Since I had previously devoted some attention to immigrant-pushing Islamic cleric Imam Omar Suleiman this post at Islamist Watchby Sam Westrop jumped out at me this morning as I did my usual perusal of the news looking for items that I think would interest you.
Westrop points out that the Salafistshave not needed to change (or pretend to change) in Europe because the Muslim population there is high enough to push their ‘purist’ agenda without ‘modifying’ their hardcore beliefs, but in the US the population is not high enough (yet!) so they need the Leftwingers, the Progressive Dems, to essentially hide behind.
One of those clever pretenders is Suleiman. I wrote about him working with Church World Service and CAIR in March of 2018 to protest Trump’s refugee slowdown. See here.
Flexible Salafis
The Growing Political Power of ‘Woke,’ Modernist Islamism
Imam Omar Suleiman rarely talks about da’wah – the Islamic duty of proselytization. He never talks about Islamist designs for an Islamic state. Instead, America’s leading Islamic cleric speaks about broad political change, employing the language and ideas of progressivism.
In fact, Suleiman, president of the Yaqeen Institute, is not just a preacher; he is an activist, found often in front of TV cameras, speaking before Congress, or being arrested on Capitol Hill at protests against the Trump administration’s policies.
His success is surprising. Suleiman is one of a number of popular clerics who emerged from a network centered around the AlMaghrib Institute, a Salafi-founded organization dedicated to a hardline strain of Islam. Its own extremism is incontrovertible. Founder Muhammad Alshareef once wrote a paper titled “Why the Jews Were Cursed,” in which he claims Jews control the media and murder prophets. Other leading Almaghrib clerics include Abdullah Hakim Quick, who calls for the killing of homosexuals and urges God to “purify” Al-Aqsa from the “filth of the Yahud [Jews],” and “clean Afghanistan and Iraq” from the “filth of the Kafiroun [unbelievers].”
Suleiman at the southern border in December 2018
Suleiman’s rhetoric has at times been just as extreme. Around 2014, he was busy beseeching the ummah to rise up and act against the forces that threatened Islam. He praised a newer generation of “awakened” Muslim youth, and lauded the piety and commitment of the people of Gaza. And he criticized those who were “too lazy” to boycott the “Zionist regime,” claiming such activism by a committed few had already cost the Israelis over 8 billion dollars.
But as his fame grew, his tactics changed. Whereas once Suleiman excused the killing of adulterers and denounced homosexuality as a “repugnant shameless sin,” today he is an ardent advocate for political alliances with the progressive Left, including “LGBT” movements. In lectures and quasi-academic essays, Suleiman and Yaqeen now promote Islam as a force for “social justice.”
Instead of talking just about refugees from Gaza or Syria, Suleiman is today also found at the border with Mexico – equipped with journalists and their cameras – to embrace non-Muslim emigrants and loudly protest the Trump administration’s policies.
And rather than remain just a regular fixture on the Islamist conference circuit, Suleiman today finds himself introduced to Congress by Nancy Pelosi, and given a platform at Bernie Sanders’ campaign rallies, to talk about the “promise of America … an America that resists the forces of bigotry … the forces of greed … that distract us from corrupt billionaires.”
Omar Suleiman is both the Left’s talking-point and its talking-head.
He is no longer issuing parochial calls for an awakened Muslim youth, but he has become part of a broader hard Left movement that claims to be building a utopia for all.
I haven’t been paying any attention to the Census other than noting that we have received at least three mailings telling us to get it done.
Here we learn that Arab-speaking immigrants to the Detroit area are working hard to be sure they are not undercounted so they can get their government goodies. But, government goodies aren’t given out to specific ethnic groups anyway.
I suspect the real reason is that they want to be sure that mostly Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa are designated separately as a way to show their potential political power.
Hard-to-count Arab Americans urged to prioritize census
A Detroit area billboard
DEARBORN, Mich. — (AP) — At a Michigan gas station, the message is obvious — at least to Arabic speakers: Be counted in the 2020 census.
