RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the body count at the hand of Islamic extremists continues to rise in America, shouldn’t the president be trying to come up with a way to defend Judeo-Christian types, who cling to guns and the Bible, from Islamic jihadi types who cling to machetes and the Quran?

Guess not, because for his first visit to a U.S. mosque, Obama chose a congregation where a Sudanese native and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Adam el-Sheikh, was chief imam for almost twenty years.

Why would a U.S. president even give credence to a congregation once led by a man who also lent a hand in founding the Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood-established organization interested in advancing sharia law?

Does Obama not care that in his spare time, the current executive director of the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Islamic legal scholars, also helped found the notorious Dar Al-Hijrah mosque, led by the late al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki? Or that in 2004, while still serving as imam of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, el-Sheikh discussed Palestinian suicide bombers with the Washington Post?

Obama’s mosque visit demonstrates tacit acceptance of a form of gender apartheid

To Muslim women’s rights activists fighting for equal access to mosques as part of a broader campaign for reform, President Obama’s visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore represents a step backwards.

This past weekend, dozens of girls and boys as young as about 8 years old ran up the stairwell to the main entrance of the musallah, or main prayer hall, of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama visits Wednesday in his first presidential visit to a U.S. mosque. As the children rounded the corner, a stern mosque Sunday school teacher stood before them, shouting, “Girls, inside the gym! Boys in the musallah.”

The girls, shrouded in headscarves that, in some cases, draped half their bodies, slipped into a stark gymnasium and found seats on bare red carpet pieces laid out in a corner. They faced a tall industrial cement block wall, in the direction of the qibla, facing Mecca, a basketball hoop above them. Before them a long narrow window poured a small dash of sunlight into the dark gym.

On the other side of the wall, the boys clamored excitedly into the majestic musallah, their feet padded by thick, decorated carpet, the sunlight flooding into the room through spectacular windows engraved with the 99 names of Allah, or God, in Islam. Ornate Korans and Islamic books filled shelves that lined the front walls.

As President and Michelle Obama argued decades ago in the context of the U.S. civil rights movement, separate is indeed unequal. To Muslim women’s rights activists fighting for equal access to mosques as part of a broader campaign for reform — from equal education for women and girls to freedom from so-called “honor killings” — the president’s visit to a mosque that practices such blatant inequity represents a step backwards. While it may be meant to convey a message of religious inclusiveness to American Muslims, the visit demonstrates tacit acceptance of a form of discrimination that amounts to gender apartheid. For that reason, we will be standing outside the mosque on Johnnycake Road, as close as the Secret Service allows, to protest the separate and unequal standards inside and advocate for equal rights.

FROM MIDEAST OUTPOST FEBRUARY 2016

Editor’s note: This prescient article was written in 2004, long before the current Muslim invasion which is overwhelming Europe and, thanks to Obama’s policies, will have a major impact here. While Steinlight believed American Jewish organizations were waking up to the dangers of Muslim immigration, this has turned out to be wildly over-optimistic. This is an edited version of a much longer essay—well worth reading in its entirely—at www.cis.org/articles/2004/steinlight2.html

Dr. Stephen M. Steinlight is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. For more than six years he was the Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.

Among the articles of faith in the waning culture of secular liberalism that has served as an ersatz religion for many mainstream American Jews, the most vulnerable tenet is belief in “generous legal immigration,” the euphemism for open-borders immigration in the lexicon of American-Jewish public affairs agencies. This is not to accuse them of crude hypocrisy and double-talk so much as engaging in intellectual and moral trimming, self-deception, and denial.

Promulgating self-deception isn’t merely bad ethics; it’s untenable as a matter of policy: it conflicts with the interests, security and values of American Jewry. Survey research, plus mountains of anecdotal evidence, reveals a profound change in attitude among American Jews. Opinion polls in the three years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 show a plurality favoring lowered immigration, 70 percent the introduction of a secure national identity card, and 55 percent believing Muslims are the most anti-Semitic group in the United States. It may not require another domestic terrorist enormity for respondents to discern simple cause-and-effect relationships; more ambitious efforts to persuade might suffice.

My experience at the grassroots suggests Jews know little about the history of their own immigration, immigration policy, the scale of immigration, or the engines that drive it. Frequently, all that’s required to effect attitudinal change is apprising them. When I began my efforts, the Jewish media spoke of Jewish attitudes in favor of open-borders immigration as “monolithic;” now it’s commonplace to speak of “a raging debate.” If this could be accomplished essentially by one person, what might a concerted, well-funded effort achieve? Among the community’s organizational leadership, enthusiasm for this dangerous anachronism is a mile wide and an inch deep.

