Reacting Monday to the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in Orlando, Mark Steyn—filling in for Rush Limbaugh—said that the “official lie” of the Left is that gun-toting “right” wing extremists are responsible for the shooting and radical Islamic terrorism is not.
The fact, Steyn said, is a radical Muslim killed 49 in a terror attack and the Left doesn’t know how to cope with the “internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition.”
Listen:
Steyn read the American headlines reporting the event which showed a stark contrast with international headlines by reporting a deadly “mass shooting” instead of an ISIS-inspired “terror attack.”
While the Left is clamoring for more gun control and screaming at the NRA, it is ignoring that radical Islam is responsible for the attack and only wants to destroy what the Left believes in. “The arithmetic isn’t complicated,” Steyn explained, “the more Islam, the fewer gays.” (For more from the author of “Here’s the Left’s ‘Official Lie’ About the Orlando Terrorist Attack” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/GayFest_Bucharest_2006_activist.jpg19202560Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-06-14 02:51:412016-06-19 01:06:35Here’s the Left’s ‘Official Lie’ About the Orlando Terrorist Attack
How many red flags does it take to see that Islamist-related terror is increasing?
In the past seven months there have been high-profile terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, and in Orlando.
In the U.S. the number and frequency of Islamist plots has been growing. Before Orlando, the U.S. alone has been the target of at least 85 Islamist-related terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001.
The attack in Orlando is the 22nd plot since 2015. To put this increase in perspective, more than a quarter of domestic terror plots in the U.S. since 2001 have occurred in the last 18 months.
With this serious threat not diminishing, it is time for a nonpartisan sober assessment of the threat of terrorism to the United States.
Fourteen years ago, President George W. Bush and Congress set up the 9/11 Commission to look at the attacks of 2001. Now it is time for Congress to convene another report. The horrific terrorist attack in Orlando only reinforces that it is past time for this.
Here are four main reasons why:
1. The threat has changed. When the 9/11 Commission looked at the threat of terrorism in 2010, the face of terrorism looked very different then it does today. Back then the U.S. was principally focused on al-Qaeda, rather than the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Today, the transnational terrorist threat has rebounded, and the clear breakpoint for this was in 2010. One of the indicators is the flood of foreign fighters moving around the world.
2. What we are doing now isn’t working. In 2010, the Obama administration embarked on a counterterrorism strategy ill-suited to deal with present threats. It is obviously not working.
It is therefore time for a fresh, nonpartisan appraisal of what works and what doesn’t.
3. The Obama administration has lost credibility on this issue. In January my colleague Jim Phillips noted that:
The Obama administration’s lack of a sense of urgency in the face of the ISIS onslaught has been breathtaking. The president even proclaimed the day before the Nov. 13 Paris terrorist attacks that ISIS was contained.
The immediate angry reaction many American’s expressed to President Barack Obama’s statement on the Orlando attack points to the growing distrust many have with how his administration has responded to the threat of global terrorism.
4. The 9/11 Commission worked. The commission’s hearings and findings helped Americans understand the nature of the global terrorist threat. The final report became a national bestseller—and with good reason.
The commission delivered a frank, credible, nonpartisan assessment.
Arguably, there is an even great need for such clarity now. Americans are more confused, divided, frustrated, and uncertain about how to deal with transnational terrorism than they were a decade ago. (For more from the author of “4 Reasons Why We Need Another 9/11 Commission After Orlando” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/maxresdefault-134.jpg7201280Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-06-14 00:11:372016-06-14 00:11:374 Reasons Why We Need Another 9/11 Commission After Orlando
Former NSA head Michael Hayden recently joined a chorus of Trump’s critics blasting him for offending Muslims. “The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative,” he said.
That’s true. It’s also meaningless because in this case the narrative is reality.
Jihadists do hate us. Islam has viewed the rest of the world with undying enmity for over a thousand years. Some might quibble over whether a 7th century obsession really counts as “undying”, but it’s a whole lot older than Hayden, the United States of America, our entire language and much of our civilization.
