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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

The DOJ Forced a New Jersey Town to Accept a Mosque, a Chinese Immigrant Family's Son Joined Hamas

By On September 30, 2020



When federal investigators showed up at the Xie family home in Basking Ridge, there was a courtesy Porsche loaner in the driveway. The pleasant New Jersey community has become the place where successful Chinese immigrants move after they’ve outgrown places like Fort Lee.

Like the earlier generation of Jewish residents, they came for the schools and suburban living. The neighbors of the Xie family on the tree-lined street are mostly Jewish and Asian upper middle class professionals employed by Fortune 500 companies and living the American dream.

The Xie home with its soaring gables, its two car garage, and the Porsche out front, signaled that they had made it. And with access to good schools, their children would outdo them.

Jonathan Xie probably never will. His guilty plea to one count of concealing attempts to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization puts an end to the case against him, and likely to the future his parents might have planned for him: a degree from an Ivy League college, a prestigious profession, and another big house like theirs in a leafy suburb.

Two years after Jonathan graduated from high school, federal investigators were going through the familiar and humiliating process of carting boxes past the loaner Porsche and the two car garage. Something had gone very wrong. Like a surprisingly diverse number of American teens, Jonathan had decided to convert to Islam, become an Islamic terrorist and kill lots of people.

Especially Jews. And possibly anyone in Trump Tower. Including President Trump.

While Islamic terrorism in America is still mostly the hobby of first and second generation immigrants from Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt, Xie was far from the first non-Muslim teen to pick up the basics of Islam and try to join a terrorist group.

But there were two unique things about the Xie case.

Jonathan came from an immigrant group with a strong sense of familial identity. When he declared that he had become a “revert” to Islam, he turned his back on his family, his culture, and his family’s Christian faith.

And then there was his choice of terrorist organization.

Teens who convert to Islam in some quiet suburb used to choose Al Qaeda, and these days pick ISIS. But Jonathan wasn’t drawn to any of the flashy globalist jihadist newcomers.

He chose Hamas. And the Muslim Brotherhood.

"As-salamu alykum. My name is Jonathan and I reverted to Islam a few weeks ago," his first letter to Hamas, a year after graduating high school, went. "I was wondering if non-Palestinians/non-Arabs would be allowed to join the Al-Qassam Brigades."

In another email, he mentioned, “As a Muslim living in the US, I would like to support the Palestinian resistance as much as possible.”

It was the sort of polite letter that Jonathan must have been taught to write when applying for internships or colleges, but he was instead applying to join the military wing of a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group known for firing rocket launchers at school buses and blowing up entire families in pizzerias.

While Xie was using the correct Islamic language, his roster of political terminology, referring to Israel as an “apartheid” state, ranting about “neo-liberalism”, and building a YouTube playlist of videos supporting Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad, both Arab Socialist Baath Party regimes, North Korea’s Communist Party, and Iran’s Shiite Houthi and Hezbollah terrorists, was strongly suggestive of a particularly radical strain of leftist politics easily available online.

Xie’s hatred for Israel and Jews vied only with his hatred for President Trump.

"Donald Trump, he should be hung from the gallows!" he ranted in one post. "I went to NYC today and passed by Trump Tower, then I started thinking about bombing it and I was imagining that the explosion would kill Trump."

While Xie's Instagram rantings could be mistaken for posturing, he tried to follow through on his plans.

"I'm joining the army," he claimed. "Not to fight for Jewish internets (sic)... but to learn how to kill."

And he actually did apply to join the military.

He boasted of donating money to Hamas, and he actually did donate to the terrorist group.

Meanwhile he was fantasizing about becoming a terrorist.

"I want to shoot the pro-israel demonstrators," he pondered in one, referencing a 4chan meme about vehicular attacks. "Maybe I should rent the truck of peace."

On a video, Xie brandished a gun and showed off a Hamas flag while denouncing "Zionism" and threatening, “I’m gonna go to the f____ pro-Israel march and I’m going to shoot everybody.”

"I should do lone wolf," he speculated elsewhere.

“Watch their blood and dead bodies litter the streets,” he fantasized in yet another message.

After all that, much of it public on social media, combined with showing an undercover FBI employee how to donate to Hamas, his guilty plea concedes the obvious. Xie did little to conceal his plans or attitudes. And while his defenders have attempted to blame mental illness, that excuse has been employed so often for Islamic terrorists that it has lost all its credibility.

But what drove a Chinese-American teen to convert to Islam and try to join Hamas?

