The organizers of the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) convention, held in Houston at the end of August, had invited all the Democratic candidates for President to address them. It was a great disappointment to the group – which would prefer that the public not be reminded that it remains an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case – that of the 15-odd Democrats invited, only two, Bernie Sanders and Julián Castro, accepted the invitation. And of those two, Sanders received the greater media attention and audience applause.
Sanders was indignant about the “bigotry” he claimed was abroad in the land: “We must speak out at hate crimes and violence targeted at the Muslim community and call it what it is: domestic terrorism.” Apparently the hate crimes and violence aimed at non-Muslims by Muslims, domestic terrorism which has been far more deadly than “hate crimes” targeting Muslims, were of little concern to Senator Sanders. He never mentioned, nor alluded to, “hate crimes and violence” aimed at non-Muslims. Perhaps he needs to be reminded of what has happened in this country in recent years. Has he forgotten about the Muslim terrorist attacks, not just in New York and Washington on 9/11/2001, but subsequently, in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, in Fort Hood, Little Rock, Orlando, San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Chapel Hill, Arlington, Virginia, Garland, Texas? Could Senator Sanders have forgotten all about these Muslim terrorists who have so often set the country on edge? He has been so determined to see Muslims as victims that he apparently is unable to recognize their role as perpetrators of terrorist attacks.
Sanders gave over much of his speech to matters of general, not Muslim-specific, interest. He’s against climate change. He thinks health care “is a human right.” He wants the “billionaire class” to pay their “fair share of taxes.” He wants to “cancel all student debt.” He wants public colleges to be tuition free. “Bold leadership must take bold action.” And so on and so predictably forth. He might have made those banal points anywhere. Then, having delivered the left-liberal boilerplate, he had some tailor-made messages of support sure to win favor with the Islamic Society of North America.
First, Sanders declared he was against Trump’s “Muslim ban” and was proud, he said, when thousands of non-Muslim Americans “rushed to airports” to show their solidarity with Muslims harmed by the ban. Sanders said nothing about the non-Muslim countries – North Korea, Venezuela – included in the ban, nor about the fact that the ban was directed only at countries that were unable or unwilling to share certain information about their citizens with the American government, thereby posing a security threat. He said nothing about why Trump’s security measure had been upheld by the Supreme Court in Hawaii v. Trump. Nor did he mention that two Muslim countries – Iraq and Chad – had been dropped from the list of countries whose citizens were banned, once they improved their collection and sharing of information about those citizens. Most telling of all, 95% of the world’s Muslims remained unaffected by what some, including Sanders, continue misleadingly to call a “Muslim ban.” Sanders did not want to complicate his simple-minded morality tale of Trumpian “bigotry.”
He kept addressing his Muslim audience, cloyingly, as his “brothers and sisters.” I wonder if, in addressing an audience of Catholics, or of Evangelicals, or even of fellow Jews, he would call them “brothers and sisters.” I suspect not. And how many of the 7,000 in his ISNA audience could possibly think of the Jewish senator as their “brother”?
Sanders told the audience that he was “the proud son of Jewish parents.” His father, he told the audience, left Poland to escape poverty and antisemitism. It would be fascinating to find out what Senator Sanders knows about present-day antisemitism in Europe, and who today are the main carriers of that pathological condition. Does he know why Jews are fearful of wearing yarmulkes in many European capitals? Does he know why Jews have been leaving Malmö, in Sweden, moving out of certain neighborhoods in Paris and London, some even leaving Europe altogether, for reasons of safety, to make Aliyah to Israel? Does he know how many Jews have been set upon, harassed, and beaten, by Muslims all over Western Europe? Does he know about the more than a dozen Jews murdered by Muslims in France, including small children shot in front of their father (before he was then killed) outside a Jewish school, and two elderly women stabbed to death in separate incidents, one of them then set on fire and the other thrown out of a window, by Muslim neighbors they had befriended? It seems that Bernie Sanders hasn’t been following the news about antisemitism in Europe. He should look into it. It might provide a salutary shock.
Bernie Sanders could stand to learn more about the Muslim terrorists in Europe, who have murdered non-Muslims in attacks in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris (many times), Nice, Toulouse, Tours, St. Etienne-du-Rouvray, London (many times), Manchester, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Malmö, Helsinki, Turku, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Beslan. Those attacks should make a deep impression, even on the likes of Bernie Sanders. And what would he make of the fact that Muslim terrorists have been responsible for more than 35,000 terror attacks around the world since 9/11? Anything? Nothing?
Sanders almost certainly does not know what the Qur’an says about Jews – indeed, I suspect he’s never read the Qur’an — but it’s not too late for him to find out. There are several dozen verses instructing Muslims on the topic. Robert Spencer has gathered them for easy reference: “The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); as fabricating things and falsely ascribing them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); claiming that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); loving to listen to lies (5:41); disobeying Allah and never observing his commands (5:13); disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more.”
Spencer notes:
The classic Qur’anic commentators do not mitigate the Qur’an’s words against Jews, but only add fuel to the fire. Ibn Kathir explained Qur’an 2:61 (‘They were covered with humiliation and misery; they drew on themselves the wrath of Allah’) this way: “This Ayah [verse] indicates that the Children of Israel were plagued with humiliation, and that this will continue, meaning that it will never cease. They will continue to suffer humiliation at the hands of all who interact with them, along with the disgrace that they feel inwardly.” Another Middle Ages commentator of lingering influence, Abdallah ibn Umar al-Baidawi, explains the same verse this way: “The Jews are mostly humiliated and wretched either of their own accord, or out of the fear of having their jizya [punitive tax] doubled.”
