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Muslim Screaming “Allahu Akbar” Murders Three In Fresno As usual, authorities aren’t sure whether or not it’s terrorism. Robert Spencer

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

On Tuesday morning around 10:45AM, a Muslim named Kori Ali Muhammad walked through Fresno, California, shooting three men dead at random, including one in the parking lot of Catholic Charities. When he was arrested, he screamed “Allahu akbar.” According to the local ABC station, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer “indicated it was ‘still too early’ to know if the shootings were an act of terrorism.”

Of course. And for those who refuse to acknowledge the nature or magnitude of the Islamic jihad against the West, it will always be too early, even if Kori Ali Muhammad presents Dyer with an ISIS membership card and a letter signed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi commanding him to carry out this attack. In this case, the familiar dance of denial by non-Muslim authorities intent on absolving Islam of all responsibility for the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings is not the central lesson of the attack – that sad charade has played out all too often in the past, and will many more times in the future, and there is nothing new to say about it.

The key story in the murders committed by Kori Ali Muhammad is that they constitute a jihad attack carried out by an apparent member of the Nation of Islam, the racist black supremacist pseudo-Islamic group headed by Louis Farrakhan. According to the Los Angeles Times, “a Facebook profile page for a Kori Ali Muhammad from Fresno paid homage to black pride and black nationalism, with images of the red, green and black Pan-African flag and images of a raised fist. The page listed him as a ‘warrior’ for RBG Nation, referencing red, black and green.”

What’s more, “in recent days, he repeatedly posted images to his frenetic Facebook page with the hashtag #LETBLACKPEOPLEGO. He referenced ‘white devils’ and praised melanoma skin cancer. In a post Monday, he wrote in all caps: ‘MY KILL RATE INCREASES TREMENDOUSLY ON THE OTHER SIDE ASÈ ALLAH U AKBAR.’ Shortly before that, he posted: ‘BLACK WARRIORS MOUNT UP AND RIDE OUT *ASÈ* #LETBLACKPEOPLEGO.’” Ase, according to the Times, “is a term from the Yoruba people of Nigeria, referencing a concept that there is power in our spirituality, words and feelings.” Muhammad also referred to “white devils” and the Nation of Islam’s mythical evil figure who created white people, Mr. Yakub.

If Muhammad is indeed a member of the Nation of Islam, he demonstrates yet again how members of the Nation of Islam, even though orthodox Sunni and Shia Muslims consider the Nation a heretical sect, can identify with the global jihad, and place themselves in its service. The most notorious example of this is the Beltway Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, who along with his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, murdered seventeen people in sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area in October 2002. Muhammad had joined the Nation of Islam in 1987; Malvo was discovered to have kept notebooks in which he drew portraits of Osama bin Laden and other jihadis and declared his determination to wage jihad himself.

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Health-Care Workers Aim to Decertify a Union Suspected of Fraud In Minnesota, they suspect the Service Employees International Union of deducting dues with our their permission. By Akash Chougule & Jason Flohrs see note please

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

This is welcome news…..and hard working union members should also challenge the unions’ use of dues to promote candidates…..rk

As its membership plummets, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is seeking to unionize home health-care workers, who have never previously organized and do not fit the traditional description of the public employees SEIU typically represents. The union is making its attempt in states across the country, but in Minnesota, where it has been rife with fraud, the personal-care attendants are pushing back, pursuing one of the largest union-decertification efforts in the history of the United States.

In 2013, Governor Mark Dayton (D.) signed a law declaring that home health-care providers — mostly women caring for disabled family members — are government employees, but only for purposes of collective bargaining. Shortly thereafter, the SEIU swooped in, pressuring workers to vote for unionization. Fewer than 6,000 ballots were cast, but because Minnesota law requires unions to receive majority support only from those who vote rather than from the entire bargaining unit, the 3,543 yes votes were enough to unionize all 27,000 personal-care attendants in the state.

To make matters worse, caretakers allege that SEIU did more than harass and “stalk” them — they say the union also forged signatures and denied anti-union voters ballots in the representation election.

