Tag: antisemitism

Religious wars

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On Thursday, I listened to a few minutes of NPR because I couldn’t find any other radio stations that weren’t worse. The subject was the insane Aussie fascist who perpetrated mass murder at mosques in New Zealand. The segment was an interview with a woman who continually referred to “mosque attacks.” At first I heard her saying “mass attacks.”

But she was implying “mosque attacks” happen in Western democracies quite frequently. “They mean this. They mean that. They demonstrate societal Islamophobia.”

So when I stumbled across an article from the Associated Press:
A look at attacks on houses of worship over last decade

… it seemed like “mosque attacks” are a thing, but in majority Muslim countries. So, I started comparing the number of Islamist attacks on mosques to the attacks on houses of worship overall. Sixteen of the incidents AP listed were attacks on mosques by organized Islamist groups. ISIS, Al-shabaab, etc.. Four were attacks on other religions by organized Islamists. Two were attacks on mosques by white supremacist individuals. One was an attack on a Synagogue by a white supremacist individual. One was an attack on a Synagogue by Islamists. One was an attack on a black church by a white supremacist. One was an attack on a Baptist church by a deranged atheist. One was an attack on a Sikh temple by a white supremacist.

Where the AP incident descriptions below are not completely clear about who committed the crimes, I have linked to complete stories that support my classification.

Green are attacks on any religion that took place in a Western democracy.

77% of all these attacks were committed by Islamists.  70% of those were attacks on other Muslims.  They all were committed in the name of Islamic terrorist organizations.

