Lowkey EXPOSES Donald Trump

 “Donald Trump has assembled the most pro-Israel cabinet in the history of the United States, I’ve investigated his funders and it all makes sense”

"Imagine if Muslims said this stuff!" - Bassem and Mehdi on Christian and Jewish Extremists

 

Bassem Youssef is back with Mehdi to co-host the third episode of ‘We’re Not Kidding.’ They talk about the religious extremists, from the illegal settlements in the West Bank to the hallways of the U.S. Congress, who are trying to bring about the end of times - as well as a bunch of red cows that wield a lot of spiritual power. And they disagree on a few things too.

Three Kansas men convicted over mass 'slaughter' plot targeting Muslims

Three members of a Kansas militia with a hatred of Muslim immigrants have been found guilty of plotting to blow up a mosque and apartment complex that housed Somali refugees in order to “wake people up”.

A federal jury in Wichita convicted Patrick Stein, Gavin Wright and Curtis Allen on charges of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy against civil rights.

Wright was also convicted of lying to the FBI. The men, who pleaded not guilty, face up to life in prison when they are sentenced on 27 June.

Their plot developed against a backdrop of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign intensified ahead of the November 2016 election.

According to prosecutors, the group decided to detonate explosive-filled vehicles at corners of an apartment complex with many Somali residents.

Link

‘It only takes one terrorist’: the Buddhist monk who reviles Myanmar’s Muslims

Islam represents only 5% of Myanmar’s population of 54 million, but nationalists like Wirathu are pushing the idea that the faith puts Buddhism, and the very essence of Myanmar, in jeopardy. He claims the 1 million Rohingya Muslims living in precarious conditions in his country – described by human rights agencies as the most persecuted people on Earth – “don’t exist”.

“It only takes one terrorist to be amongst them,” he says. “Look at what has happened in the west. I do not want that to happen in my country. All I am doing is warning people to beware.”

Wirathu adds that if Donald Trump or Nigel Farage need some advice he will happily share his ideas. These include infiltrating the Facebook pages of Muslim groups, getting all Islamic schools to record their lessons, and government surveillance of internet activity, including emails. Wirathu claims he has his own army of individuals screening the net in Myanmar.

On the well-documented situation of the Rohingya in Rakhine state – where people have been left without access to medicines, aid, and basic human necessities such as clean water, sanitation and food – Wirathu is dismissive. The Rohingya have been mostly couped up in camps since the 2012 violence, and the silence of Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy on their plight has attracted growing criticism.

Wirathu rejects the stateless Rohingya as illegal immigrants, a view echoed by the government. He will only discuss them if the description “Bangladeshis” is used, and even then Wirashu says the situation is not as it is portrayed.

“If it is true what [outsiders say], then I would offer help but I have visited the camps on many occasions. The aid agencies are refused access because they are using the refugees to fill their own pockets. Bangladeshis are posing for the media. They are not starving. They have so much food that they are selling it on in their shops – stealing even from their own.”

On the allegations that women have been abused and raped by the military, he laughed: “Impossible. Their bodies are too disgusting.”

There have been calls outside Myanmar for Aung San Suu Kyi to return her Nobel peace prize for her failure to tackle the situation with the refugees, which has broken her own promises on human rights.

Source

We don't hit even animals the way they beat up my father: Alwar victim's son

“I am lucky to be alive. We somehow managed to escape because didn't seem to have noticed us. Otherwise who knows I too would have been dead like Pehlu Khan. How can someone beat another human being so badly that he dies and that too for cows that have been purchased legally for running dairies,” said Yunus.

“Have you seen how they have beaten these young boys? Their families couldn't even recognise them when they came home for Pehlu's funeral. Is this what your religion teaches? I am grateful that I am back with my family and cannot even imagine what Pehlu's family must be going through. Is a cow worth all this? Now I am afraid that I would never buy a cow,” he says as he tries to control the tears welling up in his eyes.

