“How long did you think you were going to be able to run and operate a store that continued to harm and exploit black folks … without reaping what you sow?”
(Sara Hamdan, an IMAN organizer)
Who knew?
As I have said in a couple of previous posts, here andhere, we wouldn’t have known that Arab and Asian (New American!) shop owners in Black neighborhoods treated their customers badly, sold them booze, cigarettes and unhealthy food and then went home to nicer neighborhoods every evening if it hadn’t been for the death of George Floyd.
The tensions in ‘diversity-is-strength’ neighborhoods that led up to Floyd’s death is further explained in this story at Religious News Service yesterday.
It seems this isn’t a case of white vs. black racial tension, but one of immigrant Arab exploiters vs. African Americans.
Did you even know that the store that called police on Floyd was a convenience store owned by a Palestinian?
Minneapolis Cup Foods where George Floyd allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20.
Floyd’s death spurs debate on how immigrants should run stores in black neighborhoods
(Emphasis below is mine)
(RNS) — George Floyd was killed after employees at a convenience store owned by a Palestinian American Muslim — with a Muslim prayer space in its basement — called Minneapolis police over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill.
The role that the store played in Floyd’s death May 25 and in all that followed has been a bitter pill to swallow for many Muslim and Arab communities.
This moment has also reignited ongoing debates in Muslim communities over the ethical duties of immigrants who own businesses in black neighborhoods, from when and if they call the police to the role they can play in creating healthier food ecosystems.
“We know now that escalating situations to the police almost always does more harm than good, even for something as harmless as a fake bill,” Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, owner of the Cup Foods store that called the police on Floyd, wrote in a Facebook post.
Cup Foods, which has served customers in a largely black neighborhood for three decades, will no longer involve the police in nonviolent incidents, Abumayyaleh said.
“By simply following procedure we are putting our communities in danger,” he said in his social media post. Instead, he urged, “Work within your communities to find alternatives to policing, until the point that local and state officials decide to seriously hold police accountable once and for all.”
Food and liquor stores, often owned by Arab and South Asian immigrants, are common in mostly black, low-income neighborhoods. But the relationships between these store owners and the communities they serve have often been fraught with racial tension.
[….]
Rami Nashashibi
Rami Nashashibi, director of Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network, says a massive cultural transformation is needed for nonblack Muslim corner store owners to be allies for those they serve.
[….]
Since the police killing, IMAN has partnered with the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, a racial justice education organization, to launch “Corner Store Witnesses,” a new training curriculum aimed at nonblack Muslim business owners.
[….]
Imam Jihad Saafir, who heads Islah LA, an inner-city Muslim community center in South Los Angeles, said stores and restaurants run by Muslim immigrants were often the source of alcohol, cigarettes, drug paraphernalia and unhealthy foods that have taken a toll on locals’ health.
Beyond overpolicing, common concerns with immigrant-owned corner stores include gentrification; exploitative pricing; racist hiring practices; hostile security measures such as bulletproof glass and cages; the sale of alcohol and nicotine products; and the sale of junk food, as well as a lack of fresh produce and other healthy foods.
“In many ways, residents in those neighborhoods perceive those store owners in the same way those Palestinian store owners perceive Israeli settlements in the West Bank,” Nashashibi, who is Palestinian American himself, argued. “What justification are you using to be in that black community?”
Linda Sarsour: We have a long way to go to build relationships with the black community.
But we are marginalized so we can marginalize others!
RNS continues….
Many Arab and South Asian store owners respond to allegations of racism by pointing to their own marginalized identities and their need to protect their income. Many are working-class; some are undocumented.
Activist Linda Sarsour, whose father owned a store in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood for 38 years, urged Muslims not to blame Cup Foods’ owner for Floyd’s death, noting that the store has a positive relationship with locals.
“I understand that we have a long way to go to build transformative relationships between Arab/Asian store owners and local Black communities,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “These communities deserve business owners who are contributors to communities not just takers.”
How can that be? Everyone KNOWS that since both groups are persecuted by white racist Islamophobic Americans they should be working together against their common enemy—us! Right?
And, everyone KNOWS that bringing diversity to impoverished American cities brings strength and “enriches” communities. Right?