Islam divides the world into the Dar Al-Islam and the Dar Al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. This is not just the jihadist narrative, it is the Islamic narrative and we would be fools to ignore it.
The White House is extremely fond of narratives. The past month featured Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, taking a victory lap for successfully pushing his “narrative” on the Iran deal. Rhodes takes pride in his narratives. His media allies love narratives. But none of the narratives change the fact that Iran is moving closer to getting a nuclear bomb. Narratives don’t change reality. They’re a delusion.
Narratives only work on the people you fool. They don’t remove the underlying danger. All they do is postpone the ultimate recognition of the problem with catastrophic results.
Islamic terrorism is a reality. Erase all the narratives and the fact of its existence remains.
Instead of fighting a war against the reality of Islamic terrorism, our leaders have chosen to fight a war against reality. They don’t have a plan for defeating Islamic terrorism, but for defeating reality.
So far they have fought reality to a draw. Ten thousand Americans are dead at the hands of Islamic terrorists and Muslim migration to America has doubled. Islamic terrorists are carving out their own countries and our leaders are focused on defeating their “narratives” on social media.
Hayden repeats the familiar nonsense that recognizing reality plays into the enemy narrative. And then the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is by refusing to recognize its existence out of fear that we might play into its narrative. But Islamic terrorism doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.
You don’t have to believe in a bomb or a bullet for it to kill you. A plane headed for your office building or a machete at your neck is not a narrative, it is reality. If we can’t tell the difference between reality and what we believe, then reality will kill us. And nothing we believe will change that.
We are not fighting a war of narratives with Islam. This is a war of bombs and bullets, planes crashing into buildings and blades digging into necks. And yet the men in charge of fighting this war remain obsessed with winning a battle of narratives inside the Muslim world. They have no plans for winning the war. Instead they are occupied with managing the intensity of the conflict, taking out the occasional terrorist leader, bombing only when a jihadist group like ISIS has become too powerful, while waiting for their moderate Muslim allies to win the war of narratives for them by discrediting the jihadists.
The narrative mistake is understandable. The left remains convinced that it can get its way through propaganda. Its record is certainly impressive. But it’s strictly a domestic record. Getting Americans to believe seven strictly irrational social justice things before breakfast is very different than convincing the members of a devout tribal society with a deep sense of history that they really don’t want to kill Americans. All that the narrative war accomplished was to show that the propagandists who convinced Americans to vote for their own exploitation have no idea how to even begin convincing Muslims to do anything. Think Again Turn Away was an embarrassment. Various outreach efforts failed miserably. American politicians devoutly apologize for any disrespect to Islam, but Muslims don’t care.
Hayden isn’t wrong that there is a narrative. But Nazism also had a narrative. Once the Nazis had power, they began acting on it and their narrative became a reality that had to be stopped by armed force. But at a deeper level he is wrong because he isn’t reciting the Islamic or even the jihadist narrative, but a deceptive narrative aimed at us in order to block recognition of the problem of Islamic terrorism.
The Islamic narrative isn’t just that we hate them. More importantly, it’s that they hate us. Muslim terrorists are not passively reacting to us. They carry a hatred that is far older than our country. That hatred is encoded in the holy books of Islam. But that hatred is only a means to an end.
Hatred is the means. Conquest is the end.
Assuming that Muslims are oppressed minorities is a profound intellectual error crippling our ability to defend ourselves. Islamic terrorism is not an anti-colonial movement, but a colonial one. ISIS and its Islamic ilk are not oppressed minorities, but oppressive majorities. Islamic terror does not react to us, as men like Hayden insist. Instead we react to Islam. And our obsession with playing into enemy narratives is a typically reactive response. Rising forces generate their own narratives. Politically defeated movements typically obsess about not making things worse by playing into the narratives that their enemies have spread about them. That is why Republicans panic over any accusation of racism. Or why the vanilla center of the pro-Israel movement winces every time Israel shoots a terrorist.