Nonetheless, the resulting contract stipulated that 3 percent of the Medicaid funds that caregivers received in compensation for their work would be taken from them and handed over as union dues to the SEIU. But thanks to the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn (2014), unions representing home health workers can collect payment only from those who voluntarily opt in to the union and agree to have the dues deducted. But in Minnesota, the SEIU was caught deducting dues from caregivers who never gave them permission to do so.

Patricia Johansen, a personal-care attendant in Otter Tail County, Minn., told Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom that she never voted for the union or agreed to join and have dues deducted. In the fall of 2015, however, she noticed that the SEIU had been skimming dues from her Medicaid funds. When she complained, the SEIU said it had her signed dues-deduction authorization card on file.

Patricia, who is left-handed and “writes in an elegant and distinctive cursive” script, requested a copy — and received a form that had been filled out in her name in “crude, block letters” with a “clumsy” signature. Patricia had her dues refunded after notifying the union that she had been defrauded, but others have not been as lucky.

Now she and other personal-care attendants are collecting signatures to put the SEIU back on the ballot in hopes of decertifying this union that appears to have engaged in voter disenfranchisement, identity theft, and unlawful dues deduction, all in order to divert Medicaid funds to its own coffers.

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No, Trump Is Not a Neocon Both supporters and critics of Trump’s foreign-policy decisions should take a step back and view the whole picture. By Rich Lowry

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

With U.S. missiles flying in Syria, the “mother of all bombs” exploding in Afghanistan, and an aircraft-carrier strike group heading toward North Korea, has there been a revolution in President Trump’s foreign policy?

His most fervent supporters shouldn’t get overly exercised and his interventionist critics shouldn’t get too excited. What has been on offer so far is broadly consistent with the Jacksonian worldview that is the core of Trump’s posture toward the world.

Trump’s views are obviously inchoate. He has an attitude rather than a doctrine, and upon leaving office, he surely won’t, like Richard Nixon, write a series of books on international affairs.

What we have learned since he took office is that Trump is not an isolationist. At times, he’s sounded like one. His America First slogan (inadvertently) harkened back to the movement to keep us out of World War II. His outlandish questioning of the NATO alliance, an anchor of the West, created the sense that he might be willing to overturn the foundations of the post–World War II order.

This hasn’t come to pass. It’s not possible to be a truly isolationist president of the United States in the 21st century unless you want to spend all your time unspooling U.S. commitments and managing the resulting disruption and crises. And such an approach would undercut the most consistent element of Trump’s approach — namely strength.

His set-piece foreign-policy speeches during the campaign were clear on this. “The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest,” he said last April at the Center for the National Interest. “America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.”

In direct contradiction to isolationism, he said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would take the war to ISIS and build up our defenses. He even called himself — in a malapropism — “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

Now, there is no doubt that the Syrian strike is a notable departure for Trump, and he defended it in unapologetically humanitarian terms. But it’s entirely possible that the strike will only have the narrow purpose of reestablishing a red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria and reasserting American credibility.

That is particularly important in the context of the brewing showdown with North Korea, which he roughly forecast in his speech last April. “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach,” Trump said, advocating using economic pressure on China to “get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.”

The Tomahawks in Syria and saber-rattling at North Korea have Trump’s critics on the right and left claiming he’s becoming a neoconservative — a term of abuse that is most poorly understood by the people most inclined to use it. All neocons may be hawks, but not all hawks are neocons, who are distinctive in their idealism and robust interventionism.

We haven’t heard paeans to democracy from Trump, or clarion calls for human rights. He hasn’t seriously embraced regime change anywhere (even if his foreign-policy officials say Assad has to go). He shows no sign of a willingness to make a major commitment of U.S. ground troops abroad.

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Why North Korea’s Nuclear and Missile Programs Are Far More Dangerous Than They Look Kim Jong-un’s weapons could cause widespread devastation even if they don’t hit their targets. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

On Friday, the news media were so sure North Korea would conduct a nuclear test over the weekend to celebrate the 105th birthday of Kim Il-Sung that they almost started a countdown clock. The test never happened. Some experts said this was because President Trump caused North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to “blink.”

On Saturday, North Korea did attempt a celebratory ballistic-missile test, which failed seconds after launch. There has been speculation in the media that this failure was due to U.S. sabotage, possibly a cyberattack.

