Boston Mujahid Planned to Behead Pamela Geller

Yesterday morning a young man of the Muslim persuasion was shot to death in a CVS parking lot in Roslindale, a suburb of Boston. Usaamah Rahim had been under 24-hour surveillance — possibly due to having so many unpaid parking tickets — by a joint task force of FBI agents and Boston police. The agents reported that he pulled a knife while advancing on them, and refused an order to drop the weapon.

After the fatal shooting the brother of the deceased took to Twitter to report that his dear innocent sibling had been shot in the back while talking on his cell phone to their father.

The police, however have video evidence that indicates that Mr. Rahim was not quite as harmless as his brother made him out to be. Furthermore, it appears that the deceased’s long-range plans included the beheading of the blasphemous infidel Pamela Geller.

The video below shows Ms. Geller’s conversation with the hostess of a CNN news program. She does an adept job handling the obnoxious and tendentious questions aimed at her by her interlocutor. Pay special attention to the part about the Southern Poverty Law Center:

See also the CNN article on what happened yesterday in Roslindale.

Here are more details from The Washington Times:

Boston Suspect Plotted to Behead Conservative Blogger Pamela Geller

Usaamah Rahim, the man fatally shot by Boston police after brandishing a military knife at them on Tuesday, plotted to behead conservative blogger and activist Pamela Geller, CNN reported.

Ms. Geller organized the Prophet Muhammad cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas, on May 3 at which two suspects opened fire on a security guard before being shot and killed by police.

“They targeted me for violating Shariah blasphemy laws,” Ms. Geller told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

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No Motoons in the Dutch Parliament — On National TV Instead!

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Geert Wilders’ response to the terror attack in Garland (of which he was almost certainly one of the targets) was to request that the Mohammed cartoons be put on display in the Dutch parliament.

Mr. Wilders’ request has just been denied. However, he has a backup plan: to show the Motoons on national television, using the privileges granted him as a member of parliament.

Below is the press release sent out today by the PVV:

Wilders disappointed by decision of the Bureau of Dutch Parliament: “Muhammad cartoons on national television now”

It is very disappointing that a majority of the Bureau of the Dutch Chamber of Representatives decided not to give permission to hold an exhibition in the parliamentary buildings of the Muhammad cartoons which earlier literally came under fire in Garland, Texas.

PVV leader Geert Wilders: “Last month, I attended an event in Texas which was attacked by shooting terrorists shortly after my speech.

“The only way to show jihadis that we will never bow for terror and violence is to do exactly that which they try to prevent us to do.

“Consequently, it would have been appropriate if the Dutch parliament, in which I have been elected, would have permitted to exhibit the cartoons in question. Since the Bureau of the board of the Chamber has rejected my request, I will soon show some of the cartoons on national television, during the broadcast slot allowed to my political party. Terrorists have to realize that they will never win and how important freedom of speech is for us in the Netherlands.”

Below are excerpts from an article on the same topic in the Brandon Sun:

Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders vows to show Muhammad cartoons on national television

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders said Wednesday he plans to show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on Dutch television after Parliament refused to display them.

Wilders said he would show the cartoons during television airtime reserved for political parties, in a move likely to offend Muslims since Islamic tradition holds that any physical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is blasphemous.

Political parties in the Netherlands get a small amount of airtime each year and broadcasting authorities have no say in what the parties show. Wilders said the broadcast would likely take place in the next few weeks, but an exact date has yet to be determined.

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Turkish Arms to the Turkmens in Syria

As I mentioned yesterday, the would-be Sultan of the revived Ottoman Empire is meddling more and more blatantly in his neighbors’ internal affairs. Recep Tayyip Erdogan keeps supporting the jihad groups trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, and is having only mixed success at covering his tracks.

The latest scandal involves a shipment of weapons to Turkmen fighters in Syria that was intercepted on its way out of Turkey. Cumhuriyet, the newspaper that broke the story, has now been warned by Mr. Erdogan that it will pay a serious price for its actions. There’s little doubt that the reporters and editors responsible for the story will find themselves behind bars, along with so many other journalists who have dared to oppose the future Caliph.

