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Madness: UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color

 

My latest in PJ Media:

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©rights reserved.

Corruption? FBI Raids Home of NYPD Sergeants’ Union Head Who Criticized de Blasio and Cuomo

My latest in PJ Media:

As Matt Margolis noted in July, the FBI is “corrupt and needs reform.” This reform became all the more urgent last week, when it was revealed that the feds were far more deeply involved in the January 6 insurrection-that-wasn’t-an-insurrection at the Capitol than had been previously known. But instead of moving to restore its shattered reputation and proving it hasn’t become little more than the far-Left’s muscle, the FBI on Tuesday raided the home of Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) President Ed Mullins, a Trump supporter and outspoken critic of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

According to the New York Daily News, the raid “also targeted the police union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters.” The FBI confirmed that it was “carrying out a law enforcement action in connection with an ongoing investigation” into the 13,000-member SBA. Said de Blasio: “All I have been told is the FBI has raided the SBA HQ and it’s in connection with an ongoing investigation, but we don’t have further details on that at this moment.”

The mayor couldn’t resist, however, kicking Mullins while he was down: “A lot of what he’s done has been really, really destructive — especially in the middle of a crisis where we’re trying to unify and we’re trying to get through together. I think he’s been a divisive voice. … All I hear is the FBI raid. I want to hear the details before I comment further.”

Mullins aroused de Blasio’s ire when he posted the arrest report of Chiara de Blasio, the mayor’s daughter, on Twitter; Chiara de Blasio was arrested in May 2020 during the George Floyd riots in Manhattan. According to the Daily News, Mullins was accused of “violating department rules” in disclosing Chiara’s private information, while his lawyer, Andrew Quinn, noted that the report had already been publicized and stated: “We see this case an attempt to chill Ed Mullins’s First Amendment rights.”

Amid the controversy, Mullins “vowed to continue speaking out whenever he believes cops are vilified or mistreated” and declared: “De Blasio’s City Hall has been at war with cops since his first days in office. Charges against union activism that City Hall doesn’t like — speaking truth to those who claim power — is sadly what we’ve come to expect from this administration.”

Mullins has made other enemies as well. Former mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, who previously had worked for de Blasio, excoriated Mullins for alleged “racism.” And in May 2020, New York’s then-Health Department Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Babot declared “I don’t give two rats’ a**es about your cops” in response to a request for more masks for the police. Mullins tweeted in response: “Truth is this b***h has blood on her hands but why should anyone be surprised the NYPD has suffered under DeBlasio since he became Mayor.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘A Giant Can of Worms’: Afghans Are Walking Off U.S. Bases, No One Knows Where They Are

My latest in PJ Media:

“It’s a giant can of worms,” said a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official who asked not to be named, and in these days of rapidly increasing Biden administration authoritarianism, it’s easy to see why. Grateful Afghan refugees are, according to Reuters, upsetting the establishment narrative in large numbers by engaging in “independent departures” from the U.S. military bases where the evacuees are being housed. That is, they’re getting up and walking away, and no one knows where they are. At least 700 Afghans have now left various military bases and are somewhere in the United States. Over 300 have vanished from Fort Bliss alone. No one knows where. What could possibly go wrong?

Remember: Biden’s handlers have no idea who most of these people are. Back on September 1, according to Politico, “a State Department official said in a private briefing to reporters that ‘the majority’ of special immigrant visa applicants were left in Afghanistan due in part to the complications of the evacuation, and that he and his team are ‘haunted’ by the evacuees the U.S. could not get out by the Aug. 31 deadline.” That is, the vast majority: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on September 21, according to The Hill, that “of the 60,000 Afghans who have entered the U.S., nearly 8,000 are either U.S. citizens or residents, while about 1,800 are SIV holders, having obtained visas after assisting the U.S. military.”

That leaves around 50,200 Afghan refugees for whom we have no certain identification and no assurance whatsoever that they aren’t jihad terrorists. Nor is that all: The Hill states without a trace of irony that Biden’s handlers have “boasted” about having brought “more than 124,000 people from Afghanistan.” Who is among the other 74,000 who are apparently on their way here? No one knows.

Daniel Greenfield notes that there are three possibilities as to why these evacuees have disappeared from the military bases and left no forwarding address: “They’re not legally who they say they are and are worried that the authorities will find out”; or “they’re committing a crime such as trafficking young girls as had already been reported at Fort McCoy”; or “they’re terrorists here to infiltrate America.”

That third possibility becomes more likely in light of the unpleasant fact that Business Insider reported on August 15:

Thousands of inmates, including former Islamic State and al-Qaeda fighters, were released from a prison on the outskirts of Kabul as the Taliban called for a “peaceful transition” of power. Afghan government troops surrendered Bagram airbase to the Taliban early on Sunday. The base houses Pul-e-Charki prison, which has around 5,000 prisoners. It is the largest in Afghanistan and notorious for its poor conditions. A maximum-security cellblock held members of al Qaeda and Taliban, said reports. Footage published by an independent Afghan news agency, which supports the Taliban, appears to show militants letting the inmates out.

Did any of these al-Qaeda and Islamic State jihadis get on planes bound for America? No one knows.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Prayer in Public Schools Is Back … as Long as It’s Prayer to Allah

My latest in PJ Media:

Prayer in public schools has been a hot-button issue in the United States ever since the Supreme Court ruled against it in the landmark 1962 decision Engel v. Vitale. But now it’s back, at least in one school district in Newsomland. EdSource reported Monday that California’s “Elk Grove Unified School District began offering culturally appropriate meals and setting aside rooms in many of its middle and high schools for prayer during Muslim holidays in preparation for the additional Afghan refugee students it expects in the next month.”

Ironically, as Daniel Greenfield noted, the Elk Grove Unified School District “became famous for Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, in which an atheist sued the school because the Pledge of Allegiance includes the word, ‘Under God’. The case was an awkward mess that went to the Supreme Court, but should never have gotten that far and ended up being tossed out because Newdow didn’t actually have custody of his daughter.”

There was, however, a case in Texas in 2017 that establishes an important precedent for what Elk Grove Unified School District is doing for Afghan evacuee students now. Liberty High School in Frisco, Texas, established a prayer room for Muslim students, drawing a rebuke from Texas Deputy Attorney General Andrew Leonie, who said:

“Liberty High School’s policy should be neutral toward religion. However, it appears that students are being treated different based on their religious beliefs. Such a practice, of course, is irreconcilable with our nation’s enduring commitment to religious liberty.”

