Recently in claiming victim status Category

Just when you thought Hamas-linked CAIR couldn't get any more despicable: even when Muslims commit a brutal and gratuitous act of violence, CAIR claims victim status.

Said their attorney: “Had their names been John or Bill, Randy or Jason, I don't think these charges would be standing here today. Because of the Arab ethnicity, I think these charges were brought with the racial animus behind it." In reality, had their names been John or Bill, Randy or Jason, they'd have been charged with assault and tried for assault, and there might be a news article or two about brutality in high school football, but there would be none of the media attention or hypocritical self-righteousness that we're seeing in this case.

More on this story. "CAIR defends football players who assaulted quarterback saying charges based on racism," by Matt Lacy in the Greeley Gazette, February 7:

The Council on Arab Islamic Relations is defending four Michigan High School football players who ignored a referee and assaulted a quarterback, saying the charges are based solely on their race.

On Oct. 21, during a football game between Star Academy and Westland Lutheran High School in Dearborn Heights he quarterback for Westland planned to bow his knee to end the game with a 48-6 victory.

Referees reportedly instructed players not to have contact after the snap. While the quarterback, P.J. Kruse was taking the knee, Star players burst through the offensive line and threw him to the ground. During the ensuing melee, Kruse suffered a grade three concussion.

Following a three month investigation into the incident, The Wayne County prosecutor filed aggravated assault charges against Star Academy seniors Mohamed Ahmed, Fanar Al-Alsady, Hadee Attia and Ali Bajjey.

The attorney for the players, Nabih Ayad said the charges were based solely because the players race. CAIR-MI, the Arab Civil Rights League and the NAACP have sent the prosecutors a letter asking for all of the charges to be dismissed.

In a news conference Jan. 24, CAIR said there was new video that said the incident was “greatly exaggerated” and that no charges would have been filed happened if the players had been any other religion. At this time the organization has not released the supposed video that vindicates the students.

CAIR Executive Director Dawud Walid said “We believe that from the very beginning that, if these young men may have been of a different ethnicity, of a different religion, different skin color, that Dearborn Heights police officer most likely would not have been so aggressive in the means in which he carried out his investigation.”

Ayad said “Had their names been John or Bill, Randy or Jason, I don't think these charges would be standing here today. Because of the Arab ethnicity, I think these charges were brought with the racial animus behind it."

He went on to describe the event as simply a post play “skirmish” that frequently happens in football games.

Wayne County Prosecutor, Kym Worthy issued a statement denying CAIR’s allegations, saying the department had a strict policy against allowing race or ethnicity to influence any part of the charging process.

Defending the charges, Worthy said, “Our investigation in this case includes a video tape which captured the incident. After a review of the evidence, we have charged the people involved in this incident with the appropriate charges.”

Robert Spencer with Jihad Watch said Ayad’s statement trivializing what happened was incredible. “Really? Players commonly give their opponents concussions in non-game situations?”

Spencer pointed out that if the situation were reversed with non-Muslims assaulting a Muslim student, CAIR would be demanding the players face hate crime charges.

“In this case, they're trying to portray some thuggish Muslim footballers as victims, both to advance their Muslim victimhood narrative, and to try to intimidate law enforcement officials into being afraid to charge Muslims with anything, for fear of being charged with racial or ethnic or religious bias.”

CAIR’s reaction to the incident follows on the heels of similar incidents where the group has tried to play the victim card.

Following the FBI’s arrest of Sami Osmakac, a Muslim from Kosovo who was a naturalized American citizen, CAIR suggested that authorities may have used entrapment in the case.

Hassan Shibly, executive director for the Council on American Islamic Relations said, “The weapons and explosives were provided by the government. Was he just a troubled individual, or did he pose a real threat?" After Shibly’s comments were reported in the alternative media, CAIR backed down saying they would not pursue the entrapment allegations.

During a series of recent firebombings In Queens, New York CAIR quickly claimed that the bombings were caused by Islamophobia.

While a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the door of the Al-Khoei Islamic Foundation houses one of the most prominent Shiite mosques in New York, the assailant also firebombed a house of a black Christian couple as well as another house which served as a Hindu place of worship.

Following the attacks CAIR called for police to increase patrols around Mosques, however they did not call for similar patrols around houses of worship for other faiths.

Spencer said CAIR’s reaction reveals that the group will not hesitate to use any event to their advantage to portray Muslims as victims in this country.

“CAIR did not mention anything about the Hindus or Christians when they issued their release. This just shows how self-serving their claims of victimhood really are,” Spencer said. “They called for increased police patrols against mosques, but they didn’t say anything about calling for protection for Hindu or Christian places of worship.”...

According to former Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Eddie Green, Kifah Jayyousi was “a great guy, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.” While Green was superintendent, Jayyousi oversaw the Detroit school district’s capital improvement program.

Jayyousi was charged, according to the Detroit Free Press, with “conspiring to kidnap, maim and murder by providing money, recruits and equipment for Islamic struggles in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya from 1993 to 2001.”

Christopher Paul, a martial arts instructor at a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, is also a terrific guy. Ahmad Al-Akhras, vice chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter in Columbus, said: “From the things I know, he is a loving husband and he has a wife and parents in town. They are a good family together.”

Yet Paul, a Muslim, was charged, according to Associated Press, with “providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.” He was accused of training with Al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, training people for violent jihad attacks on targets in Europe and the United States, and more.

This kind of thing is nothing new. According to a Southern California friend of Raed Albanna, who killed 132 people in a suicide attack outside a medical clinic in Iraq in 2005, “He was into partying. We hit some pretty wild clubs in Hollywood.” Frank Lindh, the father of John Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Suleyman Al-Faris, the convert to Islam from Marin County who joined the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan fighting against American troops, has said: “In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man embarked on a spiritual quest.”

Great guys all. Some partied and some embarked on a spiritual search, but they all ended up in the same place, committing acts dedicated to furthering the cause of jihad, or facing charges of having done so.

But they may be genuinely decent fellows. It was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders: “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet -- apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard…”

Were these SS mass murderers really decent fellows? To their friends and family, they probably were. After all, they weren’t interested in undifferentiated mayhem. They were adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational. It was a necessity for them to remain “decent fellows,” for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society. That their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble them, for it was all for -- in their view -- a goal that remained good.

Today’s jihad terrorists are likewise the adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. And those murders, here again, are not committed for their own sake, but for the sake of a societal vision hardly less draconian and evil than that of Adolf Hitler, but one also that portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good -- as the Taliban showed us. But the continued reference to such people as “terrorists” pure and simple, and the refusal of the media and most law enforcement officials to examine their ideology at all, only reinforces the idea that these people are raving maniacs, interested solely in chaos for its own sake. The society they want to build, and the means besides guns and bombs that they are using to build it, so far remain below the radar screen of most analysts. These people are just “terrorists,” interested only in “terror.” And so we’re continually surprised when they turn out to be nice guys after all. Decent fellows. Like the SS.

"Father: Beheading plot suspect a dedicated teacher," from the Associated Press, February 4 (thanks to Kenneth):

Nevine Aly Elshiekh is a dog lover who teaches children with developmental disabilities. She is college-educated, well-respected by her neighbors and has no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket.

Family members and friends find it impossible to reconcile that woman with the zealot federal prosecutors say paid a hit man to behead three government informants from a recent terrorism trial.

Elshiekh, 46, was arrested two weeks ago when FBI agents raided the tidy West Raleigh ranch house she shares with her elderly parents. Her father, an Egyptian who moved his family to the U.S. more than 40 years ago, told The Associated Press the charges don't add up.

"We don't believe it," said Aly Elshiekh, 80, a retired professor at North Carolina State University. "She loves special-ed kids and has dedicated her life to helping kids with disabilities."

Also arrested was Shkumbin Sherifi, 21. Prosecutors said they paid $5,000 for the first hit to an FBI informant posing as a fictional hit man's assistant, who later showed the pair a faked photo showing the intended victim's severed head.

Sherifi is the younger brother of Hysen Sherifi, 27, who was sentenced last month to 45 years in prison for conspiring to attack the U.S. Marine base at Quantico and targets overseas.

Elshiekh, a family friend of one of the defendants, frequently made the two-hour trip to New Bern to attend the monthlong trial, which began shortly after the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. She scribbled careful notes during the testimony that led to Hysen Sherifi and two others being convicted of terrorism-related offenses. Three others pleaded guilty.

The case hinged largely on surveillance tapes made by confidential informants paid by the FBI.

Elshiekh was born in the United States, while Shkumbin Sherifi is a naturalized citizen. Like many from Raleigh's growing Muslim community, they insisted during trial that the defendants were innocent. There was no evidence presented that any of the accused men had agreed to participate in a specific plot.

Prosecutors say Hysen Sherifi exchanged letters with Elshiekh during trial and called her from jail. He also mailed her bracelets he made behind bars, according to the FBI.

Court records show Elshiekh divorced in 2010. Hysen Sherifi is married to a woman who lives in his native Kosovo.

The Sherifi family fled their homeland in 1999 during a brutal war between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. Shkumbin Sherifi lives at home with his parents and has taken classes at a nearby community college, though records show he was not enrolled at the time of his arrest.

State court records show his only prior brush with the law was in 2006, when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for resisting a public officer.

He has said his brother was framed by federal agents.

"Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks were targeted," Shkumbin Sherifi said in a video uploaded to YouTube the day of his arrest. "For Muslims, it's guilty until proven innocent."

Relatives have declined repeated interview requests. However, an older sister, Hylja Sherifi, testified at a Jan. 27 court hearing that Shkumbin is a primary caregiver to their father, who has end-stage lung cancer.

He also records rap songs in English and Albanian under the stage name Beme. His lyrics recount the sectarian violence in his homeland, which was eventually halted by an American-led bombing campaign against the Serbian military. Tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars, including the Sherifis, ended up as refugees in the United States, Germany and other western nations.

"Bombs dropping 4 in the morning, tanks blowing, windows shaking, my momma's fainting," Shkumbin Sherifi raps to a heavy beat. "I was a kid. Hey, what could I do? ... Guerrilla warfare, yeah, we fight back. But NATO don't like that. We fight for each other. Y'all tried to murder my sisters and brothers. ... We're gonna to get revenge, before Judgment Day."...

For the past nine years, Elshiekh has worked at Sterling Montessori Academy, a state-supported charter school in Morrisville. School officials declined repeated requests for comment and said only that Elshiekh has been placed on leave.

The organization's tax returns, which are public records, list Elshiekh's title as director of exceptional children and indicate she is among the school's highest-paid employees.

She has also served as a teacher at a religious school that is part of the Islamic Association of Raleigh, the city's largest mosque.

Imran Aukhil, a spokesman for the mosque, did not respond to requests for comment. Members of the congregation were among about 30 people who attended court hearings in Wilmington to show support.

Farris Barakat, a 21-year-old college student, said Elshiekh was his second-grade teacher at the mosque's school.

"Sister Nevine is an amazing person," Barakat said. "Nothing bad has ever come out of her."

On the quiet Raleigh street where Elshiekh lives with her parents, neighbors expressed disbelief she could be involved in anything nefarious.

Alan Harris, who lives across the road from the Elshiekhs, said he frequently saw Nevine walking her chocolate lab. Also a dog owner, Harris said they often spoke.

He said she wore western clothes and never discussed religion.

"She's a kind, caring person, always polite," Harris said. "From what I know of her, she is of good character. I hope she turns out to be an innocent party in all this."

In court Friday, Elshiekh wore a traditional scarf for Muslim women that covered her hair and neck. The shackles on her ankles clanked under a long, black dress....

Yesterday afternoon Human Events posted my piece about recent shameful events in New York:

The mainstream media, led by the New York Times, and the Islamic supremacist Hamas-linked hate group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are doing all they can to whip up a frenzy about the NYPD’s showing of a relatively tepid but accurate counter-terror film, The Third Jihad, to police officers.

Lost in the hysteria is the question of whether there is anything inaccurate or false in the film – yet those who are demanding apologies and reeducation from the NYPD have demonstrated not one inaccuracy in it. No one who is protesting against this film is going beyond the claim that it is “Islamophobic.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg immediately apologized, saying that showing the film to New York police officers manifested “terrible judgment.” Police commissioner Raymond Kelly apologized also: “I offer my apologies to members of the Muslim community, in particular, who would find the film inflammatory and its airing on department property, though unauthorized, to be inappropriate.”

In a sane world, Kelly and Bloomberg would not be apologizing at all. They’d be saying, “Yes, we showed the film, and we’re going to keep showing it, and what of it? If the Muslims in New York are upset about it being inaccurate, let them demonstrate its inaccuracy by taking positive steps to fight in their own community against the stealth jihad activity that the film documents.”

For the whole controversy is predicated on the assumption that The Third Jihad is whipping up hysteria about a non-existent threat. In reality, it covers much the same ground that I cover in my book Stealth Jihad, in which I show that the agenda of infiltration and subversion on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied groups is very real.

In a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, Brotherhood operatives in the U.S. are told that they “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

And at a Muslim event in California in 1998, CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad was quoted as saying: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

Nor are these isolated statements. Yet the initial New York Times article about the showing of this film, as well as all the coverage that has followed, was based on the assumption that no Muslim in the U.S. believes or acts upon such ideas. And the Times deplored that “at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.” Apparently they will all need to be reeducated.

Instead of considering whether or not the film is accurate, the mainstream media has scolded Bloomberg and Kelly for their failure to reach out to New York’s Muslim community. But here again, in a sane world, the Mayor and the NYPD would not be expected to reach out to the Muslim community and prove their good will. The Muslim community would be reaching out to the Mayor and the NYPD, eager to prove its good will. And the Mayor and the NYPD would be telling Hamas-linked CAIR that its counterterror cooperation was not enough, instead of letting this execrable Islamic supremacist Hamas front dictate New York City’s counterterror operations.

But now CAIR smells blood, and is going in for the kill. They’ve announced that Kelly’s apology was not enough, and are calling for his resignation. They’ve already succeeded, courtesy of Barack Obama’s compliant Justice Department, in eliminating any truth about Islam and jihad from national FBI training, and are now trying to eliminate it everywhere.

The outcome will be a cadre of agents and police officers full of politically correct nonsense that will render them clueless, complacent, weak and supine in the face of jihad activity. And so the jihad in the U.S. will advance unimpeded.

And so New York, by means of this controversy, is on the verge of taking yet another decisive step toward completely banning the truth about jihad and Islamic supremacism, thereby rendering New Yorkers, and all Americans, more vulnerable than ever to that jihad.

Every day my email box is filled with torrents of abuse and threats. There are at least three websites that are almost wholly dedicated to showing what a stupid and evil person I am, and ugly to boot. Opinions I never held and statements I never made, approving of genocide, racism, fascism, etc., are routinely ascribed to me. People I've stood in a room with once or twice, or said something polite about, are in numerous reports my closest collaborators, with my wholehearted approval for every supposedly wicked thing they've ever done. People I've never met claim to know all about my motives, my character, and my innnermost thoughts, and eagerly "expose" just how rotten they are.

All this just comes with the territory. It is by now obvious that the Islamic supremacist machine in the U.S., and the Left as well, doesn't just try to show its enemies to be wrong. In fact, it usually doesn't attempt that at all, or if it does, it does on false pretenses. No, what the Islamic supremacists and the Left do is try to demonize and marginalize their opponents, so that no decent person would dare to be seen with them. And even among cowardly and craven conservatives, this tactic has traction. And so in sum, I am confident that I have been insulted, abused, lied about, and threatened far, far more than Abas Idris ever was. As Pamela Geller says, "I figure I am owed about a trillion bucks, give or take."

