Category: Religion

Terrorist in London Stabbing Attack Had Just Been Released From Prison

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Just another random coincidence:

A man shot dead by police after he stabbed people in south London had been released from prison in January.
Sudesh Amman, 20, was released about a week ago after serving half of his sentence of three years and four months for terror offences.
He was under active police surveillance at the time of the attack on Streatham High Road, which police believe to be an Islamist-related terrorist incident. . . .
Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy said: “He [Amman] was under surveillance quite soon after being released which begs the question, why was he released so soon?”
Treasury minister Rishi Sunak said “the police are obviously doing absolutely everything they can to keep people safe”.
He said new measures to toughen terrorism laws — already announced by the PM after last November’s attack near London Bridge — will give the police “more powers and resources to do that as well”.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the government would announce further plans for “fundamental changes to the system for dealing with those convicted of terrorism offences” on Monday. . . .
Sudesh Amman pleaded guilty in November 2018 to six charges of possessing documents containing terrorist information and seven of disseminating terrorist publications. . . .
Amman was first arrested in north London in May 2018 by armed officers on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack.

Here’s the thing: Under our Constitution, any American has a First Amendment right to possess “documents containing terrorist information.” The British have no such protection, and are suppressing liberty in the name of security. Why? Because they don’t have a Second Amendment that would allow citizens to defend themselves. You see how these two basic liberties are related. There will always be bad people in the world who wish to do harm to the innocent, but it is foolish — indeed, dangerous — to seek protection against bad people by disarming the law-abiding citizen and forbidding the publication of bad ideas.

Consider that the principle that would allow prohibition of radical Islamic “terrorist information” could also be used to criminalize any expression of “Islamophobia.” Indeed, there are many in America who would prohibit “hate speech” critical of U.S. immigration policy. If disagreeing with liberals is “racist,” then liberals would be able to destroy our First Amendment freedom in the name of suppressing “hate speech.”

The knife attacker’s parents are from Sri Lanka, and while it may be true that the vast majority of Sri Lankan immigrants to the U.K. are decent hard-working people, it is predictable that some of their children will grow up to be alienated and anti-social, prone to radicalization:

Sudesh Amman, the man shot dead by police in what officials described as a terrorism incident in south London, had been jailed for promoting violent Islamist material and had encouraged his girlfriend to behead her parents. . . .
He was 17 and living at home with his mother and younger siblings when he first began committing terrorism offenses, according to authorities. Police became aware of his activities in April 2018 and he was arrested by armed officers in a north London street a month later.
When officers examined his computers and phone, they found he had downloaded material about making explosives and carrying out terrorist attacks, according to police.
Messages showed that he had discussed with his family, friends and girlfriend his extreme views and desire to carry out an attack, often focused on using a knife, police said.
In December 2017 Amman posted a picture of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed during a U.S. raid in Syria in October, and told his brother in a message that “the Islamic State is here to stay.”
He also described Yazidi women as slaves and said the Koran made it permissible to rape them, and in another message he encouraged his girlfriend to behead her parents.
Police said he had shared an online al-Qaeda magazine with his family and while in a discussion about school with a sibling he wrote he would “rather blow myself up”.

British immigration policy has caused this terrorist problem, yet in England, as in America, those who criticize immigration policy are accused of promoting “hate.” However, the preservation of liberty requires that a nation must defend its borders against foreign invasion.




 

A ‘Hate Crime’ CNN Won’t Mention

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“Intersectionality” in action:

Jasmine Renee Campbell is the Oregon woman facing hate crime charges after investigators said she tried to strangle a woman using the victim’s hijab.
The confrontation happened at the TriMet MAX train station in Portland on November 12, 2019. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s office announced the charges on January 3, 2020.
The victim did not suffer serious physical injuries. But District Attorney Rod Underhill explained in a news release that the victim told the police that she “no longer feels safe wearing a hijab in public.” . . .
According to the Portland Police Bureau, which is the department that led the investigation, Jasmine Renee Campbell allegedly approached the victim from behind on November 12, 2019, at a train station. Officials say that Campbell is accused of grabbing the hijab and using it to try to choke the victim.
The victim managed to push Campbell away. But, according to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office, Campbell continued the assault. The victim said Campbell forcibly ripped the hijab from the victim’s head. Campbell then allegedly rubbed the garment “across multiple exposed sexually intimate parts” of her own body.  . . .
The Multnomah County District Attorney’s office says the two women were strangers to each other. The victim was not identified by name.
But investigators described her as a 24-year-old student at Portland State University. She is a foreign exchange student from Saudi Arabia. . . .
As of this writing on January 5, Jasmine Renee Campbell was not in custody. Court records with the Oregon Judicial Department show that there is an active warrant for her arrest. . . .
The District Attorney’s Office says that the arrest warrant remains active because Campbell failed to show up for a scheduled court hearing. Campbell had been ordered to appear at the Multnomah County Circuit Court at 9 a.m. on January 3, 2020.