Indeed. One parent put it this way at a Frisco school board meeting in 2017: “Liberty High School is not a mosque. It’s not a synagogue. It’s not a tabernacle. It’s not a temple. It’s not a church. It is a school. It is a public school supported by taxpayers for the purpose of educating our children.”

However, Liberty High was able to assuage concerns. Several weeks after Leonie’s statement, Marc Rylander, director of communications for the Texas attorney general’s office, issued another statement, saying: “We are grateful for Frisco ISD’s prompt response and have been in contact with their attorneys. They assured us today that students of all faith, or no faith, may now use this meeting room during non-instructional time on a first-come, first-served basis for student-led activities. Religious liberty is a cornerstone of our society and we are glad that students at Frisco ISD may practice their faith in accordance with their beliefs.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Muslim Student at Washington University Removes 2,977 American Flags Commemorating 9/11 Victims

My latest at PJ Media:

Fadel Alkilani, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, is an enterprising young man who clearly has a bright future ahead. On Saturday, as people all over the world mourned the deaths of 2,977 people in jihad attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., Alkilani busied himself with pulling up 2,977 flags that had been placed on campus in honor of the victims and throwing them away. Among Leftists today, that’s the kind of behavior that leads to rapid career advancement– clearly, Fadel Alkilani is an up-and-coming young man.

The flags were part of the Young America’s Foundation’s “9/11: Never Forget Project”: “YAF activists at high schools and colleges across the country are keeping alive the memory of those lost to radical Islamist terrorists in the world-changing events of September 11, 2001.  The iconic displays made up of 2,977 American flags—one for each innocent life taken—bring schools, communities, and individuals together to pay tribute and continue our promise to ‘never forget.’”

YAF members at Washington University duly placed the 2,977 flags, only to have Alkilani, wearing a mask and his hair in a bun, come pluck the flags up and fill trash bags with them. In a video YAF posted on Twitter, Nathaniel Hope of Washington University’s hearty band of College Republicans confronts Alikani, who justified his action by claiming (falsely) that the flag display was a “violation of school rules.” He maintained that he, on the other hand, had not violated any university rules, telling Hope: “I did not violate any university or legal policy. Now go away.”

Later, Alkilani posted online a “Formal Statement on the Flag Relocation Incident,” in which he sanctimoniously employed that tried-and-true strategy of Leftists everywhere: He claimed victimhood. Instead of apologizing for his callous, thuggish, and fascist act, Alkilani wrote: “Currently, there is a massive harassment campaign propagated primarily by Washington University College Republicans, as well as the national Young American’s Foundation [YAF] regarding an incident that occurred at approximately 6 am on Saturday, September 11, 2021. There is a large amount of misinformation circulating, and I seek to explain both what occurred and why it happened.”

The “misinformation” that he proceeds to clear up is the claim that he was “‘stealing’ the flags. This is due to a WashU College Republicans member, taking a video of me collecting flags in plastic bags. However, I had no intention of removing the flags from the Mudd Field area, and my full protest did not have the chance to be actualized. My planned protest was to place the bags of flags on Mudd field, along with various statistics [including those below] explaining the human cost of 9/11 in the past 20 years. On the sides of the bags, some writing may be visible, but the full statement was not outlined at the time of the video. I did not deface, destroy, damage, nor steal any flags, nor did I interfere with any registered event time. I assert that I did not violate any University Code of Conduct policy, though the conduct process is undergoing. Additionally, I was verbally and physically harassed by numerous WashU students and WUPD officers, whom I plan to report through official channels.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Relax: 44 Afghan Evacuees Could Be Jihad Terrorists

My latest in PJ Media:

The sudden influx into the United States of 94,000 evacuees from Afghanistan has many defenders, and they’ve used the usual arguments against those who have raised concerns: These people are in need, they’re in need because of American actions, and thus anyone who objects is selfish, heartless, and probably bigoted and racist as well. “Criticism is intensifying,” the Washington Post opined on August 24, from some of the stars of the Left’s enemies list: “on Fox News, among Republican state lawmakers in Wisconsin where some refugees are being temporarily housed, and from the nativist, anti-immigrant factions in the country that helped Donald Trump ride into the White House.” Amid all the festivities, however, the same Washington Post reported Friday that “the Department of Homeland Security flagged 44 Afghan evacuees as potential national security risks during the past two weeks as the government screened tens of thousands for resettlement in the United States.”

Not only that, but “two Afghan nationals who were previously deported and returned as evacuees have been transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities after landing in the United States, according to two DHS officials. Both were deported after felony convictions: one for a 2010 sexual assault and the other for an armed robbery in 2011, according to one official who was not authorized to discuss the criminal records. The two individuals are currently in ICE custody in Virginia.”

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas refuses to answer the question of “how many Afghans have been blocked from traveling or failed to clear the vetting process, but he characterized the number as ‘extraordinarily de minimis’ during a briefing with reporters Wednesday, using the legal term for an insignificant quantity.” So apparently most of those who are vetted get through, including at least two people who had been previously deported.

Nonetheless, Mayorkas not unexpectedly worked hard to put a good face on it all, saying that evacuees who have been barred from entering the country are “an example of a multilayered screening process working.” Well, that’s terrific, but the problem is when the multilayered screening process doesn’t work, and people who are national security risks or criminals who were deported and yet still able to board a plane out of Kabul end up back in this country. Mayorkas doesn’t seem to have bothered to address that.

They’re facing the same problem over in Britain. The Daily Mail noted Friday: “An Afghan special forces commando has been arrested by armed police at a Manchester hotel where he was quarantining with his family. Armed officers stormed the hotel in a pre-dawn raid on or around August 31 or September 1, it has been revealed. The unnamed individual is still in detention although it is not yet known if he has been charged with a crime.” The Daily Mail, unlike the Washington Post, didn’t shy away from the obvious conclusion: “It raises questions about the quality of vetting of the roughly 8,000 Afghan refugees who were airlifted to the UK from Kabul after Joe Biden’s rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

In the Run-Up to the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, Media Pushing Stories About How Muslims Were the Real Victims

My latest in PJ Media:

Saturday marks twenty years since Islamic jihadis attacked New York City and Washington, and the establishment media is doing all it can to ensure that Americans grasp the true significance of those attacks: not that America was hit by a global jihad that has only gained in strength since then and could hit us again, but that Muslims were and are the true victims of that fateful day. In the last few days, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press have published lengthy pieces to that effect, and more in this vein is certain to come this week.