"Jury sides with Muslim guard in harassment case," by Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle via Moonbattery, January 26 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

A San Francisco jury has awarded $465,400 to a Muslim of African descent who quit his job as a security guard after a co-worker called him a "goddamn terrorist," supervisors made racist comments and a top company official endorsed a statement that "Muslims kill people."

The Superior Court jury found Thursday that Abas Idris' employer, Andrews International, was responsible for harassment and a hostile work environment that forced Idris to resign, and awarded him $65,400 for lost wages and emotional distress. On Monday, the jury added $400,000 in punitive damages.

Idris, 27, said Tuesday he's had other security jobs both before and after his 2 1/2-year stint with Andrews, but none in which "co-workers and superiors were referring to me as a terrorist or referring to me as al Qaeda."

He said the court case allowed him to stand up for his rights and to make it clear that "Islam is a religion of peace."

Yes, it certainly establishes that.

Andrews International, a worldwide security company based in Los Angeles, plans to appeal the verdict, attorney Madonna Herman said Tuesday.

"Andrews does not condone discrimination or harassment of any kind," Herman said in a statement. She said the company promoted Idris to a supervisory position and accommodated his requests for schedule changes.

Idris, of Eritrean descent, was brought to the United States from Saudi Arabia by his parents when he was 2. He was hired by Andrews as a security officer at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio in September 2010 and made $14 an hour....

Later, Idris said, one supervisor told him that war was one of the "pillars of Islam," and another said that "Muslims kill people," particularly gays.

Idris said a co-worker told him about a January 2010 conversation with a fellow security officer who referred to Idris as a "goddamn terrorist" and added, "You can't trust al Qaeda."

Idris said no one took his complaints seriously. When the incidents were discussed at a supervisors' meeting in February 2010, he said, the company's regional director, Tom Dinnauer, described Idris as "a rat with an agenda" and said his supervisor, who had declared that Muslims kill people, "has a good point."

Idris said he quit his job that month in fear for his safety.

The mainstream media and the Islamic supremacist Hamas-linked hate group CAIR are still doing all they can to whip up a frenzy about the NYPD's showing of the film The Third Jihad to police officers.

Lost in the hysteria is the question of whether there is anything inaccurate or false in the film -- no one who is protesting against this film is going beyond the claim that it is "Islamophobic." In a sane world, Kelly and Bloomberg would not be apologizing at all. They'd be saying, "Yes, we showed the film, and we're going to keep showing it, and what of it? If the Muslims in New York are upset about it being inaccurate, let them demonstrate its inaccuracy by taking positive steps to fight in their own community against the stealth jihad activity that the film documents."

Also, in a sane world, the Mayor and the NYPD would not be expected to reach out to the Muslim community and prove their good will. The Muslim community would be reaching out to the Mayor and the NYPD, eager to prove its good will. And the Mayor and the NYPD would be telling Hamas-linked CAIR that its counterterror cooperation was not enough, instead of letting this execrable Islamic supremacist Hamas front dictate New York City's counterterror operations.

But instead, we get more inverted reality coverage: "Really? Bloomberg Says Anti-Islam Film Flap Hurts NYPD's 'Credibility' With Muslims," from Gothamist, January 27:

Top cop Ray Kelly and his spokesman Paul Browne have been on the defensive all week after they were caught lying, or misremembering, the details of Kelly's involvement in an Islamophobic propaganda film that was screened on a continuous loop for over 1,300 officers. Asked again about the controversy yesterday, Mayor Blooomberg told reporters, "Anything like this doesn’t help credibility. Ray’s got to work at establishing, or re-establishing, or reinforcing the credibility that he does have [with the Muslim community]. In other news, the NYPD has credibility with the Muslim community?

Not so much, says Cyrus McGoldrick of [Hamas-linked] CAIR-NY, a group that advocates for Muslim civil rights and has called for Kelly's ouster. "This controversy has moved beyond an issue of poor judgment in the use of an Islamophobic training film to an issue of the integrity of public officials," McGoldrick said in a statement. CAIR-NY and several other groups also called for Browne's resignation, and even Bloomberg criticized his storytelling abilities. "I keep saying to everybody, ‘Get the whole story out right away,’ and that’s to keep it from going on and on and on, and to give the public the information they need," said Bloomberg. "That wasn’t done as well as we could have done it, and next time we’ll do it a little bit better."...

Sir, yes, sir! We will not offend Muslims by training the NYPD to fight jihad, sir!

Hamas-linked CAIR smells blood, and is going in for the kill. They've eliminated any truth about Islam and jihad from national FBI training, and are now trying to eliminate it everywhere. The outcome will be a cadre of agents and police officers who are full of politically correct nonsense that will render them clueless and complacent in the face of jihad activity. And so the jihad in the U.S. will advance unimpeded.

In FrontPage this morning I discuss the ongoing travesty in New York, as Hamas-linked CAIR shouts "Jump!" and the dhimmi Mayor Bloomberg responds, "How high?"

A controversy has broken out this week that epitomizes how bold the Islamic supremacist forces in the U.S. have become, and how weak and supine those who are charged with protecting the public have become.

The New York Times has run a news story and an indignant unsigned editorial about the showing of The Third Jihad, a relatively tepid anti-jihad film, to New York Police Department personnel. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) immediately got into the act, compelling New York’s ever ready to accommodate Mayor Michael Bloomberg to apologize and denounce the film, which he almost certainly has not seen. But that wasn’t enough for Hamas-linked CAIR: they’re calling now for the resignation of New York’s Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

And that stands to reason, based on the principle that when one’s enemy is down, one should kick him some more. Hamas-linked CAIR sees its chance to end all effective counter-terror measures in New York, and is going for it.

This whole controversy is epitomized by the photo illustration and lead paragraph of the first New York Times story on this issue: “In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims,” which was by Michael Powell and appeared in the January 23 issue. The photo shows the black flag of jihad flying above the White House, with the caption, “An Islamic flag atop the White House in ‘The Third Jihad.’”

Then the lead paragraph says: “Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.”

Both the Times’ use of the image and its reference to it at the beginning of the story suggest that the producers of The Third Jihad doctored the photo themselves in order to push their cockamamie idea that some Muslims want to “infiltrate and dominate America.” But in reality, Muslims originated this image, as we have reported here several times. Here is a photo of Muslims holding up this photo at a rally in New York in February 2006:

And another:

Yet this whole controversy is predicated on the assumption that The Third Jihad is whipping up hysteria about a non-existent threat. In reality, it covers much the same ground that I cover in my book Stealth Jihad, in which I show that the agenda of infiltration and subversion on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied groups is very real.

In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the U.S. are told that they “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

There is more.

This whole controversy is epitomized by the photo illustration and lead paragraph of the first New York Times story on this issue: "In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims," by Michael Powell, January 23. The photo shows the black flag of jihad flying above the White House, with the caption, "An Islamic flag atop the White House in 'The Third Jihad.'”

Then the lead paragraph says: "Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House."

Both the Times' use of the image and its reference to it at the beginning of the story suggest that the producers of The Third Jihad doctored the photo themselves in order to push their cockamamie idea that some Muslims want to "infiltrate and dominate America." But in reality, Muslims originated this image, as we have reported here several times. Here is a photo of Muslims holding up this photo at a rally in New York in February 2006:

And another:

Yet this whole controversy is predicated on the assumption that The Third Jihad is whipping up hysteria about a non-existent threat. In reality, it covers much the same ground that I cover in my book Stealth Jihad, in which I show that the agenda of infiltration and subversion on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied groups is very real.

In "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America," by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the U.S. are told that they "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

There are other indications as well:

"We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah." -- Muhammad Faheed, Muslim Students Association meeting, Queensborough Community College, 2003

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." -- Hamas-linked CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad, 1998 (denial noted and full story explained at link)

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future." -- Hamas-linked CAIR spokesman Ibrahim "Honest Ibe" Hooper, 1993

"If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate." -- prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, 2002

Yet the initial Times article and all the coverage that followed are based on the assumption that no Muslim in the U.S. believes or acts upon such ideas. None of the coverage deals with the possibility that the film might be accurate, and to what extent:

During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.

News that police trainers showed this film so extensively comes as the department wrestles with its relationship with the city’s large Muslim community. The Police Department offers no apology for aggressively spying on Muslim groups and says it has ferreted out terror plots.

But members of the City Council, civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders say the department, in its zeal, has trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.

“The department’s response was to deny it and to fight our request for information,” said Faiza Patel, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. “The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us.”

Tom Robbins, a former columnist with The Village Voice, first revealed that the police had screened the film. The Brennan Center then filed its request.

Instead of investigating its accuracy, the Times, predictably, looks into who funded the film:

The 72-minute film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defense secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Its previous documentary attacking Muslims’ “war on the West” attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.

Commissioner Kelly is listed on the “Third Jihad” Web site as a “featured interviewee.” Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that filmmakers had lifted the clip from an old interview. The commissioner, Mr. Browne said, has not asked the filmmakers to remove him from its Web site, or to clarify that he had not cooperated with them....

Clarion’s financing is a puzzle. Its federal income tax forms show contributions, grants and revenues typically hover around $1 million annually — except in 2008, when it booked contributions of $18.3 million. That same year, Clarion produced “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The Clarion Fund used its surge in contributions to pay to distribute tens of millions of copies of this DVD in swing electoral states across the country in September 2008.

“The Third Jihad” is quite similar, in style and content, to that earlier film. Narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor and former American military officer in Arizona, “The Third Jihad” casts a broad shadow over American Muslims. Few Muslim leaders, it states, can be trusted.

“Americans are being told that many of the mainstream Muslim groups are also moderate,” Mr. Jasser states. “When in fact if you look a little closer, you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”

Seeing as how most of them are listed as allied groups in that Muslim Brotherhood memorandum I linked above, this is an entirely reasonable statement.

Nonetheless, and again predictably, the Times is pressing on with its campaign, New York Mayor Bloomberg is in full retreat, and the Islamic supremacist thugs at Hamas-linked CAIR smell blood and are calling for the resignation of police commissioner Ray Kelly.

And so New York has taken a decisive step today toward outlawing the truth about jihad and Islamic supremacism, which only makes it more vulnerable to them.

First this: "The quarterback for Lutheran planned to touch his knee to the ground to end the game, with Lutheran leading 48 to 6. Police said game officials knew this and instructed teams not to have contact after the snap. But players from Star Academy, according to police, went after the quarterback, knocking him to the ground and kicking him. The quarterback suffered a concussion."

Then this: "Attorney Nabih Ayad said said [sic] players are commonly involved in 'skirmishes' in post play but that these players were treated differently because of ethnic profiling."

Really? Players commonly give their opponents concussions in non-game situations?

And finally this: "'We believe that from the very beginning that, if these young men may have been of a different ethnicity, of a different religion, different skin color, that Dearborn Heights police officer most likely would not have been so aggressive in the means in which he carried out his investigation,' said CAIR Executive Director Dawud Walid."

The involvement of the sinister thugs of Hamas-linked CAIR should raise red flags. If this were a case of four non-Muslim high school football players attacking a Muslim opponent, kicking him and giving him a concussion, you can be sure Dawud Walid would be on the other side. Hamas-linked CAIR is trying to portray these Muslim football players as victims, despite the fact that they're the ones who carried out the assault in the first place. This is in line with Hamas-linked CAIR's never-ending quest for Muslim victims. In order to deflect attention away from jihad activity and try to portray Muslims as victims, so as to shame non-Muslims into not investigating or even being suspicious of further jihad activity, Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have not hesitated to fabricate "hate crimes." Hamas-linked CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

And in this case, they're trying to portray some thuggish Muslim footballers as victims, both to advance their Muslim victimhood narrative, and to try to intimidate law enforcement officials into being afraid to charge Muslims with anything, for fear of being charged with racial or ethnic or religious bias.

"Dearborn Heights football players challenge charges," from ClickOnDetroit.com, January 24:

DETROIT - The families of metro Detroit high school students are crying foul and fighting back against charges stemming from a fight on the field during a football game.

Four teens, Ali Bajjey, Fanar Al-Asady, Hadee Attia and Mohamed Ahmed, are facing charges of aggravated assault for the incident that happened Oct. 21 between Star Academy and Westland Lutheran High School.

The quarterback for Lutheran planned to touch his knee to the ground to end the game, with Lutheran leading 48 to 6. Police said game officials knew this and instructed teams not to have contact after the snap. But players from Star Academy, according to police, went after the quarterback, knocking him to the ground and kicking him. The quarterback suffered a concussion.

But the Council on American-Islamic Relations held a news conference Tuesday on the basis that the allegations are not true.

CAIR said there is new video showing the incident was "greatly exaggerated" and that the players were targeted because they were Arab-American.

"We believe that from the very beginning that, if these young men may have been of a different ethnicity, of a different religion, different skin color, that Dearborn Heights police officer most likely would not have been so aggressive in the means in which he carried out his investigation," said CAIR Executive Director Dawud Walid.

Attorney Nabih Ayad said said [sic] players are commonly involved in “skirmishes” in post play but that these players were treated differently because of ethnic profiling.

"Had their names been John or Bill, Randy or Jason, I don't think these charges would be standing here today. Because of the Arab ethnicity, I think these charges were brought with the racial animus behind it," he said. "If you play football, you better watch out. You can't be aggressive because you may be charged with a criminal act. We're asking judges to be referees on every play."

In response, the Wayne County Prosecutor issued a statement that said it had a policy against allowing race or ethnicity to influence any part of the charging process.

“Our investigation in this case includes a video tape which captured the incident. After a review of the evidence, we have charged the people involved in this incident with the appropriate charges,” Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said....

Rainn Wilson raises awareness about "Islamophobia"

The clownish boy and deceptive Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan is becoming more comic all the time: now he's giving a talk about "Islamophobia" in collaboration with an actual comedian, as opposed to the unintentional comedian that he himself is. Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on the situation comedy/mockumentary The Office, is appearing with Reza at an event about "forcing kids to grow up learning that a certain religion is evil or should be hated."

No, Wilson and Aslan don't mean Islamic leaders who preach on TV that "Jews are a cancer in the body of planet Earth...Getting rid of these Jews is a must" and "Praise be to you, our Lord. You have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship." Oh, no. They don't say anything about preachers like that at all. Wilson and Aslan instead will focus upon those who are resisting such preachers and others like them, and trying to defend the principles of free speech, freedom of conscience and equality of rights for all. For Reza Aslan, to defend such principles equals "forcing kids to grow up learning that a certain religion is evil or should be hated."

In reality, no one is saying that "a certain religion is evil or should be hated" except Muslim imams worldwide who say that regularly about Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and more. And in fact, FBI statistics show that there is no "Islamophobia." In fact, many "anti-Muslim hate crimes" have been faked by Muslims, and Jews are eight times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate attacks.

That makes this "Islamophobia" lecture by Rainn Wilson and Reza Aslan the equivalent of Dwight's fire drill in the video above: raising awareness about something that doesn't exist in the first place, or insofar as it does, is self-inflicted.

"Education Under Fire with Reza Aslan and Rainn Wilson," from USC's Academic Culture Assembly, January 17:

A really cool event is coming up that ACA is sponsoring. Put on by ACA and the Office of Religious Life, Education Under Fire is a documentary that exposes many issues with forcing kids to grow up learning that a certain religion is evil or should be hated. A panel discussion will follow featuring Reza Aslan and Rainn Wilson.