“Provide your community with more/additional opportunities,” the ad on the pump handle reads in Arabic. In the fine print, next to “United States Census 2020,” it adds: “To shape your future with your own hands, start here.”
As state officials and nonprofit groups target hard-to-count groups like immigrants, people of color and those in poverty, many Arab Americans say the undercount is even more pronounced for them.
That means one of the largest and most concentrated Arab populations outside the Middle East — those in the Detroit area — could be missing out on federal funding for education, health care, crime prevention and other programs that the census determines how to divvy up.
That also includes money to help states address the fallout from the coronavirus.
“We are trying to encourage people not just to fill it out because of all the reasons we had given before, where there’s education and health care and all of that, but also because it is essential for the federal government to know who is in Michigan at this point more than ever before,” said Rima Meroueh, director of policy and advocacy with Dearborn-based ACCESS, one of the largest Arab American advocacy nonprofits in the country.
The Arab American community checks many boxes that census and nonprofit officials say are hallmarks of the hardest-to-count communities: large numbers of young children, non-English speakers, recent immigrants and those who often live in multifamily or rental housing.
But groups face a hurdle after the Trump administration decided not to include a category that counts people from the Middle East or North Africa as their own group. The Census Bureau recommended the so-called MENA box in 2017 after years of research and decades of advocacy.
The decision to scrap the choice angers many Arab Americans, who say it hinders representation and needed funding. Democratic U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, an Arab American representing part of Detroit and several suburbs, expressed her displeasure while questioning Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham on Capitol Hill in February.
“The community did it right — they went through the process,” she said. “You’re making us invisible.”
Does it make any sense to you? Is the area around Detroit going to get any less stuff if Arab-speaking people of the Middle East and North Africa don’t get a separate category? Or is it more about flexing some Arab-power muscle?
Just so you know here (below) is the region they are talking about, the region they call MENA—the area (still expanding) colonized by the followers of Mohammed.
Do we refer to Muslims in Africa as colonizers or is that dirty word only reserved for western countries that colonized Africa through the centuries? Just wondering. Heck we could say that Arabs are colonizing Michigan and Somalis are colonizing Minnesota!
A little fact you might not know: The number one language of refugeesadmitted to the US for at least the last twelve years is Arabic.
“If the SPLC were an impeccable civil rights organization, why would it hide money in offshore accounts?”
(Tyler O’Neill at Pajamas Media)
I haven’t paid much attention lately to the king of non-profit scammers—the Southern Poverty Law Center—so it’s good that watchdog Tyler O’Neill is doing the job along with others in the alternative media.
You won’t see this news at CNN, MSNBC or the New York Times.
Exaggerating Hate Pays: Scandal-Plagued SPLC Has Millions in Offshore Accounts, Half a Billion in Assets
What kind of civil rights nonprofit has millions of dollars in offshore accounts? According to recent reports, the scandal-plagued Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) does, and that’s just scratching the surface of its problems.
The SPLC recently published its updated “hate map” plotting “hate groups” across America, right as Americans are fearing for their lives and livelihoods in a deadly pandemic. That map inflated the numbers not only by listing “hate groups” that barely exist but by defaming mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups” on par with the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, former SPLC employee Bob Moser exposed the map as a “highly profitable scam.”
According to the SPLC’s tax documents, the organization has $529,801,832 in its endowment, the second year it had more than half a billion dollars on hand. According to an accounting firm’s report first publicized by the Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Schoffstall, the SPLC has $570 million in assets, including the $41 million in its action fund launched just last year. Annual contributions in 2019 stood at $97 million, down from the $132 million it reported in October 2017.
Highly profitable, indeed.
Most astonishingly, the SPLC reported $162 million in offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, $41 million more than the group previously reported. In fact, the SPLC’s tax documents also note that the nonprofit “has ownership in several foreign corporations. However, the center’s ownership percentage in these corporations does not rise to the level of reporting on the Form 5471.”