Western leaders claim to be fighting narratives, but they have no interest in actually challenging the Islamic narrative of superiority that is the root cause of this conflict. Instead they take great pains not to offend Muslims. This does not challenge the Islamic supremacist narrative, instead it affirms it.
Rather than challenging Islamic narratives, they are stuck in an Islamic narrative. They are trapped by the Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative of “Good Islamist” and “Bad Islamist” convinced that the only way to win is to appeal to the “Good Islamist” and team up with him to fight the “Bad Islamist”.
The “moderate” Muslim majority who are our only hope for stopping Islamic terrorism is an enemy narrative manufactured and distributed by an Islamic supremacist organization. When we repeat it, we distort our strategy and our thinking in ways that allow us to be manipulated and controlled.
It isn’t Trump who is playing into jihadist narratives, but Hayden and everyone who claims that recognizing Islamic terrorism plays into enemy narratives while failing to recognize that what they are saying is an enemy narrative.
The very notion that the good opinion of the enemy should constrain our military operations, our thinking and even our ability to recognize reality is an enemy narrative of unprecedented effect.
And this is the narrative that our leaders and the leaders of the world have knelt in submission to.
Narratives only have the power that we assign to them. No narrative is stronger than reality unless we believe in it. Not only have our leaders chosen to play into the enemy narrative, but they have accepted its premise as the only way to win. And so they are bound to lose until they break out of the narrative. (For more from the author of “Reality: Trump on Islam” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/25697720646_fa2b039926_b.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-06-07 02:03:262016-06-07 02:03:26Reality: Trump on Islam
Imagine if a bill had come before Congress after the 9/11 attacks debating the future of immigration from the Middle East. How many members of Congress would have voted to double migration from that volatile region and make it the fastest growing subset of our immigrants? 15 years after that tragic day, that is exactly what has happened, and with no input from the American people.
Last year, I counted the number of immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries and found that since 2001, the average annual intake has been roughly 100,000 per year, twice the rate in the ‘90s. But that trajectory has been increasing in recent years. During the five years from FY 2009 through FY 2013 alone, we’ve brought in 680,000 from those same countries. Now, there is evidence that this trajectory is growing sharper.
A few days ago, I posted a new immigration analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies detailing the sharp increase in overall immigration during the most recent two-year period: 2014-2015. Using the same Census data, a glance at the predominantly Muslim countries indicates that 308,000 new individuals emigrated here during those two years. The data is based on the Current Population Survey, which asks immigrants when they came to America. This is the first two-year period where the total number from Middle Eastern and predominantly Muslim countries has exceeded 300k. Which means that the annual rate of Muslim immigration has likely exceeded 150,000. Remember, these are individuals coming straight from the Middle East during the most volatile period of Islamic upheaval fomented by ISIS and other strains strictly adherent to Sharia Law.
According to Pew Research, Arabic is now the fastest growing language in the U.S. and the Census Department will offer Arabic translations of the decennial questionnaire for the first time in 2020. The number of people speaking Arabic has grown by 29 percent from 2010-2014, whereas the number of Spanish speakers has only grown by six percent over the same period. The most up-to-date monthly data from the Current Population Survey clearly indicates that this trend has grown in 2015 and for the first quarter of 2016.
As I lamented last Friday, we have sent our soldiers, particularly the special operators, to all sorts of hell holes over the past 15 years, often helping one side of the Islamic civil war over the other. We’ve dispatched them to endless wars with no good outcome. Yet, at the same time we are expending hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives refereeing civil wars and playing interference for Iran and a corrupt Afghani government, we’ve imported the problem to our very shores free of charge.
According to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland, there are over 1,000 active homegrown terror cases being investigated by the FBI in all 50 states. This is not the result of ISIS or the Taliban coming here with an Air Force or Navy and invading America; this is the result of suicidal immigration policies.