The following article from Cumhuriyet (which has since disappeared from the Internet) originally appeared at Vlad Tepes in a slighty different form. Many thanks to Burak Ant Kiliç for the translation:

Note: some of the characters with special Turkish diacritical marks failed to make it through Vlad’s character encoding, and appear here as question marks:

Cumhuriyet has reached the visuals from the D.A’s files of the truck that was stopped by the police on an informant’s notice at January 19 2014, allegedly carrying arms to Syria.

It turned out that the existence of the arms and ammuniton that were consistently denied by the government were recorded by three cameras in the trucks that are said to be MIT’s (Intelligence Agency)

It was observed that in the steel holds opened by the DA who was escorted by gendarme officials, there were mortar and cannon shells and heavy machine gun bullets covered on top by boxes filled with antibiotics.

How was it stopped?

As remembered, on 11th May 2013 in Reyhanl?, 52 people died after two trucks filled with explosives were detonated, and this was recorded as the “bloodiest terrorist action” in the history of the Republic.

On the 1st of January on a similar informant’s notice a truck was stopped by police forces in K?r?khan county of Hatay, but a search was prevented when the Mayor had interfered.While the truck’s load was recorded as “Humanitarian Aid”, CHP asserted that there were weapons in the truck, and it was carrying arms and ammunition to Syria under control of the government and MIT.

Hayati Yaz?c?, The Minister of Customs, stated “We are x-raying everything that goes to Syria, this situation has nothing to do with us,” while Efkan Ala who took his oath in the Parliament and took office that day asserted that there was aid that was going to Turkmens in the truck and threatened the journalists:

“Everybody is going to know their business. Do you know what’s inside the trucks?”

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/2/2015

The Islamic State has issued a fatwa banning the practice of pigeon-breeding. Violators will face possible flogging. Islamic theologians say the sight of the birds’ genitals as they fly overhead offends Islam. Devout Muslims possess a special visual lobe that allows them to see the genitals of birds, which are not normally visible to kuffar.

In other news, a 23-year-old “Dane” has been jailed in Copenhagen for supporting the Islamic State.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Fjordman, JD, MC, Papa Whiskey, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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John Kerry’s Harry Reid Moment?

Two days ago Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly fell off his bicycle while taking a break from negotiations with the Iranian foreign minister in Geneva. Until the racy photo of Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair yesterday and became the biggest news story of the century, John Kerry’s woes were the top headline on most news outlets. The reports were all more or less the same — this BBC article is representative.

As soon as I heard about what happened, I immediately thought of Sen. Harry Reid’s “accident” on New Year’s Day, when he supposedly fell off his exercise machine. It eventually became clear that nothing of the sort had happened — it was obviously a bogus story. Depending on whose account you believe, he either got messed up by the mob, or was set upon by his alcoholic brother.

I’m a paranoid kind of guy, so I wondered if something similar might have happened to John “Swift Boat” Kerry. I thought, OK, his accident was probably exactly what it seemed to be, but what the heck — I did a little digging anyway. And what I discovered was the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” — that is, there were no photos or videos of the accident scene. Or, if there were, they were very well-hidden.

A summary of the background on Mr. Kerry’s mission to Geneva: He was negotiating with the Iranian foreign minister. Early in the morning he took a bike ride from his hotel, which he likes to do. He was traveling with a motorcade. He pedaled across the border into France, and was 25 miles from his hotel when the accident happened. At some point his wheel hit a curb, and he fell off and fractured his femur. No other vehicles were involved. There were doctors and/or nurses in the motorcade, and he received immediate medical help.

That’s the story. But as far as I can tell, there is no video footage of the accident or its immediate aftermath. All the clips seem to be B-roll footage of him riding around in his dorky helmet. No photos of people standing around him where he’s lying on the pavement, or of his gurney being loaded into the ambulance. Just file photos of him on a bike.

The video in The Daily Mail may be footage of his cycling at around that time, but it doesn’t show the accident itself. There’s no way to tell for certain if that’s a shot of Mr. Kerry riding his bike on that particular morning. The subsequent clip may show an emergency vehicle from after the incident, but what’s happening isn’t completely clear.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/1/2015

Despite years of intervention by social service personnel, “Swedish” “youths” in Gothenburg continue to join gangs and commit violent crimes. Meanwhile, security police (SÄPO) in Sweden arrested two men suspected of being recruiters for the Islamic State.