So, not only did Campbell attack a Muslim immigrant, but she is now at large, a fugitive from justice, free to attack others. If such an Islamophobic hate crime against an immigrant had been committed by a white male right-wing Trump supporter, CNN would be giving us hourly updates on the manhunt for this dangerous fugitive. As it is, however, this crime is strictly “local news” for some reason . . .

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)



 

A Christian ‘Cult’ Sex Scandal

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How bored are you with impeachment? Well, I put up a post about it this morning and, as of 1 p.m. ET, there were zero comments. On my office TV, members of the House have spent all day “debating” the articles of impeachment, but this is a pointless exercise, because Democrats have already made up their mind to vote “yea,” and indeed, this was all preordained as soon as Nancy Pelosi got her hands on the Speaker’s gavel. Everyone is thoroughly bored by this Ebenezer Scrooge let’s-ruin-Christmas drama, so instead let’s talk about Jesus.

Three years ago, I encountered a blog by a “Christian feminist” (oxymoron alert) who was part of the “progressive” (i.e., partisan Democrat) movement that included the late Rachel Held Evans. This “Christian feminist” blogger had grown up in a Pentecostal denomination, and had experienced an abusive relationship with a “Godly man” to whom she became engaged while attending a conservative Bible college in Florida. Researching her background, in one of my deep-dive expeditions, I encountered some references to various scandals in the conservative evangelical Christian subculture, including Bill Gothard and his Advanced Training Institute (ATI).

The name Bill Gothard was vaguely familiar to me, because my wife and I had homeschooled our children for several years beginning in 1996. Our curriculum was what you’d call “eclectic,” meaning that we put together an improvised hodgepodge from different sources over the years. We are Christian conservatives in a general sense of that phrase, but we were never doctrinaire followers of any particular system of Christian homeschooling, instead just picking and choosing whatever seemed best to us. However, if you’re part of the Christian homeschooling community, you become aware that there are distinct systems, of which Bill Gothard’s approach was one of the more influential. I must confess, however, that I had no idea just how influential Gothard was in the direction of the evangelical movement from the 1970s onward.

Gothard had a particular vision of the Christian patriarchal family (husband/father “headship,” etc.) that he developed into a popular seminar called Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts (IBYC) that later changes its name to Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), within which the Advanced Training Institute subsequently was formed. Gothard’s seminar was basically a slide-show lecture about principles of Christian family life that would, he asserted, prevent children from drifting into the “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” youth rebellion. Given all the craziness that was going on in the late 1960s and ’70s — the Manson family, LSD freakouts, heroin overdoses, legalized abortion, Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. — there was a remarkable demand for Gothard’s lectures. Christian parents were scared to death that their sweet church-going kids would turn into teenage homosexual Communists or whatever, and Gothard offered what seemed to be a guarantee of safety against such outcomes. However . . .

“Gothard has never married.”

That one line in his Wikipedia page tells a lot about the scandal that subsequently destroyed Gothard’s ministry and thereby left a permanent stain on conservative evangelical Christianity. There is no evidence that Gothard is homosexual — quite the contrary, as various women allege — but the matter of his lifelong bachelorhood should still raise questions. Indeed, this question was raised even when he was a young evangelist in the 1960s. Gothard defended himself against suspicion by insisting that his devotion to the ministry made it practically impossible for him to take a wife, and there is abundant testimony that Gothard was a workaholic whose every waking hour was devoted to his ministry. Still, common sense would suggest a skeptical attitude toward a man who claimed to know everything about how a Christian family should function, when he himself never had a wife or children of his own.

My guess — and this is just speculation — is that Gothard had some kind of insecurity or inhibition in regard to sex, and this personal psychological problem of his (a) prevented him from ever marrying, and (b) informed his legalistic follow-the-rules prescription for creating the ideal Christian family. Whatever the case may be, the “life principles” Gothard taught were not objectionable in themselves, and I would not hesitate to recommend studying those principles, but in terms of the practical application of those principles to daily life, Gothard’s system seems to have become a rigid and unforgiving legalism. The much bigger problem, however, was corruption and hypocrisy.

Almost by accident, the other night I stumbled onto a YouTube video of a documentary about the Gothard scandal, The Cult Next Door. To explain how that accident happened: I’ve been watching YouTube videos as a substitute for bedtime reading lately, and I’ve always been interested in cults (Jonestown, Waco, Mormons, etc.) and this documentary about the Gothard “cult” popped up as a YouTube recommendation.

