a life narrative out of the fractured collage of documents and memories.

Again: Why is this being taught in a Catholic university? Do the parents who are paying $33,060 a year to send their children to Regis University have any clue what is being taught there? Does anyone even care? Professor Dimowitz says 70 percent of freshmen at Regis “self-identify as Roman Catholic.” However:

Many incoming students . . . have a rather cavalier attitude toward Church orthodoxy, which is part of an overall movement in contemporary attitudes. In America, especially, belief in strict Vatican law is clearly trending away from dogma. . . . According to a 2011 Pew survey of Americans, clear majorities “across most demographic groups say homosexuality should be accepted by society” and not discouraged or ignored (which are the two other categories). Interestingly, Catholics, in general, favor acceptance at 64 percent, which compares positively to the overall population’s acceptance, which is only 58 percent.

Here it should be pointed out that the choices Pew offered — whether homosexuality should be “accepted,” “ignored” or “discouraged” — omit other alternatives, particularly “tolerated,” i.e., an attitude somewhere in the range of “live and let live” or ‘who the hell cares?” This kind of toleration of homosexuality has in fact been widespread in America for decades, even while gay activists have hyped up claims that America is gripped by “homophobia.” So, sure, given the three choices the Pew poll offered, most people would say “accepted,” particular because they know that’s the answer they’re supposed to choose. We return to Professor Dimowitz’s discussion:

This general trending toward acceptance [of homosexuality], especially among millennials, opens up a fertile space for dialogue with students of a traditional college age.

(Professor Dimowitz gets paid to have a “dialogue” about gayness with college kids, and he seems quite eager to do so.)

When asked in a survey, “How did you feel about our openly discussing homosexuality in a Catholic school?” the Regis students were overwhelmingly positive. . . . Of course, part of this positivity is perhaps a function of Regis University’s generally progressive Jesuit orientation, and the question might receive a different response from a far more conservative school.

The bottom line, then, is that Professor Dimowitz and the administration at Regis University are comfortable with the idea that moral issues should be determine by (a) public opinion polls, or (b) “progressive Jesuit orientation,” and certainly not by (c) that old-fashioned “Thou shalt not” stuff in the Bible. Any institutional resistance we might have expected Catholic educators to make against society’s drift toward nihilism has been swept away. A progressive devotion to radical egalitarianism (the heretical “liberation theology” that embraced Marxist revolutionary movements in Latin America during the 1980s) steadily replaces devotion to God at institutions like Regis University.

Being “conformed to this world,” they teach “doctrines of devils.”

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

Nobody believes in that kind of stuff anymore, I guess.





 

What’s Causing the ‘Acid Jihad’?

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Headline via @GatewayPundit:

Rejected Lover Hurls Acid
in Face of Former Model

If you want to know what this does to a woman’s face, Pamela Geller has photos of “acid jihad” victims who include Shameem Akhter, 18, Najaf Sultana, 16, Munira Asef, 23, Memuna Khan, 21, Zainab Bibi, 17, and Naila Farhat, 19, all of them from Pakistan. Gosh, why would this particularly sadistic crime, which is typically committed in revenge for spurning a man’s romantic interest, be so commonplace in Pakistan?

That some men react violently to rejection is an unfortunate fact of life. Heartbreak can turn to rage, and some guys just don’t know how to take “no” for an answer. We know this. Irrational violence happens, but what if conditions in a community are such that it becomes more difficult for young men to find wives? What if there is an actual shortage of women, so that the guy whose girlfriend breaks up with him has very dim prospects of finding another girlfriend . . . ever?

What is the effect of polygamy in Muslim cultures? Where men may legally have multiple wives, and where polygamy is socially accepted, this inevitably produces (a) a shortage of women available for marriage, and (b) a surplus of young unmarried men. And then there is sex-selective abortion in societies where there is a strong preference for sons:

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. . . . [W]e’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery.