The same year that Xie graduated from high school in Basking Ridge, likely chosen by his family because it has the 2nd and 3rd highest ranked high schools in New Jersey, the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge, with the assistance of the DOJ, won a victory allowing it to build a mosque, despite zoning issues, and collecting over $3 million in fees and damages.

The DOJ’s lawsuit was one of the closing acts of the Obama administration.

Basking Ridge, home to the country’s oldest white oak tree that George Washington once picnicked under, has been slowly trending leftward. Hillary Clinton narrowly won its home area. It’s a place where some of the NYPD and FDNY firefighters who commute to New York City live, and where the multicultural employees of multinational corporations buy homes, so that American flags and Black Lives Matter signs can alternate as you drive through the township.

Even before the DOJ’s intervention, Muslim prayers were being held in a municipal building and Islamic lessons were being taught in a public school cafateria.

Xie’s parents may have come to Basking Ridge for its schools, but Islamization had arrived first.

The Islamic Society of Basking Ridge is said to be affiliatedwith the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA is in turnrooted in the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I support the Hamas faction of the MB,” Xie had posted, referring to the Muslim Brotherhood.

What role did the growing Islamization of Basking Ridge play in a Chinese-American teen converting to Islam and plotting the murder of Americans? It’s hard to know. The same DOJ that enabled the Islamic Society’s mosque also prosecuted Xie for taking Islamic teachings literally.

The pleasant township with its excellent schools had become another American training ground for Islamic terrorists.

"I am not afraid to die," Xie stated.

On the old site of the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge were the teachings of the Koran about the "character of non-believers".

“Seize them and slay them wherever ye find them,” one verse coolly mentioned.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The Godmother of Police Defunding Tried Restorative Justice, But He Kept Raping

By On September 29, 2020
"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police," Mariame Kaba's New York Times op-ed blared.

The debate over defunding the police was underway and Kaba, the godmother of police defunding, wanted to make her position clear. Essence had called Kaba a "modern day abolitionist". Black Lives Matter Chicago traces its roots to her. Every lefty media outlet from NBC News to The Intercept had promoted her. And now Kaba was taking her message of getting rid of prisons and police, and turning over the streets to the criminals, to the Times.

But what would replace prisons and the police? That's the question that media talking heads, intrigued by this exciting new political program of not enforcing the law, were asking.

"Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison," Kaba briefly noted.

Kaba didn't bother to define what "restorative justice" meant, but sensing that the only crime that the Times' liberal readers could ideologically care about was rape, dismissed the idea that the justice system could stop rapists, and then urged more subsidized housing and food spending, as if the average mugger was looking to buy a meal or a home in the suburbs. Questions about how the needs of rapists would be met under Kaba’s redistribution program went unanswered.

Pro-crime activists like talking about restorative justice, but they don’t like defining it.




There’s a very good reason for that. Imagine you get beaten to a pulp outside a bank by three muggers. After you’re released from the hospital, the muggers, who were out all this time, are called in to a restorative justice session in which they apologize for breaking your nose in three places, and you’re told to apologize for your role in perpetuating capitalism, and then they leave.

Until they do it again.

Five years ago, Kaba had tested her theory when a leader of the Black Youth Project 100, a black nationalist group set up in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, was accused of rape.

BYP100 has been at the forefront of the pro-crime and police defunding movement.

“We do not have a criminal justice system,” BYP100 leader D’atra Jackson recently claimed. “We have a capitalist system that provides a process for deciding who gets punished.”

Malcolm London was a co-chair of BYP100, and a successful community organizer, who had been arrested for assaulting a police officer, and was then released by Chicago Democrats.

His victim, "Kyra", another Chicago activist, was working as a sexual assault educator on campus. According to Kyra, he "told me sexual violence prevention was something he was really passionate about".

And then he sexually assaulted her.

BYP100 quickly announced that it had been "made aware of a sexual assault allegation involving a BYP100 leader" and that it was launching "a transformative and restorative justice process, rooted in compassion, accountability and a belief that no one is disposable."

These terms are euphemisms for a process in which all the perpetrator really needs to do is apologize because he’s not “disposable” and he needs “compassion” for his crimes.

That’s when BYP100 brought in Mariame Kaba to lead the process.

At the end of the 15 month "restorative justice" process, everyone involved decided to make public statements to show how this alternative to prisons and police could work in the real world.

Kaba sniffed at the "uninformed takes and commentaries” about “CA and transformative justice” while stating that among the things that mattered to her was making “sure that Malcolm was supported in making personal changes”. Malcolm’s statement hailed the “engaging” bi-weekly conversations that allowed him to discuss his toxic masculinity problem and occasionally cry.