In other news, a suicide attack on a police base in western Iraq left dozens of people dead.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, JD, Srdja Trifkovic, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Saying the Unsayable

Julius O’Malley is a longtime reader and commenter from Australia. Below is his first guest-essay for Gates of Vienna, on the issue of mass Third-World immigration to the West.

“We want right to enter UK legally”

by Julius O’Malley

So says the crude handmade banner held up by a group of hoodied MENA young men standing in a street in Calais, France.

Of course they do. One is tempted to remark that “I want right to enter USA legally”, but I’m not going to get it. Oddly, I understand and accept that the USA can’t just let in everybody who wants to migrate to the country.

What do these young MENA men have to offer the UK? It is an obvious question that rarely seems to be asked in our era, perhaps because it is now deemed irrelevant. What happened to make this so? It seems pretty fundamental to me that a state admits immigrants based on that state’s needs. If these MENA men were admitted would they become hard-working, law-abiding taxpayers and civil citizen contributors who would add to the social capital of the nation? Or would they just enlarge the largely hostile, pervasively unskilled and resolutely unassimilable horde of parasitic cultural invaders?

Why are there young MENA men congregating on the streets of Calais demanding entry to the UK? They are planning to somehow smuggle themselves via the Channel Tunnel into Britain where they intend to apply for asylum. They camp out on abandoned factory sites or on unused public land. Their tents and sleeping bags are provided by French charities. One new Calais camp, “Jungle 2”, has a central building, the Jules Ferry Centre, a former seaside recreation centre for French schoolchildren, where the small proportion of women and children are accommodated, and hot showers and meals are provided for the men who live in surrounding tents and shanties. They’ve even erected a rudimentary mosque there.

French officialdom tries to persuade them to make asylum application in France. They refuse. And they complain about the poor sanitation facilities provided to them. As you do when you’re an illegal transient using somebody else’s country as a staging point to illegally enter another somebody else’s country.

How did they get into France in the first place? Into Europe? They paid “people smugglers” around €3,000 each to get them across the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy, or into Bulgaria or Rumania from Turkey. That’s quite a lot of money for someone from a Third World country, so its reasonable to assume that the asylum-seekers are not from the poorest stratum of MENA societies. The people smugglers are very often Albanian or South Asian, the former gangsters who’ve diversified from trafficking narcotics and prostitutes-to-be from East to West into a new lucrative industry. The latter have yet to acquire the “mafia” tag, but conduct themselves indistinguishably. Ever noticed in the photographs of the overcrowded boats the passengers are sitting in orderly rows like obedient schoolchildren? That’s because they get shot or thrown overboard by the on-board smugglers if they stand up. Conditions whilst waiting on the Libyan shore are pretty awful too: rape, murder, beatings. It is no accident that Libya is the principal embarkation point and the spike in departures has coincided with the complete breakdown in public order since the glorious “Arab Spring” took place there.

Are they “all in this together” and thus display a camaraderie of desperate people escaping persecution? No fear. In Palermo on April, 15 Muslim asylum seekers from the Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal were arrested after docking for having thrown 12 Ghanaians and Nigerians overboard in the open sea. They drowned, of course. Why? The latter “had declared themselves Christians”. Many more would have drowned if they hadn’t formed an arms-interlinked human chain which made it impossible for them to be thrown off.

How many more instances have there been where no Christians survived to tell the tale? Or were too frightened to speak up?

Italy is a modern, affluent, stable country with a “very high” Human Development Index of 0.872 — the 26th highest in the world. After France, USA, Spain and China it is the fifth most popularly visited nation on Earth. For decades it was the number 1 or 2 tourist destination in the world. So why don’t they stay in Italy? No one asks why they don’t stay in Romania — it’s impolite — but Romania has a “high” HDI of 0.785, the 54th highest in the world. Its GDP per capita is $20,000, a little over half that of Italy’s; still it is 18 times higher than Eritrea’s and five times that of Sudan’s, so not too shabby. If I were fleeing, say, Somalia, I’d stay there. In fact if I were fleeing any MENA nation I’d be delighted to be settle in Romania.