There has been much discussion over a blanket ban on Muslim immigration, which was extremely popular in the GOP primaries, according to exit polls from every state. But why can’t we start with a more relevant policy of not making immigration from the Middle East the fastest growing category? Unfortunately, instead of using the annual defense bill to right the ship on our backwards immigration and defense policies, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John McCain (R-AZ) are looking to add 4,000 more visas to the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, granting green cards to those who work for the U.S. military as translators in Afghanistan. This is on top of the 3,000-visa expansions slipped into last year’s bill. As I noted last year, generally speaking, it is a good idea to provide this status to those natives who help the U.S. in foreign wars because they often need protection as a result of their work with the U.S. military. But as American citizens have witnessed over the past decade, the rampant spread of radical jihad throughout the Middle East has made it arduous to distinguish friend from foe.
While a number of Afghani translators have served faithfully, there have been numerous tragedies of our brave soldiers killed in Afghanistan at the prime of their lives because they were double crossed by an Afghani contractor or interpreter. One such “green-on-blue” attack killed U.S. Major General Harold Green in 2014, the highest-ranking casualty in a theater of war since Vietnam. Attacks from supposedly friendly Afghanis accounted for 15 percent of coalition soldier deaths in 2012.
Moreover, this is not a one-time deal; it has become our modus operandi to get involved in Islamic civil wars and then bring entire families in the tens of thousands from both sides to our shores. This is on top of the record high immigration from Pakistan and other Islamic countries and the almost 150,000 refugees we have taken from Iraq since 2007. If we are going to bring in more Afghanis under the guise of rewarding those who serve the U.S. military, can we at least reduce other categories of immigration from the Middle East? And if the only thing we can show for 15 years of involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is hundreds of thousands of new Sharia-adherent immigrants, there is something wrong with our entire approach to war-fighting and homeland security.
Today, we mark the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. In 1944, we were a nation united under a morally and intellectually clear mission. We uncompromisingly defended our homeland and sent our soldiers across the world to fight with a defined mission, definitive outcome and no restrictive rules of engagement. Now, we send our troops into Islamic meat-grinders with appalling rules of engagement — often helping our enemies — and then we bring the problems straight to our shores. The best way to honor the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation at Omaha Beach is to follow in their example of how to fight a war: by putting the security of Americans first. (For more from the author of “Islamic Immigration Skyrocketing in Last Years of Treasonous Obama Administration, Arabic Now Fastest Growing Language in US” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Islamic_Protest_in_Hyde_Park_Sydney_01.jpg833833Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-06-06 21:23:562016-06-06 21:23:56Islamic Immigration Skyrocketing in Last Years of Treasonous Obama Administration, Arabic Now Fastest Growing Language in US
There’s been so much debate as to whether violent extremism—which has triggered numerous terrorist attacks that have claimed thousands of innocent lives—should be attributed to Islam as a religion.
The largest Muslim organisation in the world recently admitted that bad elements of Islam are indeed part of the extremism problem.
During an international meeting of moderate Islamic leaders in Jakarta earlier this month, the Indonesia-based Nahdlatul Ulama group came out with a strong condemnation of their fellow Muslims, particularly extremist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaeda.
“We are like traditional opposition to supremacist Islamism,” Yahya Staquf, an Indonesia cleric affiliated with the Nahdlatul Ulama, told CNN, as quoted by CBN News.
Staquf openly admitted that to be able to combat the global jihadi movement, world leaders and the general public must recognize the fact that extremism originates from Islamic teachings, which are being used by terrorist groups to justify the use of violence. (Read more from “World’s Largest Muslim Organization Admits Extremism Problem Springs From Islamic Teachings” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/prayer-1008385_960_720-1.jpg720960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-26 22:51:492016-06-05 00:12:18World’s Largest Muslim Organization Admits Extremism Problem Springs From Islamic Teachings
The following essay by Matthew Bracken was prompted by a cell-phone video from Germany of a culture-enricher assaulting a German teenaged boy. I won’t embed the video; I find it almost too unbearable to watch. To see a young man so unable to defend himself, so unwilling to stand up and be a man, is disheartening and dismaying.