Attacker-Attacked Incident
Islam-Christian Oct. 31, 2010: Al-Qaida in Iraq militants attack Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church in Baghdad during Sunday night mass, killing 58 people in the deadliest assault targeting Christians since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion there. Al-Qaida in Iraq later became the Islamic State group.
Islam-Islam Dec. 15, 2010: Two suicide bombers from the Sunni extremist group Jundallah blow themselves up near a mosque in southeastern Iran, including six Revolutionary Guard commanders.
Islam-Islam July 16, 2010: Jundallah group kills 27 and injures 270 after it carries out a double suicide bombing against another Shiite mosque in southeastern Iran.
Islam-Christian Oct. 31, 2010: Al-Qaida in Iraq militants attack Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church in Baghdad during Sunday night mass, killing 58 people in the deadliest assault targeting Christians since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion there. Al-Qaida in Iraq later became the Islamic State group.
Islam-Islam Dec. 15, 2010: Two suicide bombers from the Sunni extremist group Jundallah blow themselves up near a mosque in southeastern Iran, including six Revolutionary Guard commanders.
White Supremacist-Sikh Aug. 5, 2012: Six members of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek, are fatally shot by a white supremacist, Wade Michael Page. Page was shot by a responding officer and later killed himself.
Islam-Judaism Nov. 18, 2014: Two Palestinians using axes, knives and a gun kill four Jewish worshippers and an Israeli police officer in an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue.
Islam-Islam Jan. 30, 2015: Suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the Pakistani town of Shikarpur kills 71. Jundullah claims responsibility.
Islam-Islam March 20, 2015: Islamic State suicide bombers attack a pair of mosques in Yemen’s capital, unleashing monstrous blasts that ripped through worshippers and killed 137 people.
White Supremacist-Black Christians June 17, 2015: Nine black worshippers including a pastor are killed by Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, after he prayed with them in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof was convicted of federal hate-crime and obstruction-of-religion charges and sentenced to death.
Islam-Islam Sept. 24, 2015: A suicide bomber strikes a mosque in Yemen’s rebel-held capital, killing 25 worshippers during prayers for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
Islam-Islam Nov. 12, 2016: Suicide bomber from Islamic State group kills over 50 at the shrine of Shah Noorani, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
Islam-Christian Dec. 11, 2016: Suicide bomber strikes inside a Cairo chapel adjacent to St. Mark’s Cathedral, seat of Egypt’s ancient Coptic Orthodox Church. The Islamic State group claimed the attack, which killed at least 25 people.
White Supremacist-Islam Jan. 29, 2017: A gunman killed six men during evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City. Alexandre Bissonnette pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and attempted murder charges and was sentenced to serve 40 years in prison before being eligible for parole.
Islam-Islam Feb. 16, 2017: Suicide bomber detonates his explosives vest among the devotees at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Pakistan’s Sindh province, killing 98.
Islam-Islam April 9, 2017: Twin suicide bombings rock churches in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria and Tanta, killing at least 45 people. The attack was claimed by the Islamic State group.
Islam-Islam June 15, 2017: A suicide bomber kills four people at a Shiite mosque in Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul. Among the dead is a leader of Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazaras, who are mostly Shiite Muslims.
Islam-Islam Aug. 1, 2017: A suicide bomber storms into the largest Shiite mosque in Afghanistan’s western Herat province, opening fire on worshippers before blowing himself up, killing at least 90 people. Hundreds more were wounded in the attack, which happened during evening prayers.
Islam-Islam Aug. 25, 2017: Militants storm a packed Shiite mosque in Kabul during Friday prayers. The attack ends with at least 28 worshippers killed and 50 wounded, many of them children. Two of the assailants blow themselves up and another two are shot dead by Afghan security forces.
Islam-Islam Sept. 29, 2017: A suicide bomber blows himself up outside a Shiite mosque in Kabul, killing five. The attack took place as worshippers were leaving the mosque after Friday prayers.
Islam-Islam Oct. 20, 2017: The Islamic State group claims a suicide bomber attack, killing 31 and wounding 29 people, at a Shiite mosque in Kabul.
Deranged atheist-Christian Nov. 5, 2017: Dressed in black tactical-style gear and armed with an assault weapon, 26-year-old Devin Kelley opened fire at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26 people and wounding about 20 others.
Islam-Islam Nov. 24, 2017: Militants kill 311 worshippers in a mosque attack in north Sinai, the deadliest such terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history.
Islam-Islam Dec. 17, 2017: Islamic State attack on a church in Pakistani city of Quetta kills 16 people.
Islam-Islam Aug. 3, 2018: Suicide bombers disguised in burqa robes attack a Shiite mosque in eastern Afghanistan, killing 27 people.
White Supremacist-Judaism Oct. 27, 2018: A gunman believed to have spewed anti-Semitic slurs and rhetoric on social media entered Tree of Life Congregation synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing 11 and wounding six, including four police officers.
Islam-Christian Jan. 27, 2019: Two suicide attackers detonate two bombs during a Mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral on the largely Muslim island of Jolo in the southern Philippines, killing 23 and wounding about 100 others. Three days later, an attacker hurls a grenade in a mosque in nearby Zamboanga city, killing two religious teachers.
White Supremacist-Islam March 15, 2019: At least 40 people are killed in an attack at mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

This is AP’s list, and they acknowledge elsewhere that it is incomplete:

A U.N. report released in November documented 51 attacks on places of worship in Afghanistan since January 2016 that killed more than 270 civilians and wounded hundreds more.

(Update Mar 18: And here’s another one they missed: The 2014 firebombing of Bergisch Synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany, by three Palestinian immigrants. German courts declared this to be anti-Israel, and not to be antisemitic. Sounds like Ilhan Omar.)

It’s highly likely that U.N. list skews to Islam-Islam atrocities, but calculating the increased Islam-Islam attack percentage isn’t the point of this post.

We can condemn the New Zealand attack without blaming it on Western democracies, or Tweets by Chelsea Clinton castigating Ilhan Omar for anti-semitism. One might note there are no listed attacks on mosques in Israel.

