Defending Omar

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

The database

Donald Trump is taking flak for proposing a “Muslim database.” In fact, this was proposed by a reporter, Trump never said it. Trump’s mistake is that he didn’t address the idea. As if the content of a reporter’s question is his responsibility.

What he did say, however, is worse:

Well, we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy.

The larger point that seems to have gone missing is that there already is a database of Muslims… and tea partiers and ACLU supporters and college protesters and gun owners and Bernie Sanders contributors and… well, what ever filters the NSA wishes to apply to the bulk data they’re collecting.

They already know where you’ve been, if an email had a keyword they’re looking for, your age, your race, your charitable contributions, where you were born, what you’ve purchased, what you read, what you eat and drink, the state of your health and who you’ve called and when. Do you really think they can’t already pretty precisely figure out your religion? A bit of information, moreover, some of you may have already directly declared on some government form or other.

Ben Carson and Muslim Presidents

The Muslim Islamophobes Who Agree With Ben Carson

One of these religions is not like the others.

Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.

-Omar Ahmad, founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations

It’s ironic that Progressives who reference Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” to bolster their case supporting abortion should consider Ben Carson’s rejection of sharia discriminatory.

The Constitution’s Article Six prohibits a religious test as a qualification for any public office, but that same document contains a First Amendment forbidding the federal government from establishing a national religion. An Islamic president would, by definition, either be an apostate (i.e., a lapsed Muslim according to main-stream Islamic theologians) or refuse to enforce the entire Bill of Rights.

Appealing to the Constitution when you deny its primacy in American law is not merely hypocritical, it’s taqiyya for the dhimmi.

Speech impediments

Bosch Fawstin’s winning cartoon

The First Amendment is a staple topic of this blog. I highly recommend ‘reading the whole thing’ for all the following:

“Stay Quiet and You’ll Be Okay”
-Mark Steyn

The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline “Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas”, while the Associated Press went with “Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths”. The media “narrative” of the last week is that some Zionist temptress was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted it to reveal her Mohammed thong – oops, my apologies, her Prophet Mohammed thong (PBUH) – and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.

It’ll be a long time before you see “Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack” or “AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim”. The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end – although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists’ reaction to Charlie Hebdo, that the “narrative” wouldn’t change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue…

“Stay quiet and you’ll be okay:” Those were Mohammed Atta’s words to his passengers on 9/11. And they’re what all the nice respectable types are telling us now.

The First — and a Half — Amendment
-Victor Davis Hanson

If a Christian cake decorator does not wish to use his skills to celebrate gay marriage — an innovation that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed until very recently — on a wedding cake, then he is rendered a homophobe who must be punished for not using his artistic talents in the correct way.Note that we are not talking about nondiscrimination concerning fundamental civil rights such as voting, finding housing, using public facilities, or purchasing standard merchandise. Meanwhile, are we really prepared to force gay bakers to decorate Christian wedding cakes with slogans that they find offensive or homophobic? Or to insist that an Orthodox Jewish baker must prepare a cake for a Palestinian wedding featuring a map of the Middle East without Israel? Or to require a black-owned catering company to cook ribs for a KKK group? Instead, radical gays demand the exclusive right to force an artist — and a cake decorator is an artist of sorts — to express himself in ways that they deem correct.

Without free speech, the United States becomes just another two-bit society of sycophants, opportunists, and toadies who warp expression for their own careerist and political agendas. How odd that we of the 21st century lack the vision and courage of our 18th-century Founders, who warned us of exactly what we are now becoming.

How Liberals Ruined College
-Kirsten Powers

The belief that free speech rights don’t include the right to speak offensively is now firmly entrenched on campuses and enforced by repressive speech or harassment codes. Campus censors don’t generally riot in response to presumptively offensive speech, but they do steal newspapers containing articles they don’t like, vandalize displays they find offensive, and disrupt speeches they’d rather not hear. They insist that hate speech isn’t free speech and that people who indulge in it should be punished. No one should be surprised when a professor at an elite university calls for the arrest of ‘Sam Bacile’ [who made the YouTube video The Innocence of Muslims] while simultaneously claiming to value the First Amendment…”On today’s campuses, left-leaning administrators, professors, and students are working overtime in their campaign of silencing dissent, and their unofficial tactics of ostracizing, smearing, and humiliation are highly effective. But what is even more chilling—and more far reaching—is the official power they abuse to ensure the silencing of views they don’t like. They’ve invented a labyrinth of anti-free speech tools that include “speech codes,” “free speech zones,” censorship, investigations by campus “diversity and tolerance offices,” and denial of due process. They craft “anti-harassment policies” and “anti-violence policies” that are speech codes in disguise.