This is heartbreaking to see, but very important.
This is how a dhimmi is created in a gun-free country, where armed self-defense is an alien concept. This is prison yard rules, and the young German is just fresh meat. This German kid will probably convert to Islam just to stop the pain and “gain the respect” of his new masters.
Note how the bully threatens to beat him every day just to harden him up and make him a man. A similar psychological process occurs in military boot camp with new recruits. He doesn’t know it yet, but his mother and sisters are now Moslem chattel property. He won’t lift a finger to defend German women; he is a dhimmi at best. Most likely he will just convert as a matter of bare survival, but he will always be a “second-class Muslim”, even if he submits. These IslamoNazi bullies will have him reciting the Shahada in less than a month, and after that, his sister is toast. Just fresh meat for the hijra jihadis.
This is how Islam has spread for 1,400 years: brute force, threats, intimidation, and using terror as an example of how far they are willing to go to force the spread.
Smug Americans who own firearms might laugh at the current plight of the Europeans, but they should not. The Europeans have been brainwashed by the “multi-kulti-uber-alles” Left to simply submit when the planned hijra invasion happened, which is happening now. The ordinary Euros were betrayed by Quisling traitors in high offices. From the Muslim point of view, the hijra invasion is moving from the dawah (preaching) phase to the jihad phase, using violence and threats of even greater violence to force a complete Muslim takeover. That German boy now understands who are the alpha males, and who are not: The Moslems are, and he isn’t.
But there is the long-term danger in this process even to America. If Islam wins in Europe, a well-known social/genetic dynamic will kick in. All of the German girls and women (even the man-hating radical feminists and lesbians) will be raped, enslaved, or “married” by force, but one way or the other, there will be a rising generation of Muslims in Europe who are half-German.
People should understand a genetic process called “hybrid vigor.” There is a reason the Ottoman Turks collected European boys to be raised as Janissaries. The Arab desert Muslims have terrible DNA after 1,400 years of first-cousin inbreeding, but when they impregnate their German conquest victims they will create generations of 100% full Muslims who are half German. Of course, this will happen in every European country, not only Germany.
Americans should not be smug about the collapse and Muslim conquest of Europe. Half-German “Super Muslims” will be a tough adversary. Remember the Ottoman Janissaries from history. They were fearsome fanatics, but also big, strong and smart.
Another crop of “Super Muslims” were the Berbers of Morocco, who provided most of the brains and muscle used for the invasion of Spain in 711 AD. The “desert Arabs” were a scrawny and pitiful bunch. Man for man, they were weaklings compared to the hearty Berber mountain folk. But the Berbers were divided, tribe against tribe, from one Atlas Mountains valley to another. The invading Arab armies picked off one tribe at a time, and forced them all to convert. These newly united Berber Super Muslims were imbued with ”convert zeal,” and ready to invade new worlds to spread the banner of Islam.
United for the first time in history, the Muslim Berbers of Morocco (under mostly Arab leadership) turned their natural war-lust against the Christians of Spain. Like the pre-Muslim Berber tribes had been before them, each Spanish Christian principality was divided from the others across the mountains of Spain. The united and newly converted Muslim Berber armies swept over the separate Spanish fiefdoms one after the other.
The point is that Muslim invasions have often succeeded against divided foes who were, man for man, much stronger and even smarter. A generation later, this invigorated hybrid population can be very dangerous, because after the consolidation phase where the invaded region is brought under united Islamic control, they will be straining to burst their borders and conquer new worlds, like the Super Muslim Berbers did in Spain. Think also of Iran in this context. United Arab Muslim armies conquered Persia, creating another brand of hybridized “Super Muslims.”
I shudder to think of what German Super Muslims will be capable of in thirty years, if Islam is triumphant in Europe. They would make the Earth shake.
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Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com. For his previous essays, see the Matthew Bracken Archives. (For more from the author of “The Coming European Islamic Super-State” please click HERE)
Retired U.S. Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus wrote an article entitled “David Petraeus: Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists.”