Yunus is yet to recover from the incident that occurred on Saturday wherein a group of Gau Rakhshaks attacked two vehicles and mercilessly assaulted the occupants alleging that they were illegally transporting cows. When the occupants provided them with the legal documents, they tore them up and started to beat them with sticks. All five men lost consciousness until the police came to their rescue. Three days later 55-year-old Pehlu succumbed to his injuries becoming yet another victim of cow vigilante groups that are thriving under the patronage of Hindutva outfits.

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Florida mosque arsonist shared extreme pro-Israel propaganda

The man accused of setting fire to the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce in Florida a week ago is an ardent supporter of Israel who labeled all forms of Islam as “radical.”

Joseph Michael Schreiber, a 32-year-old messianic Jew, was arrested at his home in St. Lucie, Florida, on Wednesday and charged with arson and a hate crime. Police say he confessed after his arrest.

His attack is part of a spate of anti-Muslim hate crimes since the start of the current US election season.

The mosque he set ablaze has been regularly attended by the father of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen and the crime was committed on 11 September, which marked the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The attack was also the night before the Islamic center was due to hold a community celebration for Eid al-Adha.

Full article

'We should kill them': Hindu extremists leave no room for beef eaters

Gaoshalas are common in India, run by Hindus like Mr Prasad in an attempt to protect cows from being slaughtered for meat.  “The cows are like a God to us,” he explains.

Mr Prasad walks among the cattle – patting one here, another there.  But his gentle disposition dissolves when asked about people who slaughter cattle. 

“We should kill them,” he says.  “We should kill them because there is no other way.”

And what about Christians and Muslims who eat beef?

“Killed,” he says firmly.

It’s a very radical response and not something that the vast majority of Hindus would agree with. 

However, since India’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, there have been a number of murders across the country linked to the slaughter of cows.  Cattle traders, an alleged cattle smuggler and even a man accused of storing beef in his home have all been killed.

On March 18, two Muslim cattle traders were murdered in the north-eastern state of Jharkhand, their bodies found swinging from a tree.  One of the victims was just 14-years-old. 

Full article

Israel’s hawks can't dodge blame for this day of violence

The condemnations are striking but still they ring hollow. Binyamin Netanyahu denounced the arson attack by Jewish settlers on the West Bank home of the Dawabsha family, in which Ali Saad, a baby just 18 months old, was burned to death, as an “act of terrorism in every respect”. Netanyahu was joined by Naftali Bennett, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which is close to being the political wing of the settlers’ movement. Bennett described the murder as a “horrendous act of terror”. Thedefence minister, the army, they all condemned this heinous crime.

Which is welcome, of course. It’s good that there were no ifs or buts, no attempts to excuse the inexcusable. But still it rings hollow.

Palestinian child dead in suspected Jewish extremist arson attack on home

 

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The words sound empty partly because, while this act is extreme in its cruelty, it is not a freak event. Talk to the Israeli human right groups that monitor their country’s 48-year occupation of the West Bank and they are clear that the masked men who broke into the Dawabsha family home in the early hours and set it alight committed a crime exceptional only in its consequences. “Violence by settlers against Palestinians is part of the daily routine of the occupation,” Hagai El-Ad, director of the B’tselem organisation, told me.

Indeed, El-Ad says this attack was the eighth time since 2012 that settlers have torched inhabited buildings. There have been dozens of assaults on property, too: mosques, agricultural land, businesses. “In most of these cases, they didn’t find the perpetrators, despite having the best intelligence agencies on the planet.” He is referring to the culture of impunity that has always protected the settlers.

That charge can be directed at past Israeli governments of the centre-left as well as the hawkish right: while the latter actively sponsored the settlement that followed the 1967 war, the former indulged it. But the right’s guilt runs deeper, which is why its tearful words of regret now sound so false.