The LA Times on Friday published a lengthy weeper entitled “Muslim youth in America: A generation shadowed by the aftermath of 9/11,” all about how some people say rude things to innocent Muslims just because some people did something way back two decades ago. The article begins: “On a rainy day during her sophomore year of high school, as Aissata Ba studied in the library, a photo popped into her phone. It showed a beheading by Islamic State militants, along with a caption in red letters: ‘Go back to your country.’” In the big bad, “Islamophobic” USA, the perpetrator of this horror got off scot-free: “Ba reported the incident. Administrators never tracked down the person who sent it.”

Then there was “the boy in sixth grade who would say ‘allahu Akbar,’ Arabic for ‘God is great,’ and throw his backpack near her, pretending it was a bomb.” Actually, “Allahu akbar” means “Allah is greater,” that is, greater than your god; it is a declaration of the superiority of Islam and its victory over other religions, which is why Islamic jihadists so often scream out this phrase while committing acts of violence against unbelievers.

But the Los Angeles Times doesn’t explain any of that; it’s too busy explaining how Muslims are the true victims of the 9/11 attacks: “Asked when they thought such incidents became common, the Ba family didn’t hesitate. ‘It started with 9/11,’ said Ba’s mom, Zeinebou, who immigrated to Chicago in 1999. That day in 2001 caused a chain of tragedies — for the nearly 3,000 people who perished during the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania; for the young men and women who died serving their country in the wars that followed; and for Muslims, and those perceived as Muslim, who became targets of hate.”

It would be much easier to sympathize with all this if not for the fact that since 9/11, Islamic advocacy groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with eager help from the establishment media, have insisted that any honest investigation of the motivating ideology behind the attacks, and jihad terror in general, constituted “hate.” Then there are the numerous fake anti-Muslim hate crimes, fabricated apparently in order to buttress the claim that Muslims are uniquely harassed and victimized in the United States.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Virginia Public Schools to Focus on Muslims—As Victims—in Teaching About 9/11 On Attacks’ 20th Anniversary

My latest in PJ Media:

On Thursday, the Virginia Department of Education published a video entitled, “Culturally Responsive and Inclusive 9/11 Commemoration,” detailing how Virginia public school teachers should handle the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 jihad terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The emphasis on that day and thereafter must not be on the ideology of the attackers or the ongoing jihad terror threat; rather, the focus is entirely on acknowledging and eradicating what the video calls “anti-Muslim racism.”

The video is narrated by a hijab-wearing woman, Amaarah DeCuir, who describes herself as “Professorial Lecturer, School of Education, American University & Paragon Education Consulting, President.” One would think that with all her expertise, Ms. DeCuir would know the elementary fact that Islam is not a race, and that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races. And of course she does know that, but she is operating in this video on the basis of the Leftist contention that opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women really stems from an irrational animus against Muslims as a people, and hence is a “racialized” form of “hatred.”

Yes, it’s toxic nonsense, but that’s the Left for you. In any case, Virginia public schools that implement DeCuir’s recommendations (and since the Virginia Department of Education published her video, it would appear that the department wants that to be all of them) will give students a presentation on the twentieth anniversary of the worst attacks ever on American soil that will portray Muslims as the primary victims of those attacks, and make herculean efforts to deflect attention away from the extremely inconvenient fact that the attacks were perpetrated in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings.

If you doubt that fact, note that in March 2009, five masterminds of the 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin As-Shibh, Walid bin ‘Attash, Mustafa Ahmed AI-Hawsawi, and ‘Ali ‘abd Al-’Aziz ‘Ali – styling themselves as the “9/11 Shura Council” – wrote a lengthy communiqué titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” In it, they called the 9/11 attacks an “act of Jihad,” and explained: “The Jihad in god’s [sic] cause is a great duty in our religion.” They quoted numerous Qur’an verses, including the notorious “Verse of the Sword”: “Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush” (9:5) and another enjoining Muslims to “strike terror into the heart of the enemies of Allah” (8:60).

Attorney and columnist Marina Medvin, who broke the story of this video, notes that the 9/11 Commission Report “mentions ‘Islam’ over 1,000 times and the word ‘Muslim’ over 1,000 times,” for obvious reasons. But Virginia students will learn nothing about any of that. Instead, they’ll be taught about “phobias stemming from 9/11,” “anti-Muslim racism spikes,” and the evils of the fictional “Muslim Ban.” DeCuir offers as an example of “harmful teaching” any “teaching about Islam and/or Muslims” in connection with 9/11, except, evidently, insofar as Muslims were victims of the American response to the attacks.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Girl Weeps As Taliban Approaches: ‘We Don’t Count Because We Were Born in Afghanistan. No One Cares About Us.’

My latest in PJ Media:

On Friday, the courageous Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad, whom the Islamic Republic recently tried to kidnap in New York and take back to imprisonment, torture, and death in Tehran, posted a video on Twitter of a young Afghan woman. As the tears fall down her face, the woman says:

“We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan. I cannot help crying. I have to wipe my tears to be able to film this video. No one cares about us. We’ll die slowly in history. Isn’t it funny?”

No, it’s as tragic as this woman feels it to be, and the reason why it is happening gets right to the heart of why the American mission in Afghanistan failed so completely, and left young women such as the one in this video without anyone to defend them from the Taliban.

The woman in the video is not wearing a hijab, which gives the immediate impression that she is not an observant, Sharia-adherent Muslim. Political and military realities that are rapidly changing now may have obscured the fact for her, but this woman is not being abandoned now. She was abandoned years ago, in one of the foremost mistakes of our two-decade-long series of mistakes in Afghanistan.