One thing that George Floyd’s death has done is shine a spotlight on the tensions between African Americans and especially the Arabs who have moved into ‘their’ neighborhoods (largely thanks to the naive notions the Left peddles about multicultural enrichment). Or is it possible that it isn’t naivety? Maybe creating chaos and discord is the real goal! It surely is for Antifa!
Over the years, writing at RRW,I have come across the issue of poor blacks feeling left out when Arab migrants/refugees are placed in traditional black neighborhoods and just the other day I told you about wishful thinking on the Left that George Floyd would bring the two supposedly maligned groups together.
Now I see at Arab Newsthat there is a lot of work to do to bridge the divide especially as questions arise about Muslim Arabs placing shops that sell liquor and drug paraphernalia in African American neighborhoods, the subject of my post at RRW.
(It is haram for Muslims to drink alcohol, but fine and dandy to sell it!)
By the way there were reports that during the Baltimore riots a few years ago, black thugs directed looting toward immigrant Arab shops. African Americans don’t take kindly to diversity dumping in their neighborhoods it seems.
US riots take severe toll on Arab-American small businesses
CHICAGO: Stores owned by immigrants of Arab and Muslim origin are among the many businesses that were pillaged and destroyed during the protests triggered by the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, while in police custody.
US media has focused almost exclusively on the continued anger over the circumstances of Floyd’s death on May 25, while choosing to ignore an inconvenient truth: the economic setback and mental anguish suffered by hard-working Arab American and Muslim immigrant communities.
Tribalism exists!
Why does the US media ignore the facts surrounding the tension between African Americans and Muslims? Because it goes completely against the meme they are promoting daily—blacks and Muslims are being treated badly by whites and so therefore there cannot be any discord between the supposedly mistreated minorities.
Arab News continues….
Steve and John Salamy saw their liquor store looted and destroyed in recent Chicago riots.
Protesters burned vehicles, smashed windows, defaced buildings and clashed with police as civil unrest erupted in cities across the country. Atlanta, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Denver, Salt Lake City, Nashville and Minneapolis imposed curfews while the governors of Minnesota, Georgia, Ohio, Washington and Kentucky mobilized their states’ National Guards.
Although there are Arab chambers of commerce in many of the cities heavily affected by the rioting and looting, none of the business bodies — except one in Chicago — have been able to collect accurate information on the losses suffered by the community.
Through tears, Ekhlas Salamy described how she and her sons, Steve and John, watched helplessly from across a main street as their store in Chicago was ransacked by looters.
“I am so frustrated by what happened to our store. My husband bought the business in 1988 and it is located in a mixed community of African Americans and Hispanics,” said Salamy, whose family emigrated to the US from the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
It is not fair says Mrs. Salamy!
“We have never had any problems before with the African American community. In fact, five of our employees are black and three others are Hispanic.
“We never treated them badly and never let them feel that they were any different from us. We have always treated them with respect.
[….]
She and her two sons took over the family’s Chicago business, Pete & Jack’s Liquor, at 4156 W Division Street when her husband died in August 2018.
“This is our livelihood. All my family has survived off this business,” Salamy told Arab News.
“The looters just destroyed all our hard work. I have tears in my eyes because we never did any harm to anyone. They stole everything and destroyed the entire store.”
Think it is bad now? Just wait till the Police Departments in major cities are stripped of funding and the power to arrest criminals. Steve and John will have to be hiring their own personal police force.
“The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money.”
(Author Peter Hasson)
Most of you know that, but just in case, the Capital Research Centerposted a nice little update story of where thing stands with the Southern Poverty Law Centerafter it was forced to give the boot to its longtime leader Morris Dees.
The article features Peter Hasson’s new book with the great cover—The Manipulators—about how Big Tech often uses the SPLC to police speech.
Embarrassment About SPLC Should Be Shared by Others (II)
After the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., fired its founder Morris Dees and publicly admitted that he mistreated people—reportedly on the basis of race and sex—we wrote last June about how some embarrassment surrounding that which occurred there should probably be shared by other organizations who relied on the discredited group’s work for longer than they should have. At the time, these groups included GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and the Amalgamated Foundation—which purport to provide information that can be used to evaluate the quality of nonprofits, like SPLC.