So said Mark Steyn in his book America Alone, a problem confirmed by recent developments:

Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. “The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying,” says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. “At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing,” says Hvistendahl.

If you think Troy University students on Spring Break are dangerous, what do you expect when there are millions — I repeat, millions — of young Chinese, Indian and Pakistani men who have no prospect of love, sex or marriage in their own countries? Remember, at least one expert has said that ISIS is able to recruit young Muslims who are lured into jihad by fantasies of capturing girls and women as sex slaves.

Oh, look: ISIS is attacking Ramadi.

Nothing to worry about for you, Middle-Class American. Not yet. But think of 2025, 2035, 2045 . . .

 

News Flash: Liberals Hate Christianity

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“And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
— I Corinthians 2:1-2 (KJV)

Jesse Lee Peterson’s WorldNetDaily column:

LGBT groups have been effective in linking their immoral cause to the noble civil rights movement. In reality, gays never wanted equality. They wanted society to accept their sinful lifestyle, or else. LGBT groups — to be blunt — act like fascists. Just like militant Islam demands Shariah law, homosexual pressure groups demand “sodomy law.”
So what’s so bad about discrimination anyway? Discrimination has always been a hallmark of freedom. The ability to discriminate is given to us by God so that we can make right choices.

Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch expects his liberal readers to be outraged by this. But all Jesse Lee Peterson is saying is that he, as a Christian, views homosexuality as a “sinful lifestyle” and considers the gay-rights movement an “immoral cause.”

What is Brian Tashman trying to say? He doesn’t make an argument, he just gives it the shock headline (“Right-Wing Pundit: America Under ‘Sodomy Law’”) with the evident expectation that Jesse Lee Peterson’s use of the word “sodomy” to describe homosexuality is sufficient to cause liberal outrage: “How dare he?”

Whence this certainty? Why is Brian Tashman so confident in the force of liberal indignation? Christians aren’t allowed to write opinion columns anymore? Nobody is allowed to criticize or oppose the gay-rights movement? Dissent is impermissible? Because if this is what Tashman is trying to say, isn’t he just proving Peterson right?

The recent controversy over Memories Pizza — “Try our new Supreme Homophobia Special!” — and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana has helped bring into focus the inherent problems with mandatory “equality.” If you read Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, it was apparent at the time that the majority’s “Emerging Awareness” Doctrine would have far-reaching effects in law, society and culture. These effects were not entirely predictable, because Lawrence amounted to a repudiation of many centuries of Anglo-American common law precedent. With this decision, America was setting sail into uncharted waters, voyaging toward that part of the ancient map marked “Here Be Dragons.”

What we are finding here is something like the “Sexual Anarchy” described by Matt Barber, a world without any moral truth beyond a fanatical certainty in the wrongness of “hate.” Yet if mere disapproval is “hate,” and thus subject to legal sanction, haven’t we instituted a regime of Compulsory Approval? Ideas Have Consequences, as we were warned long ago by Richard Weaver and, by making the idea of “equality” the first premise of our syllogism, we find ourselves unable to refute an argument leading us to the conclusion that the owners of Memories Pizza have no right to run their own business as they see fit, and Jesse Lee Peterson’s criticism of sodomy must be silenced.

What is at stake is liberty. Ace of Spades understands this:

I do not exist to appease your OCD need for Hierarchy, Structure, Order, Regularity, and Standard Procedures in all facets of life.
Some people continue to be wigged out at the idea that I can buy alcohol in one county but the next county over — get this! — it’s illegal to sell booze.
They just seem to have this baseline devotion to the ideal that we should all be the same. That each county should follow the same rules. That a traveler, moving from one county to the next, should not be surprised or bothered to discover there are Different Rules in effect, or a Different Culture.
That we should, in short, all have the Same Rules, and the Same Culture, with all Proud Nails pounded flat to the wood, so that there is no danger of snagging anyone’s clothing or giving anyone a cut.
Some find that comforting.
I find it creepy. . . .
It bothers Bill Quick that one bakery could have one set of policies, and yet a bakery down the street could, get this, have an entirely different set of policies.
That’s just wrong, he apparently thinks. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which is both powerful and hilarious (obligatory Strong Language Warning). Understand that Ace and his antagonist Bill Quick are both atheists and libertarian-leaning conservatives. Their argument is therefore instructive of how, once we step off the Solid Rock of biblical truth, we step into the shifting sands of doubt and confusion. The Christian knows what he believes and why he believes it — do I need to cite chapter and verse here? — and need not justify himself or prove his own case, because he does not offer his mere personal opinion. Rather the Christian relies on an eternal and transcendent Truth that exists beyond himself.

‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word;
Just to rest upon His promise,
And to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”

Our elite intelligentsia are offended by the Christian’s child-like faith, because a simple Truth that can be known by all — “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” — puts the Ph.D. and the high-school dropout on the same moral plain. The university professor is no better in God’s eyes than the janitor mopping the hallway outside the professor’s classroom. Both of them will be judged by the same standard of righteousness and both are equally condemned by that standard. We are but “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards long ago warned, and it is only by God’s mercy and by the atonement of Christ that we have hope of anything other than the fiery destruction we deserve.

To which the liberal’s only answer is: “SHUT UP!”

How dare we question their right as Our Moral Superiors™ to tell us what to think? The Christian’s simple faith is tantamount to insulting liberals. To reject their Gospel of Secular Salvation is to call into question the Heaven-on-Earth promises that liberals have been making for at least the past hundred years. The Left is determined to immanentize the eschaton, and when Jesse Lee Peterson speaks disapprovingly of “sodomy,” he must be denounced and ridiculed, lest anyone else get the idea that dissent is permissible or socially acceptable. Why, if people are allowed to disagree with liberals, next thing you know, they might start questioning whether “Haven Monahan” and his frat buddies gang-raped a girl in Charlottesville. They may begin doubting the Gospel of Climate Change, or even lose faith in Keynesian economics!

If these Christians are allowed to call sin by its right name, you see, the entire fabric of liberal belief may begin to unravel, and the system of prestige by which Our Moral Superiors™ claim the right to tell us what to think could crumble into the ash-heap of history as suddenly as the Soviet Union collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so liberals keep shrieking: “SHUT UP!”

Are we obligated to obey their totalitarian command? I think not.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786



 

Death Toll 147 After Muslim Terrorists Target Christians at University in Kenya

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The latest atrocity in the global jihad:

Up to 150 people have been murdered by masked al-Shabaab terrorists who stormed a Kenyan university and shot and beheaded Christians in the worst attack in the country in 17 years.
The group raided the Garissa University College campus shortly after 5am local time yesterday, overwhelming guards and murdering people they suspected of being a Christian.
The death toll rose to 147 last night and the 13-hour siege ended. A total of 79 were injured and 587 were led to safety.
Most of those killed were students but two police officers, one soldier and two watchmen are among the dead. . . .
The attack is believed to be the worst terrorist attack on Kenyan soil since the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998 which killed more than 200 people.
The terrorists stuck mid-way through Holy Week, the most solemn period in the Christian calendar. Last night, the Christian students were planning to celebrate the Last Supper in preparation for Good Friday.

(Via Memeorandum.) Islamic violence continues daily around the world. Most of this violent savagery goes unnoticed by the major U.S. media. Pamela Geller is one of the few sources who monitors the global jihad regularly. A few of her recent headlines:

UNHRC Confirms 200 Kidnapped Christian Girls
in Nigeria Murdered by Devout Muslim Group

Muslim mob attacks Sikh Temple in the UK

Two New York Muslim Women Arrested in Bomb Plot

No Insurance Available for Jewish Kindergartens in Belgium

Wait — what was that last headline?