UPDATE: Jihad Watch reader Gravenimage informs me that Rainn Wilson is a Baha'i, and that Education Under Fire is a documentary about the persecution of Baha'is in Iran, and the Iranian regime's practice of denying them an education.

So then why is Reza Aslan there? He does criticize the Iranian regime on occasion, but his membership on the Board of NIAC, which Iranian freedom fighters have identified as a front group for the regime, betrays his agenda. Note also the fact that ACA is advertising the showing of a film about the persecution of the Baha'is not by mentioning the Baha'is, but by speaking more generally about children learning that "a certain religion" is evil. That makes it extremely likely that Aslan is going to relate the persecution of the Baha'is to "Islamophobia," and make sure that truth-telling about that persecution doesn't lead to any criticism of Islam, despite the fact that Islamic intolerance is the chief reason why the Baha'is suffer in the Islamic Republic.

Will Reza prove me wrong in this, and instead focus only on the persecution of the Baha'is? I hope so. But his track record does not inspire confidence in that regard.

This is not as self-contradictory as it seems: Hamas-linked CAIR is nothing if not consistent. The consistency here is in Hamas-linked CAIR's ongoing efforts to make people think that Muslims are aiding anti-terror efforts, while in fact opposing those efforts in every particular. Both these tendencies are abundantly established. The goal is to make Muslims appear to be innocent victims of law enforcement "Islamophobia," while deflecting scrutiny from actual jihad terror activity. "CAIR praises Muslim community for turning in FL terrorist, then criticizes FBI for 'entrapment,'” by Matt Lacy in the Greeley Gazette, January 11 (thanks to Kenneth):

While praising local Muslims for their help in capturing a Florida Muslim who wanted to blow up area nightclubs, CAIR then criticized law enforcement authorities saying they may have used “entrapment” to catch the bomber.

Sami Osmakac, a naturalized American citizen from Kosovo, identified himself as a Muslim and said he wanted to bomb Tampa nightclubs and a sheriff’s office with bombs and guns. Osmakac also railed against Christians and Jews in videos he posted online.

Appearing on Fox 13 out of Tampa Bay, Hassan Shibly, executive director for the Council on American Islamic Relations mentioned that the local Muslim community was receiving a lot of praise from local law enforcement for their role in helping stop a radical Muslim from bombing area nightclubs.

“I met today with the U.S. attorney and the head of the local FBI and they expressed a lot of gratitude and thanks to the Muslim community for its vital role in bringing the suspect to the attention of law enforcement.”...

While praising the Muslim community, Shibly then turned around and criticized the FBI expressing concern about a perception of entrapment with their arrest.

Shibly said, “The weapons and explosives were provided by the government. Was he just a troubled individual, or did he pose a real threat?"

Following the reporting of Shibly’s comments, he has said CAIR will not pursue the entrapment allegations.

Islamic supremacist boy Reza Aslan sums up in the above tweet how Islamic supremacists and their Leftist stooges such as Jon Stewart of the Daily Show are lying about what really happened between Hamas-linked CAIR rep Nezar Hamze and the Broward County Republican Party: Hamze ran for a seat on the party's Executive Committee, and lost. That's all. No one said he wasn't welcome in the party. But this is, as always, what Aslan and others like him do: they cannot make their case by telling the truth, so they lie, again and again.

In this case, the Daily Show savaged anti-jihad warrior Joe Kaufman for his opposition to Hamze. Video here -- I am not going to embed this dhimmi garbage at this site.

Hamze himself, meanwhile, is not the choirboy victim of "Islamophobia" that the Useful Idiot Stewart makes him out to be. Joe Kaufman, in the first place, is an indefatigable freedom fighter and careful researcher, and Hamze's link to Hamas-linked CAIR is obvious and undeniable. Pamela Geller notes here some things about Hamze's record that didn't make the Daily Show: "Why didn't Jon Stewart's smart ass dhimmi reporter ask Hamze whom he meant when he railed against "neo-cons and neo-Zionists"? Why didn't they ask Hamze about Hamas-linked CAIR's unindicted co-conspirator status, or the former CAIR officials who are doing time for jihad plots? Or about how he tried to strongarm Congressman Allen West into shunning freedom fighters? Or about when he played the victim game and lied about Islamic terror until West strongly rebuked him? Why didn't Hamze get asked about what he thought of the brutal and bloody sharia law?"

Then there is this from here at Jihad Watch, in which I discuss Hamze's attempt to whitewash Sharia.

So what is in it for a guy like Stewart? Apparently he thinks the crocodile will eat him last.

Hamas-linked CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper has just emailed me to send me the link to the article below, in which we're told that New York firebomber Ray Lazier Lengend disliked Muslims and Arabs and wanted to take out as many as possible. Clearly Honest Ibe is in a celebratory mood, as he thinks he finally has his violent anti-Muslim attacker: a man whose only publicly released motive so far for disliking Muslims was that the people in mosque he attacked wouldn't let him use the bathroom, a man who is clearly unbalanced and under psychiatric observation, who also attacked a Hindu place of worship, and who had such a tendency toward violence that even his brother-in-law and his family lived in fear of him. Hooper demanded that I apologize, although I am not sure for what -- apparently for pointing out that the guy was "motivated by personal grievances" rather than by "Islamophobia."

It is obvious, however, Ray Lazier Lengend is not exactly what Hamas-linked CAIR would want in a villain. If he hated Muslims, it appears to be because his bladder was full. Nonetheless, Hooper and Co. are still popping the corks and tebowing (no, wait...) because Ray Lazier Lengend is as close as they've ever gotten to the media caricature of a violent anti-Muslim yahoo hopped up on Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs and putting a couple of rifles in his pickup to go out and kill him some Moozlums.

Such people have been so hard to come by in real life because we don't call for or approve of any violence against innocent people, or any acts of vigilantism against Muslims or anyone else. We are in reality working for justice, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equality of rights before the law for all people -- hardly a recipe for "hate" that is likely to stoke up the thugs. Anyone who actually attacked an innocent Muslim is a criminal idiot who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Of course, the Left and Islamic supremacists are still trying to blame anti-jihadists for murders in Norway that were committed by another psychopath with no coherent ideology, who called for an alliance with jihadis and criticized me for eschewing violence, but there again, the facts fail them.

And when the facts fail dishonest Islamic supremacist and their Leftist toadies, they resort to their tried-and-true method: they make them up. In order to deflect attention away from jihad activity and try to portray Muslims as victims, so as to shame non-Muslims into not investigating or even being suspicious of further jihad activity, Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have not hesitated to fabricate "hate crimes." Hamas-linked CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

This avid search for Muslim victims has coalesced with the Islamic supremacists' anxiety to discredit me and obscure the truths I tell: they were even prepared to blame me for a murder in New Jersey that turned out to be a love triangle that the killer tried to frame as an anti-Muslim hate crime. Not only did I receive a tweet from a Muslim blaming me for the murder, but also a well-placed source told me that Hooper was “salivating and waiting to jump all over” the murder story. “They are waiting to blame you for everything.”

Anyway, my congratulations to Hooper for finally bagging the big one that he will ride for all the privileged victim status he can wring from it, even if Lengend is clearly more psychotic than "Islamophobe." Honest Ibe's gleeful email to me indicates how thrilled he is today, and so I can now bring you the most entertaining hat tip evuh: "Alleged Queens firebomber wanted to massacre Muslims in mosque, prosecutors say: Brother-in-law says he feared alleged pyro: 'He had a vendetta against us,'" by Rocco Parascandola, Matt Mcnulty, Kerry Burke and Kevin Deutsch for the New York Daily News, January 5 (thanks to Ibrahim Hooper):

THE UNHINGED Queens pyromaniac who unleashed a scary New Year’s Day firebombing spree had planned to take out “as many Muslims and Arabs as possible” by lobbing Molotov cocktails at worshipers inside a mosque, prosecutors said.

Ray Lazier Lengend, 40, allegedly told cops he had planned to inflict “as much damage as possible” by hurling all five of his firebombs from the balcony of Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center onto the crowd below.

The hateful bomb-hurler, who is under psychiatric observation at Bellevue Hospital center, flat-out told detectives he did not like Muslims or Arabs, prosecutors said.

“This is a message to anyone who does this in the future,” said Imam Maan Al-Sahlani, leader of Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center, where Lengend planned to inflict major casualties. “It’s a good message that justice will come for you, the police will come for you.”

The imam applauded prosecutors’ use of the hate crime statute and hoped it would deter further anti-Muslim crimes.

“Obviously there is something wrong with him,” Al-Sahlani said.

Indeed.

Lengend, an unemployed truck driver from Queens Village, will face a judge via video arraignment Thursday from his bed at Bellevue.

He faces 18 charges including arson as a hate crime and weapon possession for throwing Starbucks Frappuccino bottles filled with gasoline at four occupied Jamaica buildings — two of them places of worship.

Lengend’s brother-in-law, Bejai Rai, 73, said his Elmont, L.I., house was also firebombed because he evicted Lengend for not paying rent.

“He had a vendetta against us,” Rai told the Daily News. “He tried to kill my wife, my two sons and my sister. I’m glad they got him otherwise he’d be back to firebomb us again.” Rai said his family could not sleep until Lengend was caught.

“This is the first night we’ve been able to rest since the bombing.”

Lengend carried out his spree in a silver Buick Regal, which had been stolen from a rental car business at Kennedy Airport....

His first target was Hillside Deli on 179th St., where Lengend threw a flaming glass bottle that ignited upon hitting the floor.

He burned four other targets, including the mosque and a Hindu place of worship on 170th St., but did not inflict the massive damage he hoped for, prosecutors said.

Lengend confessed to three earlier attacks as well, sources said. He claimed ongoing beefs were his motive for all eight crimes.

Probably Zemanik was required to give her a lunch break after she worked a certain number of hours, even if she wasn't going to eat. The diocese should not have settled in this ridiculous victimhood-mongering legal shakedown case, but probably figured it was easier than fighting it and being subjected to endless charges of "Islamophobia."

"Muslim woman settles lawsuit against Easton church," from the Pocono Record, January 3 (thanks to Twostellas):

A Muslim woman who claimed she was fired from her job as a bookkeeper at an Easton church because she complained about religious discrimination by the monsignor has settled a federal lawsuit she filed against the Diocese of Allentown.

The terms of the settlement between Omayma Arafa and the diocese have not been disclosed in court documents, and attorneys on both sides of the case did not return phone calls seeking comment.

A settlement conference had been scheduled for Dec. 22 in Philadelphia, but before the hearing, the parties notified federal Magistrate Judge L. Felipe Restrepo they had reached a settlement. Restrepo dismissed the case Dec. 16.

Arafa worked at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Easton from 2007 until January 2009, when she was let go. Her lawsuit, filed in May, said the trouble began when Monsignor Edward Zemanik was assigned to the church and immediately displayed a "cold, distant and hostile attitude" toward Arafa, who is from Egypt.

One day in August 2008, the suit says Arafa was eating pizza for lunch when Zemanik asked "You can eat that?" He went on to ask Arafa whether there were foods she couldn't eat, according to Arafa's suit.

The diocese's response, filed in June, says Zemanik asked about Arafa's dietary restrictions out of respect for her religious beliefs because the staff often ordered meals and he didn't want to bring in food that she was forbidden to eat.

Arafa's suit also alleged that during Ramadan, the month of fasting when Muslims refrain from eating during daylight hours, Zemanik required Arafa to "take lunch," even though it meant sitting in her office not eating.

The diocese claims Zemanik insisted that his staff take a break during the day, even if they did not eat lunch.

In December 2008, Arafa said she asked Zemanik whether she would have the week off between Christmas and New Year's Day as paid vacation. She alleges Zemanik asked "What do you care?" in a display of hostility toward Arafa's religious beliefs.

In its response, the diocese denied Zemanik made the remark.

Arafa also claimed she was denied health care benefits that other part-time employees in the parish received. The diocese says those employees worked part time at St. Anthony and part time elsewhere in the diocese to qualify for benefits.

Arafa said she complained to the diocese's human resources director about the alleged discrimination by Zemanik and a church volunteer, but no action was taken. She claims she was fired as retaliation for complaining about her treatment.

The diocese said it eliminated Arafa's job at the church as a cost-saving measure.

The lawsuit sought compensation for Arafa's back and future pay; pain, suffering and humiliation; and punitive damages.

As I noted here, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) used this incident to expatiate about the alleged rise in violence against mosques and Muslims. Will Hamas-linked CAIR now retract and apologize? And as you can see below, Bloomberg held a press conference about this. Will he, also, now retract and apologize?

Don't hold your breath on either count. But what Pamela Geller says is apt: "So the media mosque meme was patently untrue, and that schmuck Bloomberg looks the fool yet again after holding press conferences against 'hate crime' before he knew what, who and why. And Hamas-tied CAIR was on the radio this morning, WBAI, lying again, blaming me and other bloggers for inciting this hatred of Muslims. Vile jihadists will say anything and do anything."

"Man confesses to bombing NY mosque," from Reuters, January 4 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

A New York City man faces arson and bias charges after confessing to a series of Molotov cocktail attacks that hit a mosque and a Hindu place of worship and unsettled civic leaders concerned the actions might portend violent religious bigotry.

The suspect, who has not been identified by name, is a 40-year-old unemployed tow-truck driver who appeared to have been motivated by personal grudges, said a law enforcement familiar with the investigation who was speaking on condition of anonymity.

The suspect, who is originally from Guyana and lives in the Jamaica section of Queens where four of the attacks took place, also made "broadly anti-Muslim statements" during questioning, the official said.

But apparently they centered around his not being allowed to use the bathroom at the mosque:

He chose the mosque after being refused access to the facility's bathroom, and he mistook one of the private residences as the home of a "crack dealer" with whom he had a dispute, the official said.

Another of the targets was a private residence where Hindu services were held, but that may have been a coincidence. The suspect had a years-old dispute with someone who may not live there anymore, the official said....

"The individual is implicating himself in each of the five firebombing cases, citing personal grievances with each location," said police spokesman Paul Browne.

The arson attacks drew condemnation from religious and civic leaders of various backgrounds who joined New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for a news conference before the confession was reported.

"Fear mongering about Islam and other American minorities have ripped this country apart... We are all affected when this hate explodes," said Cyrus McGoldrick of the New York chapter of the [Hamas-linked] Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group.

I'll be right here waiting for McGoldrick to recant his false claims and apologize to those who are fighting for freedom against Islamization.

One of the firebombs hit the mosque entrance at the Imam al-Khoei Foundation, a Shiite organization in the New York City borough of Queens while some 75 to 80 people were inside....

The suspect's grievances with the convenience store may have started on Dec. 27 when a clerk confronted a man thought to have being trying to steal a Starbucks Frappuccino, police said.

"When they were pushing him out of the store, he said words to the effect of, 'We're going to get even. We're going to get back at you,'" Kelly said before the confession was reported....

A Shi'ite mosque, a house where Hindus were meeting to worship, and a Christian family home were all firebombed, along with other sites. In its daily "American Muslim News Briefs," the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) mentioned in passing that "two nearby homes were apparently targeted by the same attackers," but didn't bother to mention that one was a Hindu worship site, and went on to expatiate about the alleged rise in violence against mosques and Muslims. All acts of violence and vigilantism are to be condemned, not just those against Muslims, but Hamas-linked CAIR is trying to use this incident to enhance its fictional narrative of "Islamophobia" raging out of control and innocent Muslims facing discrimination and violence everywhere -- so as to deflect attention from jihad terror activity.