 

Let me say this: I dislike the attitude expressed in this documentary. There are satanic forces in the world seeking to destroy Christianity, and one of the methods by which these forces operate is to publicize scandals within the church as a way of discrediting Christianity altogether. One will notice that these satanic forces often claim to be devoutly Christian, even while they ally themselves with enemies of Christianity, and so as bad as the Gothard scandal was — and trust me, it was very, very bad — I am not enthusiastic about those who are dancing amid the ruins of Gothard’s ministry. Nor do I like the characterization of his ministry as a “cult,” because whatever personal failings and abusive practices were involved in IBYC/IBLP/ATI, the essence of Gothard’s teaching was a sincere (if in some way misguided) effort to apply biblical principles to family life. Gothard was arrogant, guilty of sinful pride among his many other failings, but it wasn’t like Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate or David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. There were no mass suicides at the “compound,” no armed standoff with AK-47s, nothing like that.

What went wrong with Gothard’s ministry was that warning signs were ignored, and previous scandals got hushed up. In the Internet Age, we take it for granted that a major sex scandal will be so clearly documented that, if a Christian ministry had such a problem, everybody would know about it, and so the ministry would be permanently discredited. But there was no Internet in 1980, which is probably why the first big sex scandal involving Gothard’s ministry was somehow forgotten.

Go read “The GOTHARD Files: The Early Years, 1965–79,” which is the first in a series of articles (Part II and Part III) about scandals that should have rendered the Gothard ministry permanently radioactive. Essentially, Bill’s younger brother Steve was using the ministry’s staff the way that Hugh Hefner used Playboy bunnies, sexually exploiting a harem of vulnerable young Christian women. While there was also some misconduct by Bill Gothard in the 1970s, it was Steve who played the central role in that early scandal and yet, despite the Gothard ministry’s emphasis on “accountability” as a principle, that whole mess somehow got buried, so that the ministry continued as if nothing serious had happened. When the homeschooled children of Gothard’s admirers were subsequently recruited to serve as “apprentices” at ATI headquarters, they arrived with no forewarning about what had happened back in the late 1970s and — surprise, surprise! — the pattern of abuse was repeated.

Anyway, I don’t know if you’ll find that interesting, but it’s got to be better than impeachment. Mister Chairman, I yield back my time.



 

FBI Probes Belgian Terrorist Threat

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As I’ve previously explained, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs first alerted America to the danger of Belgian extremists, and whenever The Flemish Menace™ makes another terrorist attack, it’s important to give Charles credit. Consider the latest news from Pensacola:

The F.B.I. was investigating but did not confirm a report that the Saudi trainee had watched videos of mass shootings at a dinner party sometime this week, according to a senior American official who was briefed on the investigation but not authorized to speak publicly.
The gunman, who killed three people and injured eight others, did not have any apparent ties to international terrorist groups and appeared to have radicalized on his own, according to the official.
The gunman, identified as Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, was killed by a sheriff’s deputy who responded to the attack. Lieutenant Alshamrani was training to become a pilot and initially entered the United States in 2018, according to the official. But at some point Lieutenant Alshamrani returned to Saudi Arabia and then re-entered the United States in February 2019, the official said. . . .

OK, they haven’t gotten to the part about the Belgian connection yet, but I’m sure if we keep reading, everything will become apparent:

Six other Saudi nationals were detained for questioning near the scene of the shooting, which took place over two floors in a classroom on the base. Three of the Saudis who were detained had been seen filming the entire incident, according to another person briefed on the investigation.
It was not known whether the six Saudis detained were students in the classroom building, and there was no immediate indication that those filming the incident were connected to the gunman, the person said. . . .

Seriously, there must be a Belgian angle to this, although the motive is apparently still mysterious to these New York Times reporters:

Investigators were trying to determine what motivated the gunman.
Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican whose district includes Pensacola, both described the shooting as an act of terrorism.

(Of course, these Republicans are RAAAAACIST!)

But federal law enforcement officials said it was too early to establish the gunman’s motive.
The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist activity, cited a Twitter account with a name matching the gunman that had posted a “will” calling the United States a “nation of evil” and criticizing its support for Israel.

(Because we know how much Belgians hate the Jews.)

SITE said the account had also quoted Osama bin Laden, the former Qaeda leader, and was critical of United States foreign policy.
“I’m not against you for just being American,” the posts said. “I don’t hate you because your freedoms, I hate you because every day you supporting, funding and committing crimes not only against Muslims Belgians but also humanity.”

