RUTHFULLY YOURS

An Abrahamic family: Imam’s Cordoba House highly supported by Chautauqua Faith leaders

Mark Opreaon

Eighth Century. Córdoba, Spain: At the time, the country was under Islamic rule, and cities like Córdoba absorbed the language, beliefs and religion of the Islamic people. Córdoba, now a World Heritage Site, was unique in the sense that there was unification between the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam — a notion of “shared worship” that, as evidenced in contemporary media, has increasingly diminished.

Despite these tensions, Feisal Abdul Rauf, an American Sufi imam and author, has held fast to this concept of Abrahamic harmony and brought it to the United States, where he translated it into a multi-faith, multi-national organization called the Cordoba Initiative.

It’s a program, Rauf said, with the aim to “bring harmony between America and the world of Islam,” while focusing on the aspect of religious tension.

The imam believes that much can be accomplished by building Muslim-American community centers around the world — that is, in the form of what he calls a “Cordoba House.”

“The purpose of the Cordoba House is to … have an impact — or a presence, actually — on how people think about you and [how] people want to engage with you,” Rauf said.

It is place where, Rauf said, “people — not just Muslims — can sing together, eat together, pray together,” one that welcomes all members of the Abrahamic family of religions.

What better place to start than Chautauqua Institution?

There was a failed secret US mission earlier this summer to rescue American hostages in Syria.

Senior administration officials revealed on Wednesday, Aug. 20, that a Special Operations team had attempted to rescue several American hostages held in Syria earlier this summer, including the now-deceased journalist James Foley, but that the mission ended in failure, according to a New York Times release.

The revelation was made a day after a video was made public by the Islamic State terrorists in which one of their operatives beheaded one of the American hostages, James Foley.

The statement described the mission as a “complicated operation,” which was authorized by President Obama.

American intelligence agencies believed the hostages were being held in an area in Syria, but when several dozen special ops commandos were dropped at the location, the hostages were not there.

Know your enemy. To know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS.

ISIS is not a new phenomenon.

Wahhabi armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson.

That same year the Marine Corps saw action against the Barbary Pirates and West Point opened, but even Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn chiming via Ouija board would have trouble blaming the Wahhabi assault on the Iraqi city of Kerbala in 1802 on the United States or an oil pipeline.

Forget the media portrayals of ISIS as a new extreme group that even the newly moderate Al Qaeda thinks is over the top, its armies are doing the same things that Wahhabi armies have been doing for centuries. ISIS has Twitter accounts, pickup trucks and other borrowed Western technology, but otherwise it’s just a recurring phenomenon that has always been part of Islam. Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other for over a thousand years. Declaring other Muslims to be infidels and killing them is also a lot older than the suicide bomb vest.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are at odds because its Iraqi namesake had a different agenda. Al Qaeda always had different factions with their own agendas. These factions were not more extreme or less extreme. They just had different nationalistic backgrounds and aims.

The Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda was obsessed with Egypt. Bin Laden was obsessed with Saudi Arabia. Some in Al Qaeda wanted a total world war. Others wanted to focus on taking over Muslim countries as bases. These differences sometimes led to threats and even violence among Al Qaeda members.

Bin Laden prioritized Saudi Arabia and America. That made it possible for Al Qaeda to pick up training from Hezbollah which helped make 9/11 possible. This low level cooperation with Iran was endangered when Al Qaeda in Iraq made fighting a religious war with Shiites into its priority.

That did not mean that Bin Laden liked Shiites and thought that AQIQ was “extreme” for killing them. This was a tactical disagreement over means.

Edward Said: Oppressed Fraud By Daniel Greenfield

Edward Said was the world’s second most famous Palestinian. And much like Palestine, his biography was a fake and his culture was nothing more than the advocacy of a perpetual supremacist conflict against the indigenous Jewish inhabitants whom the colonial myth of Palestine was meant to displace.