The fact that so many different places were targeted indicates that this firebomber's motive was something other than "Islamophobia," but that won't stop Hamas-linked CAIR or its lapdog media outlets.

"Media focuses on Mosque firebombed in Queens, ignores firebombing against Hindus, Christians," by Matt Lacy in the Greeley Gazette, January 2:

A series of firebombing in Queens, New York that targeted a Hindu place of worship, an African-American Christian couple’s home and a Mosque is being portrayed by the mainstream media and a Muslim advocacy group as a hate crime solely directed against Muslims.

A series of firebombs involving Molotov cocktails was directed against two homes, including one where a group of Hindus was meeting to worship, another home where an African-American Christian couple lived, a convenience store and a local mosque.

The Al-Khoei Islamic Foundation houses one of the most prominent Shiite mosques in New York. According to its website it lists branches in several cities including London, Paris, Montreal and Islamabad, Pakistan. The firebomb, made with a Starbucks bottle was thrown at the door of the center. While the door was blackened, the building did not catch fire.

Police are investigating the crime as an anti-Muslim hate crime. A spokesman for the New York Police Department told the Gazette anytime an attack is made on a Mosque or a synagogue, it is automatically investigated as a bias or hate crime.

The meeting at the Hindu home consisted of two firebombs that did not catch fire, while the home of Monty and Sonya Burnett, who are African-American and Christian, was heavily damaged.

The Burnett’s home was the most heavily damaged of all of the structures firebombed during the four attacks. It took more than 60 firefighters to get the fire under control.

While the bombings were directed at Hindus and Christians as well as Muslims, one would not know that from reading much of the mainstream press coverage of the event.

The New York Times said in the lead paragraph that “police were investigating (the firebombings) as a possible bias crime against Muslims.” Nowhere in the story does it mention the attack on the Hindu worshippers or the Christian family, simply referring to them as houses that were bombed.

The New York Daily News followed a similar lead. While the article did mention the other attacks were on Christians and Hindus, the headline read “Four firebombs, including one tossed at Queens Mosque, eyed as hate crimes.”

Other headlines by various papers included “Islamic structure firebombed in Queens, three other structures attacked”, “4 Firebombs hit Muslim targets in NYC” and “Firebomb attacks in Queens hit Mosque in possible hate crime.”

On Monday morning, the Council on American Islamic Relations sent out an e-mail release suggesting the attack was directed solely against Muslims. The e-mail said in the subject line “CAIR condemns firebombing of NY Mosque.”

The e-mail went on to say that Ibrahim Hooper, National Director for CAIR said the organization is calling on local police to boost patrols near mosques and advised members of the Muslim community to review security procedures.

Nowhere in the message from CAIR is there any mention made of or a condemnation of the attacks against Christians and Hindus during the same wave of attacks.

Instead, Hooper focused exclusively on the Muslim component saying “a number of recent reports have documented the growth and promotion of Islamophobia.”

Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch said the media spin shows the favoritism Muslim groups are given to the exclusion of other groups and that CAIR is simply trying to use this attack to portray Muslims as the exclusive victims in this case.

“Implying the attacks were directed solely at Muslims is obviously false and self-serving. It seems as if whoever did this is opposed to foreigners or religion in general and to say this is exclusively a Muslim hate crime is a politically motivated claim.”

Spencer went on to say that CAIR’s ignoring the firebombing of the black Christian family and the Hindus shows the agency’s isn’t really interested in hate crimes against other groups but simply want to use the attacks to their advantage.

“CAIR did not mention anything about the Hindus or Christians when they issued their release. This just shows how self-serving their claims of victimhood really are,” Spencer said. “They called for increased police patrols against mosques, but they didn’t say anything about calling for protection for Hindu or Christian places of worship.”

Bloomberg insists that the NYPD's counter-terror actions were entirely legal. And do these Muslim leaders really think that a leader so completely in their power such as Bloomberg, errand boy for the Ground Zero Mosque, would circumvent the law to the slightest degree where they are concerned?

This is a naked attempt to intimidate the already compliant Bloomberg into dropping the last vestiges of anti-terror efforts in New York City.

"Muslims boycott Mayor Bloomberg's interfaith breakfast," from the BBC, December 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Islamic leaders in New York City have boycotted Mayor Michael Bloomberg's annual interfaith breakfast, in protest at reports of surveillance on Muslims.

They declined their invitations to the annual meeting in a letter outlining their concerns.

The Associated Press news agency first reported in August that the city police department had tried to infiltrate Muslim neighbourhoods and mosques.

Mr Bloomberg has insisted the city's counter-terrorism efforts are legal.

Fourteen Muslim leaders and a number of other community figures - including rabbis, a Roman Catholic nun and Protestant pastors - signed the letter boycotting the Friday breakfast, which is meant to celebrate the city's diversity.

Rabbi Michael Weisser, however, said beforehand that he would attend the breakfast after Muslim friends urged him to use the opportunity to raise their concerns with the mayor.

Rabbi Weisser told the Associated Press he had no problem with the police department following leads, but objected to any official targeting of Muslim organisations.

"From a Jewish perspective, it reminded me of things that were going on in the 1930s in Germany," Rabbi Weisser said.

Does Rabbi Weisser have any idea what was really going on in the 1930s in Germany? The "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" of April 7, 1933 barred Jews from civil service jobs. Are Muslims barred from civil service jobs in New York or anywhere in the U.S.? No. That same month, the Nazis restricted the number of Jewish students at German schools and universities. Are Muslims restricted in number at American schools and universities? They are not. Then in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of German citizenship and forbade marriage between Jews and Germans. Are Muslims able to become American citizens and marry American non-Muslims? Yes. In 1937 and 1938, Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jews, and Jewish lawyers disbarred. Are Muslims able to practice medicine and law in the U.S.? Yes, they are.

In short, Muslims are not, nor should they be, subject to restrictions that are remotely comparable to those that Jews suffered in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Weisser's comparison is monstrous, both for its trivialization of the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany, and for its libelous slur against the NYPD.

"We don't need that in America. We can't be painting a whole group of people with the same broad brush."....

Mr Bloomberg has previously won praise from the city's Muslim leaders for strongly defending proposals to build an Islamic prayer and cultural centre near the former World Trade Center site.

But reports that the NYPD collected information on people who were neither accused nor suspected of wrongdoing have led to a sense of betrayal among some in the community.

According to AP, undercover officers gathered information through chatting with shop owners and patrons and playing on cricket teams, as part of a surveillance programme designed by a CIA officer.

This piece tries to portray the Rockwoods as innocent victims of an FBI setup. Paul Rockwood says that his plot was "all talk," and yet he also admits that "we decided to assassinate certain people." Even the most softball journalistic treatment from the dhimmi LA Times cannot paper over that and make Paul Rockwood a sympathetic character.

"In Alaska, becoming the militants next door," by Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, December 22:

Reporting from Fairton, N.J.— A little more than a year ago, he was a weather forecaster at a remote outpost in King Salmon, Alaska, population 442. He and his wife — he with his close-trimmed red beard and shy smile, she with her rosebud cheeks and sweet English accent — lived in a two-story frame house strewn with toys. They were popular dinner companions and regulars at community theater productions.

Now Paul Rockwood Jr. is a convicted terrorist, serving eight years in a federal prison. His wife, Nadia, is exiled on probation in England after her own criminal conviction. Since their arrest in 2010 — accused by the FBI of drafting and delivering a list of targets for terrorist attacks — friends and neighbors have been left in confusion, wondering how the nice young couple could have turned into the terrorists next door.

The possible answer, provided in Rockwood's first interview since his arrest, opens a window on one man's uncertain spiritual journey and radicalization after the Sept. 11 attacks. It also offers a look at the government's increasingly deep dragnet for suspected domestic terrorists.

To federal authorities, Rockwood, 36, is a man who turned from hard-partying bartender and ex-Navy seaman to Muslim militant committed to killing fellow Americans.

To Rockwood, the plot involving targeted assassinations and bombs was a "pure fantasy" created by a government agent he thought was his friend, a common refrain in the nation's burgeoning number of "home-grown" terrorism plots prosecuted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rockwood concedes that he drew up a list of people. He thought they should be punished.

"But ... it was all talk," Rockwood said in a small interview room at the correctional facility he has called home since July 2010.

By his account, the events of Sept. 11 stunned and repelled Rockwood and his wife, both raised Catholic. They were living in Virginia, and Rockwood had recently gotten a job as a contractor with the National Weather Service, hoping to eventually land a full civil service position and a more stable future.

"A week later, I was flying back from New Mexico and I was telling my co-workers, 'I'm not getting on the plane if there's Arab or Muslim people on the plane,'" he said. "But as time went on, I started needing to know why somebody would kill themselves, flying a plane into a building."

Rockwood was taking medication for anxiety and Meniere's disease, an affliction of the inner ear that causes vertigo, headaches and nausea. He was also trying to cut back on his partying and had taken a comparative religion class to try to quiet his mind.

He started studying Islam online.

"I was struck by how similar the beliefs in Islam were to Christianity, and at the same time, I guess also the differences made sense to me; it was a straighter path," he said.

Rockwood said he also felt that he was beginning to understand what had driven the Sept. 11 hijackers. "These people felt that they had been under attack," he said. "They kind of saw it as a self-defense response. It was like you'd be impressed if an American soldier jumps on a grenade to save his buddies; it takes a lot of courage to give up your life like that."

In December, only three months after the attacks, Rockwood took the shehada, the Muslim affirmation of faith, and not long after began attending the radical Dar al-Arqam mosque in Falls Church, Va. That mosque had frequently served as a platform for Ali al-Timimi, a radical lecturer who would soon be convicted and sentenced to life in prison on charges of soliciting followers to join the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Here, Rockwood was exposed to the teachings of Anwar Awlaki, a Yemeni American engineer whose entreaties to U.S. Muslims to engage in holy war made him one of the most influential voices of violent, radical Islam in the West. Awlaki was killed in September in a U.S. missile strike in Yemen.

"I held beliefs that were similar to his beliefs," Rockwood said. Among them were outrage over the deaths of innocents, fury over war crimes committed by U.S. troops and a conviction that the Iraq war had been started to lock up new oil supplies for the United States.

Nadia resented the way her husband's newfound religion consumed him, and the couple separated for a time. Eventually, though, she converted to Islam. Not long after, the couple's first child was born, and Rockwood took the job in King Salmon, his civil service entree to the weather service.

Nadia integrated easily into the close-knit social life in King Salmon, but it was harder for Rockwood. "Some of the best people I ever met lived in King Salmon. But it was hard for me not to have other Muslims," he said.

Two years after arriving, and again in 2009, Rockwood traveled to Cairo, hoping to find a way that he and Nadia could move there and enroll their young son in an international madrasa. Nadia, though, didn't want to live in Egypt. So Rockwood did his best to settle into life in King Salmon, relishing the occasional chance to debate politics and the war in Iraq, especially with his then-boss, whom he described as a devout Christian and a fellow military veteran.

His boss, he feels sure, noticed that he was listening to Awlaki sermons and using his personal laptop to visit websites such as Revolution Muslim, which praised Nidal Malik Hasan's deadly 2009 shooting rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas, as a "preemptive attack." It was his boss, he believes, who called him to the FBI's attention, though the government has said its initial tip in the case came from outside Alaska.

By that time, Rockwood was back on prescription drugs to counter a flare-up of his Meniere's disease. He was lonely and thinking again about moving to Egypt.

"I don't know how to express it. I was depressed about everything. I was upset. I wanted to leave the country, but at the same time, I wanted to change the country. I was confused. I'm still confused. I guess to compare it, I'm kind of sympathetic about how the Japanese Americans must have felt in World War II," he said.

* * *

That was when one of the leaders at the mosque in Anchorage asked whether he wouldn't like to meet a potential convert. The gentleman was a state trooper, he was told, and wanted to learn more about the religion. Would Rockwood talk about his own experience?

They met and became, Rockwood thought, fast friends. "Every time I came to Anchorage we would go to the mosque, go out to dinner, he'd ask me for help in how to recite the Koran, how to fast. He actually became a Muslim. He took the shehada. He said the words," Rockwood said, a little incredulously.

"Our conversations for months and months had nothing to do with politics or jihad and the wars. But slowly over time, that was all he wanted to talk about," Rockwood said. "He'd bring up certain things or ask me certain questions to try to get me riled up. Things like atrocities that were committed during the war: Abu Ghraib, the villages, the rapes. Basically, we'd both share our outrage and ask, what should be done about this? Who should be doing something about this?"

The discussions — often carried out at an expensive hotel where the trooper paid to put up Rockwood in a room — began to grow deadly serious.

"We decided to assassinate certain people. We had these conversations. I'm not going to deny it," Rockwood said. "I told him that I'd kept news articles with the names of people that were involved in the atrocities and stuff. He said, 'Great, get me a list of names.' Part of it was a macho kind of thing…. Also, he was offering me money. He said he was going to give me $8,000" to get started on the plan.

Rockwood said the trooper bought cellphones and other electronic devices that purportedly were to be used as remote triggers for bombs.

But at the same time, Rockwood and his wife had been talking about moving to England. His Meniere's disease had become devastating, and the National Health Service there would provide free treatment. He gave notice at work, and the couple had a garage sale to get rid of most of their possessions.

"I knew I was never going to do anything. I knew I was going to go to England and not come back. But I needed the money. It's not a redeeming quality, but I was using him for my own purposes. I didn't realize at the time that he was using me, too."

It all came to a head on the eve of their intended departure when Rockwood talked on the phone with the trooper, who said from Anchorage that he needed the list of names. Nadia was going to Anchorage, so Rockwood gave her the list. When she arrived, she met the trooper at Wal-Mart and was filmed by the FBI handing over the envelope.

Rockwood shook his head. "If it was happening now, when I'm clear-headed, I definitely wouldn't have gone along with it," he said. "All it would have taken was a conversation to wake me up and snap me out of it."

The Rockwoods boarded their flight from King Salmon to Boston, where they planned to visit family before heading to England, but they were stopped by the FBI when the plane landed in Anchorage. They were questioned, ostensibly for an investigation of the activities of the state trooper.

Soon, though, it became apparent that the authorities were interested in Rockwood, not the trooper. Though not under arrest, the couple weren't allowed to leave the city. With Nadia pregnant and all their possessions down to a few suitcases, they stayed first in a nice hotel, then as their funds dwindled, a motel, and finally a homeless shelter.

"I had five cars following me around Anchorage," he said. "I took my son to Chuck E. Cheese, I took him to a children's museum, and they had people following me around with cameras. I can't even tell you how much pressure I was under."

Eventually, faced with the possibility of being charged with terrorism, the Rockwoods pleaded guilty to the only crimes they knew they had committed: making false statements to the FBI during a terrorism investigation. Rockwood said the key was a pledge that Nadia would not have to go to jail.

"I would have said I was the guy on the grassy knoll if it meant keeping her out of prison," Rockwood said. "But I want people to know why I pled guilty. I want people to know what the government is doing, what lengths they're going to, to get these terrorism cases."...

"The suggestion that this was planted in his mind is just false.... He researched the means to select targets, and his looking for people to kill and how to kill them was well before law enforcement got involved," Karen Loeffler, U.S. attorney in Alaska, said in an interview....

No ad, no matter how clever or winning, is going to eradicate the suspicion that many Americans have of Muslims. This is because Americans are concerned about Islam not because of the work of greasy Islamophobes, but because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and motivated by its texts and teachings -- all in the U.S. in the last couple of years.