(Obviously a typographical error, which I’ve corrected.)

The account could not be independently verified, and law enforcement officials did not confirm that it was connected to the gunman.
The gunman was a member of the Saudi Air Force.
The lieutenant was a trainee with the Saudi Air Force. Saudi pilots have trained at the Pensacola base since 1995.
The gunman used a locally purchased Glock 45 9-millimeter handgun with an extended magazine and had four to six other magazines in his possession, according to one of the people briefed on the investigation.

Remember, you should always trust the FBI:

During a news conference Friday night, the FBI declined to release the shooter’s identity and wouldn’t comment on his possible motivations.
“There are many reports circulating, but the FBI deals only in facts,” said Rachel L. Rojas, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Jacksonville Field Office.

Well, I think we’ve got enough information now to know the gunman’s motive, despite the reluctance of federal officials and the New York Times to jump to any hasty conclusions. Charles Johnson and his LGF readers all understand that Belgian crypto-Nazis are to blame.



 

His Name Was Mohammed Alshamrani

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If I had to guess, I’d say he’s probably from Belgium:

Four people are dead including the suspect after an active shooting incident at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida, police said.
The shooter was identified as Mohammed Alshamrani, a Saudi national [oops, I guessed wrong — RSM] and member of the country’s air force who was in the U.S. for flight training, law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation told ABC News. Investigators are trying to determine whether the shooting was terror-related, the officials said.
Authorities responded to reports of a shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola at 6:51 a.m. on Friday, officials said. ATF and FBI also responded to the scene.
The shooting took place at one of the classroom buildings on the base, officials said. Officers with the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office arrived on the scene and fatally shot the suspect after exchanging gunfire.
Three people, including the shooter, were pronounced dead on scene, police said. One victim was taken to the hospital and died from injuries.
Eight others injured in the shooting were transported to Baptist Hospital, police said. . . .
During his roundtable on small business and red tape reduction accomplishments on Friday, President Donald Trump sent his condolences to families of the “warriors” killed and spoke about his call with the King of Saudi Arabia.
“I can tell you it’s a horrible thing that took place and we’re getting to the bottom on it,” Trump said. “All of the investigators are there now and they’re studying it very closely and terrible thing, and our condolences to the families.”

Y’know, if this shooter had been some kind of white nationalist alt-right extremist, CNN would be 24/7 on this story all weekend, and every liberal blog would be blaming Trump for this terrorist act. Instead what you will see is that the mainstream media and liberal bloggers will quickly bury this story, except perhaps to call out “right-wingers” as “racists” for daring to suggest that some Muslims might be dangerous.




 

Why Do Democrats Hate Jesus?

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It’s Thanksgiving Day. Our two youngest sons, Jefferson and Emerson, are home from college, while my wife is roasting a turkey and preparing all the other delicious food for our afternoon feast. Meanwhile, Democrats are mad because a popular rapper is praising God:

An atheist group has gone on the attack against rapper Kanye West for performing his Sunday Service at a Texas prison claiming that the event was an “egregious” violation of the U.S. Constitution.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) blasted Texas Sheriff Ed Gonzalez for allowing the “Jesus Walks” rapper to appear at the Harris County Jail in Houston, Texas, on November 17 in a four-page letter.
Kanye West performed his weekly Sunday Service before more than 500 inmates, both male and female, in two different services at the county jail facilities. The performance was given high praise by Texas Governor Greg Abbott who tweeted out his compliments saying, “If he moves just one person closer to God the world will be a more peaceful place.”
But the FFRF was far less pleased with the rapper’s church service.
In its letter, the atheist group demanded that the county cease any other efforts to “organize or promote worship services in the future.”
However, a representative of the First Liberty Institute told Fox News that there is no reason that Kanye West should be barred from conducting a service in a county jail.
“Kanye West visited the Harris County Jail to offer hope and encouragement,” said Mike Berry, First Liberty chief of staff. “The last time I checked, you can do that in this country. If every sheriff in America invited Kanye West to visit their jails, we might have less need for jails.”

Let’s not pretend that we don’t know what who these atheists are, or what they’re really about. They are Democrats, who hate God for the same reason Democrats hate motherhood and patriotism — because they hate America, and anything that is good for America, Democrats are against.