In our early years in Afghanistan, once the Taliban was toppled, we set about nation-building, initially with an eye toward establishing a Western-style constitutional republic in Afghanistan. But State Department foreign policy experts drastically underestimated the Afghan people’s attachment to Islamic law (Sharia), and disastrously discounted Sharia’s political aspects in the naïve belief, fueled by Islamic apologists in the U.S., that Islam was a religion of peace that was perfectly compatible with Western secular models of governance.

The opposition to Sharia quickly gave way to their desire to be culturally sensitive. The Melbourne Forum on Constitution Building noted in 2018 that “most of the external actors, including the United States, American church groups and the United Nations, initially attempted to marginalise the role of Islam and Sharia in favor of liberal rights and freedoms. However, understanding that Islam and Sharia are entrenched parts of Afghan constitutional culture, foreign advisers such as Yash Ghai and Barnett Rubin, who were directly involved in the drafting process convinced external assistance providers to stand aside and leave Afghans to make choices on these sensitive constitutional questions.”

And so the Afghan Constitution that Afghanistan’s then-President Hamid Karzai formally ratified on January 26, 2004, begins “in the name of Allah, the Most Beneficient, the Most Merciful” and is written in the name of “We the people of Afghanistan, believing firmly in Almighty God, relying on His divine will and adhering to the Holy religion of Islam.” The Constitution notes its appreciation for the “jihad and just resistance of all the peoples of Afghanistan.” It declares that “Afghanistan shall be an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state,” and that “the sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” The significance of this is spelled out explicitly: “No law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Basheer Jones Hates America. He Wants to Be Mayor of Cleveland.

My latest in PJ Media:

Basheer Jones is a Cleveland city councilman and a candidate for mayor of Cleveland in the upcoming September 14 primary election. He is also unusually forthright, even for a twenty-first-century Democratic politician, about his contempt for the land in which he seeks elected office.

Jones is a devout, observant Muslim, and already, according to CleveScene, his “personal religious beliefs and organizational ties have become linked with his campaign. Jones made a number of questionable campaign expenditures in 2020 to international Muslim organizations and figures, including expenses likely related to his December travels in Egypt and the sponsorship of a Muslim orphanage there and a Quranic school in Senegal.”

What’s more, “a recent controversial video shows Jones saying, women are not our leaders.’” Jones, like Muslim spokesmen all over the Western world when confronted with statements that are politically inconvenient, insists that his words were “taken out of context.”

But that is not remotely the worst of it. On Sunday, the RAIR Foundation published an exposé on Jones that contained audio of Jones speaking on January 3, 2016, and making fun of Muslim immigrants who were thankful to be in the United States, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Before 9/11,” Jones asserts, “our people, our brothers and sisters from the immigrant communities, like, ‘America is a great place. Oh, it’s the land of the free, home of the brave.’ You’d see the imams, big imams, on the stage, singin’, you know.” Here the crowd starts to laugh softly; Jones chuckles a bit along with them and continues: “‘I pledge allegiance to the flag,’ you know, ‘this is the greatest place in the world.’ And we were tellin’ you, ‘Ah, no it’s not. Ah, we know about this place. This place, we know, we know that guy, somethin’ about him.’ And then 9/11 hit. Everybody started comin’ to us. ‘Brothers, please, come, come march with us, stand –’ Brother, we been tellin’ you, that they’ll change on you just like that, man.”’

Jones was apparently referring to American authorities supposedly turning on Muslim communities after 9/11 and subjecting them to “Islamophobic” counter-terror measures. In any case, his contempt for the grateful immigrants, and I-told-you-so implication that he had somehow been vindicated after 9/11, when America proved to be not so great a place after all, ought to have raised eyebrows among those who backed Jones for Cleveland City Council and are now supporting his mayoral ambitions.

There is no indication, however, that anyone was concerned in the slightest with their candidate’s anti-Americanism. We are, after all, talking about the Democratic Party. This is the party that stood by and did nothing when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Kabul) tweeted: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Can the Hamas-Linked AP Any Longer Be Considered a News Source?

My latest in PJ Media:

The Associated Press (AP) is one of the largest, most respected, most venerable news sources on the planet. It is also increasingly clear that the AP, in these overheated days, has reduced itself to acting as a press agency for Hamas. This tendency has become so pronounced recently that among all the massively biased far-Left propaganda outfits that make up the establishment media, the AP has essentially disqualified itself from being regarded any longer as even close to being a reliable source for news.

The first indication that the AP had run off the rails came during the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, when Israeli forces bombed a building in Gaza that housed a Hamas operations base and an AP office. The AP protested, claiming that it had no idea, none whatsoever, that it was sharing a building with Hamas, and this organization of intrepid journalists was put into the embarrassing position of having to be informed by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, about the operations of Hamas right under their noses.

But it’s almost certain that they knew already, and said nothing about Hamas’ presence in their building because of sympathy with the jihad terror organization and a shared antipathy to Israel. This became clear again on July 13, when the AP ran a tear-jerker entitled “Israel bars jailed Palestinian from daughter’s funeral,” claiming: “Israel refused to let a prominent jailed Palestinian lawmaker attend her daughter’s funeral on Tuesday, despite a campaign by activists and human rights groups for her to be released on humanitarian grounds.”

Those terrible Israelis! And it gets even worse. According to the AP article, the “jailed lawmaker” was “Khalida Jarrar, 58, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” who “has been in and out of Israeli prison in recent years. A military court sentenced her to two years in March for being a member of an outlawed group. With time served, she is set to be released in October.” Her late daughter Suha “worked on issues related to gender and climate change for the Al-Haq human rights group.”

Suha “worked on issues related to gender and climate change”! Why, she was a saint on earth, and the evil Israelis wouldn’t even let her bereaved mother pay her respects! However, the AP left out a few telling details. According to Gidon Ben-zvi in Algemeiner, Suha Jarrar worked for the same terrorist organization of which her mother was a member: “Suha Jarrar worked for al-Haq, a highly controversial organization with ties to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP], of which her mother was a member. Al-Haq has asserted that terrorists have a ‘right’ to receive salaries from the Palestinian Authority.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

CNN Uses Ashli Babbitt to Paint Trump Supporters As Terrorists

My latest in PJ Media:

“To some,” CNN tweeted Friday, “Ashli Babbitt, who was killed in the Capitol riot, was a terrorist. To others, she’s a martyr and seen as a recruiting tool.” Twitter’s legion of blue-check Leftist propagandists immediately protested that other “terrorists” are seen as martyrs as well. Never-Trump former Bush consultant Matthew Dowd likened Babbitt to Hitler, who was responsible for the murder of twelve million people in Europe, and actor Terry Kinney likened her to Mohamed Atta, who was partially responsible for the murder of nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001. In their indignation, however, they ignored the fact that CNN’s language was clearly designed to lead their tiny remaining audience to take Trump supporters for terrorists.