Take Bennett. Put aside his repeated insistence that there will never be a Palestinian state, thereby crushing the dreams of an independent life for all those living under Israeli rule. Focus only on his conduct this week. Today’s murderous arson attack is assumed to be an act of revenge for the court-ordered dismantling on Wednesday of two buildings in the West Bank settlement of Bet El. The buildings were unfinished and empty. Israel’s supreme court ruled them illegal and ordered the army to demolish them. The settlers raged at the decision, demonstrating violently against the soldiers and police who were there to enforce it. And guess who stood on a roof at Bet El, egging the protesters on, stirring them to ever greater heights of fury? Why, it was Naftali Bennett.

 Full article.

Opposing Extremist Groups in Islam (ISIS, Kharijites,etc) - Dr. Sh. Yasir Qadhi

Today’s Top 7 Myths About Islamic State

 


 By Juan Cole

The self-styled ‘Islamic State’ Group (ISIS or ISIL), the Arabic acronym for which is Daesh, is increasingly haunting the nightmares of Western journalists and security analysts.  I keep seeing some assertions about it that strike me as exaggerated or as just incorrect.

1.  It isn’t possible to determine whether Daesh a mainstream Muslim organization, since Muslim practice varies by time and place.  I disagree.  There is a center of gravity to any religion such that observers can tell when something is deviant.  Aum Shinrikyo isn’t your run of the mill Buddhism, though it probably is on the fringes of the Buddhist tradition (it released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995).  Like Aum Shinrikyo, Daesh is a fringe cult.  There is nothing in formal Islam that would authorize summarily executing 21 Christians. The Qur’an says that Christians are closest in love to the Muslims, and that if they have faith and do good works, Christians need have no fear in the afterlife.  Christians are people of the book and allowed religious freedom by Islamic law from the earliest times.  Muslims haven’t always lived up to this ideal, but Christians were a big part of most Muslim states in the Middle East (in the early Abbasid Empire the Egyptian and Iraqi Christians were the majority).  They obviously weren’t being taken out and beheaded on a regular basis.  They did gradually largely convert to Islam, but we historians don’t find good evidence that they were coerced into it.  Because they paid an extra poll tax, Christians had economic reasons to declare themselves Muslims.

We all know that Kentucky snake handlers are a Christian cult and that snake handling isn’t typical of the Christian tradition.  Why pretend that we can’t judge when modern Muslim movements depart so far from the modern mainstream as to be a cult?

2.  Daesh fighters are pious.  Some may be.  But very large numbers are just criminals who mouth pious slogans.  The volunteers from other countries often have a gang past.  They engage in drug and other smuggling and in human trafficking and delight in mass murder.  They are criminals and sociopaths.  Lots of religious cults authorize criminality.

3.  Massive numbers of fighters have gone to join Daesh since last summer.  Actually, the numbers are quite small proportionally.  British PM David Cameron ominously warned that 400 British Muslim youth had gone off to fight in Syria.  But there are like 3.7 million Muslims in the UK now!  So .000027 percent of the community volunteered.  They are often teens, some are on the lam from petty criminal charges, and many come back disillusioned.  You could get 400 people to believe almost anything.  It isn’t a significant statistic.  Most terrorism in Europe is committed by European separatist groups– only about 3% is by Muslims.  Cameron is just trying to use such rhetoric to avoid being outflanked on his right by the nationalist UKIP.  One of the most active Daesh Twitter feeds turns out to be run by an Indian worker in a grocery chain in Bangalore who lived in his parents’ basement and professed himself unable to volunteer for Syria because of his care giving chores.  Daesh is smoke and mirrors.

4.  Ibrahim Samarra’i’s ‘caliphate’ is widely taken seriously.  No, it isn’t.  It is a laughing matter in Egypt, the largest Arab country.  There are a small band of smugglers and terrorists in Sinai who declared for Samarra’i, but that kind of person used to declare for Usama Bin Laden.  It doesn’t mean anything.  Egypt, with 83 million people, is in the throes of a reaction against political Islam, in favor of nationalism.  It has become a little dangerous to wear a beard, the typical fashion of the Muslim fundamentalist.  Likewise, Tunisia voted in a secular government.