Daily Caller News Foundation senior investigative reporter Peter J. Hasson’s new The Manipulators: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives reminds us of yet others who should perhaps share in the embarrassment, as well.
For many years, as Hasson overviews, the high-profile SPLC has liberally used its “hate-group” and “extremist” designations to unfairly label conservative groups and individuals, as it was engaging in questionable financial practices and fundraising tactics. After Dees’ departure, public scrutiny was more widely brought to bear on its behavior.
As part of that scrutiny, more than a few former SPLC employees and journalists from the Montgomery Advertiser reported that SPLC’s longtime tacit acceptance of Dees’ behavior was always something of an open secret.
After the scandal, SPLC retained attorney and onetime Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen, to conduct an investigation into what had been going on there. The work of Tchen—who many believe tried to influence the Cook County (Ill.) State’s Attorney earlier last year to drop 16 felony charges of disorderly conduct against Jussie Smollett for his fraudulent allegation of a racist, anti-gay attack—has not been open. There has been no “Tchen report” (or summary of one) released by SPLC, at least as of this writing.
“The SPLC is a once-respected discrimination watchdog that has long since devolved into a smear-mongering fundraising mill,” according to Hasson, and now often assists Big Tech campaigns to police speech.
“The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money,” he observes. “Ultra-wealthy leftists write massive checks to the SPLC to demonstrate their wokeness because the SPLC is to identity politics what Planned Parenthood is to abortion.” In fact, “SPLC’s fear-mongering is a lucrative operation, and one that’s tax-exempt to boot. The SPLC has more than $400 million in assets, including a cool $90 million stashed in offshore funds”—a number that The Washington Free Beacon reports is now $162 million.
Less than a week ago I told you about how Facebook is blocking sites like VDARE that apparently the woke and oh-so-smart people at Facebook don’t like, and it is no surprise to see Google hard at work doing the same.
Here is Robert Spencer, whose blog Jihad Watchhas been the go-to site for the latest news about the ‘religion of peace’ for going on two decades, finding the site buried by Google.
And, look who is here—Imam-extraordinaire Omar Suleiman!
Daniel Greenfield, the peerless Shillman Fellow and FrontPage writer, tweeted the news on May 7: “Google just erased my Sultan Knish blog and Front Page Mag articles from the first pages of results for my name doubt very much this is accidental.”
I did too, so I checked for myself, and sure enough: a Google search for “Robert Spencer” now does not bring up Jihad Watch, where most of my writing outside of books has been published for the last seventeen years, but it does give you defamatory and distorted attack pieces from the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center*** and the Saudi-funded Bridge Initiative, and nothing that doesn’t portray me and my work in the most unfavorable possible light.
This latest example of the tech giants’ determination to silence all dissenting voices reveals one often overlooked fact: they are desperately afraid.
Google is so afraid of Jihad Watch, in fact, that it is going to great lengths to make you think that the site (which you can find here) doesn’t exist at all.
Several years ago, under pressure from the Texas-based imam Omar Suleiman, Google changed the algorithm for its search results so as to bury anything critical of Islamic jihad violence or Sharia oppression of women. Jihad Watch, which for years had been the first result in a Google search for “jihad” (back when Google searches were based solely on relevance and the popularity of the site), fell off the front page of “jihad” searches.
Now Google has gone even farther to make sure you don’t see Jihad Watch. Just this morning, I was looking for an old Jihad Watch article from a few years ago that I needed for a citation, and I entered an exact phrase from that article into the Google search bar. What came back were two sites where the article had been republished, but no indication that it had ever been at Jihad Watch at all.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel of a totalitarian society, 1984, to which far more people refer than have actually read the book, the dissenter Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth involves erasing from all historical records any mention of people who have been declared “nonpersons.” Foes of the regime aren’t just vilified. Their very existence is erased. Dissent is easy to control if all record of it ever having been enunciated is eradicated, and Google has apparently taken a page from Orwell’s book.
Of course, Jihad Watch is one of the least of the concerns of Big Tech. They’re erasing all manner of people who dissent from the Leftist agenda. Greenfield notes that “Google controls 80% of search. That means it controls what the internet looks like. And it’s continuing to erase conservatives from the internet. I’m just the latest victim. Its censorship and creepy surveillance have reached new heights during the pandemic.”