If Sabeel Ahmed really wants to stop "Islamophobia," here is an easy way. Muslims can:

1. Focus their indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.
2. Renounce definitively, sincerely, honestly, and in deeds, not just in comforting words, not just "terrorism," but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Sharia even by peaceful means. In line with this, clarify what is meant by their condemnations of the killing of innocent people by stating unequivocally that American and Israeli civilians are innocent people, teaching accordingly in mosques and Islamic schools, and behaving in accord with these new teachings.
3. Teach, again sincerely and honestly, in transparent and verifiable ways in mosques and Islamic schools, the imperative of Muslims coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis, and act accordingly.
4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach sincerely against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.
5. Actively and honestly work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.

If Muslims do those five things, voila! "Islamophobia" will evanesce!

"New ads aim to eradicate Islamophobia," by Delal Pektas for WBEZ, December 20 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Some new TV ads in Chicago are trying to portray Islam in a good light.

The ads will be broadcasted on some cable channels for the next three months. Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, the Director of Gain Peace Project-Chicago, said the commercials are meant to eradicate Islamophobia.

"It's very important for us to realize that by watching these ads, we hope that the viewers could realize that Islam is not a faith to be feared but a faith that cherishes human values, a faith that encourages its followers to reach out to the neighbors and to the community," Ahmed said....

In order to deflect attention away from jihad activity and try to portray Muslims as victims, so as to shame non-Muslims into not investigating or even being suspicious of further jihad activity, Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have not hesitated to fabricate "hate crimes." CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

Also, so avid are some Muslims to discredit me and obscure the truths I tell that they were even prepared to blame me for a murder in New Jersey that turned out to be a love triangle that the killer tried to frame as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Impervious to shame, the Anti-Muslim Hate Crime industry keeps churning out spurious product. In this case it was a HuffPo Leftist pseudo-journalist who was trumpeting the fake hate crime: "Another Huffington Post Hate Crime Fizzles (Aisha Khan Found Safe)," by David Wood at Answering Muslims, December 22:

[...] In a recent Huffington Post article about Islamophobia and the Lowe's controversy, Daniel Tutt drew his readers' attention to two vicious hate crimes against Muslims--clear proof that Islamophobia is rampant and spreading:

In the background of this grassroots work, two tragic events have taken place, which reveal the real world "human impact" of Islamophobia. In Kansas City, a young Muslim college student, Aisha Khan has gone missing after complaining to her family of a drunken man harassing her. In Houston, Texas a Muslim man named Yaqub Bham was severely beaten in what family members are calling a hate crime. These events show the urgency of the problem at hand.

What evidence did Tutt have to support his claims? A Muslim student went missing after a drunken man harassed her. Tutt sees this as clear proof that Khan was abducted by anti-Muslim bigots (probably those who regularly visit Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs). And a Muslim man's family is calling an attack a "hate crime." Tutt doesn't bother questioning his assessment at all.

Now for the reality check. Aisha Khan wasn't abducted at all. ABC News reported this morning:

Aisha Khan, the 19-year-old Kansas college student missing for nearly a week has been found safe and unharmed, according to ABC News' Kansas City affiliate KMBC.

Overland Park Police Officer Brian Schnavel said that Khan was not abducted or held against her will, according to KMBC.

Schnavel said no criminal act occurred.

Will Tutt apologize for falsely accusing Americans of a hate crime against a Muslim girl? We can only hope.

Hope all you like, David, but "journalists" like Tutt have no sense of accountability or responsibility. They behave this way all the time, and never backtrack or apologize.

As for Tutt's other example of Islamophobia, the evidence isn't in yet. However, based on the reports so far, the man who committed the attack seems to be insane....

Read it all.

Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists are once again claiming victim status for Muslims and trying to use that status to deflect law enforcement attention away from Muslims in this country -- this time in New York. If they're successful, jihadists will have a free hand. And now they've got 34 Representatives on board. There is a word for such people.

"34 Congress Members Call For NYPD-CIA Probe," from AP, December 21 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than two dozen members of Congress are calling for investigation into the CIA’s relationship with the New York Police Department.

The members of Congress want to know more about the CIA’s collaboration with the police department to monitor Muslims after an Associated Press investigation.

A letter signed by 34 members of Congress was sent to the Department of Justice and House Judiciary Committee asking for a thorough probe.

Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., says: “We cannot allow the explicit profiling and targeting of Muslim Americans by the very people who are tasked with protecting and serving their community.”

Earlier this year, the AP revealed that the CIA helped the NYPD build intelligence programs to monitor Muslims after Sept. 11, and a top CIA operative was working at the police department.

What a coincidence: they were on their way to a conference on "Islamophobia" and they got pulled off a flight just for being Muslim! Imagine! And this is such palpable hooey: I fly several times a month, sometimes several times a week, and innumerable times have flown on planes with Muslims in traditional dress. No one gets pulled off a flight solely for being dressed as a Muslim, whatever may be the hysterical charges of the Muslim victimhood industry. "Muslim Men to Sue Airlines After Allegedly Being Kicked Off Flight," from the Associated Press, December 19 (thanks to all who sent this in):

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Two Muslim men who say they were kicked off an airplane in May after the pilot objected to their presence are suing Delta Air Lines Inc. and a regional carrier that operated the Delta Connection flight from Memphis to Charlotte, North Carolina.

According to a suit filed Monday in federal court in Memphis, Masudur Rahman and Mohamed Zaghloul were traveling to Charlotte to attend a conference on anti-Muslim discrimination at the time.

Rahman, who is an adjunct instructor of Arabic at the University of Memphis, has said he was dressed in traditional Indian clothing. Zaghloul, who is a religious leader with the Islamic Association of Greater Memphis, was dressed in Arab garb that included traditional headgear.

The two passed through regular security screening and were waiting at the gate to board when they were pulled out of line and subjected to a second security check, according to the suit. They were questioned about their trip and their luggage and belongings were searched before the men were cleared and allowed to board.

Shortly after the plane pulled away from the gate, the pilot announced the aircraft was returning to the terminal. Once there, according to the suit, the men were pulled off the plane, asked more questions and searched again, this time with a "comprehensive body pat down."

Although they were again cleared to board, the pilot refused to allow them back on the plane, the suit claimed. The plane began to depart without the men when an unnamed airline official called it back and it returned to the gate for a second time.

The suit claims the official then boarded the plane and spoke with the pilot, who said he would not allow Rahman and Zaghloul on the plane because their presence could make other passengers uncomfortable.

According to the suit, the official told passengers that anyone who was apprehensive about the presence of the two men could take a different plane and would be given a generous voucher. There were no takers. The pilot still refused to allow the men to board and they were booked on a later flight, the suit said.

Delta and Atlantic Southeast Airlines Inc., which is owned by SkyWest Inc., issued a statement Monday that read: "Atlantic Southeast and Delta oppose discrimination in any form from any source, and our employees act at all times in the best interest of passenger safety and security. We cannot comment further on pending litigation."...

"Defendants excluded Mr. Rahman and Mr. Zaghloul because of the way they looked," the suit claims. "They had beards, wore traditional Arabic clothing, and were visibly foreign. Defendants unlawfully relied upon these characteristics to conclude that Mr. Rahman and Mr. Zaghloul were security threats, disallowing them from utilizing their purchased tickets."

The suit said the two were traveling to a conference on "`Islamophobia,' and how Muslims religious leaders could help address this issue."

The suit seeks unspecified compensation for the men's losses and injuries as well as punitive damages.

Fashion plate Rehab in unaltered image from his website (since removed!)

All you really need to read is the headline: "Let's Face it: It's the Radical Right, not Islam, that is the Greatest Threat to the American Way," by Ahmed Rehab of Hamas-linked CAIR in the Huffington Post, December 16 (thanks to T.T.). From the headline alone you can fill in the rest: whining, victimhood posturing, and no hint whatsoever that any Muslims are waging jihad against the United States.

And obviously Rehab is right. Just look at the Radical Right-wingers who have perpetrated or attempted to perpetrate violent attacks against innocent Americans: there was Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood right-wing mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be right-wing mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be right-wing bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be right-wing bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square right-wing mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station right-wing murderer; and Naveed Haq, the right-wing mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be right-wing mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a right-wing plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane right-wing bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of the Radical Right and motivated by its texts and teachings.

And then there were all these right-wing declarations of imminent right-wing takeover in the U.S.:

"We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah." -- Muhammad Faheed, Muslim Students Association meeting, Queensborough Community College, 2003

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." -- CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad, 1998 (denial noted and full story explained at link)

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future." -- CAIR spokesman Ibrahim "Honest Ibe" Hooper, 1993

"If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate." -- prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, 2002

No, wait --

Anyway, this deflection strategy from Rehab should come as no surprise. The thuggish Rehab has also spoken up in defense of the Islamic supremacist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir's right to hold its convention in Chicago (Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in many countries), while working to suppress the freedom of speech of anti-jihadists.

Michael Coren demolishes this increasingly common theme, which I discussed here.

Remember all those Jewish terror plots? Jews shouting "Shema Yisrael" as they blew themselves up in crowds of non-Jews and flew planes into buildings? Remember those captured internal documents of Jewish organizations saying they were working toward "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within" so that "the religion of Moses was victorious over other religions"?

Syed Soharwardy is by no stretch of the imagination an original thinker. As I have noted many times here, Leftists and Islamic supremacists tend to parrot the same talking points, as if they were all reading from the same script. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a database somewhere of themes to sound and stock answers to questions, since they repeat themselves with such dreary regularity. Soharwardy here is repeating talking points that we have heard before from the likes of dhimmi Jeffrey Goldberg, Islamic supremacist pseudo-moderate Reza Aslan, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison and Nicholas Kristof, among many others.

Christopher Hitchens ably took apart the central claim being made here when writing last year about the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero: "'Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,' Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like."

Soharwardy's aim (and the aim of all the others who have repeated this) is to intimidate his hearers into thinking that criticism of Islamic supremacism leads to the gas chambers, and thus there must be no criticism of Islamic supremacism. The unstated assumption is that if one group was unjustly accused of plotting subversion and violence, and was viciously persecuted and massacred on the basis of those false accusations, then any group accused of plotting subversion and violence must be innocent, and any such accusation must be in service of preparing for their subversion and massacre.

The difference in this case is not only that Muslim leaders worldwide have made their intention to conquer and subjugate non-Muslims very clear, in a way that Jews never did in the run-up to the Holocaust; it is also that anti-jihadists nowhere advocate a "final solution" for Muslims, and never will -- we are merely calling upon them to drop the authoritarian and repressive aspects of Sharia and obey the laws of the Western societies in which they live. This is a movement in defense of freedom and equality of rights before the law.

But Syed Soharwardy wants to advance his repressive and authoritarian model for society, and in order to do so he has to smear those who are resisting the imposition of that societal model.

Also, Marisol observes:

If you have a persecution complex, but actually want to lose sympathy, a surefire tool for success is to compare yourself to:

1. Nelson Mandela
2. Jesus
3. The Jews in the Holocaust

Indeed.

"Imam says Muslims being persecuted like Jews," by Mark Dunn in the Toronto Sun, December 13:

OTTAWA – A Calgary-based Imam says Muslims are being attacked in the same way Jews were before Hitler ordered their extermination.

Syed Soharwardy, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, says a regulation change requiring Muslim women to remove their niqabs and burkas when swearing the oath to become a Canadian amounts to Muslim bashing.

From intimidating and bad-mouthing the Muslim faith and belittling the Koran and Muslim beliefs, he drew a parallel with the treatment of Jews in Germany.

“Muslims are going through that situation right now that the Jews faced before the Holocaust,” Soharwardy told CFCN TV in Alberta.

“That was going on in Germany before the Holocaust, same thing is happening now about Muslims. So this is absolutely an alarming situation.”...

Islamic supremacists such as Dalia Mogahed, Hamas-linked CAIR and Reza Aslan and their Leftist Useful Idiots such as Russell Simmons, as well as Useful Idiot far-Left "journalists" such as Michelle Goldberg and Adam Serwer, are in a fine froth about the Lowe's decision to drop advertising from All-American Muslim. It's bigotry, you see, for a company to drop advertising on a Muslim TV show for whatever reason, but it's not thuggery to try to force American companies to advertise on that show by using threats, intimidation, and smears.

Leftist journalists and Islamic supremacist spokesmen always march in lockstep, using the same talking points, as I've pointed out previously in connection with Aslan's frequent recycling of tired and discredited themes. In this case Goldberg enunciates the theme that this whole attempt to bully Lowe's and other advertisers is sounding: "Right-wingers attack TV’s All-American Muslim for portraying Muslims as ordinary folks, and Lowe’s pulls its advertising—signaling that it agrees Muslims shouldn’t be depicted as anything other than terrorists."

My article here is often referred to in support of this idea, but of course I didn't say that, and the idea that that's why anyone objects to All-American Muslim is ridiculous on its face. The Left and Islamic supremacists are so intellectually bankrupt that they cannot mount a coherent refutation of their enemies; all they can do is caricature, misrepresent and defame them.

In reality, All-American-Muslim purports to be fighting "Islamophobia." That is a claim that the show makes about itself in the beginning of the very first episode. Yet it then goes on to depict Muslims who by their own account aren't observant, and so not reading the texts and teachings that Islamic jihadists use to justify violence -- and so they're not the kind of people who would have given rise to any suspicion of Muslims in the first place. If All-American Muslim had said it was fighting "Islamophobia" and then shown pious, devout Muslims teaching other Muslims that the interpretation of Islam of al-Qaeda and other jihadists was all wrong, we might have had something useful. If they'd shown Muslims fighting against terror, it might have been inspiring.

And if they'd simply have left "Islamophobia" out of it and shown people from a Muslim background living their lives, it might have been an enjoyable show without pretending to deal with larger political and societal issues.

As such it is just misleading. I never called for advertisers to drop the show, and neither did my colleague Pamela Geller -- contrary to widely published claims. But if Lowe's and 63 others decided to do so, they are perfectly within their rights and should not be harassed or intimidated.

"Group Says Lowe’s Is One of 64 Companies to Pull Ads From ‘All-American Muslim,’" by Jorge Rivas for Color Lines, December 13 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

The conservative Christian group that’s claiming responsibility for home improvement chain Lowe’s pulling their ads from the reality show “All American Muslim” says there are 64 other companies that have cancelled their ad buys for the show as a result of their e-mail campaign.

McDonalds, Amazon and Bank of America are among the companies the Florida Family Association (FFA) says they’ve targeted to get their commercials off the reality tv show “All American Muslim.” Lowe’s was the first to make headlines because they’re the only company to confirm they canceled ad buys as a result of the the conservative group’s campaign.

“While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that program” a representative for Lowe’s wrote in a statement.

“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish,” read one of FFA’s emails to it’s members that urged them to contact dozens of companies and ask them to “discontinue advertising on this show.”

According to the Muslim Public Affairs Council, FFA’s campaign against “All-American Muslim” stems from the work of two “infamous Islamophobes” writers Robert Spencer, author of “The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran,” and Pamela Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.”

“The main danger of All-American Muslim is that it’s misleading,” wrote Geller in an article reprinted by FFA. “The Muslims portrayed in the show are free to choose their path. That is the beauty of living in a free society. But so many aren’t. … Who speaks for Jessica Mokdad, who lived not far from where this show is taping, in Dearborn, Michigan? Mokdad was honor murdered by her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi, for ‘not following Islam.’”

There are, however, some sane voices jumping into this mind-boggling debate.

“Lowe’s should be ashamed for succumbing to this type of bigotry,” said Deana Nassar, Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Liaison on the group’s website. “The show is an important effort to portray the everyday lives of a group of normal, mainstream Muslim Americans. Caving into the fear campaign initiated by thinly veiled hate groups sends the wrong message at the wrong time.”

