RUTHFULLY YOURS

On July 4, 1900, Samuel Hoffman and his father, Moshe, walked across the gangplank of a ferryboat that unceremoniously dumped them, along with a large group of fellow immigrants, at a dock on 14th Street in Manhattan. Independence Day for these newcomers meant liberation from czarist Russia.

New Yorkers were used to seeing confused, freshly arrived immigrants walking through lower Manhattan, but these two stood out. It was a searing-hot summer day and both father and son wore winter overcoats and boots.
“Our clothing and awkward bundles on our backs, as we walked along 14th Street, drew everyone’s attention to us,” Samuel Hoffman wrote at age 83 in an account for his family. “I was 15 years old, bewildered and almost overcome by the alien and unfamiliar scenes that stretched and throbbed all around father and me.”

Like most immigrants, they couldn’t speak the language. Coming from a small village in Russia, they had never seen anything even remotely like New York City. They could have arrived from another planet. All they had to guide them was a piece of paper with the address of a distant relative who lived on the Lower East Side.

After generations of extreme poverty and religious persecution, Moshe and his more savvy wife, Yetta, had decided to sell their house and borrow enough money to pay for two tickets to America. The plan was that father and son would then earn enough money in the New World to bring over the rest of the family. Constant hunger was a hallmark of Samuel’s childhood in Russia. His daily diet had consisted of one piece of black bread and a potato dipped in herring sauce for flavor. Occasionally there were onions and radishes and a glass of milk for the children. It had been that way for generations and there was little chance it would ever change.

Breaking with tradition, Yetta chose to send Samuel instead of her eldest son. Although Samuel looked even younger than 15, Yetta believed that he would fare better than his older brother. She knew her son.

There was no government assistance for the giant wave of immigrants to America at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, like all the immigrants that had come before, they would fend for themselves. They also helped each other. The distant relative on the Lower East Side took in Samuel and Moshe, even though, with three children and two boarders in only three rooms, that was a challenge. Another distant cousin, with a larger home in Brooklyn, soon took them in until they could afford a room of their own.

After a series of jobs that brought in more money, and going to school at night to learn English, Samuel started his own business. He bought nine sewing machines on credit and hired employees. Many trades were closed to Jews, but the garment industry seemed to belong to them.

The ill-fated prosecution of six Baltimore police officers for the accidental death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 was the spawn of the Black Lives Matter movement. The preposterously unjustified charges against the officers grew out of the BLM conceit that cops are racist murderers. On May 1, 2015, state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby invoked Al Sharpton’s extortionist chant of “No Justice, No Peace” as a motivation for her charging decisions, after rioters had destroyed the livelihoods of dozens of Baltimore’s workers and small businessmen.

It is therefore fitting that Mosby’s vendetta is collapsing all around her, based as it is on an ideology composed of demonstrable lies about law enforcement. Judge Barry Williams handed Mosby her third and most devastating defeat on June 23, acquitting Officer Caesar Goodson of all seven counts against him, including the ludicrous second-degree murder charge.

Gray, a 25-year-old drug dealer with a long criminal record, had been arrested for possession of an illegal knife on April 1, 2015, after running from a bike patrol officer who had made eye contact with him. During transport in a police van driven by Officer Goodson, Gray suffered a spinal cord injury that led to his death a week later. The exact timing and cause of that injury are still in dispute.