*** One of the funniest things I ever read from someone who had newly been labeled a hate GROUP by the Southern Poverty Law Center was Daniel Greenfield’s post in 2012when he learned he (with his blog Sultan Knish) had been added to the SPLC’s Hate GROUP list.
HOW I BECAME A HATE GROUP
Here are just a few snips:
When I went to sleep last night, little did I know that while outside sirens competed with car alarms in the symphony that is New York City, I had already been declared a hate group.
Being declared a hate group wasn’t in my plans for the day, but like winning the lottery, it seems to be one of those things that happens when you least expect it. Except that as the little bald man in front of the bodega tells you, you have to play to win, but you don’t even have to buy a ticket to be declared an official hate group.
My first response on finding out that I was now a hate group was to look around to see where everyone else was. A hate group needs the “group” part, and one man and a cat don’t seem to be enough. Even when the cat is a well known bigot who hates mice, birds, car alarms that go off in the middle of the night, the plumber and sudden noises.
Still the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed, “Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield” as one of their “Active Anti-Muslim Hate Groups…”
I suppose I found this so funny because the SPLC has done the same to me (I have a cat) too!
Well they didn’t specifically stand up to Facebook in defense of VDARE, but VDAREis presumably an early causality of Facebook’s speech “Oversight Board” or perhaps is a test run to see how upcoming purges will be received.
If you hadn’t heard about the silencing of VDARE, learn about it here at VDAREitself and make VDAREa regular stop on your daily reading list. I just now googled VDAREand the first item that came up was not its website, but this headline (VDARE | Southern Poverty Law Center) and that is because Google is also (as you are surely well aware) in the silencing business too.
Here is aVDARE storyfrom yesterday you should see about a black sniper killing an 80-year-old couple visiting their son’s grave in a Delaware veterans’ cemetery. Have some fun and see if you can post it at facebook!
Report: Black Male Murders White Couple In Their 80s With Sniper Rifle—Revenge For Ahmaud Arbery?
Now here is what 60 conservative leaders sent to Facebook last Friday:
The conservative Free Speech Alliance, led by Media Research Center founder and President L. Brent Bozell, III, and including more than 60 conservative leaders, among whom are CHQ Managing Editor George Rasley and American Target Advertising President of Corporate Affairs attorney Mark J. Fitzgibbons, yesterday released the following statement about Facebook’s new Oversight Board and efforts to decide what content should be taken down from the site:
While leftist organizations savaged him, we supported CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he talked about making Facebook a marketplace of ideas and spoke forcefully saying the company “must continue to stand for free expression.”
Yet leftist forces within and outside of Facebook have condemned him for this, agitating for the company to become an arbiter of what is, and isn’t truth; and therefore what should and should not be presented on Facebook. Facebook wants the public to believe that its new Oversight Board will help solve the problems “about what content to take down or leave up.”
Conservatives warned from the start that any new oversight mechanism was fraught with danger. Our fears were well founded. This new board will damage Facebook more than it can imagine.
[…..]
It is too early to tell how such this board would rule. [Not really, it looks like VDARE was a test run.–ed] But it is terrifying to imagine how a powerful, leftist group like this might view control conservative speech — speech that defends free enterprise, traditional marriage, religious freedom, the lives of the unborn, free speech and gun rights, to name but a few.
The answer in social media has often been to call such beliefs “hate speech,” the club the left has used to beat their opponents into submission on college campuses and online. And it has been a code word for anti-conservative censors like the Southern Poverty Law Center to shut down speech it doesn’t like.
Go herefor more of the letter and to see who signed it.
Now head on over to VDARE(vdare.com) and see what Facebook and the Southern Poverty Law Center do not want you to see!
After the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., fired its founder Morris Dees and publicly admitted that he mistreated people—reportedly on the basis of race and sex—we wrote last June about how some embarrassment surrounding that which occurred there should probably be shared by other organizations who relied on the discredited group’s work for longer than they should have. At the time, these groups included GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and the Amalgamated Foundation—which purport to provide information that can be used to evaluate the quality of nonprofits, like SPLC.