Mia Farrow and Russell Simmons have called for a boycott of Lowe’s on Twitter, with Simmons promising to “sic every civil rights agency on (Lowe’s) until they straighten this out.” A representative for Simmons also confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter that he will buy any remaining ad space on the show to promote the RushCard, a prepaid Visa credit card.

MoveOn.org has also started a petition calling on the companies FFA targeted to continue buying air time on “All American Muslim.”

Or else.

And the bigots and haters over at Hamas-linked CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror funding case that has seen several of its officials convicted for terror-related crimes, are crying "bigotry." Apparently Lowe's, since it initially advertised on the misleading All-American Muslim show, must advertise on it forever or be cast out of politically correct Paradise. In a sane world, this would be called a shakedown.

More on this story. "California Senator Threatens Boycott After Lowe's Pulls Ads from Muslim-American Reality Show," from the Associated Press, December 11 (thanks to all who sent this in):

LOS ANGELES – A state senator from Southern California was considering calling for a boycott of Lowe's stores after the home improvement chain pulled its advertising from a reality show about Muslim-Americans.

Calling the retail giant's decision "un-American" and "naked religious bigotry," Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he would also consider legislative action if Lowe's doesn't apologize to Muslims and reinstate its ads. The senator sent a letter outlining his complaints to Lowe's Chief Executive Officer Robert A. Niblock.

The retail giant stopped advertising on TLC's "All-American Muslim" after a group called the Florida Family Association complained the show was "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values."

The program premiered last month and chronicles the lives of five families from Dearborn, Mich., a Detroit suburb with a large Muslim and Arab-American population.

"The show is about what it's like to be a Muslim in America, and it touches on the discrimination they sometimes face. And that kind of discrimination is exactly what's happening here with Lowe's," Lieu said.

The Florida group sent three emails to its members, asking them to petition Lowe's to pull its advertising. Its website was updated to say that "supporters' emails to advertisers make a difference."

Suehaila Amen, whose family is featured on "All-American Muslim," said she was disappointed by the Lowe's decision.

"I'm saddened that any place of business would succumb to bigots and people trying to perpetuate their negative views on an entire community," Amen, 32, told The Detroit News on Sunday.

Lowe's issued a statement Sunday apologizing for having "managed to make some people very unhappy." The North Carolina-based company did not say whether it would reinstate advertising on the show.

The apology doesn't go far enough, Lieu said. The senator vowed to look into whether Lowe's violated any California laws and said he would also consider drafting a senate resolution condemning the company's actions.

"We want to raise awareness so that consumers will know during this holiday shopping season that Lowe's is engaging in religious discrimination," he said.

Religious discrimination? You mean Lowe's is advertising on all the Christian and Jewish reality shows, but not on the Muslim one? Actually the show itself is a manifestation of religious discrimination, since there is no counterpart to it depicting people of any other faith.

In addition to an apology and reinstatement of the ads, Lieu said he hoped Lowe's would make an outreach to the community about bias and bigotry....

"Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lightning rod for many of those views," the company's statement said. "As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance."

Lieu's office said a decision was expected Wednesday or Thursday on whether to proceed with the boycott.

Dawud Walid, Michigan director of the [Hamas-linked] Council on American-Islamic Relations, said his group felt "extreme disappointment" at Lowe's "capitulation to bigotry."

Walid said he has heard expressions of anger and calls for a boycott by Muslims but said a key to resolving the Lowe's advertising controversy will be how non-Muslim religious leaders and others react to Lowe's decision.

"I will be picking up the phone tomorrow to some of our friends and allies to explain the situation to them," Walid said Sunday.

It is surprising that Swamy lasted as long as he has in Harvard's hyper-politically correct environment; his original piece ran at Atlas Shrugs on July 16. At Harvard, the wheels of injustice grind more slowly than I would have expected.

In any case, here is another assault on the freedom of speech and another victory for the ongoing Leftist and Islamic supremacist attempts to demonize, stigmatize and marginalize all speech regarding any kind of resistance to jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism.

"Harvard removes courses taught by Subramanian Swamy," from PTI, December 8 (thanks to all who sent this in):

NEW YORK: Harvard University has decided to remove courses taught by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy at its annual summer school session, terming his views as " reprehensible" in a controversial piece he wrote on Islamic terrorism in India.

At a meeting of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty members voted with an "overwhelming majority" to remove two economics courses - 'Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business' and 'Economic Development in India and East Asia' - that Swamy teaches at the three-month Harvard Summer School session.

The faculty meeting, convened to approve the 2012 Summer School course catalogue, resulted in a "heated debate" when Comparative Religion Professor Diana Eck proposed an amendment to exclude Swamy's courses from the catalogue, the Harvard Crimson reported.

In a July op-ed piece for an Indian publication, Swamy had recommended demolishing hundreds of mosques and suggested that only Muslims in India who "acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus" should be allowed to vote.

Anyone who actually reads Swamy's piece will see that he recommended the first in response to Muslims targeting Hindu holy places, and the second in response to the jihad to turn India into dar al-Islam. Harsh? Maybe, but Eck and Harvard offer no alternatives for how Hindus can defend themselves from the jihad. They would prefer that they sit back passively and consent to Islamization rather than say something that jars the adherents of the Religion of the Perpetually Offended.

Eck said Swamy's op-ed "clearly crosses the line by demonising an entire religious community and calling for violence against their sacred places," adding that Harvard has a moral responsibility not to affiliate itself with anyone who expresses hatred towards a minority group.

And yet Harvard accepted millions from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who after 9/11 demonized Israel by suggesting that U.S. Middle East policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. New York Mayor Giuliani was so indignant that he refused the 10 million dollar check Alwaleed had sent him for the rebuilding of New York. But as far as Harvard and the academic establishment in general is concerned, some forms of "demonization" are more acceptable than others.

"There is a distinction between unpopular and unwelcome political views," Eck said.

That's an arbitrary distinction. The anti-freedom Left and the Islamic supremacists are working very hard these days to drive all resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism out of the realm of acceptable public discourse. This is just another small victory for them in that effort.

Earlier, more than 400 students had signed a petition calling for Swamy's removal after Harvard had decided to stand by him, affirming its commitment to free speech principles.

So much for free speech principles.

Now lampooning Qur'an-burning is "Islamophobic": this is getting confusing

The endless search for hate crimes that will enable Islamic supremacists to portray themselves as victims takes an absurd turn in Ontario: someone taped a cartoon criticizing Qur'an-burning to the door of a mosque, and the poor Muslims inside are traumatized. Imagine the fear that would engulf the Muslim community if someone left a new, pristine copy of the Qur'an and a "Welcome to Our Community" card on the mosque doorstep.

"Editorial cartoon posted on mosque door prompts hate crime investigation," by Nicole O’Reilly for the Hamilton Spectator, December 7 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Hamilton Downtown Mosque leaders are saying they are the victims of a hate crime after two copies of a cartoon depicting a caveman dropping a Quran into an open fire were taped to the women’s prayer entrance.

The cartoons, which include the words “primitive man discovers fire,” were found duct-taped to the doors of 96 Wilson St., on Sunday.

The image, an editorial cartoon, was originally published in the Toronto Star in September 2010 as a critique of Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ “International Burn a Quran Day.”

“It was an attack on Pastor Terry Jones, calling him a primitive man,” Toronto Star spokesperson Bob Hepburn said Tuesday, adding that it was in no way an attack on Islam.

At the time of publication, the Star did not receive any formal complaints, Hepburn said.

It’s not the original intent, but rather the intention of the culprit that has Imam Sayed Tora concerned. “If a person wants to show support for the Muslim community, there are many other ways to do it,” he said.

Hamilton police spokesperson Catherine Martin said the hate crime unit is investigating whether the incident constitutes a hate crime...and are asking anyone with information to come forward.

The cartoons were discovered by the mosque’s board president, Wahed Al-Jabry, around 4 p.m. as the community prepared for a fast-breaking meal to celebrate the ninth day of Muharram – the first month in the Islamic calendar. Another member found plants around the mosque had been uprooted.

Tora said the board gathered to discuss the incident, before deciding to report it to police Monday. The images and surveillance footage was handed over.

The recording shows a dark, four-door car pull up in the mosque’s west parking lot around 3:45 p.m.. The driver remains in the car, while the passenger – a bald, white man – jumps out and carries what looks to be the two pieces of paper already taped together towards the mosque.

The community is feeling stressed and fearful, Tora said, adding that his own nine-year-old daughter asked him whether the mosque will be attacked.

The mosque cancelled children’s classes and the homework club Monday and Tuesday. After being promised increased police patrol, he said classes may resume soon.

It’s “reasonable to assume” that the perpetrator was not posting the cartoon to support the Muslim community, but rather to support the ideas of Pastor Terry Jones, said Hussein Hamdani, spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Greater Hamilton, of which the Downtown Mosque is a member.

He said the events are particularly disturbing since the mosque just held a well-attended open house.

Most hate crimes against Muslims go unreported, Hamdani said. That’s why it was important for the community to speak out.

The idea that most hate crimes against Muslims go unreported is extremely unlikely. A hypersensitive, haughty group that relentlessly portrays itself as an innocent victim, and hate crimes against it are going to go unreported? I doubt it. This is just an attempt to cover for the inconvenient truth that hate crimes against Muslims are actually infrequent:

Anti-Jewish attacks 70% of hate crimes, anti-Muslim attacks 9% of hate crimes -- Senate to hold hearings on "anti-Muslim bigotry"

Just-released New York 2009 report: Hate crimes against Jews: 251. Hate crimes against Muslims: 11.

Backlash! Anti-Muslim hate crimes only eight percent of hate crimes, far less than those against Jews

And so in order to deflect attention away from jihad activity and try to portray Muslims as victims, so as to shame non-Muslims into not investigating or even being suspicious of further jihad activity, Islamic supremacist groups have resorted to making it up. Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have not hesitated to fabricate "hate crimes." CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

Hamas-linked CAIR continues its relentless campaign against anti-terror efforts of all kinds. This is of a piece with its at least outwardly successful campaign to drive the truth about Islam and jihad out of FBI training materials for agents who are supposed to be combating terrorism.

Pamela Geller has the story: Hamas-linked CAIR sent out an alert entitled "CAIR Concerned About FBI's Use of 'Outreach' to Spy on Muslims." Geller brought this piece of Orwellian audacity back to reality with her headline: "AFDI/SIOA Concerned About Hamas-linked CAIR's Use of 'Outreach' to Spy On, Bully, Intimidate and Lie to Government Agencies Nationwide."

The Hamas-linked CAIR statement expresses "concern about the 'chilling effect' on constitutionally-protected activities that may result from the apparent use of FBI community outreach efforts to secretly gather intelligence on American Muslim communities, groups and individuals.

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "the FBI is using its extensive community outreach to Muslims and other groups to secretly gather intelligence in violation of federal law."

Clearly any activities that really do violate federal law should be stopped immediately. But note that Hamas-linked CAIR has complained about virtually every step law enforcement has taken to try to stop jihad activity in the U.S. Their complaints have a chilling effect on counter-jihad and anti-terror efforts. And that chilling effect has never come up as a cause for concern in any CAIR statement.

Islamic groups are already busy deflecting attention by preemptively claiming victim status. "PM murder plot prompts tight security in Trinidad and Tobago," from CNN, November 24 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

(CNN) -- Authorities in Trinidad and Tobago are beefing up security after uncovering an assassination plot against the prime minister and three Cabinet members, state media reported.

A senior government official told the Caribbean New Media Group, or C News, that suspects linked to the plot have been arrested and that more arrests are expected.

The threat against Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and the three Cabinet members came from a group that includes international drug and gun traffickers, the same official said. A "radical Islamic group is also involved," C News reported, without specifying which....

More: "Assassination plot against Trinidad's Prime Minister, Ministers uncovered," from The Guardian (Trinidad), November 26:

Muslims in central Trinidad say they are being branded as terrorists after reports surfaced that an Islamic organisation in the area is linked to an alleged assassination plot involving Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and other Cabinet Ministers. At the Masjid-ul-Muttaqeen mosque, Munroe Road, Cunupia, Maulana Sheraz Ali said more than 15 Muslim organisations were directly affected by the report.

“Since 9/11 the Muslim community has faced a lot of pressure and now we have become immune to the stigma,” Ali said. Saying he was not disputing the validity of the assassination plot, Ali explained: “I really feel the authorities could have narrowed it down a little more. “They leave everybody, who is Muslim, open for all kinds of suspicion. They should have been more precise instead of labelling everybody. There are so much Muslim groups in Central who are affected by this.”...

Yet more evasion of responsibility and finger-pointing from Muslim leaders. When have we seen anything else from them? The unmentioned fact here, of course, is Islamic jihad terrorism. If jihadists would stop justifying violence, hatred and supremacism in the name of Islam, this "negative perception of Islam" would melt away.

More on this story. "Nigeria: Muslim Leaders Berate Media on 'Negative Representation of Islam,'" by Hamza Idris for the Daily Trust via AllAfrica.com, November 24 (thanks to Maxwell):

Istanbul — LEADERS of Muslim communities in Africa yesterday in Istanbul, Turkey frowned at the international media for portraying Islam as a religion of violence and intolerance. Muslim representatives, who spoke at the ongoing Summit of Religious Leaders of Muslim Countries and Communities in Africa (SRLMCC) which was organized by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs, observed that poor understanding of the teachings of Islam as well as negative campaigns were responsible for the violence, poverty and ignorance in many African countries.

Prime Minister of Turkey, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spoke at the opening session of the five -day conference noted that though his country is not part of Africa, his people are deeply pained by the happenings in the continent.

"There is a systematic campaign across the world against Islam. The negative perception of Islam as a religion of conflict as being portrayed by the media is very wrong. The media is using some marginal examples to define Islam as a religion of conflict and terrorism and as Muslims, we have to come together to overcome these challenges. Turkey will continue to assist Muslim communities in Africa in the areas of education, science and technology," he said.

Dr Abdul Lateef Adegbite, the Secretary-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, who was represented by Professor Yahya Oyewole Imam, said the council was responsible for inter-faith dialogue and collaboration with other agencies towards the propagation of good virtues of Islam.

The Shehu of Borno Alhaji Dr. Abubakar Ibn Umar Garbai El-Kanemi on his part described the coming together of Muslims in Africa as a positive development.

"The time for such initiative and effort is more appropriate now than ever before. This is because in these days of globalization and science and information technology, Islam has continued to face greater challenge of unity, peace and harmony. These are no doubt easy to achieve if we all adhere strictly to the great tenets of Islam which guide Muslims of all ages on what to do and what not to do," he said.

Muslim leaders from all African countries are attending the event.

It's inevitable: every time there is a jihad plot, the mainstream media trots out its template for stories like this one: shocked (shocked!) neighbors explain that the accused was a decent fellow, the local mosque says that they hardly knew the guy, others explain that he wasn't really all that much of a Muslim (despite abundant evidence to the contrary in this case), and Muslims wring their hands about "Islamophobia" and an impending backlash against innocent Muslims that never ever actually materializes.

And so here we go again.

"Shock, Anguish Uptown as Neighborhood Reacts to Terrorism Arrest," by Lucy Pawle for The Uptowner, November 21:

[...] Harlem and Washington Heights neighbors who knew Pimentel, reportedly under police surveillance since 2009, said he spent his days sitting alone outside the apartment building, smoking cigarettes.