While I believe the above explanations of both events are unlikely, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs still pose serious and growing threats because they represent an unstable regime developing and testing increasingly advanced WMDs based on poor engineering and badly inadequate R&D. This is why a new U.S. approach to the threat from North Korea is long overdue.

I did not believe a nuclear test would occur as part of North Korea’s weekend celebration. I was not convinced by commercial-satellite imagery cited by some experts as evidence of an imminent nuclear test, since there is constant activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site that often leads to predictions of nuclear tests that do not occur. On the other hand, when North Korea actually conducts nuclear tests, these same experts are usually caught off guard.

Predicting North Korean nuclear tests is difficult, because Pyongyang is aware it is being watched by U.S. spy satellites. North Korea probably engages in subterfuge at its test site to make the world think nuclear tests are imminent when they are not, and to conceal preparations for actual tests.

North Korean nuclear tests during major celebrations like the 105th birthday of Kim Il-Sung are unlikely because, as North Korea’s nuclear program becomes more sophisticated, the chances of failed tests increase. North Korean leaders probably wanted to avoid the humiliation of a failed nuclear test on an important holiday when the eyes of the world were fixed on the Hermit Kingdom.

There also is a more likely and simpler explanation for North Korea’s April 15 missile test and its subsequent failure. North Korean officials probably decided to conduct a missile test as a demonstration of their nation’s military might that had a higher likelihood of success than a nuclear test.

While some experts are speculating the missile test failed because of U.S. sabotage or cyber warfare, the more likely explanation is that the failure was due to the poor state of North Korean science and engineering. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis is “deeply skeptical” that the U.S. was responsible for the failed missile test, and he said in a recent Axios.com interview, “The failures we’ve seen are better explained by the pains of the R&D process. There is a reason that ‘rocket science’ is a metaphor for something that is hard to do.”

About 50 percent of North Korean missile tests — and 88 percent of its intermediate Musudan missile tests — have failed. This is what happens when a brutal totalitarian regime tries to pursue a complex weapons program using borrowed and stolen technology and relies on third-rate scientists.

It goes without saying that the world’s leading experts in rocketry and physics are not flocking to North Korea to work on the WMD programs of an evil totalitarian regime with a serious job-security problem — Leader Kim may have you executed if your project encounters failures or setbacks.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali on What the Future Holds for Muslim Women The noted feminist advocate imagines how Islam’s treatment of women could evolve in the years ahead. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

Editor’s Note: The following piece is adapted from “Preserving the Values of the West,” the remarks delivered by Ayaan Hirsi Ali upon accepting the 2016 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education alongside her husband, Niall Ferguson. It is reprinted here with permission.

The specific example I would like to address today is the relationship between men and women. All cultures have strong views on marriage, family, divorce, promiscuity, and parenting. Not all cultures are similar or interchangeable, however.

Within Islam today, I believe that we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims in the world based on how they envision and practice their faith, with important consequences for women.

The first group is the most problematic — the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on Shariah, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.

I call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad when he was based in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for Shariah law as a divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in jihad. There is no equality between men and women in their eyes, either legally or in daily practice.

The second group — and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world — consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance toward non-Muslims.

I call this group “Mecca Muslims,” after the first phase of Islam and the peaceful Qur’anic verses that were revealed in Mecca. In this group, the position of women is contested.

More recently, and partly in response to the rise of Islamic terrorism, a third group is emerging within Islam: Muslim reformers — or, as I call them, “modifying Muslims” — who promote the separation of religion from politics and other reforms. Although some are apostates, the majority of dissidents are believers, among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence. Reformers generally favor equality between men and women.

The future of Islam and the world’s relationship with Muslims will be decided by which of the two minority groups — the Medina Muslims or the reformers — can win the support of the rather passive Meccan majority.

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Obama Political Spying Scandal: Trump Associates Were Not the First Targets This list includes Dennis Kucinich and investigative journalists. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

In 2011, Dennis Kucinich was still a Democratic congressman from Ohio. But he was not walking in lockstep with President Obama — at least not on Libya. True to his anti-war leanings, Kucinich was a staunch opponent of Obama’s unauthorized war against the Qaddafi regime.