For one thing, like most of the group-organized attacks listed above, those 51 did originate from the culture. The white supremacist attacks all appear to have been single individuals, outside the culture. For another thing, all those individuals have been caught and have/will face(d) punishment under Western rules of law. This is not true of the Islamist attacks on Muslims.  Finally, there is no question that the Islamist attacks were all motivated by religion.

If, as the SJWs contend, all cultures are equal, then all cultures should be equally condemned when such atrocities take place. That they are not tells us something about these Western critics of Western values. We find mass murder abhorrent, and an affront to our values, no matter who the victims. Islamists do not.

Defending Omar

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Jim Clyburn’s defense: Ilhan Omar’s experience is ‘more personal’ than Jews who had parents in the Holocaust

As Democrats line up to defend Rep. Ilhan Omar and come up with her excuses for her anti-Semitism, House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., tried to minimize her comments by arguing that she escaped violence in Somalia, so her experience was “more personal” than Jews who merely had parents survive the Holocaust.

If he had bothered to look for similar experience that did not result in anti-Semitism, he might have mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali; like Ilhan Omar a Somali refugee. And whose experience with discrimination, death threats, and, yes, even Twitter attacks, is at least as personal as Ms. Omar’s.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Preaching of Islam and the Left’s Alliance with Islamists (2018, 22:59, the following starts 10 minutes in)


“Anti-semitism is back because of Islam.”

Hirsi Ali says she had never heard of the Holocaust until she arrived in the Netherlands in 1992. She was 24.

Ms. Omar arrived in the United States in 1995 at the age of 14. I wonder if someone will ask Ms. Omar when she first heard of the Holocaust. Even given the state of the American public school system, one would think she’s heard of it by now.

Ilhan Omar represents the district where over 60 Somalis have joined, or have been arrested for attempting to join, ISIS and al-Shabaab. Even NPR took notice of the phenomenon as long ago as 2009. The Somali-Minneapolis Terrorist Axis.

Ilhan Omar is an apologist for at least some of those Minnesota terrorist aspirants. One of whom said “I was not going there to pass out medical kits or food. I was going strictly to fight and kill on behalf of the Islamic State.” Of that man she wrote to the sentencing judge,

“A long-term prison sentence for one who chose violence to combat direct marginalization is a statement that our justice system misunderstands the guilty. A restorative approach to justice assesses the lure of criminality and addresses it.”

He got 30 years. Maybe as a result of that appalling appeal to forgive choosing violence, (mostly against other Muslims).  Or maybe because of Omar’s contention that our justice system misunderstands guilt unless it supports her cause.  You can’t doubt she is asking for different treatment for Somali terrorists who live in the US.

Go inside ‘Little Mogadishu,’ the Somali capital of America for a view of how well assimilation is working.  See also, Somali Gangs Battle in Minneapolis; Somalis Demand That Cops Do Something

Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes the observation that the majority of the followers of Islam conflate politics and law with religion. Freedom of, or from, religion is problematic for those Muslims who insist on Sharia as State policy.

Here’s a thoughtful look at why Islamic politics/law and religion are congruent from Shadi Hamid, contributing editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution:

Is Islam ‘Exceptional’?

How events from 14 centuries ago still shape the religion’s relationship to politics, and what that means for the future of the Middle East

[W]here theologians like Martin Luther famously fashioned a dialectic between faith and good works, these two things are inextricably tied together in Islam. Faith is often expressed through the observance of the law. The failure to follow Islamic law is a reflection of the believer’s lack of faith and unwillingness to submit to God. Salvation is impossible without law. This has implications for the nature of the Islamic state. If following the sharia—for example, refraining from alcohol and adultery, observing the fast, and praying five times a day—is a precondition for salvation, then political leaders and clerics alike have a role in encouraging the good and forbidding evil, a role they played, to various degrees, for the entirety of the pre-modern period…

