Earlier this week, Margaret Huang, the (new!) president of the Southern Poverty Law Centerannounced the giveaway to NON PARTISAN groups promoting voter registration for people of color!
SPLC to invest up to $30 million on nonpartisan voter outreach
Image from 2017 campaign for Amnesty International, Margaret Huang in center.
I am thrilled to share with you that we’re launching the SPLC’s Vote Your Voice initiative to help support voter registration and mobilization efforts in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
We’ll be investing up to $30 million from our endowment in nonpartisan, nonprofit voter outreach organizations in these states to increase voter registration and participation among people of color.
You know what would be so funny! Black and brown conservative groups in those states should apply for the grants and see if they are truly grants for nonpartisan voter registration! Opportunity to sue the SPLC if rejected???
Here is more of what Huang had to say:
As you know, our nation has a long history of denying voting rights to its citizens, especially Black and brown people, women and young people. While we have seen gains in voting rights and access in recent decades, since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, there has been a resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression that is targeting communities of color “with almost surgical precision.”
These tactics include purging voter rolls, blocking rights restoration efforts, eliminating polling places, scaling back early voting, instituting onerous voter ID laws, limiting access to voting by mail and other measures. As I’m sure you are aware, last Tuesday’s primary election in Georgia — a state that has been a hotbed of voter suppression efforts — was an operational disaster. It’s a deeply troubling preview of what the Nov. 3 election could look like.
This initiative is especially important right now, as millions of people across the country feel the urgency to make their voices heard this fall after the continued silence from our leaders on the many Black people being killed by police. Voting won’t solve this problem the day after the election, but in order to begin dismantling white supremacy, we need to ensure that every voter of color is able to cast their ballot without interference or hardship.
The work ahead of us will not be easy. The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to have a disproportionate impact on democratic participation for communities of color who have been harmed most deeply by the health and economic crisis and who will encounter greater barriers to voter participation given the new risks of voting in person on Election Day.
Throughout the five states where this initiative is focused, numerous organizations have been tirelessly working to promote voter registration and participation to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard and everyone’s vote is counted. Many of these groups struggle to secure the resources they need to conduct outreach due to a once-in-a-generation economic recession. They are also facing new barriers to reaching voters in an era of social distancing where face-to-face canvassing has been curtailed.
That’s where we want to help.
In addition to supporting voter registration and mobilization activities among voters of color, we’ll be seeking to particularly aid those who face the greatest barriers to participation, including returning citizens, young people, individuals who have been purged from voter rolls, and infrequent voters who are not usually contacted by outreach groups.
We’re also aiming to help groups build capacity in between federal election cycles — too much of this work is transactional where groups are only supported ahead of presidential and congressional elections. We plan to help sustain these organizations during local election cycles by providing multi-year grants.
“I’ll be honest, some of the worst micro and macro forms of racism I’ve experienced as a black Muslim have not been at the hands of white people but white Arabs/desis.”
(Remaz Khalaleyal, Sudanese-American activist)
Who knew!
Here is a further discussion about how the death of George Floyd is producing much soul-searching within the American Muslim community about the fact that Arab Muslims are often racists.
I told you about the issue herelast week, but was surprised this morning to see an opinion piece published at none other than the New York Timesexposing the hard truth.
Why Did Cup Foods Call the Cops on George Floyd?
Nuisance abatement laws force stores in low-income neighborhoods to operate almost as an arm of law enforcement.
Don’t be deterred by the subheading, it is interesting, but almost seems to me to be a way to turn off readers to the juicy part of this piece by Moustafa Bayoumi.
Ever since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers on May 25 after a grocery store reported that he had used a counterfeit $20 there, Muslim Americans have been asking why the store’s workers called the cops in the first place.
Palestinian immigrant-owned Cup Foods where it all began!
Like many grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods, Cup Foods is owned and largely staffed by an immigrant Muslim family, and the police call has prompted some to see racist motives.
Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, the Palestinian-American owner of Cup Foods, the grocery store, was away when a 17-year-old worker made the call.
A statement from the store referred to a “state policy that requires stores” to notify the police about counterfeit bills and Mr. Abumayyaleh described the practice as “standard protocol” for businesses. He vowed that his store will no longer do so “until the police stop killing innocent people.”
For many small-business owners in low-income neighborhoods, the decision to not call the cops is not so easy. The problem isn’t that you will subject yourself to more crime without the police. It’s that the authorities often force the business owners to operate almost as an arm of the police. If they refuse, they risk being shut down by the city through nuisance abatement laws.
After a discussion about the stores that were once owned by Jews:
Today, many of these stores in major cities around the country are run by Arab-American and South-Asian-American merchants, but the justifiable resentments remain the same. [Resentments about how the owners go home to better neighborhoods at night.—ed]
Okay, enough of the nuisance laws etc. Here, fifteen paragraphs in, comes the admission that Arabs and South Asian Muslims are racist.
The facts of third-party policing do not take away from the need for conversations about anti-black racism within Muslim American communities. Although Muslim Americans routinely have to deal with the bigotry of Islamophobia, many have been in denial for far too long about the anti-black racism among the believers.
Remaz Khalaleyal
About a third of American Muslims are African-American and the history of Islam in the United States is deeply connected to the African-American story. Yet research by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which studies American Muslims, shows that African-American Muslims still often feel unwelcome in South Asian and Arab Muslim circles.
In a powerful Instagram post, Remaz Khalaleyal, a Sudanese-American activist, addressed the owner of Cup Foods. “I’ll be honest, some of the worst micro and macro forms of racism I’ve experienced as a black Muslim have not been at the hands of white people but white Arabs/desis,” she wrote. (“Desi” refers to people from South Asia.)
She is right. Nonblack Muslims have a lot of anti-racist work to do.
And even if our current system of policing didn’t use crime and crime prevention as a way to pit stores and customers against one another, nonblack Muslims would still find ways to buy into anti-blackness. Racism isn’t limited to store owners, after all.
The death of George Floyd ought to show nonblack Muslim Americans two important things. As Americans, we must strive for better public safety for everyone. And as Muslims, we must find better versions of ourselves.
Read it all here. How great is that to know that white ethnic Europeans are off the hook for a change.
For several days I’ve been meaning to give you an update on the pair of Brooklyn lawyers, both new Americans, who were caught tossing an incendiary device into a police cruiser in a recent Antifa/Black Lives Matter riot in New York.
There is a lengthy discussion about the fools at the New York Timeswhere they are identified as being from immigrant families. He is Jamaican and Rahman was born in Pakistan according to the NYT. I wonder how many of our tax dollars went into educating this pair.
The New York Post published a video of Ms. Rahman extolling the virtues of violent protests.***
If it weren’t so serious, it’s funny to watch her try to keep her keffiyeh on her face. Hiding her identity or guarding against the Chinese virus?
Here is Joshua Klein at Breitbarttelling us more about where Fordham-educated attorney Urooj Rahman, 31, got her terror training.
Molotov-throwing Lawyer in Brooklyn Was Intern for Soros-funded Anti-Israel Group
One of the two lawyers accused of trying to torch an NYPD cruiser during protests that engulfed Brooklyn over the weekend spent a summer in the West Bank as a fellow and intern with radical Palestinian activist organizations.
Two attorneys, Colinford Mattis, 32, and Urooj Rahman, 31, reportedly were caught attempting to distribute homemade molotov cocktail devices to protesters who were clashing with police near the 88th Precinct in Fort .
Rahman attempted to distribute Molotov cocktails to the witness and others so that those individuals could likewise use the incendiary devices in furtherance of more destruction and violence,” a witness was quoted as saying to authorities in a detention memo from federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York.