A hostile crowd was forming at the site of Gray’s arrest, so the arresting officers put Gray in Goodson’s van and instructed Goodson to drive to another location where they could complete the paperwork without interference. Goodson would make five more stops thereafter; he never spoke to Gray. Gray’s injury occurred at some still unknown point during that journey. At stop two, the three arresting officers removed Gray from the wagon, placed leg shackles and flexicuffs on him, documented the arrest, put him back in the wagon on his stomach, and left. Gray had been going limp and passively resisting the officers during that second stop; once they left him in the van he began screaming, kicking, and throwing himself around so violently that outside observers saw the van rocking. At stop three, Goodson went to the back of the van for less than 11 seconds, and then called for assistance. Judge Williams found that there was not enough time at stop three for Goodson to actually check and assess Gray. Officer William Porter answered Goodson’s call for assistance at stop four. Porter asked Gray, who was on the floor on his stomach as at stop two, how he was doing; Gray answered: “Help.” Porter asked him what he wanted help with, and Gray responded: “Help me up,” according to Porter’s testimony. Porter helped Gray get on the bench inside the van. Porter asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray answered yes. Porter did not believe that Gray was in need of medical treatment, but told Goodson after stop four that he did not think that Gray would be admitted to Central Booking, and that for purely administrative reasons they should take him to the hospital instead. Goodson did not call for medical assistance but proceeded to stop five to pick up another arrestee, Donta Allen. At stop five, Porter saw Gray kneeling on the floor and leaning on the bench. Porter again asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray again answered yes. Gray seemed lethargic but was otherwise breathing normally and showed no other signs of distress. By the final, sixth stop, Gray was unconscious, not breathing, and in visible need of urgent medical care. Goodson called for help and took him to the hospital.

Immediately after the massacre in Orlando, the gay press was full of articles that adamantly refused to admit the reality of Islamic homophobia.

The same organisations that obsess over which bakeries in the U.S. and Europe will or will not bake wedding cakes for gay couples, and rightly have no trouble berating homophobic Christian pastors, seemed wholly uninterested in the motivations of the Pulse nightclub killer. Instead, these papers and websites were filled with articles, petitions and joint letters, enjoining people not to notice the Islamic element.

These gay activists have a vision of the world where only “patriarchal” white males of Jewish or Christian heritage can cause the world’s problems.

A small minority of very vocal “far-left” activists are now using their LGBT status as a smokescreen not to advance gay rights but to advance “far-left” politics.

The recent shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida have already begun to be submerged by the news cycle. Shock at the worst mass-shooting in American history — which saw the death of forty-nine people and the wounding of even more, fifty-three — has been further dulled by various distractions in the debate. This time, these have included a debate on America’s gun laws and speculation around the sexuality of the gunman.

All of these matters have been fought backwards and forwards and should certainly be components of any argument. But the part of the debate that has been the most important and — as usual — the most covered over, has been the religious motivation of the gunman. This, and the response it has entailed, is worth dwelling on: it reveals a concerted effort not to learn from events.

Just as it is inevitable that those obsessed with gun legislation should wish to make the debate about gun legislation, so it is inevitable that those with any other over-riding political agenda should wish to pin responsibility for the shooting on whatever is their particular obsession. It seems inevitable, for instance, that “Black Lives Matter” would blame the shooting on “the four threats of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism.”

The recent sexual assault of a five-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the reaction by public officials and the media amounting to a cover-up dramatically illustrate, yet again, how the West battles against the harsh reality of unlimited Islamic immigration. The incident occurred June 2 at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls where prosecutors allege a 5-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. Two juvenile suspects, boys, ages 14 and 10, were detained, charged and released. A third, a 7-year-old boy involved in the incident, was not charged. The boys are from Iraqi and Sudanese families, but it’s unclear if they are refugees or how long they’ve been in the community.

Public officials released few details about the incident, stating that the suspects are juveniles about whom information is routinely withheld. This only caused outcry from locals who were incensed by the incident itself, failure of officials to provide information, lack of media attention and release of the boys from a juvenile detention center within six days of their arrest. Outraged residents reignited calls to close the Twin Falls refugee center, a drive that failed a year earlier.

Further outrage occurred when the Justice Department stepped in, allegedly to address the concerns of distressed residents. Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson threatened the community and media with federal prosecution if they “spread false information or inflammatory statements about the perpetrators.” Although Olson later explained that her comments were made because Twin Falls City Council members had received threats of violence against them, her statements convinced many critics that she was attempting to silence the community and not merely quell outrage or assuage the concerns of locals that the incident will be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

The crisis in Twin Falls is understandable given its history of refugee immigration. The small city has only about 47,000 residents, yet is has became a beachhead for Muslim immigration as a result of the work of a refugee center there managed by the College of Southern Idaho. The CSI refugee center dates back to the 1980s and is one of four agencies in Idaho working with refugees over the years.