The great genius of Arab and Islamic supremacism was their pretense that the Jewish story of an indigenous minority resisting their colonialism was really their own story. Having failed to destroy every culture that they had conquered, they instead appropriated their stories, painting their fallen empires as the tragic victims of the imperialism of the very people whom they had conquered and oppressed.

Arabs and Muslims still remained the dominant and domineering group in the Middle East repressing other cultures and religions from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, but they flipped the history books over so that the descendants of caliphs and conquerors who had ground the Jews and other indigenous peoples under their boots could reinvent themselves as the victims of Jewish oppression. The members of vast families and clans spanning the Middle East selectively embraced a Palestinian identity if they happened, at any point in their lives, to find themselves within the borders of the Jewish State.

That is both the larger theme of Joshua Muravchik’s Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel and of its chapter on Edward Said, who helped turn the history books upside down.

Like many of the professionally oppressed, Edward Said came from wealth and privilege. Like Arafat, the world’s most famous Palestinian, Said, the world’s second most famous Palestinian came out of Cairo.

His childhood in “Palestine” was as much of a fiction as Palestine itself. Instead his mother had traveled to give birth in Jerusalem to take advantage of Jewish medical expertise. From that tiny act of occupation came the vast cultural appropriation that the newly baptized “Palestinian” would go on to inflict on the indigenous inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Edward Said’s career trajectory took him deep within academia where he denounced rival scholars for constructing simplistic stereotypes of the Middle East by constructing a simplistic stereotype of them as “Orientalists” who were “othering” the east.

In a typically tribal display of hypocrisy, Edward Said was othering the very people he was accusing of othering his own people.

Mark Christian’s Journey From Islam to Jesus Christ — on The Glazov Gang »

A former Muslim from Egypt shares his brave and precarious journey out of a totalitarian ideology — and the dire threats he has suffered since.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Mark Christian, the President and Executive Director of the Global Faith Institute. He is the son and nephew of high ranking leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his home country of Egypt. After his conversion from Islam to Christianity, Dr. Christian dedicated his life and work to the proposition that “the first victims of Islam are the Muslim themselves.”

Dr. Christian joined the show to discuss A Journey From Islam to Jesus Christ, sharing his brave and precarious journey out of a totalitarian ideology — and the dire threats he has suffered since (starts at 12:25 mark). He also discussed Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood in the American Heartland, explaining Global Faith’s battle to stop Muslim Brotherhood front groups’ malicious plans within the “Tri-Faith Initiative” in Omaha, Nebraska. Within the dialogue, he unveiled ISIS’s Islamic inspirations, the true nature of Islam, and much more:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/mark-christians-journey-from-islam-to-jesus-christ-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

It had seemed to the four clean-cut college freshman that night like a typical McDonald’s: spanking clean, well-lighted, and safe. It was in a good neighborhood too, right next to Texas A&M University in College Station – a campus known for its friendly atmosphere and official down-home greeting: “howdy”

Out on a double date, the two couples pulled into the parking lot of so-called “University McDonald’s” shortly after 2 a.m. that Sunday – and beheld a scene unlike anything portrayed in all those wholesome McDonald’s television commercials. Before them, hundreds of young black males were loitering about, some without shirts.

Other local residents — the more cynical and world-weary, both whites and most blacks — would have taken one look at the crowd and driven off, dismissing many of the young and posturing black males as thugs. But not them: innocent white kids from the suburbs. They presumed this was post-racial America — and that they were in an easy-going college town.

Twenty minutes later, two of them were dead.

Incredibly, the race of the assailants was scrubbed from local news coverage; and utterly missing from tersely written wire-service stories about a Brazos County jury’s whopping $27 million negligence verdict on July 30 against “University McDonald’s” – an outlet owned by the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant. What the media considered unmentionable nevertheless loomed over a riveting seven-day trial, which came amid the growing phenomenon of black-on-white violence — unprovoked attacks on whites and black mob violence like the so-called “knock-out game.”

Chris Hamilton, lead lawyer of the small Dallas firm that humbled the corporate giant, was asked, during a phone interview, how many reporters had even bothered to inquire about the race of the assailants during the many interviews he gave.