Muslims are, of course, not bound to Islam’s founding moment, but neither can they fully escape it. The prophet Muhammad was a theologian, a politician, a warrior, a preacher, and a merchant, all at once. Importantly, he was also the builder of a new state. It is difficult to know when he was acting in one role rather than the other (which has led to endless debates over whether some of the prophet’s actions in certain domains were, in fact, prophetic). Some religious thinkers—including Sudan’s Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and, later, his student Abdullahi an-Na’im—have tried to separate these different prophetic legacies, arguing that the Quran contains two messages. The first message, based on the verses revealed while the prophet was establishing a new political community in Medina, includes particulars of Islamic law that may have been appropriate for seventh-century Arabia but are not applicable outside that context. The second message of Islam, revealed in Mecca before the prophet’s emigration to Medina, encompasses the eternal principles of Islam, which are meant to be updated according to the demands of time and place…

One could go further and advocate not only for a progressive interpretation of Islamic law but also for its basic irrelevance to public life—that the separation of religion from politics forms the foundation of any pluralistic post-Enlightenment liberal society.

Here’s some discussion of sharia.  This video is not in focus, but it is still worth listening to.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Responds to Questions at Ohio University (2011, 13:43)


The response to the guy with a head full of intersectional cultural relativism at 9:22 is priceless.

Democrats should listen to that.

2020 Democrats normalize anti-Semitism by defending Ilhan Omar

Democrats seeking the party’s 2020 presidential nomination are starting to come out in defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar, and in the process, they are normalizing anti-Semitism.

Leading Democratic candidates Sens. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren have all come out defending Omar and pointing fingers at her critics, despite a series of statements she has made targeting American Jews…

[Bernie Sanders] “We must develop an evenhanded Middle East policy which brings Israelis and Palestinians together for a lasting peace. What I fear is going on in the House now is an effort to target Congresswoman Omar as a way of stifling that debate.”

[Kamala] Harris… “There is a difference between criticism of policy or political leaders, and anti-Semitism” and also arguing, “I am concerned that the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk.”

[Elizabeth] Warren… “Branding criticism of Israel as automatically anti-Semitic has a chilling effect on our public discourse and makes it harder to achieve a peaceful solution between Israelis and Palestinians.”

The debate has not been stifled, it has been shifted in order to redefine long standing anti-Semitic tropes as political criticisms. Which are considered religious tenents.

More worth reading:
Victor Davis Hanson
The New, New Anti-Semitism

2020 Democrats normalize anti-Semitism by defending Ilhan Omar

Burdensome

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Nancy Pelosi defending Ilhan Omar:

“I think she has a different experience in the use of words, and doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that [she] didn’t realize, but nonetheless that we had to address,” Pelosi said.

Omar most recently came under fire after she accused Jewish Americans of having “allegiance to a foreign power.”

Pelosi made a similar statement on Thursday, when she told reporters at a press conference that she believes Omar didn’t understand “the full weight” of how other people understood her words.

“When you cross that threshold into Congress, your words weigh much more than when you’re shouting at somebody outside, and I feel confident that her words were not based on any anti-Semitic attitude, but that she didn’t have a full appreciation of how they landed on other people, where these words have a history and cultural impact that may have been unknown to her,” Pelosi said.

Nancy’s excuse for Omar is certainly absurd. It’s also condescending, imperialist, and culturally supremacist. Poor little Muslim girl doesn’t have the background to understand her own words. She’s only been in the United States for 24 years.

I guess that’s the white woman’s burden, Pelosi style. I can’t understand why all the woke Twitter users haven’t declared a fatwa on the Speaker.

Feminist diversity

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If Louis Farrakhan, black nationalist and fanatic leader of the religious group Nation of Islam, had received a smidgen of the attention Milo Yiannopoulos had from our Maim Scream Media™, then Tamika Mallory, Co-President of “The Women’s March” would be begging on the street instead of racially deflecting her antisemitism on The View.

If there is toxic masculinity anywhere at all, it lives rent free in Farrakhan’s head. Tamika Mallory doesn’t mind.