Ibn Kathir notes Islamic traditions that predict that at the end of the world, “the Jews will support the Dajjal (False Messiah), and the Muslims, along with ‘Isa [Jesus], son of Mary, will kill the Jews.” The idea in Islam that the end times will be marked by Muslims killing Jews comes from the prophet Muhammad himself, who said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” This is, not unexpectedly, a favorite motif among contemporary jihadists.
Many people in the Houston audience certainly would have known what the Qur’an has to say about Jews. I am sure Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, who introduced him so fulsomely in Houston, knows some, and possibly a great many, of these Qur’anic passages. And Muslims in the ISNA audience, too, would have known not just the verses specifically about Jews, but also the Qur’anic verse that tells Muslims that they are “the best of peoples” (3:110) and the other verse that describes non-Muslims as the “most vile of created beings” (98:6). But no one is about to bring these passages to Sanders’ attention; they would only discomfit him; he wouldn’t know what to think. Better to keep him in the dark. And that’s where, on the subject of Islam, by not reading the Qur’an and Hadith, Bernie Sanders has chosen to remain.
mortimer says
Yes, let Bernie Sanders put his money where his mouth is. He claims to be ‘PROUD’ of his Jewish ancestry? So let him show that by walking through the Muslim neighborhoods and no-go zones in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Nice, Toulouse, London, Manchester, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Malmö, Helsinki, Turku, Moscow, and St. Petersburg dressed as an Orthodox Jew and see if he is ‘proud’ of his unholy alliance with Islam.
To ask GOVERNMENTS to cooperate in INTERNATIONAL SECURITY is not bigotry, but responsibility.
Bernie in power would also try to make Americans secure from terrorism. He is a big hypocrite on the matter of security and seen to be one.
I am sure ALL of Bernie’s homes have hi-tech security systems and cameras in them.
Sun says
1+
I would like to add Warsaw. According to media reports, Israeli students were brutally attacked and injured in an incident in the Polish capital. Even if Eastern Europe did not accept many migrants from Islamic countries they also have problems…
https://www.krone.at/1992741
No Muzzies Here says
He is begging for Muslim votes and above all, MONEY! He is telling them in clear language that he would be more than willing to sell out the United States to the Muslims, if only they would elect him.
We have had one president already who did that. We don’t need another one!
CogitoErgoSum says
This makes me wonder. Why won’t any reporter ever ask Sander’s whether he has read the Quran? It’s such a simple question with a yes or no answer. If he says “no” then the obvious follow-up question would be “why not?” If he says “yes” then he could be asked to explain certain passages such as Quran 9:29. I have NEVER heard any politician asked any of this when it comes to Islam. Sanders had no problems asking a Christian about his beliefs and then berating him at a hearing in Congress.
Wellington says
I agree, CES. Sanders should be asked that question. In fact, he should be asked if he knows what terms like kitman and muruna mean. Does he even know the difference between the words sura and sira? Does he know who Kinana and Asma bint Marwan were? Abu Afak? Could he name just one major school of Islamic theology, Sunni or Shiite? Does he know that there is more Jew hatred in the Koran than in Mein Kampf? And so on.
Of course, it would take an informed reporter to ask these kinds of questions and informed reporters are getting scarcer by the decade. More expansively, it has been my overwhelming experience that non-Muslims who defend Muslims and Islam know virtually nothing about Mo’s creed. No doubt about it, ignorance of evil is a tremendous threat to liberty. A lot of ignorance still exists out there about Islam and there is no excuse for this 18 years after 9/11 and over 35,000 documented Islamic terrorist attacks since then.
Sanders is a deeply shameful human being. Like Karl Marx, he is wrong about almost everything, never more so than on the matter of the one religion that calls for war to be made upon mankind “until all religion is with Allah.” {Sura 8:39} What a useful idiot he is.
CogitoErgoSum says
It’s humorous to me that when Jimmy Kimmel asked Bernie if he believed in God the reply Sanders gave started out, “I am who I am….” Isn’t that sort of like what God said to Moses? Yeah, Bernie and God; they are who they are.
gravenimage says
I doubt Sanders has ever read the Qur’an.
elee says
Kapo
gravenimage says
I think Sanders is more in denial over the threat of Islam to Jews.
tgusa says
Bernie was a USSR sympathizer in the 80s. Actually, he went above and beyond sympathizer to praising the soviet system. We have a collection of loons, liars and lowlifes running for president on the democrat side.
Rarely says
The Democrats don’t hold a monopoly on loons, liars and lowlifes running for president.
tgusa says
Didn’t say they do but I was writing in regards to democrats as this article is about Bernie. The crats do have an over abundance of loons liars and lowlifes running for president right now. More than I have ever witnessed in my life time.
Angemon says
Desperately pandering to minority votes…
James Lincoln says
Bernie Sanders, another “stone waste of white”…
Anke Leibrecht says
say no to Sanders.
gravenimage says
Bernie Sanders at the Islamic Society of North America (Part 1)
………………..
Useful idiot.
Reziac says
…the other verse that describes non-Muslims as the “most vile of created beings” (98:6).
If non-Muslims are so vile, why did Allah create them?? That Allah, he must not know what the heck he’s doing up there.
MJP says
This senile old Communist will stoop to any level for votes & the worst part of it is it is a trend for the Democratic party to support these Demonic Creatures