 

Harvard-Educated Sociology Professor Charged With Brooklyn Hate Crime

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Michael Gould-Wartofsky graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2007 and is the author of the 2015 book The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement. He had been an adjunct professor at New York University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in Sociology, but that was before he was caught vandalizing a Catholic church:

A former professor at NYU has been arrested and charged with hate crime after he allegedly uprooted plants outside a Brooklyn church, throwing them at the door and damaging a $5,000 statue.
The whole incident was caught on security camera at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in Williamsburg early Sunday. The church’s pastor, Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello, tells NBC New York that police told him 34-year-old Michael Gould Wartofsky was drunk when he vandalized the church’s property.
Wartofsky is seen on video with two other men, walking down 8th Street. He stopped in front of the church and started pulling plants from the garden, throwing it at the door but two other men didn’t participate, according to the church.
The ex-Sociology professor also yelled something at the security camera. He then dragged a heavy resin statue of St. Jude to the middle of the street, repeatedly kicking it and then leaving it there.
Gigantiello says he believes Wartofsky was making a statement. “This exhibition of violence, anger, and hatred is very disturbing. This is definitely an attack on the Catholic Church,” Gigantiello said.
Police charged Wartofsky with hate crime criminal mischief but no charges of public intoxication were filed.
An NYU spokesperson tells NBC New York that Wartofsky has no fall term assignment as an adjunct professor at NYU, and that he’s not currently an NYU employee.

My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that (a) Gould-Wartofsky is gay and (b) he’s a trust-funder who wasn’t “currently” working at NYU because he doesn’t actually need to work for a living. As to guess (a), why else would a man be walking down a street drunk, with two other men, and feel such overwhelming animosity toward a Catholic church that he’d take vengeance on a statue of St. Jude? And as evidence for guess (b), he doesn’t seem to have published anything since 2015 and the last public event listed<> on his personal website was in 2017. If you’re a “progressive” young academic living in the Trump Age, you could be publishing essays and op-eds every day, to feed the limitless demand for anti-Trump opinions. So the fact that Gould-Wartofsky apparently hasn’t been publishing much of anything lately, and isn’t currently teaching, suggests to me that he possesses independent wealth, i.e., he’s a trust fund baby.

As I say, these are only guesses, and if I’ve guessed wrong about Gould-Wartofsky — if he’s a working-class heterosexual — he would not have proper grounds for a libel suit, because you can’t sue for mere speculation, if it’s clearly labeled as such. But I don’t expect to get any cease-and-desist letters from Gould-Wartofsky’s attorneys, because if your client’s charged with a hate crime, it will keep you pretty busy.


 

‘Austere Religious Scholar’

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In the carnival of #FakeNews self-ownage, the hits just keep coming:

The Post’s obituary briefly acknowledges the circumstances of al-Baghdadi’s death before painting, at length, a rather sympathetic portrait of al-Baghdadi’s “canny pragmatism.” This is how the Post describes his background:

From his teens, he was fascinated with Islamic history and the intricacies of Islamic law. Acquaintances would remember him as a shy, nearsighted youth who liked soccer but preferred to spend his free time at the local mosque.
“He always had religious or other books attached on the back of his bike,” Tariq Hameed, an acquaintance from the same lower-middle-class neighborhood, told a Newsweek interviewer in 2014. The young Ibrahim disdained the Western clothes popular with Samarra’s young men, preferring the traditional prayer cap, beard and white dishdasha robe of the religiously devout, neighbors said.
He graduated from the University of Baghdad in 1996 and received a master’s degree in Koranic recitation from the Saddam University for Islamic Studies in 1999. Immersing himself in the arcane world of 7th-century religious codes, he grew increasingly conservative. Acquaintances remembered how the college-age Mr. Baghdadi took offense at the sight of men and women dancing in the same room during wedding celebrations.

It’s an odd thing, though: Al-Baghdadi was “austere” and couldn’t stand to see men and women dancing together. And yet:

Later, former hostages would reveal that Mr. Baghdadi also kept a number of personal sex slaves during his years as the Islamic State’s leader, including slain American hostage Kayla Mueller and a number of captured Yazidi women.

How austere can you get? On balance, I think Trump’s sendoff to al-Baghdadi was a heck of a lot more appropriate than the Post’s.

One is reminded — and not coincidentally — of how every time a black teenage hoodlum gets shot by a cop, the media treat us to stories about how this “honor student” (urban gang-bangers are always on the honor roll, it seems) was beloved by his family and enjoyed playing sports. These accounts are usually illustrated with a photo of the deceased perp as an eighth-grader, never the Facebook photos the teenage thug posted — brandishing pistols, smoking weed, flashing gang symbols, etc. The liberal ideology of the media evidently requires them under every circumstance to depict black people as innocent victims of “racism,” and this practice now seems to have been extended to all Muslims, including terrorist leaders who enslave and murder women. No Republican congressmen could ever expect such favorable coverage as the Washington Post accords to America’s worst enemies.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)