Only 30% of asylum seekers in Italy actually apply for asylum in Italy; the other 70% move north-west and north. Historically, Italy has been a toughish country in which to gain refugee status/political asylum: the success rate varies dramatically from year to year, but since 2005 has hovered around 40%. Still, one would think that those landing in Italy would at least try in Italy. That more than twice as many don’t than do makes one suspicious that these people are not truly desperate for asylum, but are simply opportunistic economic migrants. Oddly, nobody in France or the UK seems to say to the applying refugees: you were in Italy, why didn’t you apply there?

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The Man Who Would Be Caliph

It has been clear for more than a decade that the former prime minister and current president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has aspirations to revive the Ottoman Empire with himself as Sultan. His duties as Sultan would include functioning as the Caliph of all Muslims (or at least the Sunni branch of Islam).

The meteoric rise of the Islamic State, which is headed by a rival claimant to the office of Caliph, has given new urgency to Mr. Erdogan’s mission, and induced him to accelerate his grandiose attempts to consolidate power and establish his uncontested supremacy as the leader of Sunni Islam. He has increased his persecution of political rivals and opposition journalists in the last couple of years, and his meddling in the affairs of other countries, especially Syria, is becoming more and more brazen.

Among other responsibilities, the Ottoman Sultan/Caliph would hold suzerainty over al-Quds, or Jerusalem, which historically was part of the province of Syria in the Ottoman Empire. In the following video clip from last month, Mr. Erdogan expresses his longing for Jerusalem and his determination to regain control of it.

Remember: this man is the leader of Turkey, our “staunch NATO ally”.

Many thanks to Tanya for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Transcript:

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The New Stockholm Syndrome Looks Like HIV

The last week or so I’ve been struggling to finish a post on the perils inherent in our current immigration “policies”. Aside from my health issues (boring), digging up the pertinent information from a wide variety of sources was daunting. So much of it is deliberately shrouded in secrecy and divided among multitudes of organizations, bureaucracies, and “subcontractors. The trek through what appeared to be a trackless desert of agencies, programs, and (ir)responsible bureaucratic directives seemed endless. When it came to creating a coherent essay out of the disparate pieces, I sadly set the puzzle of evil intentions aside to wait for my physical condition to improve. Sigh…

What had brought my ongoing concern to a boil was that well-known Epistle from the Far-Left Fourteen. Their smarmy politospeak letter to President Obama actually got me out of bed and sitting at the keyboard. Given the wall-to-wall coverage by our intrepid MSM I’m sure your concern has been equally engaged, too, hasn’t it? Oh. You were away in Outer Mongolia last week so you missed it? Well, gentle readers, let me refer you to the four-page plea from some of America’s elected extremist Leftists to their Supreme Leftist Leader. It’s here and it’s ugly.

These senators will do anything for a vote. “Anything” includes demanding that we take in an extra 65,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016. I call this The New Stockholm Syndrome. There are several signs and symptoms associated with TNSS but its main manifestation is an inordinate, incurable desire to stuff your country with Syrian refugees and then proceed to let them destroy your culture. Before now I would’ve said, “It’s a Swedish thing; we couldn’t understand.” But now I know better: it’s a leftist thing. To begin to understand it, think of it as an opportunistic infection arising from the death of a previously healthy immune system. Yeah, like HIV. The public health departments have educated us all on the ways to avoid the near occasions of acquiring an HIV infection but it’s not entirely escapable: if your momma gives birth to you whilst in the throes of an HIV outbreak herself, you get to share the disease with her.

It’s the same with the extreme versions of socialism: if your elected leaders — and especially your fourth branch of government, those unelected and promiscuously replicating bureaucracies — are infected with suicidal levels of political correctness and/or multi-cultural diversity, then your chances of surviving their compulsively intrusive kamikaze “programs” will become dimmer by the day.

In this case, just do the math, sticking to politically correct parameters: we are told and so we all know for certain that only a tiny minority of Muslims are terrorists. Well, ninety percent of those Syrian culture-enrichers the senators are panting after are Muslim. If you’re an adherent of the “tiny minority” theory of terrorism, then we get to have, oh maybe, 650 new jihadists roaming the fruited plains. None of the remaining enrichers will be vetted for disease, dirty bombs, or designs on our country. File this under “the check is in the mail” — and I remind you that the check is drawn on the account of the already over-burdened American taxpayer.