A Belgian insurance company has refused to insure a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels.
The company claimed the risk of a terror attack on the European Jewish Association-run institution was too high.
EJA General Director Rabbi Menachem Margolin called on all European governments and heads of European Union institutions to provide security to all Jewish institutions that would satisfy insurance companies, and establish an alternative insurance mechanism that would secure any institution that might fall victim to anti-Semitic attacks.

Read the whole thing. This is both insane and unnecessary.

Sixty years after the Allies defeated Hitler, why should European Jews have to live with this kind of fear every day? Why should Christian students in Kenya have to fear being shot or beheaded by a gang of bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics? And why should Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative have to fight court battles — and media smear tactics — to run its advertisements in Philadelphia?

On Wednesday SEPTA buses first began rolling with ads the transit agency was forced to run after losing a legal battle on First Amendment grounds.
“Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Qu’ran,” state the ads, which feature a picture of Hitler.
Eighty-four articulated buses operating out of three depots will carry the ads, SEPTA said.
That message doesn’t sit well with local Muslims.
“That’s wrong,” said Amira Muhammed, 30, of Northeast Philly, of the ad, after she got off a Route 33 bus carrying the new advertisement. “That’s not in the Koran. It says we have to respect other religions.”
Muhammed was shocked to learn that SEPTA lost a legal battle with the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), which paid $30,000 for ad space, and that SEPTA is required to run the advertisements.
“What we need to do is go in front of City Hall and say that this needs to stop,” she said.

You can’t stop the truth, Ms. Muhammed. The Koran does advocate violence against Jews, against Christians, against everyone who refuses to bow down to the hateful doctrines of the ignorant murderous “Prophet” for whom you are named.

How Irrational Is ‘Islamophobia’?

The truth is not “hate” and facts are not a “phobia.” Some people just don’t want you to know the truth about Islam and its founder.

“Muhammad was a bloodthirsty polygamous warlord
and also the prophet of a religion that
commands the murder of non-believers.”

All honest and intelligent Americans know this to be true. It is simply a fact of history, and anyone who doesn’t know the truth can read Robert Spencer’s books The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and The Truth About Muhammad. You can read Brigitte Gabrielle’s Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. You can read Pamela Geller’s Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. No one has an excuse to be ignorant of the truth, nor should any American ever be afraid to speak the truth.

What we need is more courage. I just gave a donation to the American Freedom Defense Initiative and I hope others will do the same.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786

 

How Irrational Is ‘Islamophobia’?

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A few headlines today at the Drudge Report:

MUSLIMS TO OUTNUMBER
CHRISTIANS ‘IN 50 YEARS’

REBELS CAPTURE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE IN YEMEN…

Al-Qaida storms jail, frees 300 inmates…

This morning, I quoted a young Canadian feminist blogger who denounced “Islamophobia” as racial prejudice and “baseless hatred” that causes “the suffering of countless victims.” Meanwhile, there is this breaking news:

Two New York City women inspired by ISIS were arrested Thursday for allegedly plotting to set off a bomb, authorities said.
Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, allegedly conspired to prepare an explosive device they planned to detonate in a terror attack in the U.S., according to court documents.
Velentzas and Siddiqui were roommates from Queens. They are expected to appear in federal court in Brooklyn later Thursday afternoon. . . .
“Arrests were made by the JTTF and the NYPD in a national security investigation early this morning in New York City,” John Miller of the NYPD said.

Another headline via Memeorandum:

Al-Shabaab ‘holding many Christians alive’
amid attack on Kenyan university

A “phobia” is by definition an irrational fear, but there is nothing irrational about the fear inspired by Muslim violence.

 They Want to Kill Us All

UPDATE: More breaking news:

What is irrational is any attempt to appease these monsters.




 

‘Islamophobia … Baseless Hatred’?

