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.
So much for the President halting all immigration to the US during the on-going Chinese virus crisis. See yesterday’s post.
Today we have Politico(of all places) describing what is believed to be the direction President Trump’s executive order on immigration might take when it is revealed possibly today.
Trump’s immigration pause falls well short of full ban
On Monday night, President Donald Trump vowed he would suspend immigration into the United States during the coronavirus outbreak.
On Tuesday, he unveiled his plan. It was far short of a full ban. Trump announced that he will sign an executive order blocking most people for 60 days from receiving a permanent residency visa, or green card. But the order will still allow the government to continue processing visas for hundreds of thousands of temporary employees, including farm workers, landscapers and crab pickers — the largest source of immigration.
The order is also expected to carve out additional exemptions for so-called essential employees, including health care workers, and immigrants who come into the United States through immediate family members, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Trump, who will sign the executive order as soon as Wednesday, said the measure will be reassessed in two months.
“It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrants, labor flown in from abroad,” Trump said at the daily White House briefing, nodding to the 22 million Americans who have filed for unemployment in recent weeks. “We must first take care of the American worker, take care of the American worker.”
[….]
The move angered conservatives who were hoping the president would go further. The Trump administration has already paused most routine visa processing and refugee cases during the coronavirus pandemic, meaning the president’s executive order may be redundant for many already-stalled cases. Moreover, a majority of immigrants seeking green cards are already living in the U.S.
“Briefly delaying green cards for people, most of whom are already in the U.S. and working, and ignoring work visas doesn’t help U.S. workers and doesn’t ease pressure on hospitals, “ said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.“Can’t know for sure until there’s actually something official to read, but this looks more like a political gesture than a serious policy move.”
[….]
“To continue most immigration at this time would show a callous disregard for those Americans who are enduring deep economic suffering,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, which supports immigration restrictions.
[….]
Trump’s announcement had his critics decrying the move as a transparent attempt to rile up the president’s base in an election year, while distracting from the ongoing criticism of his coronavirus response.
“[ It is] time we call BS on the “scientific-technological elite.””
(Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review)
Daniel Horowitz is one of an increasing number of conservative commentators who are asking questions about the draconian policies that are crippling America based on models and scary numbers of supposed COVID-19 deaths daily reported by our scientific elite.
The political fallout is going to be massive (that is an understatement) if the general public begins to feel duped by politicians who are not letting a crisis go to waste and thus pushing America to the socialist Left.
I suspect books are being written as we speak about the Birx/Fauci effect on the future of American society and governance.
Horowitz: Dr. Birx: ‘We’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality’
Why would our governing elites be so motivated to overstate the impact of COVID-19 and scare people beyond the unprecedented levels of panic that are already pervasive in this country?
Believe it or not, the coronavirus epidemic does not stop deaths from other causes. While the politicians are shutting down other medical care in this country, they fail to recognize that life and even death go on. Many of us have been concerned that they have been conflating deaths due to coronavirus with deaths of those who have coronavirus but ultimately succumb to other illnesses. In their quest to continue this degree of fascism, plus in the motivation of some hospitals to get more federal relief funds, there is every incentive to code as many deaths as possible as related to COVID-19.
Yesterday, Dr. Deborah Birx finally let the secret out during the daily press conference in response to a reporter’s question. “I think in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality,” said Dr. Birx, who along with Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the face of this push for a national lockdown.
“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem. Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.”
“The intent is if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” concluded Birx.
I just snipped a bit of Horowitz’s hypothesis. Read it all here and see what cardiologists are saying.
It was posted a few days ago, and if you saw the reports last evening about how the projections for worst case scenarios just may not be coming true, you too might be smelling a rat!
This story gave me a laugh (I know it is a serious issue)! However, I can’t help chuckling about the Open Borders Dems who all of a sudden are becoming tribal about their people in their states. Civil liberties be damned!
Not sure how this fits into Frauds and Crooks, but what the heck, I’ll archive it in my ‘Politicians as frauds’ category.
Rhode Island Police to Hunt Down New Yorkers Seeking Refuge
Governor Raimondo: We are going to find you!
Rhode Island police began stopping cars with New York plates Friday. On Saturday, the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of self-quarantine.
“Right now we have a pinpointed risk,” Governor Gina Raimondo said. “That risk is called New York City.”
[….]
Rhode Island has just over 200 [cases of COVID-19 at the time this story was posted—ed], and it has begun an aggressive campaign to keep the virus out and New Yorkers contained, over objections from civil liberties advocates.
This is Judge Judy’s home in tony Newport, RI.
Raimondo, a Democrat, said she had consulted lawyers and said while she couldn’t close the border, she felt confident she could enforce a quarantine.
Many New Yorkers have summer houses in Rhode Island, especially in tony Newport, and the governor said the authorities would be checking there.
“Yesterday I announced and today I reiterated: Anyone coming to Rhode Island in any way from New York must be quarantined,” the governor said. “By order. Will be enforced. Enforceable by law.”