The cynical pols who wrote that letter to the President used research from the Refugee Council USA to back up their demand that we make room. This is akin to calling a drug addict as an expert witness when making the case for legalizing heroin. Just click on that URL from the Refugee Resettlement Watch to bring up a search page on the history of this fine organization. And remember, the job of any bureaucracy is to guard its viability. It has to keep coming up with ‘work’ that justifies its existence.

The toxic horrors of the War on Poverty are in full flower now. Nearly every urban center controlled by the Democrat machine is failing on all levels: culturally, educationally, fiscally — you name a category and these determined socialist programs have deeply failed us. But you can count on the electoral vote going to the Democrats — and that was the whole point in that evil enterprise, the one Daniel Moynihan warned us about ahead of time. Even worse, these criminals have piled a heap of ruin on the very people they claimed to be helping. Our cities are exploding even as the Democrat governance of these places implodes. Look at Detroit and think “Chernobyl without the radiation”. Climbing our way over the mountains of trashed humanity and reclaiming those toxic areas will be the work of generations. That is, if we can hold the politicians and the professional bureaucrats at bay long enough to begin the work of excavation. Part of that work will be closing the door to large numbers of third world immigrants — closing the door and holding it shut against the very same ideological machinations that ruined America in the last fifty years.

I’m not well enough to continue my research and have sadly abandoned it. However, in our email today came the following post from the New English Review. Jerry Gordon has collected Ann Corcoran’s information, and Ann herself, to provide both a fascinating interview and a coherent summation of the criminal acts being foisted upon us. Unlike Sweden, we weren’t a socialist paradise before the immigrant onslaught. Unlike Sweden we already have a large minority population whose resentment is nourished by the same people who profit from it. Someday #BlackLivesMatter will be seen clearly as a con job by a bunch of opportunists. But that’s a problem to confront on another day. First, we need to be informed about the latest crisis being created by the folks at Constant Crisis, Incorporated™

That’s why I’m excerpting from the post Jerry Gordon has up at the New English Review.

He dives into the alphabet soup and comes up with the words these charlatans hide behind and use to disguise their real intentions.

Jerry also interviews Ann Corcoran, the woman above all others — including the foundations and purported ‘rightwing’ slick sheets — who single-handedly has educated many of us about the clear and present danger of our ongoing immigration crisis. “Ongoing” crisis as in one that has continued under the radar for decades. I suppose a “crisis” that is more than thirty years old is, strictly speaking, no longer a crisis. But what word can we use in its stead? The problems of immigration remain A Crisis because the bought-and-paid-for silence/complicity of our degraded mainstream media insures that the reality will be squelched until such time that it affects even their precious skins. Until then, we’re on our own to discover the truth.

Thank heavens for people like Jerry Gordon and Ann Corcoran. They deserve our gratitude. If this country is ever put aright again, their names will be in the history books. Just as, when the cabal surrounding the FDR Adoration Society eventually drops into a well-deserved oubliette, Diana West’s crucial work on the truth of those years will get the promulgation which it deserves and which we need. These events may not happen in our lifetime, but we need to stay vigilant for the generations coming after us so they will at least have some pieces to recover.

Now on to Jerry Gordon’s post, or at least some excerpts. Since I haven’t asked to mirror it, I will only use part of it — amended for my own purposes — but leaving you with plenty to read at the original URL. If there is repetition of what I have said in this long introduction, bear with me; I’ve been writing and thinking about this subject all week — ever since I came across that letter to Obama from those odious extremist Left senators. Because what NER has done here is so much more extensive than what I’d rounded up, I am duty-bound to give you the better report.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Jerry begins with the Pew Project numbers and some alphabet soup. If you read these reports long enough, you get used to the MEGO bumf, but it never becomes easy to read. [As we go forward, the emphases and kibitzing in this essay will be mine. The research, unless otherwise specified, will be Jerry Gordon’s. —D ]

Here’s my adaptation of Jerry’s opening paragraph. He cites Pew Research for his numbers on immigration; my preference is to make a table that is more easily comprehended when dealing with large numbers:

  • In 2013 over one million legal immigrants came to America. [did you know the number was that high? I wonder what it is now as Obama’s foreign policy of deliberately induced chaos has proceeded apace?]
  • Of these “over one million” immigrants ten percent were Muslims — though it doesn’t indicate what kinds of Muslims made it here [don’t forget to do your math on the terrorist “tiny minority” among this group].
  • More than 1.3 million Muslims have been brought into the U.S. via a billion dollar program run by the US Refugee Admissions Programs [Pew doesn’t say how long a period it took for us to admit these 1.3 million Muslims but I’d bet it’s less than a decade. Look at this other group, a gift from the UN, which is, I think, separate from the US RAP numbers Jerry quotes. Every single year the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees — that’s UNHCR to you — gives us a separate 70,000 . If you begin to research this area, UNHCR will come up a lot].

Here’s a chart I found going back to 2009, which Mr. Gordon might find useful:

Jerry continues:

According to Ann Corcoran, editor of the Refugee Resettlement Watch (RRW) blog, this UN refugee agency “virtually calls the shots” for the US RAP that provides legal refugee immigrants with a veritable smorgasbord of cash welfare, Social Security benefits for elderly refugees, Medicaid, educational assistance and a pathway to ultimate citizenship. Including both federal and state level benefits; some experts estimate that the annual total cost of the US RAP could be upwards of $12 to $20 billion annually.

[We are being beggared by beggars. But that may be the whole point of the extremist Left’s scheme to eliminate the backbone of the middle class by overwhelming it with immigrant labor and endless regulations —D]

He then breaks down some of the ways in which these bureaucrats use your money. Again, a table; a flow chart would be even more enlightening:

The tripartite US RAP is administered by:

  • the US Department of State, Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration (BPRM) that admits and contracts with voluntary agencies to process refugees;
  • the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that allegedly screens refugees abroad;
  • and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) of the US Department of Health and Human Services that funds grants to program contractors and refugee ethnic groups for community absorption.

Look where all this goes:

The President, upon advice from the State Department BPRM, sends Congress an annual directive conveying these UNHCR refugee allotments that are virtually “rubber stamped” by immigration and border security subcommittees of Congress.

When we alarmists sound that alarm this is what all our noise is about — the hollow sound of rubber stamps where there used to be voice votes in Congress. But now it’s backwards: the fourth branch of government — the bureaucracies named above in this case — should have to appear before the relevant Congressional committees to have their fiefdoms held in check. Only after their budgets have been approved by Congress’ advise-and-consent function should they then go to the president for approval. But that’s not how it works anymore. A corrupt short-circuit by the fourth branch of the federal government has been inserted into the process, emasculating Congress.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/31/2015

Secretary of State John Kerry was hospitalized in Switzerland after falling off his bicycle and breaking his leg. Mr. Kerry is in stable condition, and reportedly in good spirits.

In other news, hundreds of thousands of Turks took to the streets of Istanbul yesterday to celebrate the 562nd anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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The Pause That Refreshes


(Graphic courtesy FrontPage Mag)

By now you’ve all heard about a young Muslim woman named Tahera Ahmad, who started a guanostorm on Twitter this morning about her brutal treatment at the hands of United Airlines. It seems that a stewardess discriminated against her by refusing to let her have an unopened can of Diet Coke.

At this point, it looks like we’re in for Flying Imams Lite — there’s a boycott campaign against United being ginned up online by Muslims and their leftist allies. The airline is already groveling and salaaming and issuing profuse apologies to the world’s 7.8 octillion Muslims.

For the moment, let’s put aside the fact that (as Daniel Greenfield points out) Ms. Ahmad, in her capacity as a Muslim chaplain at Northwestern University, joined the protest in social media against honoring Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis. We’ll let The Guardian have first say:

‘No Diet Coke for You’: Islamophobia at 30,000 Feet Leads to Viral United Airlines Boycott

Muslim chaplain Tahera Ahmad’s Facebook post alleges discrimination, saying man next to her was served beer as airline says it will ‘get a better understanding’

What happens when you ask for an unopened can of Diet Coke on an airplane? If you’re a Muslim woman, according to one report, you don’t get served.