Of course, the comparisons Dowd and Kinney made were monstrous. How many people did Ashli Babbitt and the Capitol rioters kill on January 6, 2021? None. There isn’t even any actual evidence that their entry into the Capitol building really constituted an “insurrection.” But CNN’s tweet was little better. It was framed in exactly the same way it would have been if CNN had actually been talking about a jihadi: “To some, Osama bin Laden, who was killed in his compound in Pakistan, was a terrorist. To others, he’s a martyr and seen as a recruiting tool.”

Recruiting for what? Those “far-right terror groups” that loom so large in the Left’s imagination, but are so hard to find in reality. CNN’s story that was linked from the tweet makes this explicit: “‘She is going to be used for many, many years,’ said Simon Purdue, a fellow at the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, who last month wrote an article on the significance of Babbitt’s supposed martyrdom as a recruiting tool. ‘The more they mention her, the more dangerous her story is going to be.’”

Purdue “drew parallels between the rhetoric surrounding Babbitt’s death and that of Vicki Weaver. Weaver was the wife of White separatist Randy Weaver who was fatally shot by an FBI sniper during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992. The Weavers’ teenage son was also killed a day earlier as was a U.S. marshal. Vicki Weaver’s ‘perceived status as an innocent, white, female victim of “state aggression” instantly placed her on a pedestal.’ Purdue wrote. Her death, in particular, became a rallying cry and recruiting tool on the far right and helped inspire Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.”

The Oklahoma City bombing was in 1995, but we sure are hearing a lot about it lately. That’s how far the establishment media has to go in order to find any really significant “white supremacist” violence, and so it has to be pressed into service to shore up the Left’s narrative, which Old Joe Biden’s handlers put into his mouth on June 1: “Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

If No Islamophobic ‘Hate Crimes’ Exist, They Must Be Invented. The Next Target Is Southwest Airlines

My latest in PJ Media:

If “hate crimes” targeting Muslims do not exist, they must be invented. They’re simply too politically useful to do without. And so it is that the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is aiding a Muslim woman, Fatima Altakrouri, who claims that Southwest would not allow her to sit in a plane’s exit row because she was wearing a hijab.

Just for some perspective, in the last few weeks alone, in Nigeria, Islamic jihadis murdered a Christian pastor and his 3-year-old son. Elsewhere in the same country, Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar” murdered 37 Christians, all the while roaming freely in the presence of security personnel, who did nothing to stop them. In Indonesia, eleven Muslims were arrested for plotting jihad massacres at several Christian churches. In South Sudan, thirteen Christians were murdered in a village that, according to the Episcopal Church of South Sudan, “experiences frequent attacks by Arab Islamic militias.” In Pakistan, a Muslim mob murdered a Christian for trying to defend his sister whom Muslims had stripped naked in the street. In Uganda, Muslims beheaded and removed the tongue of a pastor who had debated Muslims and converted some of them to Christianity.

Now, I don’t mean to minimize the gravity of being denied a seat in the exit row, but compared to incidents of that kind, which take place more or less regularly, it doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. If this is an example of what CAIR can come up with in terms of “Islamophobia,” it’s pretty thin gruel. Yet “Islamophobia” in the U.S. and Europe gets far more international media attention than the global Muslim persecution of Christians. Now, why is that?

As for Fatima Altakrouri, according to USA Today, she has “filed a complaint with the Department of Transportation, saying she was not allowed to sit in an emergency exit row on a Southwest Airlines flight because she was wearing a hijab, but her sister was allowed to sit there without one.”

Altakrouri claims that after denying her request, a flight attendant mocked her as a terrorist: “As I was walking, I overheard her saying to the passengers in the seats that were around that area, laughing, saying that ‘If we sat her there, she’d bring down the plane in an emergency. You can imagine the shock I was in at that time.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘One Mosque Is Erected Every 15 Days in France, While One Christian Building Is Destroyed At the Same Pace’

My latest in PJ Media is a VIP article. I am happy to be able to offer you a 5% discount on becoming a VIP member at PJ Media. Just enter the code SPENCER when you sign up here.


Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatoire du Patrimoine Religieux (Observatory of Religious Heritage) in Paris, is sounding the alarm about the rapid erosion of France’s cultural heritage. “One mosque is erected every 15 days in France,” he said recently, “while one Christian building is destroyed at the same pace. It creates a tipping point on the territory that should be taken into account.” Yes, it should be taken into account by anyone, Christian or non-Christian, who is concerned about the future of France. But it isn’t.

According to the Catholic News Agency, “Lamaze’s appeal for increased awareness came after a fire destroyed the 16th-century Church of Saint-Pierre in Romilly-la-Puthenaye, Normandy, northern France. The fire, deemed accidental, took place on April 15, exactly two years after the blaze that devastated Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.” What’s more, “Lamaze told CNA in an interview that in addition to one religious building disappearing every two weeks — by demolition, transformation, destruction by fire, or collapse — two-thirds of fires in religious buildings are due to arson.”