“He seemed nice,” said Simon Islam, 36, who moved into the building five months ago with his wife and daughters. “He used to talk to everyone when they came in and out the building, but he was very quiet. He just used to smoke,” Islam said.

Juan Rey, whose mother lives in the building, described Pimentel as “a nice guy who used to open the door for people when they were carrying their groceries.”

David Rodriguez, who’d known Pimentel for a year, said he “never saw the look of terrorism in him.” Expressing astonishment at the arrest, he said Pimentel “could have blown the whole building up and no one would have known“ that he was the bomber. “His own grandmother wouldn’t know.” He described Pimentel as a regular guy in sweatpants and sweaters. “I never saw him praying; he wore regular clothes,” Rodriguez said. “I just can’t believe it.”

Pimentel sometimes welcomed Islam with “As-Salamu Alaykum” – a traditional Muslim greeting – and had explained to him how he’d converted to Islam from Catholicism. “He said he converted six or seven years ago,” Islam said. “Once I was drinking here with friends and cousins, and he pointed and said, ‘No, no. It’s not good.’”

But around the corner at Nadal1Deli, employee Mohammed “Alex” Alohdd pointed out that Pimentel didn’t fast during Ramadan. “He called himself a Muslim, but he wasn’t a proper Muslim,” Alohddi said. “I’ve known him for three years but I didn’t like him that much. I just didn’t feel good with him. He used to ask people outside for cigarettes.”

At the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on East 96th Street, where Pimentel visited, according to his mother, Imam Omar Abu Namous echoed Aloddi’s sentiments. “These circumstances, that he used to come to this mosque, are only coincidences, and have no relationship whatsoever with his activities,” the imam said. He hadn’t heard of the arrest and didn’t recognize Pimentel’s name, but said that if Pimentel had confided in a fellow parishioner, “they would have informed me and I would have informed the government.”

Emphasizing his opposition to fundamentalist ideology, the imam described the Islamic Cultural Center as fostering peace. He worried that Pimentel’s arrest would spark Islamophobia. “People have a deep misunderstanding about Islam,” Abu Namous....

Indeed. Including, apparently, Pimentel (Muhammad Yusuf) himself. But Lucy Pawle did not think to ask Abu Namous what he was doing to make sure others in his mosque didn't misunderstand Islam in the same way that Muhammad Yusuf did. Such a question would have been "Islamophobic."

Here is still more Islamic supremacist evasion of responsibility and finger-pointing. Erdogan, like every other Muslim spokesman in the West and elsewhere, refuses to acknowledge that "Islamophobia," insofar as any suspicion of Muslims actually exists, is due to Islamic jihad terror. If Islamic jihad terror and supremacist attempts to impose Sharia on the West were to end definitively, "Islamophobia" would disappear. The fact that Muslim spokesmen like Erdogan never admit this is indicative of their true agenda: to deflect attention away from the global jihad and Islamic supremacism and to claim protected victim status for Muslims, so that the jihad can advance uncriticized and unimpeded.

"Erdogan blasts anti-Islam propaganda," from Iran's PressTV, November 21 (thanks to Benedict):

Turk [sic! -- unless they mean "the Turk," i.e., Erdogan] has censured anti-Islam propaganda and called on the Muslim world to show solidarity against rising Islamophobia across the Western world, Press TV reports.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that there is a vicious propaganda campaign against Islam by some Western circles, Press TV's Ankara correspondent reported.

Erdogan was addressing the Second Meeting of Leaders of African Continent Muslim Countries and Societies which opened in Istanbul on Monday.

“There are those who use some marginal cases, to equate Islam and Muslims with terrorism, clashes, intolerance and poverty,” Erdogan stated.

“A mistake by a member of a religion or society should not be attributed to the religion or society,” he added.

“This means that Islamophobia should be condemned as much as racism and anti-Semitism is [condemned],” the Turkish premier stressed....

In Human Events this morning I discuss the latest Muslim claim of victim status and attempt to deflect attention away from jihad terrorism: the protest in New York Friday against NYPD counter-terror measures. Unfortunately for these protesters, shortly after they protested and just after I wrote this, yet another jihad plot in New York was discovered.

Last Friday around 500 Muslims in New York marched to NYPD headquarters in lower Manhattan to protest police infiltration of mosques and surveillance in Muslim areas. It is noteworthy that we have never, in 10 years since 9/11, seen Muslims anywhere in the U.S. mount a demonstration of comparable size against Islamic jihad terrorism and the supposed “hijacking” of Islam by terrorists. Even worse, the protesters failed to explain how they would propose to stop Islamic jihad terrorism in the U.S. without this kind of vigilance.

One protester asserted: “Had this been happening to any other religious group, all of America would be outraged.” That is probably true, because no other religious group has provided any cause for such surveillance. If any group did so, then it would be incumbent upon the NYPD and all other law enforcement bodies to do the same things they have done in reaction to Islamic jihad terrorism, while of course ending immediately any surveillance or other procedure that violates constitutional protections.

For these protesters to have behaved as if the surveillance of their mosques and communities was motivated by simple “racism” and “Islamophobia” required them to ignore a particularly significant elephant in the room: the ongoing and increasingly common reality of jihad terror plots in the United States. And ignore it they did: “We’re peaceful people. We don't deserve to be under surveillance,” said one protester. Another complained: “They think that all Muslims are criminals, and it’s not right.”

Those words recalled a prominent Muslim saying in 2010 that he wanted to combat “Islamophobia” and “to try and put a good positive spin out there that Islam is a good, peaceful religion. We’re not all terrorists, you know?”

Those were the words of Naser Abdo, a Muslim soldier in the U.S. Army who was granted conscientious objector status because he did not want to fight against his fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. After gaining this status, Abdo found a novel way to put a "positive spin out there,” and show that “we’re not all terrorists.” He began plotting to construct bombs and detonate them in a crowded restaurant full of soldiers from Fort Hood, where another Muslim, U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, murdered 13 Americans in a jihad attack in November 2009. Abdo defiantly admitted his guilt in court, and even cried out, “Nidal Hasan Fort Hood 2009.”

Abdo’s case doesn’t mean that every self-described believer in Islam as a “good, peaceful religion” is a murderous liar as he was, but it does illustrate the fact that assurances are not enough from peaceful Muslims—and protests against law enforcement certainly aren’t any help, either.

There is more.

Akbar Ahmed is a world-renowned Islamic moderate, but in this piece he plays the same games of victimhood, shifting of attention from jihad to "Islamophobia" and evasion of responsibility that his colleagues in Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists and jihadists have perfected over the last decade.

My own experiences with Akbar Ahmed have not been positive. He has ignored my invitations to debate or dialogue (with the exception of one noncommittal email saying he was looking forward to "talking soon" -- he never did), and has responded to my views on C-Span with deceptive evasions and irrelevancies.

"N.Y. bomb plot: What radicalizes some converts to Islam?," by Akbar Ahmed in the Washington Post, November 21:

The case of Jose Pimentel, an “al-Qaida sympathizer” accused of plotting a bomb attack in New York, has once again focused our attention on why converts to Islam appear to be so fascinated by violent jihad. Is there something in the act of conversion that transforms normal citizens into messengers of death?

For the answer, let us look at the pattern of converts to Islam in the West. In the last generation we have had many high profile converts such as Yusuf Islam, a.k.a Cat Stevens, Sheik Hamza Yusef, Ingrid Mattson, and of course, one of the most famous of them all, Muhammad Ali, the great boxer. Each one of them brought their extraordinary talents to Islam and promoted better understanding between Muslims and non Muslims....

It's interesting to note that even when listing converts to Islam who are not jihadists, Ahmed includes Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, who in 1989 called for the murder of Salman Rushdie in accord with Islam's blasphemy law; Hamza Yusuf, who has spoken at events sponsored by the Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood group Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Ingrid Mattson, former president of that same Hamas-linked ISNA.

So what has changed today? Why are we seeing a number of American converts to Islam plotting against this country? In order to answer this question, I travelled recently for almost a year through the United States with a team of young researchers. We published the findings in Journey into America (2010). What we found was a Muslim community that very much appreciative of being in the United States as proud citizens, but was also sharing a sense of being under siege after 9/11. They saw their religion, culture, and traditions mocked mercilessly. They were conscious of the attacks on mosques and women wearing Islamic dress.

Note that he says nothing about Islam's doctrines of jihad warfare. Converts to Islam plot jihad because Islam is "mocked mercilessly." So once again, it is a matter of that "respect" that Muslims find ever-elusive. If non-Muslims would only respect them, everything would be all right. Remember as you read this that "Islamophobia" is a myth, trumped up for patently manipulative, propagandistic purposes. And remember also that I am "mocked mercilessly" in my work, and yet somehow I find it rather easy to avoid constructing bombs and plotting to murder vast numbers of people. Why converts to Islam, on the other hand, find this so difficult, Akbar Ahmed does not deign to explain.

The problem we found was not only the widespread Islamophobia. We also, to our dismay, saw a Muslim leadership that was unsure of its strategy and directions. Muslim leadership was often divided along ethnic and sectarian lines and not able to create an overarching vision for the community in the United States. In particular, religious leaders seemed largely disconnected from the cultural environment in which many young Muslims grow up. In the absence of a clear message emphasizing the peace and compassion which lie at the heart of Islam, the strong messages of confrontation and violence coming from religious leaders like Anwar al-Awalaki filled the void. To compound matters, some senior American political figures are either hostile to Islam or indifferent to it....

Akbar Ahmed should explain: do the extensive teachings on Islamic jihad that Muhammad Yusuf has at his website originate with Anwar al-Awlaki? Did he invent them?

Ahmed, for all his "moderation," concludes with a veiled threat:

Concerned about the possibility of someone slipping through the administrative net and actually exploding a bomb which could kill a large number of Americans, we had recommended several steps which need to be taken urgently. While there have been vigorous interfaith activity and attempts to create a greater understanding among religions, too many preventive measures not been taken, we note with regret. In order to avoid possible future men of violence from succeeding, a vigorous exercise that combines political and Muslim leadership, along with the media, needs to be planned and implemented. It is well to keep in mind that about 50 percent of Americans in poll after poll confirm what we found in the field: they believe Islam is incompatible with being American. The matter is both urgent and serious. Unless immediate steps are taken, we may well see more Jose Pimentels in the future.

So we must regard Islam as compatible with being American, or more Muslims will try to murder Americans. Yet the reason why so many Americans view Islam as incompatible with being American is because Muslims so easily turn to violence and murder when their wishes are denied, and because of veiled threats like this one.

It is noteworthy that we have never, in ten years since 9/11, seen Muslims anywhere in the U.S. mount a demonstration of comparable size against Islamic jihad terrorism and the supposed “hijacking” of Islam by terrorists. Even worse, the protesters failed to explain how they would propose to stop Islamic jihad terrorism in the U.S. without this kind of vigilance.

"Muslims to NYPD: ‘Respect us, we will respect you,’" from the Associated Press, November 18 (thanks to all who sent this in):

NEW YORK — Hundreds of Muslims prayed in a lower Manhattan park and marched to New York Police headquarters Friday to protest a decade of police infiltrating mosques and spying on Muslim neighborhoods.

Bundled in winter clothes, men and women knelt as the call to prayer echoed off the cold stone of government buildings.

"Being Muslim does not negate our nationality," Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid told the crowd of about 500 gathered in Foley Square, not far from City Hall and local courthouses. "We are unapologetically Muslim and uncompromisingly American."

The demonstration was smaller and more subdued than the Occupy Wall Street protests that led to clashes with police and made headlines worldwide. Police wore windbreakers, not riot gear, and protesters called for improved relations with police.

"We want for you to respect us," Abdur-Rashid said, "and we will respect you."

It was the first organized opposition to the NYPD’s intelligence tactics since an Associated Press investigation revealed widespread spying programs that documented every aspect of Muslim life in New York. Police infiltrated mosques and student groups. Plainclothes officers catalogued Middle Eastern restaurants and their clientele. Analysts built databases on Arab cab drivers and monitored Muslims who changed their names.

"Had this been happening to any other religious group, all of America would be outraged," said Daoud Ibraheem, 73, a retired graphic artist from Brooklyn.

That is probably true, since no other religious group has provided any cause for such surveillance. If any group did so, then it would be incumbent upon the NYPD and all other law enforcement bodies to do the same things they have done in reaction to Islamic jihad terrorism, while of course ending immediately any surveillance or other procedure that violates Constitutional protections.

For these protesters to have behaved as if the surveillance of their mosques and communities was motivated by simple “racism” and “Islamophobia” required them to ignore a particularly significant elephant in the room: the ongoing and increasingly common reality of jihad terror plots in the United States.

Following the prayer service, the Muslims — joined by about 50 Occupy Wall Street demonstrators — crowded the sidewalk for the short walk to the large police headquarters building known as One Police Plaza. They stayed only briefly, chanting for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s ouster, before returning to Foley Square.

Protesters carried signs that said "NYPD Watches Us. Who Watches NYPD?" A dozen or so uniformed police officers monitored the demonstration and followed the march, but there were no clashes between protesters and police...

"We’re peaceful people," said Dalia Nazzal, 18, a freshman at the City University of New York, a target of police infiltration. "We don’t deserve to be under surveillance."

I'm sure she doesn't, but she could make a stronger case for that by working sincerely against Islamic supremacism and jihad in her own community rather than complaining about counterterror efforts.

Mohamed Mahmoud, 40, the owner of a Brooklyn printing shop, said he knew several people who had been approached by NYPD officers trying to recruit them as informants. Documents obtained by the AP also show that police monitored even those Muslims who decried terrorism and partnered with the government to prevent violence.

"They think that all Muslims are criminals, and it’s not right," Mahmoud said.

No, they just want to find the ones who are.

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 17 — Evangelical Christians are using high-tech devices such as solar-powered talking bibles to proselytize to Malay Muslims in Selangor, state lawmaker Datuk Hasan Ali said today.

Hasan, who is in charge of the state’s Islamic affairs portfolio, said the state’s religious authority (Jais) had discovered that Christian missionaries were now spreading their gospel through technologically-advanced means apart from setting up welfare groups providing cash and other financial aid to single mothers and the destitute.

He added that Jais’s research showed Christian evangelists were spreading their faith to young Muslim students in free tuition classes and counselling sessions, besides distributing Christian pamphlets in public places, homes, universities and places that were ostensibly called “community centres” to carry out their evangelical work.

The ex-PAS state commissioner disclosed this in a written reply to a question from Umno-Sungai Burong assemblyman Datuk Mohd Shamsudin Lias.

According to a website called Book of Joe, the palm-sized radio-like device contains all the books in the New and Old Testaments and is fitted with batteries that will run for almost 10 hours before needing to be recharged, whether by the sun, a light bulb or a nine-volt AC adapter. It costs only US$99.95 (RM310).

This latest disclosure, after a controversial August 3 raid by Selangor Islamic authorities on the Damansara Utama Methodist Church (DUMC) in Petaling Jaya, could trigger another Christian-Muslim conflict.

Christian leaders have consistently denied claims that they are attempting to convert Muslims, but relations between the two creeds with roots in the Middle East continue to smoulder in multi-religious, multi-cultural Malaysia where the religion of the federation is Islam as stated in the Federal Constitution.

Hasan said Jais is working to counter Christian proselytism of Muslims by holding sessions to clarify Islamic doctrine and its laws.

The lawmaker said Jais [religious police] is also seeking to strengthen the enforcement of the Non-Islamic Religions (Control of Propagation Amongst Muslims) Enactment 1988 as well as the Syariah Criminal Offences Enactment 1995.