“I was already indebted to Mariame Kaba before I began this process and will forever be thankful for her commitment to community,” Malcolm concluded.

Then Malcolm was accused of rape. Again.

"After a year and a half long accountability process, Malcolm made the choice to continue raping Black women," Kyra complained in a follow-up statement last month. “The process had many goals, but the main hope was that at the very least Malcolm wouldn’t rape anyone else.”

So much for that.

"In the coming months and years after our process ended, other people came forward to share their own stories of sexual harm involving Malcolm," Kaba noted in her own statement.

Instead of warning other potential victims, Malcolm's restorative justice process was treated as a success story. And then the black nationalist activist allegedly raped a woman in 2018.

“Accountability is not only about self-reflection, apology and repair for a particular incident. It is also making sure not to repeat the same behavior. On that front, he has failed,” Kaba griped.

Two months earlier, Kaba had accused “white people” of being unable to imagine that a world without police would be less violent than one with it. “As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm,” she argued.

Malcolm’s case showed just how important caging criminals to reduce violence and harm is.

There is a reason why we lock up criminals. Especially career criminals. It’s to protect victims. When you insist, as BYP100 did, that criminals aren’t disposable, their victims then become disposable.

BYP 100 is currently running a "She Safe, We Safe" campaign to put an end to violence against "black women, girls, femmes and gender non-conforming people". It might want to start at home.

In Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene Carruthers, a key BYP100 and anti-police figure, described this process as embodying black queer feminism. The embodiment of black queer feminism is letting rapists rape black women.

Around the same time that Kaba’s op-ed calling for the elimination of the police ran in the New York Times, Carruthers was pushing police defunding and a shift to “community solutions” on PBS without caring how badly the “community accountability” process for Malcolm London had ended.

Malcolm London, the accused rapist, is still listed as a TED talk speaker, and involved with a variety of organizations. He’s also available for corporate events, birthdays, and fundraisers.

The whole point of community accountability is its lack of accountability.

The criminal justice system has countless flaws, but offers accountability. Restorative justice and the entire portfolio of euphemisms attached to it is little more than a struggle session for rapists. And when those rapists are members of oppressed groups, it’s even easier for them to play the game.

Confess to your toxic masculinity, invent a legacy of abuse, apologize, and then do it again.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is not, despite a common misunderstanding, to rehabilitate criminals. Only people can rehabilitate themselves. And they need a reason to do it. Engaging biweekly conversations on toxic masculinity for 15 months is a free therapy session for sociopaths that does nothing to prevent a serial sexual abuser from doing the same thing again.

Kaba’s process proved that some people really do need to be caged. Or everyone ends up caged.

How many people are afraid to leave the houses because of Black Lives Matter riots? How many families, mostly black, are afraid to let their children play outside because of how many children have already been shot by gang members in Democrat cities where they no longer have to fear prison?

That’s what being caged is actually like.

Public safety is a binary. You cage gang members or you cage 8-year-olds at risk of being hit by a stray bullet. You cage muggers or you cage the grandmother lying on the pavement with a bloodied head. You cage rapists or you cage the women they rape. It comes down to who matters more.

“No one should be discarded or disowned, and we had to decide to stick with both Kyra and Malcolm,” Carruthers wrote.

But you can’t choose both the rapist and his victim.

“Many people have invested countless hours and emotional labor to support Malcolm in taking full accountability. Unfortunately, he has let them down. He has also given critics of CA processes fodder which is enraging,” Kaba complained.

It’s a shame when letting a sexual predator go on doing his thing makes abolishing police look bad.

The world that Kaba would make is laid out on her site which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The site, Transform Harm, rails against what it calls Carceral Feminism

One article complains that, “our country has an ugly history of using police and prisons to stop sexual violence”, another falsely insists that, “locking people up won’t help combat sexual violence.”

A Brooklyn sociologist talks up having rapists write apology letters.

Aya Gruber, a feminist legal theorist, insists that police shouldn’t arrest domestic abusers.

“Sexual harassment and assault are pervasive in our society because extravagant wealth and absolute poverty are pervasive,” a Jacobin editor argues.

Alison Phipps, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, claims that sending Larry Nassar, who had sexually abused some 250 girls, to prison and throwing away the key embodies "political whiteness" which is the belief that "rape is perpetrated by ‘bad men’ who should be exposed. That police exist to catch these men, and courts to do justice on them."

If you think rapists are bad people who should be locked up, you’re guilty of “political whiteness”. And if you’re a black woman who wants her rapist to go to jail, you’re a white supremacist.

It’s easy for most people to dismiss these views, but they have the backing of a billionaire who finances much of the activist Left, and has planted his own DAs in major cities across America.