All this was going on, Lamaze noted, against a backdrop of incomprehension and indifference: “The current minister of culture is seeking to establish a protection charter, but the situation is extremely serious and, alas, I don’t see any real awareness growing, nor any sense of responsibility in the face of this crucial challenge for our national heritage.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New York Times Details Horrors of Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban,’ Ignores Victims of Jihad Attacks


The New York Times story opens with a scene of unmitigated horror: “On May 30, 2019, Mohamed Abdulrahman Ahmed should have been in class preparing for exams. Instead, neighbors found the gifted high school senior hanging lifeless from a beam in his home in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. He had taken his own life.” Since this is the New York Times, it comes as no surprise that the ultimate culprit is none other than Donald J. Trump, and his nefarious “Muslim Ban” that his wise successor’s handlers have now consigned to the dustbin of history.
Times author Ty McCormick does his best to tug at our heartstrings as he describes Dadaab, “a sea of sand and thorn scrub and makeshift tarpaulin dwellings” that is “home to more than 200,000 people — a city the size of Richmond, Va., or Spokane, Wash., except without electricity or running water.”
It’s a place absolutely mired in despair, but “over the years, refugees in Dadaab have clung to one hope: resettlement overseas, sometimes in Europe or Canada but mostly in the United States. Tens of thousands of Dadaab’s residents have come to the United States; in 2015, for instance, more than 3,000 people from the camp were resettled there.”
But then came the reign of the Evil One: “Those hopes of a better life were dashed on Jan. 27, 2017, when on his eighth day as president, Donald Trump suspended all refugee admissions and banned entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. (Restrictions were eventually applied to 13 countries in all.)”
It’s a predictable sob story about how hard the residents of Dadaab have had it since they have been unable to come to America. One is moved to tears, but when one begins to consider the issue rationally, other considerations inevitably intrude: there are people who are having hard times all over the world. In fact, there are even people who are having hard times in the United States of America. There are people who are suffering economically, like the people in Dadaab. There are people who are suffering physically, emotionally, mentally, and in other ways. All over the world, there is suffering and pain. Why, then, is it the moral responsibility of the United States of America to alleviate the suffering of the people of Dadaab? No one in Kenya or Somalia or France or China or Australia or anywhere else is doing a thing to alleviate the sufferings of Americans; why is it up to Americans, all of whom are suffering in various ways themselves, to alleviate the suffering of everyone else?
Meanwhile, what about the suffering of those whose lives were destroyed by Somali migrants who came into the country before Trump’s travel ban came into effect? Can we get a New York Times article on them? Somali Muslim migrant Mohammad Barry in February 2016 stabbed multiple patrons at a restaurant owned by an Israeli Arab Christian. When is the New York Times going to interview the people whom Barry stabbed, and publish a piece about how they have suffered, and how their lives forever changed that day? When is the New York Times going to write a piece about the other people who were in the restaurant that day, and explore their trauma, their horror, their terror, and the nightmares and anxiety they have experienced since then?
When does the New York Times plan to profile the victims of Dahir Adan, another Somali Muslim migrant, who in October 2016 stabbed mall shoppers in St. Cloud while screaming “Allahu akbar”? Do Adan’s victims get a New York Times article about their injuries, their healing processes, any operations they may have had to undergo, and their own ongoing trauma and fear?
How about the victims of Abdul Razak Artan, yet another Somali Muslim migrant, who in November 2016 injured nine people with car and knife attacks at Ohio State University? Does the New York Times plan to explain to us how the victims whom Artan tried to run down with his car (in an instance of the common phenomenon of vehicular jihad) now find their hearts racing at the prospect of having to cross the street?
Of course, the New York Times is not going to publish even a single line about the suffering of those people and others like them, or even consider the possibility that Trump’s travel bans did anything but harm. Only the suffering of the people of Dadaab and others like them, not the suffering of victims of jihad attacks, matters to the Times. The suffering of the people of Dadaab is very real, and should be addressed, but is the only solution, or the best solution, really the resettlement in the United States of large numbers of people among whom is an unknowable number of jihad terrorists, who will enter undetected since any vetting to try to discover them will be deemed “Islamophobic”?
There will soon be new victims of Biden’s handlers’ marvelous, multicultural discarding of the “Muslim Ban.” The New York Times will ignore them, while congratulating themselves on how they helped install a president who strikes back against “racism” and “xenophobia.”
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Grab the Popcorn: Free Speech Foe Gets Threatened with Prison for ‘Blasphemy’


The threat is not surprising, given the authoritarian Islamic character of Pakistan’s government and its vicious hostility to the Ahmadiyya movement, as it forbids Ahmadis to call themselves Muslims and persecutes them in numerous ways. The TrueIslam.com website presents Ahmadi Islam as the pure and genuine form of the religion, despite the fact that the Ahmadiyya movement is regarded as heretical by mainstream Muslims and represents an infinitesimal percentage of the worldwide Muslim population. Zafar and his colleague Amjad Mahmood Khan, who was also threatened, must have known that such a site would ruffle the Pakistani government’s feathers.
But what made this more than just another story about the repressive Pakistani government is the fact that back in January 2013, Zafar published an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, “Making Islamic Sense of Free Speech.” In it, Zafar offered a manifesto for the destruction of the freedom of speech worthy of a true totalitarian.
“The difference between Islam’s view on free speech and the view promoted by free speech advocates these days,” Zafar asserted, “is the intention and ultimate goal each seeks to promote. Whereas many secularists champion individual privileges, Islam promotes the principle of uniting mankind and cultivating love and understanding among people. Both endorse freedom for people to express themselves, but Islam promotes unity, whereas modern-day free speech advocates promote individualism.”
The unity Zafar envisioned involved restrictions on the freedom of speech: “In order to unite mankind, Islam instructs to only use speech to be truthful, do good to others, and be fair and respectful. It attempts to pre-empt [sic] frictions by prescribing rules of conduct which guarantee for all people not only freedom of speech but also fairness, absolute justice, and the right of disagreement.”
So we can have the freedom of speech as long as “fairness” is ensured by Islamic “rules of conduct.” With evident distaste, Zafar continued by claiming that “the most vocal proponents of freedom of speech, however, call us towards a different path, where people can say anything and everything on their mind. With no restraint on speech at all, every form of provocation would exist, thereby cultivating confrontation and antagonism. They insist this freedom entitles them the legal privilege to insult others. This is neither democracy nor freedom of speech. It fosters animosity, resentment and disorder.”
Note the sleight of hand: “With no restraint on speech at all, every form of provocation would exist, thereby cultivating confrontation and antagonism.” Zafar was implying that the Muslims who riot and kill because of perceived affronts to Islam were not responsible for their own actions, but that those who supposedly provoked them were.
This is an increasingly widespread confusion in the West, willfully spread by people such as Zafar. In reality, the only person responsible for his actions is the person who is acting, not anyone else. You may provoke me in a hundred ways, but my response is my own, which I choose from a range of possible responses, and only I am responsible for it.
But having established that if someone riots and kills in response to someone else’s speech, the fault lies with the speaker, not the rioter, Zafar drove his point home: speech must be restricted in the interests of “world peace”: “Treating speech as supreme at the expense of world peace and harmony is an incredibly flawed concept. No matter how important the cause of free speech, it still pales in comparison to the cause of world peace and unity.”
And who will decide what speech accords with “world peace and harmony,” and what speech does not? Why, Zafar and his friends, of course. But what if the Pakistani government claimed that right for itself, and decided that what Zafar himself was saying did not accord with “world peace and harmony”?
Harris Zafar could well become the Nikolai Yezhov of our age. Yezhov was the Soviet secret police chief who sent innumerable people to their deaths in the gulag before Stalin decided it was his turn. Nowadays, Zafar has become the first advocate of restrictions on the freedom of speech to run afoul of people who want to take his own freedom of speech away. But as the silencing continues, he will by no means be the last.
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Seriously? As Trump Announces Another Mideast Peace Deal, Biden Named Person of the Year