“You’re the only one,” he replied.

Race, of course, was irrelevant to the high-stakes negligence trial that revolved around McDonald’s lack of on-site security and corporate responsibility. Yet shortly before the trial, Hamilton hinted at the issue of race – suggesting that two very different worlds were colliding at University McDonald’s during its after-midnight hours – a mix that was potentially volatile. The trial, he told a local television reporter, was not only about seeking justice for his clients — but about the public’s need “to know what’s really going on at McDonald’s: what the risks are; what the dangers are of sending your kids there, particularly after midnight.”

“Paul Ryan is moving to reframe the debate on regulations,” notes The Hill, “arguing that the nation’s poor are the real victims of the red tape spewing from Washington.” The Wisconsin Republican’s “Expanding Opportunity in America” initiative intends to address what the Obama administration calls “income equality,” which persists despite massive federal efforts.

According to the House Budget Committee majority staff, at least 92 federal programs purport to help lower-income Americans. These include dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 food-aid programs, and more than 20 housing programs. In fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $799 billion on these programs. Ryan is hardly alone in charging that some of these programs hurt the poor. He cites Creighton University economics professor Diana Thomas, who says that Department of Transportation regulations requiring rear-view cameras will impact low-income car buyers, who prefer to spend their money elsewhere.

Those in the lowest fifth of income spend the greatest share of their incomes on energy. Earners in the lowest income quintile spend 24 percent of their pre-tax income on energy, as opposed to 4 percent in the highest quintile. Therefore, as this analysis from the Manhattan Institute notes, “America’s poorest citizens will be hurt most by the new EPA regulations” on emissions and “it is the poor who will have their budgets squeezed as they struggle to pay for gas and electricity.”

Sofie E. Miller, senior policy analyst at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, writes that federal regulations “often leave low-income Americans paying a heavier price than their neighbors.” Energy standards for appliances “cause prices to increase and push some low-income consumers out of the market.” Likewise, Diana Thomas says “regulation has a regressive effect: It redistributes wealth from lower-income households to higher-income households by causing lower-income households to pay for risk reduction worth more to the wealthy.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist for the Department of Labor argues that new “cap and trade” environmental regulations “will reduce opportunities for the poorest Americans.” The regulations “impose real costs on the economy,” and deprive workers of “the security of employment that comes from industrial activity.” Citing rent control, Stephanie Slade charges that “it’s liberals who continue to support laws that, whatever their intentions, have turned out to be disproportionately harmful to the poorest members of society.”

As mass hysteria over the fatal shooting of a Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown grips the progressive movement, President Obama is sending the most divisive, corrupt race-baiter in his cabinet to the riot-torn St. Louis suburb where the suspect died.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who has single-mindedly focused on converting the Department of Justice into a racial grievance incubator, is scheduled to visit Ferguson, Mo., today in an appearance billed as an attempt to restore calm to a community that has erupted in almost daily violence since Brown, a young black man, was shot Aug. 9 by a police officer. Left-wingers who believe as an article of faith that America is racist insist, despite the growing body of exculpatory evidence, that Brown was murdered by a white policeman. They will not be dissuaded no matter how much proof accumulates that the officer fired on Brown because he believed his life was in danger.

The visit comes as the Left’s narrative that the nearly 300-lbs. Brown, who had just robbed a convenience store minutes before encountering decorated policeman Darren Wilson, was an innocent gentle giant trying to surrender, unravels more and more each day. More witnesses are coming forward to identify Brown as the aggressor in a vicious attack on Wilson in which he tried to grab the gun of the six-year veteran of the Ferguson police force and inflicted head injuries so severe that the officer may lose an eye.

Yet the belief that Brown is the real victim remains strong in many circles.

Inane commentary is being churned out by hopelessly affective left-wingers at an impressive clip. For example, leftist lawyer Michelle D. Bernard told the under-medicated Chris Matthews of MSNBC that in 2014 — when the U.S. has a black president, black attorney general, black billionaires, and black professionals in probably every field of human endeavor — legions of Americans still hate black males.

“I don’t have an answer that is palatable to be able to look my children in the face and say there are people in this country who– not only do not like African-Americans, but they despise black men,” Bernard said.

Legions of activists and commentators have convinced themselves that we know exactly what happened.
The events in Ferguson, Mo., have launched a familiar spectacle: the race to be wrong first.

Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American man, was shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The Washington Post had more on the story about what one witness called an “execution-style slaying”:

“Lawyer Freeman Bosley Jr. said Dorian Johnson, a friend of Brown’s, has told the FBI that Officer Darren Wilson confronted the two because they were walking in the middle of the street.

“Wilson cursed at the pair and ordered them onto the sidewalk, Bosley told The Washington Post. When they refused to comply, he said, the officer grabbed Brown’s throat through the window of his cruiser, pulled out a pistol and shot him. Wilson then chased Brown, shot him in the back and shot him five to six more times as Brown’s hands were raised, Bosley said.”

An autopsy commissioned by the Brown family suggests that account is not true, at least in regard to the most incendiary charge. None of the bullets fired at Johnson entered his body through his back. That hardly means Wilson was justified in shooting Brown even once. Nor does it necessarily mean Wilson is a murderer. The simple fact is we don’t know.

The rush to condemn Wilson’s conduct and the gallop to martyr Brown may have set land-speed records. The New Yorker, like numerous outlets, reported that Brown was walking to his grandmother’s home when confronted by Wilson. A video released from the by turns hapless and devious Ferguson Police Department alleges that he was actually walking from a thuggish and brazen shoplifting of a box of cigars from a convenience store.

His march through Georgia has been gravely misunderstood ― as has Israel’s strategy in Gaza.

William Tecumseh Sherman 150 years ago took Atlanta before heading out on his infamous March to the Sea to make Georgia “howl.” He remains one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures in American military history. Sherman was an attritionist, not an annihilationist — a strategist who believed in attacking the sources that fuel and field an army rather than butting heads against the army itself. To review his career is to shed light on why the Israeli Defense Forces were both effective in Gaza and hated even more for being so effective.

Much of the South has hated William Tecumseh Sherman for over a century and a half, but not because his huge army killed thousands of young Confederate soldiers (it did not). Grant did that well enough in the horrific summer of 1864 outside Richmond. Rather, Sherman humiliated the plantationist class by staging three long marches during the last twelve months of the Civil War — from Tennessee to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Savannah, and from Savannah up through the Carolinas. In each of these brilliantly conducted invasions, Sherman, with a few notable exceptions, sought to avoid direct fighting with Confederate forces, either outflanking opposing armies that popped up in his way, or entrenching and letting aggressors wear themselves out against his fortified lines. He did enormous material damage, as he boasted that his enemies could do nothing to impede his progress — humiliation being central to his mission.

Instead of fighting pitched battles, Sherman was interested in three larger strategic agendas. War in his mind was not a struggle between militaries so much as between the willpower of entire peoples, distant though they be from the battlefield. One chief aim was iconic. Sherman sought to capture cities or traverse holy ground that might offer his forces symbolic lessons that transcended even strategic considerations. He wanted to capture the important rail center of Atlanta before the November 1864 election and thereby ensure that the war would continue under a reelected Lincoln rather than be negotiated into a meaningless armistice by George McClellan. By taking the South’s second-most-important city, Sherman reminded the Union that the Northern strategy was working and that Lincoln, as the architect of it, deserved support.

Marching through the heart of Georgia to Savannah also reminded the Confederacy that it could not stop a Union army from going pretty much where it pleased — even into the heretofore untouched Southern heartlands. The much-hyped March to the Sea took on an almost messianic character in dissecting the Confederacy, as Sherman torched plantations and freed slaves. His so-called bummers praised their “Uncle Billy” and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they tramped through Georgia. Sherman was interested in such theatrics as part of a larger moral lesson that “War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” He was particularly keen on reminding those who start wars that they must bear the consequences of their ideologies.