Thank you, sir, for the clarification. Up until now, I had believed Barack Obama; that Islamic terrorism was caused by climate change.
Petraeus’ premise is that “inflammatory political discourse…against Muslims and Islam…including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion… will compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens… directly undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”
Let us first dispel a universal myth and the fundamental flaw in Petraeus’ argument. There is no such thing as gratitude in foreign policy; only interests.
In every one of the “alliance” cases Petraeus cites: Sunni Muslims in al Anbar province, the Iraqi Shiite government, the Afghan Northern Alliance, the nation of Indonesia – all of them worked with the United States because of mutual interest, not happy talk.
NATO exists and operates on the basis of mutual interest and even after a decade of vitriol and their mutually exclusive ideologies, Hitler and Stalin still concluded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Petraeus is concerned that political rhetoric will inhibit our ability to root out entrenched terrorist, like in Libya, which would not have become entrenched with terrorists except for the foreign policy malpractice of the Obama Administration and CIA Director Petraeus, arguably compounding “the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.”
The Islamic State, ISIS, has made no secret of its intention to infiltrate Europe and the United States through “refugee” migration or other means for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts.
In his Congressional testimony, FBI Director James Comey admitted that there is no way to screen the tens of thousands of Muslim refugees the Obama administration plans to accept into the US.
Yet Petraeus considers any effort to halt uncontrolled Muslim immigration as “blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion,” “demonizing a religious faith” or “toying with anti-Muslim bigotry.”
Petraeus employs all the familiar false propositions made popular by Democrat Party operatives, the liberal media, and, more recently, by the Republican establishment as a not-so-well-disguised repudiation of potential courses of action outlined by Donald Trump.
It reads less like a valuable contribution to the foreign policy literature than a left-wing academic polemic or an audition for a cabinet position in the Administration of Hillary Clinton.
Petraeus equates prudent self-defense measures to hate-speech and considers potential ISIS infiltration an acceptable risk in order for “moderate” Muslims to feel good about themselves.
And just exactly who are these “moderate” Muslims Petraeus wishes to appease?
Is it the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood Qatar, or Sunni Islamist Turkish President Erdogan to whom, collectively, the Obama Administration has recklessly outsourced our Middle East policy?
Petraeus knows full well that it is not an issue of religion, but recognition of the potentially deadly consequences of thousands of violent migrants from a volatile region entering the US en masse.
In the end, the Petraeus argument provides little more than the tired clichés of Islamophobia, that Muslim hostility to the West is caused by verbal slights or other affronts to Islam.
No one is advocating gratuitous insults, but unwarranted appeasement or other emotionally satisfying liberal gestures are, in reality, construed by Muslim leaders as a weakness to be exploited.
In the world of realpolitik, it is preferable to be liked. It is advantageous to be respected. In the absence of those, fear will do. (For more from the author of “Petraeus’ Profoundly Silly Islamophobia Article” please click HERE)
The daughter of a Muslim ruler in the Middle East who embraced Christianity after a miraculous encounter with Jesus Christ has been imprisoned for her faith, according to a local ministry.
Evangelist Paul Siniraj, founder of Bibles For Mideast, an undercover Bible smuggling ministry that gets the Word of God into some of the most repressive Muslim countries, shared the story of 16-year-old Najima, once a devout Muslim who followed the Five Pillars of Islam, never missed the required five-times-a-day prayers, gave to the poor, and even fasted, as Islamic law requires.
However, while studying at a Western university, she noticed a small piece of paper stuck in a crease at the table at which she was sitting. It was part of a Bible tract about Jesus Christ . . .
The young woman threw the tract in the trash can, thinking that would be the end of it, but the verse kept lingering in her mind. One night, while Najima lay awake pondering the verse, a presence came into the room, filling the room with blinding light . . .