Time magazine has named Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “Person of the Year,” in a tacit acknowledgment that they are, for all their individual differences, essentially a single cog in the socialist internationalist machine that is poised to roll all over us. And there is no doubt that driving the American republic to the point of near-death with election chicanery on a breathtaking scale is indeed a significant achievement, but amid all the excitement, it was barely noticed that President Trump had delivered yet another rebuke to the massively failed foreign policy establishment that is poised to get back in the saddle and start failing some more, by engineering peace between Israel and another Arab state, Morocco.
Trump tweeted Thursday: “Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!” The Morocco deal, like the previous one between Israel and Sudan, seems to be a straightforward bargain. Trump also tweeted Friday: “Today, I signed a proclamation recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. Morocco’s serious, credible, and realistic autonomy proposal is the ONLY basis for a just and lasting solution for enduring peace and prosperity!” So Morocco gets recognition of its sovereignty over the Western Sahara, and the world gets another step toward peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
That makes four agreements between Israel and Arab nations, something John Kerry confidently stated was not even remotely possible. Isn’t it great that Kerry is about to go back to work for the Person of the Year (what pronouns does that beast with two backs use?) and start showing us how it’s done again?
No one thought it could be done, except, of course, Donald Trump. Back in September, when Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed their deals with Israel, Trump stated: “We’re here this afternoon to change the course of history. After decades of division and conflict we mark the dawn of a new Middle East.” This was accurate. These “Abraham Accords” have already changed the entire landscape of the Middle East as, for the first time in decades, pragmatic considerations are taking precedence over the fixed ideas that have guided the foreign policy stances of all the Muslim and Arab countries regarding Israel.
Although this aspect of the conflict has been little noted and is still routinely ignored by foreign policy analysts, the Muslim world’s opposition to Israel has not been based upon conflicting claims for land or anything else, but upon core principles of the Islamic religion. As The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process shows, the Qur’an commands Muslims to “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191). Even though it is a historical fiction that Israel actually drove Muslim Arabs out, this claim is a staple of pro-Palestinian propaganda, and hence it is a divine imperative, no more negotiable than the Ten Commandments are for Jews and Christians, that Muslims must destroy Israel and “drive out” the Israelis.
That means that as long as pious, believing, knowledgeable Muslims are in charge in Muslim countries, which is by no means always the case, no negotiated settlement will ever establish Israel securely and end the jihad against it. That in turn is why analysts ignore Islam when considering the conflict: people don’t like bad news, or problems that cannot be solved. Nonetheless, this is the reality of the situation, and no good can ever come from ignoring reality.
Why, then, did Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and now Morocco normalize relations with Israel? Because it was in their interests to do so. Sudan was taken off the terror list in exchange for normalization. The Islamic Republic of Iran has for years claimed Bahrain as Iran’s nineteenth province, and the UAE likewise feels the heat of being in close proximity to one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. In a certain sense, these deals with Israel are a byproduct of Barack Obama’s decision to send billions to the mullahs’ tottering regime: a newly secure and empowered mullahcracy threatens Bahrain and the UAE, and so it was in their best interests to look for assistance from a country that Iran also menaces.
Now, with the mullahs expecting The Person of the Year and their minions to prop them up again, there are numerous indications that many in the Islamic world have had quite enough of the Palestinians’ jihadist intransigence and resistance to all peace accords, and are willing to proceed on a pragmatic basis, quite aside from what Islamic doctrine and law say, in order to secure their own countries against the threat from Iran.
And so maybe Old Joe deserves the credit for Middle East peace that the establishment media is certain to give him no matter what: if he hadn’t publicly stated his intention to empower and enable the Islamic Republic, Sunni Arab states wouldn’t see the need to make accords with Israel to protect themselves from the mullahs. Make that man, uh, those people, Person of the Year!
Meanwhile, it’s too bad that there is no unbiased, trustworthy organization giving out prizes for efforts toward world peace. If there were, Trump would be a shoo-in. But that would require a sane world.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Gingrich: 2020 Election is the ‘Biggest Theft Since 1824’ – But It’s Even Worse Than That


Newt Gingrich tweeted Friday:

“The more data comes out on vote anomalies that clearly are not legitimate the more it looks like 2020 may be the biggest Presidential theft since Adams and Clay robbed Andrew Jackson in 1824. State legislatures should demand recounts.”