Together they have brought in refugees from countries spanning the globe, including Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, the Congo, Bhutan and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some put the total number of refugees in the state at 20,000 since 1970. Since September 2001 alone, the U.S. State Department has sent more than 11,000 refugees to Idaho, more than 96% Muslim, from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Syria.

The FBI is trying to control what the public learns about the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Orlando Sentinel reports:

A June 20 letter from the FBI, attached to the City [of] Orlando’s lawsuit over withholding 911 calls and other records from 25 media outlets including the Orlando Sentinel, was also sent to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office with instructions pertaining to how they should respond to records requests.

The letter requests that agencies deny inquiries and directs departments to “immediately notify the FBI of any requests your agency received” so “the FBI can seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels, as necessary.”

The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office sent the Sentinel the letter Tuesday night in response to a request for documents, video and audio recordings from the early morning hours of June 12.

A spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office said the FBI sent them the letter Monday night and “instructed us to forward it to anyone requesting records.”

Seminole County is to the north and east of Orange County, which includes Orlando. On Twitter, Sentinel reporter Gal Tziperman Lotan posted the full letter, signed by Tampa-based Special Agent Paul Wysopal. “He refused comment Wednesday,” according to the Sentinel report.

The FBI’s position here is not without logic. The investigation of a terrorist attack is primarily a federal responsibility, so one might expect decisions related to the case, including about public disclosure of information, would be made centrally. The Sentinel notes that the lawsuit—which seeks a declaratory judgment as to what documents should be released—was moved from Orange County Circuit Court to federal court after the city named the U.S. Justice Department as a defendant.

But one is inclined to view the FBI’s actions with suspicion, in light of last week’s hamhanded nondisclosure. As we noted, the bureau released a transcript of one of the attacker’s calls to 911 with his declarations of fealty to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, censored. (He made other calls, whose content has yet to be made public.)

After enduring several hours of ridicule, the FBI released the transcript. It was surely no coincidence that the nondisclosure was consistent with the Obama administration’s agenda, both political (playing down terrorism during an election year) and ideological (denying that Islamic terrorism is Islamic).

Good ol’ Barack Obama. So deeply do he and his administration love America, that they felt secure enough in their own patriotism to appoint an America-hating radical to the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism (SCVE). After all, they undoubtedly reasoned, what possible harm could such an individual do in that kind of a setting? Perhaps you’ve heard of her—a young woman named Laila Alawa, born to Syrian parents who immigrated to the United States when the girl was ten. Soon after she became a U.S. citizen in April 2015, Ms. Alawa wrote: “I will always be Syrian. I will always be from Syria. I will always be of Syria.”

Ain’t that nice?

Ms. Alawa has long regarded the United States as a nation that oppresses and abuses Muslims, as she explained in a July 2014 piece which she wrote for The Guardian. Therein, Alawa says that ever since her arrival in America, she has “learned to view” law-enforcement officials and “my new government” with “a certain level of suspicion”—particularly after 9/11, when “stories of warrantless deportations, faith-based workplace discrimination (and termination), and arrests that resulted in unending detention were common.” Citing the “constant surveillance, government stings and wannabe informants” to which she believes Muslims in the U.S. are being subjected, Alawa laments that “my long-held suspicions have been confirmed—the knowledge that my faith makes me suspicious in the eyes of the government to which I’ve pledged my allegiance…. We know that we’re often discriminated against by our government and our fellow Americans.”

This young woman has a very bright future in the Democratic Party if she wants it. Heck, she already sounds downright Hillary-esque, and she’s only 25!

Alawa regularly disseminates views like these in her work as an opinion writer for The Guardian, Salon, Glamour, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and The Islamic Monthly. Further, she hosts The Exposé, a weekly podcast “tackling tough topics with snark and wit.”

In addition, this multi-talented woman is also a self-described “online activis[t]” whose mission is “to elevate the voices of those who are often not heard.” Her Twitter posts are rife with allegations of — (what else?) — American racism and “Islamophobia.” Some examples: