NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

On the Moral and Legal Status of Islam in the United States By Jason D. Hill

Posted By on June 14th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/on_the_moral_and_legal_status_of_islam_in_the_united_states.html

Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, cosmopolitanism and race theory

Last week, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban and Canada’s leading intellectual, Jordan Peterson, met to lambast illegal immigration and political correctness which they believe make sensible public discussions impossible. Peterson also made a noteworthy claim worth thinking about. He said that Islam is not compatible with democracy and that this issue has been barred from public discussion.

I believe Peterson is correct. Islam is not only incompatible with democracy. It is inimical to America’s fundamental values and principles. More important, it is in violation of the United States Constitution. It is time for the United States to take a pre-emptive strike against a moral and political ideology whose stated goal is the abolition of our political system.

When we examine the application of Sharia law in the West, most particularly in Europe where it is gaining ascendancy, people will come to see a few fundamental tenets about Islam. Its foundation and governing principle is that Sharia law regulates the personal and public behavior of all Muslims and non-Muslims under its governance.  When we think of Islam mainly as a religion, we cannot disambiguate it from Sharia law which, when examined, allows us to see that the legal, cultural and political aspects of the religion supersede the purely private religious aspects of it. World Islam, above all, has become a political ideology.

Sharia law is a weaponized political tool supervening the public sphere that violates every sacred tenet of American life.

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US Army War College Surrenders to CAIR By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on June 14th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/us_army_war_college_surrenders_to_cair.html

The U.S. Army War College (USAWC) has just surrendered to the demands of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an “unindicted co-conspirator,” to quote the U.S. Dept. of Justice, in the largest terror funding case in American history.

The June 19, 2019 planned lecture on my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks was canceled due to a CAIR-induced hysteria that focused on presenting me — a native Arabic speaker of Egyptian/Middle Eastern descent — as a “racist” and “white nationalist” who is out to incite American soldiers to murder Muslims.

Although the USAWC claims that the event has been “postponed” — and that CAIR’s smear campaign has nothing to do with its decision — what really happened, along with the troubling lessons learned along the way, follow:

On January 4, 2019, I received an email, portions of which follow:

Mr. Ibrahim: On behalf of the Director and Staff of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC), I am honored to invite you to speak as part of the USAHEC’s 2019 Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series… [W]e would like you to speak about your new book, “Sword and Scimitar.”  The Perspectives series attracts a wide audience including the U.S. Army War College students, faculty, and staff, ROTC cadets, Soldiers from regional military bases, university students and faculty, and the general public.

“On a personal note,” the author of the email added, “I think your new book, and a lecture based on it, will resound very well with the primary audience of our lecture programs — the students and faculty of the U.S. Army War College.”

After I accepted the invitation, my USAWC contact reiterated: “I am excited to book you, I think your topic will be perfect for my audience.”

Aside from a few more exchanges on dates and logistics, that was that — until CAIR got wind of the event.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard? A dean at the university tells graduates all success stems from inherited privilege and chance. By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on June 14th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-deserves-to-go-to-harvard-11560464201

It’s college graduation season, when high-profile commencement speakers are scrutinized as barometers of academia’s ideological leanings. A speech by Harvard College’s dean this year suggests you learn more when a school bureaucrat articulates the worldview that shapes campus culture than when a celebrity jets in, collects an honorarium and leaves.

Rakesh Khurana opened his Class Day speech to graduating seniors with a summary of the changes at Harvard over the previous four years. He omitted two in which he played a central role: the removal of law professor Ronald Sullivan from oversight of an undergraduate dorm and the effort to banish single-sex social clubs. Mr. Sullivan’s legal representation of rape defendant Harvey Weinstein had put the “well-being” of Harvard’s students at risk, Mr. Khurana announced earlier this year, and the single-sex clubs perpetuated “spaces that are rife with power imbalances.”

Power imbalances were a big theme of Mr. Khurana’s remarks. He proposed to “interrogate” what it means to deserve something, whether being at Harvard or being successful in life. The “capitalist ethos,” according to Mr. Khurana, tells us that “we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions.” Mr. Khurana—who is also a professor of business and of sociology—claimed to be mystified by that belief. In Monopoly, the board game Mr. Khurana called synonymous with the capitalist system, it’s the roll of the dice that determines “whether we land on Park Place or land in jail.” Monopoly is like real life, he concluded, which is often determined by factors beyond our control—above all by “those privileges sociologists call ‘structural inequities.’ ”

In Mr. Khurana’s view, it’s time to stop using words like “deserve” and “deserving,” because they don’t account for the “systemic inequities” that play such large roles in our accomplishments. Harvard, he announced, has made progress in “acknowledging and naming the privilege” that makes the language of “deserving” so “insidious.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Hong Kong Matters China is swallowing a showcase of freedom. Will Trump speak up?

Posted By on June 14th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-hong-kong-matters-11560466365

The young demonstrators in Hong Kong this week have done the world a favor. In calling attention to their plight, they are educating the rest of us in the nature of President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party rule in Beijing. Donald Trump in particular should be listening—and speaking up.

The demonstrators—and the million Hong Kongers who marched peacefully Sunday—object specifically to a pending law that would allow extradition from the territory to the Mainland. The people know this will put anyone who criticizes China in jeopardy of being sent to the Mainland for almost certain conviction and punishment. Hong Kong’s legacy of British law will still control—except in cases where China decides otherwise.

The official disclaimers from Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam that China has no such intentions are meaningless. She was appointed by Beijing and takes her orders accordingly. She is insisting on moving ahead with the law despite the mass protests because China has demanded it. Her job, and perhaps her own future freedom, would be jeopardized if she dared to resist.

The new law is itself a violation of China’s promise to Hong Kong that it could continue to control its legal system for 50 years after its handover from the British in 1997. As these columns wrote in 1984 after Margaret Thatcher struck her deal with Deng Xiaoping, “the essence of the [joint] declaration is that five million largely free people will soon have their futures determined by a totalitarian government not known for tolerance or stability.” We urged Britain to amend its Nationality Act to admit to England all Hong Kongers who wanted to leave.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gaza rocket strikes Israeli synagogue and school in Sderot

Posted By on June 14th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/gaza-rocket-hits-israeli-school-no-injuries/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&u

A rocket from Gaza struck a yeshiva in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, a frequent target of attacks. There were no injuries. 

Palestinian terrorists fired a rocket from Gaza into southern Israel late Thursday, striking a Chabad building housing a synagogue and school but causing no injuries, Israeli authorities said.

The rockets – fired from the town of Beit Hanoun, according to Channel 13 – set the stage for a likely Israeli reprisal and raised the possibility of a new round of fighting, weeks after a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli police said the rocket struck a building in the Israeli border town of Sderot, a frequent target of rocket fire.

The ceasefire, reached in early May, has begun to unravel in recent days. Overnight on Wednesday, Israeli fighter jets struck an underground terrorist infrastructure belonging to Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack was in response to rocket fire from Gaza earlier that night, the IDF reported.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Remedial Lesson in Climate Education by Greg Williams

Posted By on June 13th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/06/a-remedial-les

I am a mathematics teacher in a well-to-do school.  Next year will be my fiftieth year in the profession.  I am well known around the school as someone who hasn’t fallen for the CO2 swindle, although I have no problem with the notion that the various climates around the earth are changing in various ways.  Being a mathematics teacher, the notion the mainstream media runs, that the earth has “a climate”, appals me.  How can we can “average” the multitude of climates around the earth and come up with “the climate”? It does not compute.

I often come across students and teachers who express concern over climate change and the need for humanity to do something about it.  I always begin such conversations with the question, “What’s the problem?”  They always, eventually, get down to the fact that it’s carbon “pollution” and how we must stop burning fossil fuels and embrace renewables in order to save the planet. Again, its the MSM spin. My next question is how much CO2 is in the atmosphere?  I have yet to come across anyone at school, when asked that question, who knows that it’s a bit above 400 ppm.  After informing them of this particular fact, I ask if they know how low the CO2 concentration can fall  before life on earth ceases.  Again, I have yet to come across anyone at school who knows that once it drops to about 180 ppm, we are in trouble.

My third question after that is this: if 400 ppm is too much and 180 ppm too little, how much CO2 is just right?  Again, no one has been able to answer this, as no one on the planet knows the answer.  I then try to present students (adults have usually stopped listening by that stage) with some perspective on 400 ppm. I ask them to think of a million molecules of atmosphere as a million one-dollar coins placed adjacent to each other in a square.  The square would be 25 metres by 25 metres, about the size of a school’s small gymnasium. The 400 ppm of CO2, if represented by those dollar coins, would make up a square 50 cm by 50 cm. What’s more, since humanity is responsible for only about three per cent of the CO2 in the atmosphere, the human contribution to those one million coins would be 12 coins.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tory leadership vote result: Boris Johnson surges ahead in first round with 114 votes

Posted By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/06/13/tory-leadership-race-news-vote-conservative-election-brexit/

Rivals are hoping the favourite will implode

Call it the Devon Loch strategy. With Boris Johnson enjoying a seemingly unassailable lead, having won 114 votes in the first round of ballots in the leadership contest to decide our next Prime Minister, his remaining rivals have only one hope: that he will fall, in spectacular fashion, at the final hurdle.

Devon Loch was the racehorse, owned by the Queen Mother, who took a commanding lead in the 1957 Grand National, only to inexplicably tumble to the ground 40 yards from the winning post.

His Blonde Ambition tour now formally underway following –  off the back of a low-key launch designed to show he can do sensible, the former foreign secretary also appears to have a clear run.

Not only does he have twice as many declared backers among MPs as any contestant, he is wildly popular among the membership and a new poll shows that were he to be Prime Minister, the Conservatives would be on course for a thumping 140-seat majority.

So the latest strategy among his rivals is to seek to become the candidate still there in the final round, when the two contestants chosen by Conservative MPs are put forward to the membership, and then cross fingers, legs and toes that Mr Johnson will mess up.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hong Kong protesters attack Britain’s response to extradition outcry as pressure from Beijing grows Sophia Yan,

Posted By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/13/hong-kong-protesters-attack-britains-response-erosion-rights/

Hong Kong demonstrators are calling on the UK to voice stronger opposition against the controversial extradition that triggered mass protests and rare scenes of violence.

On the day after hundreds of thousands took to the streets to block parliament from debating the proposed laws, some protesters turned their ire to the city’s former colonial rulers.

“Is Britain going to honour its promise to the Hong Kong people that our way of life will not be threatened after they handed us over to the Chinese?” Jessica Yeung, 50, a university professor on a hunger strike by the city’s main government building, told The Telegraph.

“Britain told us to trust them, so we trusted them,” she said, as rows of riot police watched a few metres away. But the UK “has let us down terribly”.

Protesters surrounded the Hong Kong parliament on Wednesday demanding city leaders scrap a plan to send individuals to face trial in mainland China’s murky legal system, where the ruling Communist Party controls the courts.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Ingraham Angle Promotes Qanta Ahmed’s And Asra Nomani’s Two-Tiered Takiya On Islamic Persecution Of Christians Andrew Bostom

Posted By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/ingraham-angle-promotes

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday June 10, 2019 hosted two so-called “reformist” Muslim women, Qanta Ahmed and Asra Nomani for a discussion of Christian persecution under Islam, which is a shameful, murderous pandemic. Neither woman could deal honestly with the Islamic, Sharia-based roots of this persecution, although certainly Ahmed was much more egregious in her dissimulation/ takiya. Hard data make plain “The Concordance of Sharia ‘Thirst’, Rampant Christian Persecution, and Jew-Hatred in Muslim Societies”. This juxtaposition reveals a striking concordance between Christian persecution by Muslims, the excess prevalence of extreme Antisemitic sentiments within Muslim societies, and Muslim attitudes favoring strict application of the Sharia.

Qanta Ahmed made these egregious pronouncements:

“It [Christian persecution] is also anathema to Islam that reveres Jesus [NO; he’s a Muslim prophet who destroys Christianity], that sees the Gospel as a holy book of God [No; deliberately corrupted version of the Koran]…Islam says everyone has a right to a free will, a right to reject Islam, to reject the truth of God [NO; per Koran 4:89, 2:217; 9:5; 9;29 & canonical hadith, “apostates” are to be killed; jihad to be waged to submit Jews & Christians to limited practice under Sharia jurisdiction if they survive]…So these Muslims are acting beyond the bounds”

She then goes on to extol Qatar for its alleged Catholic ecumenism, and the Kurds—chronic, mass murdering persecutors of Christians, past as prologue.

Asra Nomani was better, but her takiya can be almost as corrosive. She claimed mendaciously that Koran 1:7 is only hateful because of a “Wahhabi interpretation”. This verse in fact has a classical-cum-modern overwhelming (90%) interpretation across 13-centuries, Sunni and Shiite alike, I just carefully reviewed, and it curses the Jews for having incurred Allah’s anger [linking this verse to Koran 5:60, Jews as apes and pigs], and the Christians for having gone astray [linking Koran 1:7 to Koran 5:77]

Here is Asra Nomani, verbatim:

“Why is the cross under attack? It is because the Koran that I have here in the first chapter, the last sentence that we have [she means the Fatiha, Koran 1:6 to 1:7] , we say that we have to stay on the straight path [i.e., Islam] but [what] the Saudi interpretation and how governments like Qatar and Turkey have added is we have to stay on the straight path and not depart from it like the Jews and Christians have done They say that thinking of Jesus as a son of God is like polytheism and that is ultimately worse than murder they say. So that is why you have attacks on the symbol”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Hiding behind ‘Islamophobia’ By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/hiding_behind_islamophobia.html

Jihadists are masters at putting people on the defensive and the term “Islamophobia” is a potent weapon constantly used by them.  Essentially, it shuts down any comment about Islam that is not favorable.  Initially it is the back door to censorship.  Ultimately, it is to establish the Islamic takeover of the West because it obfuscates factual evidence of many of the heinous aspects of sharia law and societies under Islamic rule.

It was “[a]t the end of the 1970s, [when] Iranian fundamentalists invented the term ‘Islamophobia [.]’ The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate.” The term, which is “worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world.”

The lack of specific definition, of course, leaves the door wide open to multiple interpretations, all to the benefit of the jihadists who would use the word to suit their vile purposes.  Thus, “the term ‘Islamophobia’ denies the reality of an Islamic offensive in Europe all the better to justify it [and] it attacks secularism by equating it with fundamentalism.” It silences all those Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practice their faith freely [.]”

Repeatedly, freedom lovers have demonstrated how the term Islamophobia has served its purpose spectacularly well.  It allows Islamic apologists to “silence any criticism of Islam.”  The term has infiltrated Middle East and Islamic Studies and anyone who would monitor mosques for threats to the public order will be denounced. Consequently “child marriages, forced marriages, female seclusion, honor killings, gang rapes of infidel women, or the enslavement and sale of females for sex slavery” cannot be publicized for fear of being accused of racism.