Despite the total Malay-Muslim political control of the Malaysian government, police, courts, military, the media and what-have-you, and a vast gamut of totalitarian laws at their disposal, we find that Muslims can go from all powerful 'sons of the soil' to hapless victims in mere seconds. With no evidence of said 'conspiracies' required (or existing in the first place), any amount of Islamic-sponsored oppression and repression is justified indefinitely.

What would it take for you to commit mass murder in the name of Allah?

Would you do it for money? For love? Out of a sense of justice? Out of a sense of religious duty? Would you do it because an agent provocateur bamboozled and wheedled and pleaded and encouraged you?

Absurd as they may seem, these remain serious questions, for as jihad mass-murder plots are being uncovered in the United States more frequently than ever, those accused of perpetrating them, and several Islamic groups, increasingly are charging entrapment: that overzealous FBI agents pushed poor innocent Muslims into taking part in a jihad plot that otherwise would never have existed.

The problem with this line of thinking is that no amount of encouragement could get the average American non-Muslim to participate in a plot to commit mass murder.

But of course the hard-Left Guardian, long a tool of Islamic supremacists, doesn't consider that.

"Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI 'entrapment' questioned," by Paul Harris in the Guardian, November 16 (thanks to Paul):

David Williams did not have an easy life. He moved to Newburgh, a gritty, impoverished town on the banks of the Hudson an hour or so north of New York, at just 10 years old. For a young, black American boy with a father in jail, trouble was everywhere.

Williams also made bad choices. He ended up going to jail for dealing drugs. When he came out in 2007 he tried to go straight, but money was tight and his brother, Lord, needed cash for a liver transplant. Life is hard in Newburgh if you are poor, have a drug rap and need cash quickly.

His aunt, Alicia McWilliams, was honest about the tough streets her nephew was dealing with. "Newburgh is a hard place," she said. So it was perhaps no surprise that in May, 2009, David Williams was arrested again and hit with a 25-year jail sentence. But it was not for drugs offences. Or any other common crime. Instead Williams and three other struggling local men beset by drug, criminal and mental health issues were convicted of an Islamic terrorist plot to blow up Jewish synagogues and shoot down military jets with missiles.

Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists. It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack. For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it. "I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone," she told the Guardian.

Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI "entrapment" in terror cases. "We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen," said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams....

But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s.

That tipster was quickly hired as a well-paid informant. If suitable suspects are identified, FBI agents then run a sting, often creating a fake terror plot in which it helps supply weapons and targets. Then, dramatic arrests are made, press conferences held and lengthy convictions secured.

But what is not clear is if many real, actual terrorists are involved.

Another "entrapment" case is on the radar too. The Fort Dix Five – accused of plotting to attack a New Jersey army base – have also appealed against their convictions. That case too involved dubious use of paid informants, an apparent over-reach of evidence and a plot that seemed suggested by the government.

Burim Duka, whose three brothers were jailed for life for their part in the scheme, insists they did not know they were part of a terror plot and were just buying guns for shooting holidays in a deal arranged by a friend. The "friend" was an informant who had persuaded another man of a desire to attack Fort Dix.

Duka is convinced his brothers' appeal has a good chance. "I am hopeful," he told the Guardian.

But things may not be that easy. At issue is the word "entrapment", which has two definitions. There is the common usage, where a citizen might see FBI operations as deliberate traps manipulating unwary people who otherwise were unlikely to become terrorists. Then there is the legal definition of entrapment, where the prosecution merely has to show a subject was predisposed to carry out the actions they later are accused of.

Theoretically, a simple expression, like support for jihad, might suffice, and in post-9/11 America neither judges nor juries tend to be nuanced in terror trials. "Legally, you have to use the word entrapment very carefully. It is a very strict legal term," said Greenberg....

Often they just seem to be "fishing expeditions". In the Newburgh case, the men involved met FBI informant Shahed Hussain simply because he happened to infiltrate their mosque. In southern California, FBI informant Craig Monteilh trawled mosques posing as a Muslim and tried to act as a magnet for potential radicals.

Monteilh, who bugged scores of people, is a convicted felon with serious drug charges to his name. His operation turned up nothing. But Monteilh's professed terrorist sympathy so unnerved his Muslim targets that they got a restraining order against him and alerted the FBI, not realising Monteilh was actually working on the bureau's behalf.

Muslim civil rights groups have warned of a feeling of being hounded and threatened by the FBI, triggering a natural fear of the authorities among people that should be a vital defence against real terror attacks. But FBI tactics could now be putting off many people from reporting tip-offs or suspicious individuals.

"They are making mosques suspicious of anybody. They are putting fear into these communities," said Greenberg. Civil liberties groups are also concerned, seeing some FBI tactics as using terrorism to justify more power. "We are still seeing an expansion of these tools. It is a terrible prospect," said Mike German, an expert at the American Civil Liberties Union and a former FBI agent who has worked in counter-terrorism.

German said suspects convicted of plotting terror attacks in some recent FBI cases bore little resemblance to the profile of most terrorist cells. "Most of these suspect terrorists had no access to weapons unless the government provided them. I would say that showed they were not the biggest threat to the US," German said.

"Most terrorists have links to foreign terrorist groups and have trained in terrorism training camps. Perhaps FBI resources should be spent finding those guys."

Also, some of the most serious terrorist attacks carried out in the US since 9/11 have revolved around "lone wolf" actions, not the sort of conspiracy plots the FBI have been striving to combat. The 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, only came to light after his car bomb failed to go off properly. The Fort Hood killer Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot dead 13 people on a Texas army base in 2009, was only discovered after he started firing. Both evaded the radar of an FBI expending resources setting up fictional crimes and then prosecuting those involved.

Yet, as advocates for those caught up in "entrapment" cases discover, there is little public or judicial sympathy for them. Even in cases where judges have admitted FBI tactics have raised serious questions, there has been no hesitation in returning guilty verdicts, handing down lengthy sentences and dismissing appeals....

Yes. Because most people would not blow up others for any amount of money.

Hamas-linked CAIR sent this out before it got angry with the NYPD

Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists are once again claiming victim status for Muslims and trying to use that status to deflect law enforcement attention away from Muslims in this country -- this time in New York. If they're successful, jihadists will have a free hand. "Angry Over Spying, Muslims Say: 'Don't Call NYPD,'" from the Associated Press, November 14 (thanks to Sr. Soph):

NEW YORK (AP) — Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to the police with their concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups.

Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to a lawyer before speaking with the authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. Some members of the community have planned a demonstration for next week.

Some government officials point to this type of outreach as proof that Muslims aren't cooperating in the fight against terrorism, justifying the aggressive spy tactics, while many in the Muslim community view it as a way to protect themselves from getting snared in a secret police effort to catch terrorists.

As a result, one of America's largest Muslim communities — in a city that's been attacked twice and targeted more than a dozen times — is caught in a downward spiral of distrust with the nation's largest police department: The New York City Police Department spies on Muslims, which makes them less likely to trust police. That reinforces the belief that the community is secretive and insular, a belief that current and former NYPD officials have said was one of the key reasons for spying in the first place.

The outreach campaign follows an Associated Press investigation that revealed the NYPD had dispatched plainclothes officers to eavesdrop in Muslim communities, often without any evidence of wrongdoing. Restaurants serving Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated, and dozens were infiltrated. Police used the information to build ethnic databases on daily life inside Muslim neighborhoods.

Many of these programs were developed with the help of the CIA.

At a recent "Know Your Rights" session for Brooklyn College students, someone asked why Muslims who don't have anything to hide should avoid talking to police.

"Most of the time it's a fishing expedition," answered Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York. "So the safest thing you can do for yourself, your family and for your community, is not to answer."

New York Republican Rep. Peter King said this kind of reaction from the Muslim community is "disgraceful."...

Indeed.

Muslim groups have previously organized educational programs around the country describing a person's legal rights, such as when they must present identification to a police officer and when they can refuse to answer police questions. A California chapter of a national Muslim organization posted a poster on its website that warned Muslims not to talk to the FBI. The national organization ultimately asked the California branch to remove the poster from the website.

In New York, the AP stories about the NYPD and internal police documents have outraged some Muslims and provided evidence of tactics that they suspected were being used to watch them all along. These disclosures have intensified the outreach campaigns in New York....

At another meeting, organized by the [Hamas-linked] Council on American-Islamic Relations, students watched a film of two actors portraying FBI agents talking their way into a young Muslim's home and interrogating him. At the meeting, students were warned not to speak with police even if their parents, imams or Muslim clerics urge them to cooperate.

"You'll even hear imams saying, 'As long as I obey the law, I have nothing to worry about.' But that's not how it plays out on the ground," said Cyrus McGoldrick, CAIR New York's civil rights manager.

CAIR has had a strained relationship with law enforcement and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case....

Now that is very surprising and refreshing to see in a mainstream media news story.

Marina Mahathir is a Malaysian social activist and writer. And you may recognize her last name: she is also the oldest daughter of a certain Malaysian former prime minister, the man who is in many ways responsible for the ongoing Islamization of Malaysia, Doctor Mahathir bin Mohamad. In case you forgot, he is infamous for his virulent brand of antisemitism and his remark as Malaysia’s prime minister during a 2003 Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting: that Jews “…run the world by proxy.” Marina has largely inherited his particular political outlook; she is always ready to utter any amount of cognitive dissonance in the service of Islam. From “Irrational Fears Abound”, by Marina Mahathir, The Star, 9 November 2011:

TEN years ago the world turned a decidedly nastier place for Muslims. Although Islamo­phobia already existed before Sept 11, the events that day ratcheted it up several notches. Suddenly Muslims in the United States and all over the world found themselves under intense scrutiny, much of it hostile.

What happened on September 11, 2001? Three thousand people, the vast majority of whom were non-Muslims, were murdered en masse, not by ‘Islamophobes’, but by Muslim jihadists in explicit accordance with Islamic teachings. And Marina has the typically Islamic chutzpah to proclaim Muslims are the real victims. It’s like a teenager murdering his own mother and father, and then petitioning the court for leniency during his murder trial because he’s an orphan.

Stereotypes abounded. Although Islam is a religion of peace, all Muslims were branded terrorists, undemocratic, violent, oppressors of women.

The only images seen in the media were of angry bearded men wielding weapons and shouting threats to the West. Only Muslim women covered head to toe in dour black, were seen. It did not help that some Muslims themselves provided fodder for these images.

Tales of aggression against Mus­lims abounded. Headscarves were pulled off, insults hurled and, at airports, anyone with the slightest tinge of an Arabic name was pulled out for special inspection. Some people suffered even more violence, resulting in injury and even death.

These ‘tales of aggression’ are precisely that—largely fictional tales, consisting almost entirely of disinformation and victimization fantasies. Documented cases of actual violence against Muslims in western countries by non-Muslims are exceedingly rare, while the copious amounts of legalized discrimination, official oppression, and documented violence directed against non-Muslims by Muslims (especially in Muslim-ruled lands like Malaysia) are almost always conveniently ignored by Muslim apologists like Marina Mahathir.

Fear ruled and with it came prejudice and discrimination, much of it fuelled by the media. Most of it stemmed from ignorance about the world of Islam, which is not only large but also diverse.

This diversity does not at all mean that there is no agreement in the Islamic world on the eventual objective for Islam to implement sharia around the globe, and the use of Jihad, violent or otherwise, as a legitimate means towards this goal.

A Muslim in the Middle East is culturally different from a Muslim in Asia, but that was not appreciated in much of the West. Indeed Middle Eastern Muslims comprise only 15% of the entire Muslim world. Further­more there are many Western Muslims who look and act no different from their fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq only angered Muslims, who then reacted in ways that ingrained the stereotypes about them.

See, all that terrorism committed by Muslims is really the fault of their victims. Are Muslims ever responsible for any acts of violence, Marina?

The early post-Sept 11 Islamo­phobic madness only lessened when much better information and knowledge about Islam and Muslims became available. This took two forms.

One, many Muslims took it upon themselves to educate non-Muslims about Islam, and in particular reached out to other faith communities to talk about their commonalities, rather than differences.

And two, thousands of students flocked to universities to learn more about Islam. Both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of Islam did much to teach students about the real religion, rather than the one perpetuated by the media.

Ten years later, although it cannot be said that Islamophobia has disappeared, Western perspectives on Islam have become more measured and based on better knowledge. One of the biggest boosts to the image of Islam and Muslims has been the Arab Spring.

Suddenly the images of Muslims were young, modern, and protesting not about the West but about their own corrupt leaders. Although they did not explicitly talk about religion, in 2011 the Middle East became associated with the yearning for freedom and democracy, one not too different from what developed countries enjoyed.

Women were seen at the forefront of the revolution, both head-scarved and not, and changed the image of the oppressed Muslim woman.

We know that the ‘Arab Spring’ has been, at the very least, vastly oversold by the very same Western media that Marina happily bashes. This so-called ‘spring’, rather than being the birth of Jeffersonian freedoms, is proving to be a season for old tyrants to be replaced, sometimes violently, by more 'Islamist', sharia-compliant ones.   

As for the oppression of Muslim women, who is oppressing them, and why? Would that have anything to do with Islamic scripture that devalues women, renders them effectively as minors and forever places men as their superiors? Or is this oppression yet again somehow the fault of the infidels? Don’t hold your collective breath waiting for Ms. Marina to answer that.

It just goes to show that prejudice and discrimination, both rooted in fear of the unknown, can always be dispelled with better knowledge, at least in those willing to learn. There are of course many who simply refuse to open their hearts and minds to such enlightenment, but progress has been made in incremental steps.

It is also clear that very often those who steadfastly refuse to eliminate their prejudices do so because they think it is politically profitable to them. The loudest Islamophobes always seem to be politicians trying to win the populist vote. And the only way they maintain those votes is by keeping people ignorant. Hence, their refusal to engage at all with Muslims.

See, it is the fault of infidels for refusing to bend over backwards to accommodate (i.e. ‘engage’) the Muslims.

Every phobia about groups of people who are different from us works in the same way. They rely on stereotypes and on the fear that allowing these minority people the same basic rights as others would mean that they would demand more.

Thus, although no Muslim ever asked for it, some people in the US insist that there are plans to impose syariah law there. The media stokes the hysteria and stigmatisation. Unjust accusations and calls for depriving them of citizenship becomes the norm.

The way Marina writes, you might think ‘syariah’ (sharia) law is something bad that might cause harm to Americans. Why would she suggest that—is she herself an Islamophobe? Regardless, the historical record does not lie—Muslims everywhere always move to implement Sharia law, or parts thereof, as soon as their numbers and influence in a given jurisdiction make it politically feasible to do so. Are Muslims in the US going to be any different? Plainly, as even a cursory examination of the facts reveals, the answer is almost certainly 'no'.

Although those baying for blood are small in number, they still make innocent people suffer. People who have never harmed anyone else suffer distrust and hostility from their former neighbours. Violence against them is justified, sometimes with religious backing. The entire atmosphere is poisoned by hate.

Muslims never hate anyone, it seems—only ‘Islamophobes’ spread ‘hate’ by reporting on the actions of Muslims and the ideology that they follow.

This past week, where some people seem to be proudly picking on the powerless, has reminded me of that Islamophobic hysteria. I fear for our country and where we are heading.

Where is Malaysia heading? The truth is likely not to unduly worry the likes of Marina Mahathir or her father, but Malaysia’s future, in short, is more Muslims and more sharia. In other words, Malaysia’s future is firmly in the hands of not ‘Islamophobes’, but of Islamic supremacists.