Kucinich’s very public efforts included trying to broker negotiations between the administration and the Qaddafi regime, to whom the White House was turning a deaf ear. It was in that context that he took a call in his Washington office from Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the ruler’s son and confidant. Four years later, as he recalled in a recent opinion piece, Kucinich learned that the call had been recorded and leaked to the Washington Times.

The former lawmaker believes the monitoring of his communication and the subsequent leak are the work of American intelligence agents.

To be sure, it is not a solid case. Kucinich is now a commentator at Fox News, on whose website he explains his side of the story, and on whose programming ardently pro-Trump contributors are a staple — including contributors who have been sympathetic to the new president’s claim that he was monitored by his predecessor. The gist of Kucinich’s piece is to “vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur.” The express point is to counter the ridicule heaped on Trump’s claim that he personally was wiretapped at Trump Tower.

As we’ve repeatedly noted (see, e.g., here, here, and here), there is no known support for Trump’s narrow claim (made in a series of March 4 tweets). Yet, there is now overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration monitored Trump associates and campaign and transition officials. There were, moreover, leaks of classified information to the media — particularly in the case of Trump’s original national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose telephone communications with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. were unlawfully disclosed to the Washington Post.

There is a question closely related to that of whether the Obama administration was guilty of a gross abuse of power — exploiting its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to keep tabs on its political opponents, thwarting and punishing their resistance. The question is: Did it start with Donald Trump?

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Facebook Encourages Employees to Skip Work for Pro-Immigrant May Day Protests By Debra Heine

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

Facebook Inc. has given its staff the green light to skip work and join pro-immigrant protests on May 1, “International Workers’ Day,” when members of the communist left around the world protest.

The tech giant said it won’t punish employees who take time off to join pro-immigrant protests, and according to Bloomberg News, the company will also “investigate” if any of its vendors (providing security staff, janitors, shuttle-bus drivers, etc.) “illegally crack down on their employees’ protest rights.”

“At Facebook, we’re committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions and speaking up,” a spokesman wrote in an emailed statement. “We support our people in recognizing International Workers’ Day and other efforts to raise awareness for safe and equitable employment conditions.”

Facebook notified employees of its policy in a posting on an internal forum April 14. A spokesman said it applies regardless of whether workers notify the company ahead of time. The Menlo Park, California, company also said it would re-evaluate its ties to any vendor if it breaks the law that protects workers’ rights to organize and protect themselves.

“It’s important not just to the engineers and H-1B holders that are traditionally thought of as the immigrants in tech but also to folks who are subcontracted but work side-by-side on those campuses,” said Derecka Mehrens, co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising, a union-backed coalition. “Immigrants play a critical role in the tech sector — both as engineers and coders but also in keeping tech campuses running smoothly.”

I remember well how Facebook — dedicated as they are to “fostering an inclusive workplace where employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions and speaking up” — gave a similar green light to tea-party conservatives who wanted to protest against Obama’s policies from 2009 to 2012.

Wait … that didn’t happen at all, did it? To be fair, that’s likely because they had very few — if any — conservative employees at the time (at least none that were out of the closet).

On the other hand, Facebook did allow its liberal employees to suppress conservative views in its “Trending News Module” for years on end.

Facebook is only one out of many other tech companies that have been vocal in their opposition to Trump’s immigration agenda. In February, more than 120 tech firms united in opposition to his executive order on immigration by filing a legal brief. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Kelly: ‘Metastasized and Decentralized’ Terror Ops Make Threat Worse Than 9/11 Era By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly warned today that Islamic terrorism “is threatening us today in a way that is worse than we experienced 16 years ago on 9/11” because of how terrorists’ operations have “metastasized and decentralized.”

Speaking at George Washington University, Kelly emphasized “we are under attack every single day” and “the threats against us are relentless.”

“We are under attack from criminals who think their greed justifies raping young girls at knifepoint, dealing poison to our youth, or just killing some of us for fun,” he said. “We are under attack from people who hate us, hate our freedoms, hate our laws, hate our values, hate the way we simply live our lives. We are under attack from failed states, cyber-terrorists, vicious smugglers, and sadistic radicals.”