Sadly, it hardly ends there. These excerpts touch only three of the more egregious offenders. Other enemies of the First Amendment are left unmentioned. For example, radical feminists, CAGW ‘settled science’ zombies and the IRS.

The Orwell Project

From Mark Steyn, a must read on Free Speech: The Sound of Silence

If you don’t believe in free speech for those you hate, you don’t believe in free speech at all…

[R]ight now the leftie sexual identity groups are happy to make common cause with the Islamocrazies because they’re both about shutting people up…

[I]f 300 years of free speech can be rolled back in the interest of “enhancing public safety”, why not property rights, due process, freedom of association, freedom of religion or even (gasp!) sexual liberty?

Of course, we’re already there. Property rights are violated daily by TSA strip-searchers, and by EPA regulators: Due process is already disappearing on American college campuses, and your local police routinely seize property from those who have committed no crime: “Forced association” is a key element of Obamacare, and free association has been declared verboten by the IRS: Religious freedom is suffering verbal blitzkrieg from our president who claims murder of identified religious groups – in the name of Allah – is “random:” Sexual liberty is being redefined as “affirmative consent” by the same twisted ideologues who enabled and protect the Rotherham child-rapists in the name of “community cohesion.”

You can identify the statists easily. They’re the ones trying to make words mean exactly the opposite of what they actually mean: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” -George Orwell, 1984

 

Can’t we all just get along?

Sometimes all of us but CAIR can.

Extreme leftwing Bill Maher and rightwing Rep. Allen West agree on the seriousness of some Marines urinating on enemy bodies:

Maher, “If they were real Taliban, if they were people who burn down girls’ schools you know, and do honor rapes, threw acid in people’s faces, I’m not that upset about pissing on them, dead or alive.”

West, “The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.”

At least we didn’t waterboard the remains.

Moderate Islam

Nancy Pelosi wants the 70 percent plus of Americans who oppose the building of a Mosque at ground zero investigated. I think I can save Congress some money on that with a brief review of comments from the main proponents of the mosque: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Kahn.  Here’s why there is opposition:

Imam Rauf;

“The Muslim world has felt for a long time besieged by the West, by Western culture, Western faith traditions, Western atheism from the Soviet Union…”

The Soviet Union is a Western culture? Who knew? Perhaps we should take with a grain of salt Imam Rauf’s conflation of Sharia with the Constitution.

He also tells us:

“Um, we tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims…”

Really? Who was in Kosovo – protecting Muslims? And, guess what. Al-Qaeda has more Muslim blood on its hands than anybody except perhaps Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeni.

Imam Rauf’s wife tells us the 13 story mosque – named the Cordoba Center, to be opened on September 11th at ground zero – is all about outreach and healing. She should fire her PR firm. 

When challenged by protests from those to whom she is presumably outreaching – over 70 percent of Americans (whom she says are Republicans) – this is her healing gesture:

“This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism, that’s what we feel right now,” Khan said. “It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia; it’s hate of Muslims. And we are deeply concerned.”

…[The project] has to go ahead. There is too much at stake.”

Daisy, it’s not hate of Muslims. It’s about your lack of respect and consummate disingenuity.

Update: 10:12PM
Imam Rauf and the ‘One State Solution’ for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

If the official policy of the United States is that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “two states living side-by-side in peace,” how can the State Department be using, for diplomatic missions to Arab states, an emissary [Rauf] who doesn’t believe Hamas is a terrorist organization and who favors a one-state solution in which the Jewish state is disappeared?

Yes, indeed, outreach and healing.