If the SPLC were an impeccable civil rights organization, why would it hide money in offshore accounts?Cayman Island bank accounts are notorious as a tool for tax evasion and the fact that the SPLC has such accounts should be a red flag for anyone examining its credibility.
Then again, this organization has so many red flags, it’s hard to know where to start. Someone should write a book about it! Oh wait, I already did that.
They have once againlistedRefugee Resettlement Watch as a hate group, nevermind that RRWis just me and my blog. I wonder if I have any legal rights?
By the way, I suspect I was recommended for their list by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society several years ago because I was exposing HIAS’s ‘business model’. I explain all that at RRW in 2014.
I have no way of proving it, but I suspect that HIAS and the SPLChad a hand in shutting down RRWlast summer.
CAIR-NJ Calls on FBI to Probe Death Threat Targeting Family of Muslim Congressional Candidate
(SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ, 4/22/2020) – The New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ) today called on state law enforcement authorities and the FBI to probe a death threat targeting the family of Muslim congressional candidate Amani al-Khatahtbeh.***
On the evening of April 21, Al-Khatahtbeh reportedly received a phone call from an unknown number threatening to kill her and her family. She received the threat shortly after a virtual town hall she hosted on Instagram.
The caller said in part: “Your parents live at [address]. I will f**king kill them and. . .I will torture them and feed them bacon and f**king pork…As soon as you get off the phone, I’ll f**king go to his house…“Ni**er, you’re Muslim, you f**king ugly Arab Muslim. You terrorist.”
In a statement, CAIR-NJ Executive Director Selaedin Maksut said:
“The chilling death threat exemplifies how Muslim candidates are especially targeted during election cycles.
***Inspired by the success of her role model, Rep. Ilhan Omar, she is running against longtime Democrat incumbent Frank Pallone in the Sixth Congressional District.
By the way, when you put yourself out there, expect blow back. I recently got a hate mail letter in my post office box—the author said he was going to rape me and sue me for being a Nazi. It was unclear from the letter which punishment would be meted out first!
Would someone keep an eye on this story. Just search for her name every few days and see if any additional news turns up. Let’s see if someone is arrested for making a death threat.
….which means there is a great opportunity for any of you who want to launch your own web-based media either national or more importantly state and local websites and blogs.
I have for years—a dozen actually—been urging all of you to consider writing your own blogs.
There is a crying need for citizen investigative journalists who would follow various government programs as watch dogs.
And, as local newspapers die, you should consider becoming the news outletin your own community, county or state. What are you waiting for!
There may be silver linings to be found with this COVID crisis after all. Small local newspapers are likely to go down, see here at The Hill last week:
Local news outlets struggle to survive coronavirus fallout
Sad (maybe), but if your city or county is like mine, the local newspaper was long ago gobbled up by a Left-leaning mega media company blatantly putting its slant on the local news.
Enough of the nagging, here is what I wanted you to see that should bring a smile to your faces.
From Kurt Schlichter writing at Town Hall (hat tip: Paul):
Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!
We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.
They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.
It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces.
[….]
The media largely fell for the Imperial College Apocalypse Flu scenario, but then they wanted to. It’s more fun to be chronicling the Fall of Rome than Just Another Day in the Third Century A.D. under Emperor Elagabalus. The doomsayers ended up walking back their zillion dead to a few thousand dead, and the media just sort of ignored it because “Phew! Dodged a bullet!” doesn’t have the same resonance as “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE (and it’s Trump’s fault, not our ChiCom friends’ fault).”
[….]
Our media is garbage, full of clowns and dilettantes with no experience and less common sense. The media is now complaining that the pandemic is hurting its industry badly and that some of the media may go under because of the Woking Pneumonia.
Read it allbecause we all need a good laugh these days!