He was right, except for one detail: the stolen election of 2020 is shaping up to be much worse than that of 1824.
Rating America’s Presidents explains that by that year, the Democratic-Republican Party, which was the party of the previous three presidents, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, now included virtually every politician of significance and had split into factions of its own. The congressional caucus that had chosen Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe bypassed the candidate whom many considered to be Monroe’s heir apparent, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Instead, the caucus picked a candidate who stood for the old Republican principles of strict adherence to the Constitution and a weak federal government: William Crawford, who had been a senator from Georgia, minister to France, and secretary of war and secretary of the treasury in the Monroe administration.
The caucus, however, didn’t have the influence in 1824 that it had enjoyed in previous years. Those who favored the positions that had initially been identified with the moribund opposition party, the Federalists, including a strong federal government that funded internal improvements, a centralized Bank of the United States, and high tariffs to protect American industry, were Adams and the speaker of the House, Henry Clay of Kentucky. Then there was General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and, more recently, a senator from Tennessee. Jackson had genuine popular support, which was increasingly important, as more and more states were choosing electors by popular vote.
No one, however, knew exactly where Jackson stood on the issues. Adams, whom Jackson would soon count among his bitterest political enemies, actually supported him for vice president, albeit with a quip about Jackson’s volatile character: “The Vice-Presidency was a station in which the General could hang no one, and in which he would need to quarrel with no one.”
One reason why 2020 is worse than 1824 is that everyone in that race, like everyone for the first century and a half of the republic, had an America-first agenda. So there was nothing like the modern-day division of candidates on that score, and voters didn’t have to ask themselves which candidate was less likely to sell America’s interests to the highest international bidder.
What’s more, the positions that were truly best for America in the long run were distributed across factional lines; the Adams party held some, and the Jackson party held others. The gargantuan growth of the federal government today and its increasing interference in the daily lives of its citizens make one long for the era when politicians were determined not just to pay lip service to the idea of limiting its power. One need not acquiesce in that unrestrained and continually growing power in order to accept the Supreme Court’s declaration of the constitutionality of using federal funds for internal improvements as based on the Commerce Clause; nor does this require one to endorse the later abuse of that clause. The Bank placed control of the public funds in private hands, which was never wise, as it risked the possibility of an elected clique, rather than the people, setting the national agenda; we are seeing the consequences of that in other contexts today.
The question of Andrew Jackson’s fitness for office was a key issue in 1824, as it had been for no previous presidential candidate. Jackson was widely considered to be unsuitable to be president, as he had little political experience. Clay sneered, “I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.”
Nevertheless, the election results had Jackson leading the field, winning ninety-nine electoral votes, with eighty-four for Adams, forty-one for Crawford, and thirty-seven for Clay. As none of the candidates had a majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, where the choice was between the three top vote-getters. Clay threw his support to Adams, who prevailed. Adams, as president, then chose Clay as the secretary of state, which was reasonable in light of their agreement on key issues. But Jackson and his supporters charged Adams and Clay with making a “corrupt bargain” to secure the presidency for Adams. Jackson raged: “So you see the Judas of the West [Clay] has closed the contract and will receive his thirty pieces of silver. Was there ever witnessed such bare faced corruption in any country before?”
So it was that the presidency of John Quincy Adams, a man who was distinguished throughout his long political career for his integrity, was tainted from beginning to end by charges of corruption and venality. Adams entered the White House under a cloud that never dissipated. In his inaugural address, Adams appealed to the goodwill of the American people: “Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my predecessors, I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence.”
He didn’t get it. His victory was so tainted that his presidency was effectively crippled from the start. Of course, he didn’t have the weight of a complicit and compliant media and political establishment behind him. Compared to Donald J. Trump, John Quincy Adams had it easy.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump is Right: Our Exit from Afghanistan is Long Overdue


President Trump is withdrawing a significant number of troops from Afghanistan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is livid. According to AP, McConnell “warned against a potentially ‘humiliating’ pullout from Afghanistan that he said would be worse than President Barack Obama’s 2011 withdrawal from Iraq and reminiscent of the U.S. departure from Saigon in 1975.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Michael McCaul, Republican leader on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, insisted: “We need to ensure a residual force is maintained for the foreseeable future to protect U.S. national and homeland security interests and to help secure peace for Afghanistan.” But McConnell and McCaul are advocating for a failed policy. It is long past time to leave Afghanistan.
In his State of the Union address on February 5, 2019, President Trump stated: “As a candidate for President, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.” Epitomizing the need to do this was what happened when Trump first moved to end America’s longest endless war, the war in Afghanistan, with a treaty with the group that the U.S. entered Afghanistan in order to topple, the Taliban, in February 2020. The ink was still fresh on the signed document when the Taliban launched a new attack against Afghan government forces, killing twenty Afghan soldiers and police officers.
The attack was a fitting symbol of the fruitlessness of these endless wars and the bankruptcy of the assumptions and policies that had led to their being waged.
After all these years, we have little to show for all our efforts in the nation that has been ominously dubbed the “graveyard of empires.” The U.S. has sacrificed the lives of numerous heroic service members and squandered trillions for nearly two decades in the fond hope that it could remake Afghanistan into a stable, Western-style republic that would respect the human rights of all its citizens. That’s still the plan, as far as the architects of our intervention are concerned: One foreign policy establishment wonk counseled patience, saying that Afghanistan “is not going to become Switzerland overnight,” a fact that is as obvious as Joe Biden’s dementia.
Great. So we know now after almost twenty years that it isn’t going to happen overnight, but how long exactly is it going to take? To that question the advocates of endless intervention have no definite answer. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in late 2019: “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”
All right, but what’s it going to take? Do Rumsfeld, McConnell, and McCaul really think that after nearly twenty years, one more year, or five more years, or ten more years, will do the job?
Afghanistan will never be a Western-style republic and will likely never be free of the Taliban without a massive transformation of Afghan society, no matter how long we stay, and such a transformation is not on the horizon. This was clear relatively early in the conflict, but the obviousness of this fact did not make successive Republican and Democratic administrations rethink the wisdom of being there.
And so after all this American expenditure of personnel, money, and materiel, there is absolutely no doubt that once we leave, the Taliban will make gains and may even regain control of the Afghan government.
Did that mean that America had to keep troops there for fifty years? A hundred years? Should we just make Afghanistan the fifty-first state and seal our commitment there forever? Or should the U.S. instead focus on what is best for America in Afghanistan, working to contain the jihad there and to ensure that the Taliban does not and cannot engage in international jihad terror activity, while otherwise leaving the Afghans to their own devices?
America’s tragic misadventure in Afghanistan makes it clear that a new foreign policy strategy is urgently needed, and that the ideas and assumptions that have governed U.S. foreign policy for nearly a century needed to be consigned to the dustbin of history. President Trump had proposed to do that. Now we are likely to see instead a retrenchment of the forces that made the tragedy of two decades of war in Afghanistan happen in the first place. President Biden, or President Harris, or President Pelosi, or whatever horror show we may be facing next, could send the troops that Trump withdraws right back into the belly of the beast.
After all, as Trump said last September, “the top people in the Pentagon…want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing.” He is getting us out. Others, wanting to keep the Masters of War happy, may get us right back in.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.