The world that Soros’ DAs, that the various Black Lives Matter groups, and their Democrat backers are determined to bring into being is a place where women have no rights, and where criminals enjoy the utter freedom to do anything they want to anyone, as long as they don’t use hate speech.

And it would be one long unrelenting nightmare for women.

Among all its utter horrors, the pro-crime policies of restorative justice would roll back much of modern feminism which relies on the criminal justice system to punish everyone from wife-beaters to rapists, while insisting that the solution to the abuse of women is in higher taxes and more welfare.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Arab Muslims are People of Color, Arab Christians are White

By On September 27, 2020
Maintaining its proud commitment to printing all the news that will divide Americans by race, sex, and creed, the New York Times published a list of what it claimed were the "922 of the most powerful people in America" while claiming that only 20% of them are people of color.

The term “people of color” is already ambiguous enough with white professors, grad students, and NAACP presidents claiming to be black. But the New York Times’ racial list, a thing reeking of Nuremberg and Goebbels, put the paper in charge of deciding who is a person of color by marking them with yellow. It’s a good thing no notorious racist ideology had the same idea.

(The Times had previously published a list of members of Congress who had voted against aiding Iran’s nuclear ambitions and terrorist regime by marking Jewish members in yellow.)

Like all racist Rohrsarch charts, the Times’ racial list says more about it than about America.

The Times claimed that only 112 of the 431 House of Representatives members are people of color. It lists Rep. Rashida Tlaib as a person of color, while listing Rep. Justin Amash as white.

Tlaib's parents and Amash's father came from Arab towns and neighborhoods in Israel. Amash's mother came from Syria. They both have traditional Arab names.

How is Tlaib a person of color while Amash is white?




The Amash and Tlaib clans both have a sizable presence in Israel. They’re both Arabs, but, aside from Tlaib being a militant leftist while Amash is an ex-GOP Never Trumper, the only obvious difference is that Amash’s family was Christian while Tlaib’s family is Muslim.

The New York Times’ message is that Muslims are “people of color” and Christians aren’t. It doesn’t matter if their families might have lived some 20 minutes away from each other.

Arab Christians are white while Arab Muslims are a minority group.

As Twitter observers of the New York Times racial list noted, the paper of racial record appears to invariably list Arab Christians as white, while Muslims are described as people of color.

"24 people lead the Trump administration. 3 are Asian, Black or Hispanic," the New York Times insisted. That doesn't include Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, whose grandparents came from Lebanon, and Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense, whose grandfather emigrated from Lebanon. The Times likewise lists Governor Chris Sununu, of partial Lebanese and Arab Israeli descent, as white, and certainly not a person of color.

What makes an Arab immigrant from Israel, Lebanon, or Syria, white? Christianity.

Israeli Jews, like Lyor Cohen, YouTube's Global Head of Music, also don’t qualify. The New York Times lists Cohen, the son of Israeli immigrants, as yet another white non-person of color.

It’s not just Jews or Arabs who aren’t considered minorities unless they’re Muslim.

Rep. Anna Eshoo's father was an Assyrian Christian who, in her own words, "was driven from the Middle East." The New York Times still lists her as white. Assyrians and Armenians are not people of color. The difference isn’t, as we see in Amash and Tlaib’s case, racial, it’s religious.

It doesn't matter whether you come from Syrian, Lebanon, Iraq or even Iran: if you're not a practicing Muslim, you're white.

Take the case of Farnam Jahanian, the Iranian immigrant who became the president of Carnegie Mellon. Jahanian came to America before the Islamic Revolution and enrolled in a Catholic school. The New York Times however decided that Jahanian is not a person of color.

He’s just white.

While the New York Times has a very rigid standard for being a person of color from the Middle East, it has a very loose one for being a person of color as long as they have Spanish ancestry.

Or speak Spanish.

The New York Times' attempt at defining race leads to awkward absurdities. It lists MIT President Rafael Reif, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Venezuela, as a person of color, while next to him, Michigan University President Mark Schlissel, whose family came to America, without first going through Venezuela, is listed as plain old white.

Rep. Devin Nunes is listed as a person of color because his Portugese ancestors moved to America in the 19th century. Rep. Mike Levin, whose mother is Mexican qualifies, but Senator Pat Toomey, whose mother is of Portugese ancestry, doesn’t meet the Times’ racial test.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, of the powerful Lujan family, which has dominated New Mexico politics, has her governorship treated as an accomplishment for the oppressed.

"Of the people in charge of the 25 highest-valued fashion companies, 3 are Asian or Hispanic," the Times huffs.