And the man sitting next to you gets an unopened can of beer just fine.

Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim chaplain at Chicago’s Northwestern University, documented these allegations from onboard a United Airlines flight this weekend in an episode that almost immediately went viral – and led to pledges to boycott the airline.

On her Facebook page, Ahmad claimed a flight attendant was “clearly discriminating against me” after she asked for an unopened of soda for hygienic reasons and says was told, “Well, I’m sorry. I just can’t give you an unopened can, so no Diet Coke for you.”

When the man next to her allegedly got an unopened beer can from the in-flight service, Ahmad said she was told something even more inflammatory: “We are unauthorized to give unopened cans to people, because they may use it as a WEAPON on the plane.”

Ahmad said her fellow passengers were of no help: “you Moslem, you need to shut the F up,” Ahmad said, in the Facebook post, that she was told by another male passenger across the aisle. “[y]es you know you would use it as a WEAPON, so shut the F up.”

There’s something fishy about this story. First of all, there’s only one account of the incident, and that’s Ms. Ahmad’s. And it’s everywhere. All the media stories are based on it.

Now, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be discrimination to deny a Muslima an unopened can whilst allowing, say, a Hasidic rabbi to take one. It would be simple prudence, a sound counter-terrorist policy.

But airlines can’t do that, for the same reason the TSA pats down nuns and sends Granny through the naked scanner: to prove that no one is being discriminated against. That’s far, far more important than any prudent counter-terrorism policy.

So I simply don’t believe United has such a policy.

That’s one thing. Now take a look at a second account of what happened, also based on Tahera Ahmad’s social media posts but with slightly different details, from the The New York Daily News [emphasis added]:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2015

The number of Mediterranean migrants rescued yesterday has been revised upwards to more than 4,200, traveling on 22 different boats. 17 would-be migrants were also found dead on those boats.

In other news, a Draw Mohammed event held in front of a Phoenix mosque went off peacefully. The ex-Marine who staged the action said that he was doing it to remind Americans to protect their First Amendment rights.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, Mithrandir, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

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Out on Bail and Thinking About Killing a Priest

A Catholic church in Brampton, a suburb west of Toronto, was vandalized by a culturally enriched young fellow named Iqbal Hessan. Based on surveillance videos, Mr. Hessan damaged and desecrated St. Catherine of Siena church. And he also told police investigators that he wanted to kill a priest.

So what did the magistrate do? Why, he let the miscreant out on bail, of course!

Ezra Levant of TheRebel.media talks about the incident in the following clip:

Below is a news report about the reaction of the pastor at St. Catherine of Siena church:

Pastor at Vandalized Church ‘Surprised’ He Wasn’t Told of Threat Against Priests

Accused man out on bail

BRAMPTON — The pastor at St. Catherine of Siena church wants to know why police didn’t tell him that a Cooksville man who is out on bail after being accused of committing crimes that targeted his church had thoughts of killing or hurting a priest.

Father Camillo Lando said he is holding a meeting with his two priests today to “tell them to be careful” after hearing of the disturbing allegations that were revealed in Brampton court yesterday during the bail hearing for 22-year-old Iqbal Hessan.

Court heard that in his statements to police after his arrest this week, Hessan said he was thinking of killing or hurting a priest the night he’s alleged to have broken into the church.

“We should be aware of this,” Lando said. “If he is threatening us, why was he released? And why wouldn’t the police call to tell me he said these things.”

Peel police haven’t responded to a request for comment.

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How the Muslim Brotherhood Operates in Tennessee (Part 7 of 8)

Below is the latest newsletter from the Tennessee Council for Political Justice.

Newsletter #169 – How the Muslim Brotherhood Operates in Tennessee (Part 7 of 8)

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded for the purpose of rejecting Western civilization and replacing it with global sharia law by restoring the Caliphate.

Tennessee’s Islamists select imams and speakers to reinforce this objective and influence younger Muslims.

Imams educated at Al Ahzar University in Egypt

Al Ahzar University is credited with starting the Islamist movement by training Islamic radicals tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, and stands for the propagation of Islam and sharia as a complete way of life. Considered the preeminent teaching center of sharia law, Al Ahzar authenticated the English translation of “Reliance of the Traveller, The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law.”