Rahman was captured in a photo obtained by the New York Daily News wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh on her face and holding a makeshift Molotov cocktail. The keffiyeh, a chequered black and white scarf, has become a symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
Rahman is a graduate from Fordham University law school. In 2014, she did a summer fellowship internship program at the Israel based Mada Al-Carmel’s Arab Center for Applied Social Research in a partnership program with Palestine Works.
The Mada Al-Carmel center is heavily financed by George Soros through his Open Society Foundations.
[….]
Rahman called for an “overhaul of policing in America” to end “gentrification’s violent effects on communities of colors,” echoing the central demand of some of the protest movement over George Floyd’s death.
Appearing before Judge Margo Brodie, Salmah Rizvi, a former high-level Obama intel official reportedly posted $250,000 bail to secure the release of Rahman.
Rahman reportedly had to return to federal custody after the U.S. Court of Appeals decided to reverse the decision by the District Court to allow her to post bail.
When she first posted bail, Rahman’s friend, Rizvi, told the court, “I earn $255,000 a year.” “Urooj Rahman is my best friend and I am an associate at the law firm Ropes & Gray in Washington, D.C.”
According to a report from Law360, the judge noted the strong evidence against Rahman, who was additionally accused of distributing incendiary devices to other rioters, but agreed to grant her bail due to the “willingness of family and friends to sign on as suretors.”
The Washington Free Beaconreported that Rizvi “served in intelligence posts in the Defense and State Departments during the Obama administration, where her high-value work would often inform the President’s Daily Briefs.”
To learn more about Rizvi, Rahman and the Soros connection, continue reading here.
On Friday the feds upped the charges against three bomb-throwers including Rahman. She and the two others face sentences of life in prison.
Bail was earlier revoked for Rahman and Mattis. See here.
Endnote: If one went behind the scenes to see the Leftists training their journalists, I expect the number one instruction is for them to tell the storiesof the lives of individuals—poor immigrants, poor abused African Americans, poor____ (fill in the blank)—to play on the emotions of the reader or viewer.
Why aren’t we doing more of that—telling the sad stories of those abused and injured by the Leftists and their policies?
***Just as I was wrapping up, the link to the video at the NY POST was not working, but here is the entire clip at Youtube:
The alleged sicko is Akinola Akinlapa, but try as I may I could find no reference to the 18-year-old’s immigration status.
The name is a common one in—drum roll please—Nigeria!
The arrest happened a week ago, and thanks to a reader for spotting it, or I would have missed it.
There are a lot of local news reports on the Rhode Island case, but I am not seeing anything mentioned in the national media—it doesn’t advance their political agenda, of course.
Because most of the local news reports simply rely on the Justice Department’s press release, I figured the best thing for me was to post it in full here:
High School Student Charged with Coercion and Sexual Exploitation of a Minor
PROVIDENCE – An 18-year-old Providence high school student has been charged in U.S. District Court in Providence with allegedly coercing a 10-year-old Utah girl to disrobe and engage in sexually explicit conduct in front of a live online camera.
New American?
It is alleged in court documents that Akinola Akinlapa, with the online user name of Melissa#7384, messaged and provided a 10-year-old girl with a link to what he told her was an online children’s gaming platform. After that link and a second link allegedly sent to the girl by Akinlapa opened to blank pages, a video call was initiated between the two.
It is alleged that Akinlapa told the young girl that the links she had clicked transmitted a virus to her computer and that her personal information had been taken from the computer.
Akinlapa instructed the 10-year-old to undress in front of the camera if she failed to do so her personal information would be posted to the Internet.
Note to prospective pervs—law enforcement can find your IP address.
It is alleged in court documents that when the 10-year-old undressed and stood in front of the camera, Akinlapa instructed the girl to perform sexually explicit acts. The girl pretended to comply, cut off the communications, and notified her mother who in turn contacted the West Valley City, Utah Police Department.
An investigation by the West Valley City Police Department and FBI agents in Salt Lake City, Utah, and in Providence identified an IP address at Akinlapa’s Providence residence as being the source of communications with the 10-year-old Utah girl.