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An astonishing phenomenon of the 21st century is the perversely ironic way in which the Information Age has actually increased ignorance. With all the knowledge in the world just a quick Google search away, many people have somehow managed to seal themselves off inside cocoons of confirmation bias, where they only encounter narratives that fit their preconceived personal prejudices. It is not simply a matter of people avoiding opposing opinions, but of filtering out facts in such a way that their worldview becomes wholly unrealistic. Paranoid hostility flourishes inside these online bubbles where kooks cluster, affirming their shared delusions and piling up “evidence” to “prove” their false beliefs to each other. It was while making my rounds in the online lunatic asylum that is Feminist Tumblr that I encountered this 157-word rant:

Islam, like all other religions/ideologies, should remain an open ground for criticism, but to say that Islamophobia is absolutely not related to racial persecution and racism in any way is an oversimplification.
Anyone on this earth could be a Muslim, but it’s the brown and black ones that being attacked and killed for being associated with Islam. Anyone could have some kind of tie to Islam, the ideologies presented in Islam, but it’s the brown men and women, the kids with “Middle Eastern” names, the Sikhs wearing turbans, Hindus wearing traditional attire that are being called “terrorists” at the highest frequency.
Ask an Islamophobic assailant why he hit a Sikh man with his car and he’ll tell you he did it because he hates Islam, he hates terrorists.
Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body, to say that it has nothing to do with racism would be to overlook the suffering of countless victims of such baseless hatred.

Stipulate that concerns about radical Islam do create a certain level of suspicion that is ethnic in nature, and that people may wrongly suspect a Hindu or a Sikh — or a Christian, for that matter — of being Muslim.

Anyone can ask Ali Akbar (a half-Arab/half-black Southern Baptist from Texas) about this kind of confusion. For that matter, you can ask Raheem Kassam, the spokesman for the U.K. Independence Party, who is the child of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, but who is himself a thoroughly secular young Englishman.

This raises the question of whether “Islamophobia” actually exists. The term “phobia” denotes an irrational fear, yet the history of recent decades offers enough rational basis for concern to make the word “Islamophobia” inherently problematic. One may perhaps distinguish between two phenomena — a vigilant concern about dangerous radicalism, on the one hand, and a simple-minded bigotry on the other — but making that distinction does nothing more than to say, “Ignorant people are ignorant.” To say that fair-minded and educated people should condemn ignorant prejudice isn’t controversial. What is controversial is to assert that “Islamophobia” is a more important problem than the actual dangers posed by radical Islam.

The flat statement that “Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body” is a falsehood, and to then throw in “the suffering of countless victims of . . . baseless hatred” as the emotional freight of an argument requires us to ask, “Are the ‘victims’ truly ‘countless’? Where is the evidence of this ‘suffering’?” In order to sustain such claims, it will not do to cite a list of incidents or anecdotes. No one disputes the fact that ignorant hateful people do ignorant hateful things.

What is in dispute is whether “Islamophobia” — specifically, the concern about Islamic terrorism — has generated such a spree of anti-Muslim violence and harassment as to produce “countless victims.”

FACT: Anti-Jewish hate crimes are four times more common than anti-Muslim crimes in the United States.

According to the FBI, Jews were the targets in about 60% of religious-bias incidents in 2013, the most recent year for which complete data is available. By comparison to the 625 anti-Jewish crimes, Muslims were targeted in 135 incidents (13.7%), and Catholics were the third-most commonly targeted group, accounting for 6.1% of such incidents.

Facts matter. We cannot let ourselves to be misled by propaganda, whatever the source or nature of that propaganda may be. When we know the facts, our skeptical curiosity ought to be aroused whenever we encounter tendentious claims. Who is it, we must ask, that deries the “countless victims” of “Islamophobia”?

Here is the profile of the Tumblr blogger who wrote that 157-word rant: Zanab, Nineteen, Female, Ontario, Canada. No rational person desiring information on hate crimes would deliberately seek out the expertise of a Canadian teenager, yet inside the online ideological bubbles of the Information Age, no one bothers to contradict this girl’s claims. If not for my habit of patrolling the weird universe of Feminist Tumblr, you might have no idea how these poisonous seeds of dangerous disinformation are being sown.