In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the DHS chief said, “we’ve grown somewhat accustomed” to the terror threat and “now question all the security, all of the issues that we have put in place to secure the nation, because it’s a little bit of an inconvenience at an airport, or a little bit of an inconvenience as you pass onto an airplane.”

“The threat to our nation, our American way of life, has not diminished… As I speak these words, the FBI has opened terrorism investigations in all of our 50 states. And since 2013, there have been 37 ISIS-linked plots to attack our country.”

Kelly noted estimates that as many as 10,000 Europeans fought with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, in addition to thousands more foreign fighters representing the rest of the globe including the Western Hemisphere, and “they have learned how to make IEDs, employ drones to drop ordnance, and acquired experience on the battlefield that, by our reports, they are beginning to increasingly bring home.”

“Many of these holy warriors will survive, come back to their home countries, where they will wreak murderous havoc in Europe, Asia, the Maghreb, the Caribbean and the United States,” he added.

Because many ISIS foreign fighters hail from countries that have a visa waiver agreement with the United States, “they can more easily travel to the United States, which makes us and continues to make us the prime terrorist target.”

But, he said, “few of the challenges we face from a terrorism point of view are even close to as difficult” as homegrown terrorism, which has seen an “unprecedented spike.”

“In the past 12 months alone, there have been 36 homegrown terrorist cases opened in 18 states. These are the cases we know about,” Kelly said. “Homegrown terrorism is notoriously difficult to predict, detect, and certainly almost impossible to control… if you are a terrorist with an innocent internet connection like the one on your ever-present cell phone, you can recruit new soldiers, plan your attacks and upload a video calling for jihad with just a few clicks.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Elizabeth Warren’s book says socialism will work like it’s never worked before By Ed Straker

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

Elizabeth Warren’s new book, “This Fight is Our Fight”, says that ordinary folk can do better economically if we only had more government control and less individual freedom.

As a liberal writer in the New York Times says:

She rails against the growing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite;

Is Warren referring to the US government? Perhaps the “tiny elite” she refers to are the legislative, judicial, and executive branch which have more and more of our hard earned money, and more control over us than any corporation ever could.

She argues that this concentration of economic rewards has also undermined our political system;

Warren’s right about that, in a way; when one group of citizens can vote themselves the money of another group of citizens, our political system is undermined.

and links unequal wealth and power to the stagnating incomes, growing insecurity and diminishing opportunities facing ordinary families.

Warren’s right about that too, in an unintended way. The more government spends, the less is available to the private sector. Out of control government spending and over $200 trillion in unfunded government obligations will eventually crush the economy.

She puts a face on these stresses with capsule portraits of middle-class travails: a Walmart worker who needs to visit a food pantry, a DHL worker forced to take a huge pay cut, a millennial crushed by student debt.

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Getting Over Hillary Democrats need to comprehend the Electoral College. James Freeman

Posted By on April 19th, 2017

Among the more remarkable aspects of Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016 is that a political rookie seemed to have a better grasp of the rules of the election than his highly experienced opponent. Specifically, Mr. Trump’s message to voters was premised on the idea that the Electoral College would decide the winner. More than any candidate in recent memory, he offered an explicit pitch to the Midwestern voters he needed to secure an electoral win, while making almost no effort to build a constituency in states he was likely to lose. The losing side in 2016 is still struggling to come to grips with this fact, as it explores various reasons to explain away its failure.

“Why Do Democrats Feel Sorry for Hillary Clinton ?” is the headline on a recent Andrew Sullivan column for New York magazine that blames Mrs. Clinton for her 2016 loss. Mr. Sullivan writes that he’s amazed by the hold that the Clinton family “still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general.”

It might seem obvious to blame a loss on the loser, but Mr. Sullivan observes:

…everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her staffers were.

This column has heard other explanations for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, including fake news and the WikiLeaks publication of Clinton adviser John Podesta’s private emails. But Mr. Sullivan is urging Democrats to stop making excuses:

Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment… the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union… She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one… And yet she still managed to lose!