Filled with joy, the young woman told her friends and family about her newfound faith. However, her father and brothers were filled with rage and stripped her naked and bound her to a chair fixed to a metal plate with which they wanted to electrocute her. She asked them to lay a Bible in her lap. (Read more from “Daughter of Muslim Ruler Imprisoned for Doing Something Amazing” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/maxresdefault-117.jpg10801920Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-04 00:10:432016-05-04 00:10:43Daughter of Muslim Ruler Imprisoned for Doing Something Amazing
By Thomas Seibert. Calls by a top member of the ruling party of Turkey for an Islamic constitution to replace the secular basic law in place in the country, a NATO member and crucial U.S. ally, have been rejected by politicians from all stripes, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a pious Muslim. But as Erdogan is trying to avoid a debate that could harm him politically, the question remains: How should the relationship between state and religion be defined in a country with a 99 percent Muslim population?
Turkey’s current constitution, which enshrines the principle of secularism in Article 2, was drawn up under military rule in 1982. All parties in Ankara agree that a completely new text should be written to give Turkey a more modern and more democratic outlook.
Erdogan is trying to convince Turks to also change the form of government from the current parliamentary to a U.S.-style presidential one, with himself at the helm. The opposition says his real aim is absolute power without the sort of checks and balances that limit executive excesses elsewhere, amid speculation in the media that a referendum on a new constitution could be called this year. Erdogan cannot be sure that a majority of Turks would accept a presidential system in such a vote, with some polls saying support for his plan is as low as 35 percent. (Read more from “Europe’s First Islamic Constitution?” HERE)
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Labor Candidate Favorite for London Mayor After Racially Charged Campaign
By William James. Sadiq Khan of opposition Labour Party is the strong favourite to win London’s mayoral election on Thursday after a contest marked by religious tensions and accusations of racism.
Polls show Khan, the son of a bus driver, is as much as 20 percentage points ahead of rival Conservative Zac Goldsmith in the race to run one of the world’s top financial centres. If he wins, he will succeed current Conservative mayor Boris Johnson to become the first Muslim to head a major Western capital.
London’s population of 8.6 million is among the most diverse in the world and it is rare for identity politics to enter British campaigning.
But Goldsmith, with the support of Prime Minister David Cameron, has for weeks focused on Khan’s faith and past appearances alongside radical Muslim speakers, accusing him of giving “platform, oxygen and cover” to extremists.
Former human rights lawyer Khan says he has fought extremism all his life and regrets sharing a stage with speakers who held “abhorrent” views. (Read more from “Labor Candidate Favorite for London Mayor After Racially Charged Campaign” HERE)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken control of six churches in the war-torn southeastern city of Diyarbakir in his latest move to squash freedom of speech and religious movement.
The state-sanctioned seizure is just the latest in a number of worrying developments to come out of increasingly hardline Turkey, which is in advanced talks with the EU over visa-free travel for its 80 million citizens.
Included in the seizures are Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches, one of which is over 1,700 years old.
They have now effectively become state property – meaning they are run by the government – in a country with a dire human rights record where about 98 percent of the population is Muslim.
The order to seize the churches was made on March 25 by Erdogan’s council of ministers, according to the website World Watch Monitor. (Read more from “Islamist Turkey Seizes ALL Christian Churches in City” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/cross-66700_960_720-1.jpg720960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-04-22 02:35:392016-04-22 02:35:39Islamist Turkey Seizes ALL Christian Churches in City
The daughter of a Muslim ruler in the Middle East who embraced Christianity after a miraculous encounter with Jesus Christ has been imprisoned for her faith, according to a local ministry. 
By Thomas Seibert. Calls by a top member of the ruling party of Turkey for an Islamic constitution to replace the secular basic law in place in the country, a NATO member and crucial U.S. ally, have been rejected by politicians from all stripes, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a pious Muslim. But as Erdogan is trying to avoid a debate that could harm him politically, the question remains: How should the relationship between state and religion be defined in a country with a 99 percent Muslim population?
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken control of six churches in the war-torn southeastern city of Diyarbakir in his latest move to squash freedom of speech and religious movement.