Excerpts from “Reliance of the Traveller” include:

  • “the Objectives of Jihad” 8 — … wars against Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians if they don’t accept the invitation to Islam or they can pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)
  • “Giving Zakat to Deserving Recipients” 17 (zakat is Islamic charity) — those fighting for Allah [i.e., “volunteers for jihad”]
  • “Dealing with a rebellious wife” 12(4)(c) — a husband may hit his wife…

Mohammed Ahmed, former imam at the Islamic Center of Nashville (ICN). Ahmed told attendees at the June 2011 meeting of the Religion Communicators Council that he supported the Egyptian police forced virginity tests performed on female protesters in Tahrir Square. The imam explained: “Why? It’s a very interesting fact that the police giving you a heads up, ‘oh, those people are not virgin’. That’s mean they are not good people”

Osama Bahloul, imam at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro (ICM). He has a degree in Dawa (proselytizing for Islam; his thesis was the establishment of a Dawa curriculum aimed at secularists, atheists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.) The ICM hosted the Muslim Brotherhood unindicted co-conspirators CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and Jamal Badawi.

Imams educated at University of Medinah, Saudi Arabia

The University of Medinah in Saudi Arabia is associated with the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Sunni Islam. Salafists want to practice Islam in its most original, purest and “authentic” form without relying on cultural practices or clerical interpretations.

  • AbdulRahman ibn Esa Chao, imam at the Islamic Center of Tennessee. Reported to have graduated from the University of Medinah at age 21, the youngest graduate of record. He also studied at the IIASA (Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America), located in Virginia, funded by Saudi Arabia. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies says, “[IIASA] is the largest source of Saudi hate literature in the Washington area.
  • Abdulhakim Mohammed was the imam at the ICN from 1999-2007 during which time he helped them set up the private Islamic school the Nashville International Academy. Born in Yemen, he spent much of his early childhood in Detroit, Michigan. He spent approximately eight years at the University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, then returned to Yemen to work at managing Islamic schools and other educational programs. Prior to the ICN, he was the imam at the Islamic Center in Ann Arbor and then at the radical Brooklyn Al Farooq mosque, a.k.a. the “al-Qaeda mosque.” This is also the mosque attended by the “blind sheikh” who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
  • Yasir Qadhi, resident scholar at the Memphis Islamic Center and Dean of Academic Affairs, al Maghrib Institute. His media company used to sell recordings by the al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar Awalaki. Al Maghrib students include the Christmas Day bomber and convicted terrorist Daniel Maldonado. Qadhi is an International speaker and Holocaust denier, who says “we are loyal to our countries insofar as it does not interfere with our religion of Islam.”
     
    Qadhi calls Christians and Jews spiritually “filthy.”
  • Rafiq Mahdi, (formerly known as William Henderson), is a black American convert to Islam who, after leaving the Nation of Islam, trained in Saudi Arabia. He is considered the “unofficial imam of Knoxville”, where he helped establish the Annoor Mosque. Prior to Knoxville, he led the Masjid Al-Iman in Florida, described as a “small fundamentalist mosque” which was the spiritual home of the “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. Padilla had ties to al Qaeda and was convicted of planning a jihad attack in 2002.
     
    Mahdi helped fundraise for the KindHearts Foundation which was shut down under suspicion of raising money for Hamas.

Imams trained at other Saudi institutions

  • Abdullah Al Ansar, the first imam at the Islamic Center of Tennessee. Graduate of the Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Has over 14 years of experience in dawa. Prior to ICTN he was the imam at Detroit’s Masjid Al Tawheed whose website (prior to scrubbing) published links to jihadi lectures in the UK. Al Ansari preached the following:
     
    “He [Allah] told us to fight the Jews and Christians. Fight them until they give jizya. They give this protective tax from their hands and they are humiliated and subdued.”
  • Abdelrahman Murphy, a former faculty member at Knoxville private Islamic School Annoor Academy, Youth Leader for Roots program and mentor to MSA at UT Knoxville. He completed the Imam Certificate Program in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Currently, Murphy runs the youth program at the Islamic Center of Boston, encouraging the young people to “be like Mohammed.”

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