“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

— Article I, Section 1, U.S. Constitution

The federal government is broken. And while there is plenty of blame to go around, only Congress can fix it.

We don’t mean this as an indictment of any one leader or party, because the dysfunction in Washington today has accreted over decades, under Houses, Senates, and presidents of every partisan combination, as well as the many different justices of the Supreme Court.

To be sure, not every misguided, dysfunctional federal policy is a direct act of Congress. But that points toward the root problem.

The stability and moral legitimacy of America’s governing institutions depend on a representative, transparent, and accountable Congress to make its laws. For years, however, Congress has delegated too much of its legislative authority to the executive branch, skirting the thankless work and ruthless accountability that Article 1 demands and taking up a new position as backseat drivers of the republic.

So today, Americans’ laws are increasingly written by people other than their representatives in the House and Senate, and via processes specifically designed to exclude public scrutiny and input. This arrangement benefits well-connected insiders who thrive in less-accountable modes of policymaking, but it does so at the expense of the American people — for whose freedom our system of separated powers was devised in the first place.

A strange debate over policing is currently occurring in many large cities. On one side are defenders of “broken windows” policing—cracking down on “little things” like public urination, aggressive panhandling, graffiti, sleeping in doorways and multiple similar offenses which will ultimately reduce more serious offenses. Specifically, a would-be armed robber feels free to commit his crime when he sees a neighborhood rife with vandalism, garbage on the street etc. Moreover, arresting those who don’t pay their bus or subway fares or otherwise commit minor crimes helps apprehend miscreants wanted for more serious offenses.

Nevertheless, crime reduction successes aside, there is growing pressure to roll back broken windows, especially in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In some instances the call is for less aggressive policing—cops should just ignore sleeping drunks in doorways and reduce “stop and frisk.” In New York City, however, the anti-broken windows sentiment focuses on the laws themselves. The police currently ignore those possessing 25 grams or less of marijuana. And further reductions are in the works as the City Council debates downgrading several “quality of life” laws, notably public urination, excessive noise and littering, into civil, not criminal offenses and with reduced penalties.

One argument against aggressive enforcement is that it over-burdens the courts while multiplying potentially troubling resident/police encounters. But more pressing is that “nuisance” law enforcement disproportionally penalizes blacks and Hispanics. After all, few rich whites deal pot in public parks or jump subway turnstiles. In a sense, enforcing broken windows policing is part of a larger effort to equalize an allegedly racially unfair judicial system, for example, reducing the stiff penalties for crack cocaine (favored by African Americans) versus lighter punishment for the powdered cocaine used by whites.

Why would anybody prefer a disorderly environment that breeds more serious criminal behavior? Who wants to stroll through a park filled with small-time drug dealers, snoozing drunks and confrontational beggars?

Let me suggest an awkward, almost unspeakable answer to this question: “quality of life” standards differ across American society and an insufferable public nuisance for some is tolerable for others. Arguing about broken windows is part of our ongoing culture war debate. In particular, critics of broken windows insist that the policy, as currently applied, rests on white middle-class values and they are correct. One only has to observe life in cities populated by large numbers of underclass African Americans, e.g., Detroit, Newark, and East St. Louis among others. Here there is no clamor for broken windows policing and it almost seems that resident want to live in an environment filled with low-level crime, graffiti, open drug dealing and all the rest targeted by broken windows policing. Conversely, enforcing broken windows is irrelevant in upscale largely white communities like Scarsdale NY.

He is part of the election of 2014 that put the GOP in control of the Senate….RSK
Tom Cotton currently represents Arkansas in the United States Senate. He is a 6th generation Arkansan who was born and raised on his family’s cattle farm in Yell County. He graduated from Dardanelle High School before going to Harvard and Harvard Law School.

The tragic attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred during Tom’s final year of law school, and he began to reconsider his future plans. After a clerkship with the U.S. Court of Appeals and a short time in a private law practice, Tom joined the United States Army as an Infantry Officer where he spent nearly 5 years on active duty.

Tom completed combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served with the 101st Airborne and a Provincial Reconstruction Team. Between his two combat tours he served as a platoon leader with the Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery, the unit responsible for military honors funerals. Tom’s military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Infantry Badge and Ranger Tab.

Prior to his election to the Senate, Tom worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co. and served one term in the House of Representatives.