On June 2, 2020, members of the Providence FBI Violent Crimes Against Children Task Force, to include law enforcement officers and agents from the FBI and Providence and Warwick Police Departments, executed a federal court-authorized search of computers and smart phones at Akinlapa’s residence.
A brief forensic review of the contents of a smart phone allegedly belonging to Akinlapa was found to contain images of at least two pre-pubescent females that were also allegedly discovered by investigators to be contained in an online account belonging to Akinlapa.
According to information presented to the court, investigators have determined that Akinlapa allegedly communicated with more than a dozen pre-pubescent girls in much the same way it is alleged that he communicated with the 10-year-old Utah girl.
Akinlapa was arrested on June 3, 2020, on a federal criminal complaint charging him with sexual exploitation of a child, possession of visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, coercion and enticement of a minor, and possession of child pornography, announced United States Attorney Aaron L. Weisman and Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Boston Division Joseph R. Bonavolonta.
A federal criminal complaint is merely an accusation. A defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
There should be a federal law that the immigration status (citizenship status) of anyone arrested by the feds should be noted in statements to the media. In the meantime we will assume ‘new American’ status for the alleged sexual deviant Akinlapa.
Usually these Justice Department press releases mention the length of possible sentences if convicted. This one doesn’t. But for child porn it could mean a lot of years behind bars since Akinlapa is 18 years old—possibly a lot of years US taxpayers will be paying for his upkeep.
And, unless some local reporter is interested enough to dig deeper (unlikely in Rhode Island), I’m thinking this is the end of the story.
“These are good-paying jobs, these are federal employees with good health insurance, good salaries and good retirement benefits. This is not like losing a low wage job.”
(Gabriel Pedreira, regional union organizer for the American Federation of Government Employees)
That is if Congress doesn’t move swiftly to bail out the agency that processes applications for citizenship among other things.
The Dems must be going nuts because this is just the season when their push to get more Democrat voters through the citizenship process in time for the November election is usually in full swing.
The story is from the Vermont Digger, a publication I highly recommend to readers interested in what is happening in the people’s republic of Vermont. (Hat tip: Brenda)
Vermont USCIS employees face furlough due to budget shortfall
Thousands of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees across the country, including some based in Vermont, may be furloughed next month due to a shortfall in the federal agency’s budget.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a “dramatic” decrease in revenue the agency relies on, generated by applications and petitions related to citizenship, according to a USCIS spokesperson. In response, 13,400 USCIS employees nationwide may be furloughed as a cost-saving measure.
Vermont is home to one of five USCIS service centers that are responsible for processing millions of citizenship applications, according to a 2017 report to Congress. The agency employees people primarily in St. Albans and Essex.
During the 2016 fiscal year of the five service centers, Vermont’s had both the highest allowed employee spots of 1,021 and the highest number of working staff of 959 employees.
Union organizer Pedreira
Gabriel Pedreira, a regional organizer for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents USCIS employees said the situation for Vermont is particularly dire.
[….]
According to the USCIS spokesperson, the shortfall is due to a projected drop of 61% in citizenship applications and petitions through the end of the 2020 fiscal year.
[….]
Cross-border travel into the United States has slowed drastically during the Covid-19 crisis, as travel restrictions have been imposed — including the partial closure of the U.S.-Canada border.
[….]
Pedreira said in a time of economic decline in the United States, the loss of pay for USCIS employees affects more than just those workers — it affects the entire economy.
“These are good-paying jobs, these are federal employees with good health insurance, good salaries and good retirement benefits. This is not like losing a low wage job,” Pedreira said. “So these are employees who because they make a good salary contribute to the local economy.”
Who cares about the rest of you low wage nonessential workers hurt by the Chinese Virus—these are good jobs!
Continue reading hereand see that the old curmudgeon Senator Patrick Leahy is on the case.