5.  Daesh holds territory in increasing numbers of countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But outside of Syria and Iraq, Daesh is just a brand, not an organization.  A handful of Taliban have switched allegiance to Daesh or have announced that they have.  It has no more than symbolic significance in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  These converts are tiny in number.  They are not significant.  And they were already radicals of some sort.  Daesh has no command and control among them.  Indeed, the self-styled ‘caliph’, Ibrahim Samarrai, was hit by a US air strike and is bed ridden in Raqqah, Syria.  I doubt he is up to command and control. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have a new agreement to roll up the radicals, and Pakistan is aerially bombing them.

Even in Syria and Iraq, Daesh holds territory only because the states have collapsed.  I remember people would do this with al-Qaeda, saying it had branches in 64 countries.  But for the most part it was 4 guys in each of those countries.  This kind of octopus imagery is taken advantage of by Daesh to make itself seem important, but we shouldn’t fall for it.

6.  Only US ground troops can defeat Daesh and the USA must commit to a third Iraq War.  The US had 150,000 troops or so in Iraq for 8 1/2 years!  But they left the country a mess.  Why in the world would anybody assume that another round of US military occupation of Iraq would work, given the disaster that was the last one?  A whole civil war was fought between Sunnis and Shiites that displaced a million people and left 3000 civilians dead a month in 2006-2007, right under the noses of US commanders.

In fact, US air power can halt Daesh expansion into Kurdistan or Baghdad.  US air power was crucial to the Kurdish defense of Kobane in northern Syria.  It helped the Peshmerga paramilitary of Iraqi Kurdistan take back Mt. Sinjar.  It helped an Iraqi army unit take back the refinery town of Beiji.  The US ought to to have to be there at all.  But if Washington has to intervene, it can contain the threat from the air.  Politicians should just stop promising to extirpate the group.  Brands can’t be destroyed, and Daesh is just a brand for the most part.

7.  Daesh is said to have 9 million subjects.  I don’t understand where this number comes from.  They have Raqqah Province in Syria, which had 800,000 people before the civil war.  But the north of Raqqah is heavily Kurdish and some 300,000 Kurds fled from there to Turkey.  Some have now come back to Kobane.  But likely at most Daesh has 500,000 subjects there.  Their other holdings in Syria are sparsely populated.  I figure Iraq’s population at about 32 million and Sunnis there at 17%, i.e. 5.5 million or so. You have to subtract the million or more Sunnis who live in Baghdad and Samarra, which Daesh does not control.  Although most of the rest Sunni Iraq has fallen to Daesh, very large numbers of Sunnis have fled from them.  Thus, of Mosul’s 2 million, 500,000 voted with their feet last summer when Daesh came in.  Given the massive numbers of refugees from Daesh territory, and given that they don’t have Baghdad, I’d be surprised if over all they have more than about 3-4 million people living under them.  And this is all likely temporary.  Plans are being made to kick them right back out of Mosul.

Source

ADL, Defamation, & Indoctrination of Israelis (2009)

276 Enslaved Nigerian Girls: The atrocity of Boko Haram

You repulsive vomitous excuse of a man.
Human beings are not for sale.   The girls belong to their own selves, belong to their own families and communities.   You are nothing short of a thief.

This is a bastardization of Islam, of decency, of liberation, of all that is good and beautiful.

We are dealing with people’s children here.  If we were dealing with property, it would be akin to someone breaking into another person’s home, stealing their property, and then stating that they are willing to sell the stolen material.

Except that we are not dealing with property.  We are talking about human beings.

- See more at: http://omidsafi.religionnews.com/2014/05/05/276-enslaved-nigerian-girls-atrocity-boko-haram/#sthash.aNBk7UBy.dpuf

Atheism in Egypt: The challenges facing non-believers?

This is what happens when you shove self-righteous extremist/sexist crap down people's throats.

The Roots & Cure of Extremism - Abdul Hakim Murad