2 of the 3 are Pablo Isla, a successful Spanish businessman who runs a huge Spanish company, and Tadashi Yanai, who runs a huge Japanese company. Is celebrating the accomplishments of Spanish and Japanese tycoons in their own countries supposed to represent some sort of resistance to discrimination and racial inequity in America?

Why is a Spanish businessman listed as evidence of racial progress while Greek businessmen, including Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, who was born to an electrician in Phoenix, are just white guys whose success demonstrates that America is a racist nation defined by its color lines?

And that cuts to the absurdity of defining someone whose family came from Spain as a person of color, while those immigrants whose families came from Italy and Greece are white guys. Why are Portugese and Basque immigrants people of color, and Greeks and Italians aren’t?

But if the New York Times appears to be vague on what makes someone a person of color if they speak Spanish, it’s quite firm on what it takes to be legitimately from the Middle East.

It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has adopted the same idea as ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Mohammed, that non-Muslims don’t have any place in the Middle East.

The Left barely polices the boundaries of Latino or Indian identity. Even black identity is so loosely policed that white leftists have been able to get away with pretending to be black. But when it comes to the Middle East, it recognizes only one group of people as legitimate.

Its conquerors.

Christians, Jews, and non-practicing Muslims need not apply. When it comes to other groups, the categories are drawn around race, ethnicity, and even immigration status. But in the Middle East, it doesn’t matter if your parents or grandparents emigrated from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, or Syria. Their ethnic ancestry doesn’t matter either. Only one thing matters: religion. Islam.

This pernicious bigotry was used to cut off immigration for Christian refugees during the Obama administration while welcoming in Muslim migrants, a perverse reversal of oppression in a region whose Christian population is vanishing under the fire and fury of Muslim persecution.

The New York Times’ racial list is revealing when it comes to the prejudices and agendas of the allies of the Islamist movements and their organizations ethnically cleansing Christians.

The Left’s twisted ideas about race lead it to present the region’s persecuted Christian, Jewish, and non-Muslim minorities as white oppressors, while its Muslim supremacist majority are the oppressed people of color who need to be liberated from the oppression of their victims.

This isn’t just twisted. It’s an ideological argument for genocide.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Black Mayors and Police Chiefs are Being Accused of White Supremacy

By On September 24, 2020



“I would have so much more respect for the Bail Fund if they had bailed him out and then let him stay in one of their homes,” Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins blasted the Massachusetts Bail Fund.

A statement from a DA blasting the MBF for freeing a rapist wouldn't usually be extraordinary, except that Rollins, whose campaign was backed by George Soros, was supposed to be different. Not only had Rollins run on a pro-crime platform promising not to prosecute shoplifting, breaking and entering, and resisting arrest, but she had reacted to the Black Lives Matter riots with a hysterical rant about her rage and the white community.

Rollins had dismissed the damage from Black Lives Matter riots because it "could be fixed".

And then the Massachusetts Bail Fund freed Shawn McClinton, a convicted sex offender, who had been accused of raping a woman a few weeks after he was let go, leading Rollins to snap.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund, whose motto is “Free them all”, really meant it.

The problem that Rachael Rollins, the first black DA of Suffolk County, a pro-crime black nationalist activist, ran into is a familiar one for a new generation of leftist politicians, many from an identity politics slate, who learned the hard way that they will always be out-radicaled.

It’s no longer enough to just support riots and property crimes, you have to support rapists too.

The Black Lives Matter wave destroyed the credibility and leadership of a new wave of identity politics Democrats who had seemed exciting until they were actually tested and failed miserably.

A few years ago, Jenny Durkan was being hailed as the first lesbian mayor of Seattle. Then she was besieged by a Black Lives Matter mob, and, after hailing CHOP as a new Summer of Love, had no choice but to shut it down. Carmen Best, Seattle’s first black police chief, was forced to resign after facing police defunding budget cuts that decimated her department.

Chief Danielle Outlaw, formerly Portland's first black police commissioner, who got away from the city's perpetual riots to become Philadelphia's first black female commissioner, discovered that there's no escaping the violence. Many of the cities at the center of the violence have tried appointing black police leaders and electing black DAs only to realize that doesn’t appease.

“The fact that I, as a very obvious African American female police chief, have been accused by those within that group or those who support that group, as being a supporter and protector of those who are believed to be white supremacists—if that's even the case—is ridiculous. Right?” Chief Outlaw had wondered back in Portland.

Chief Outlaw may have thought that she would leave that kind of craziness behind when she left Portland, but she was soon being accused of white supremacy in Philly when the police didn’t crack down on white business owners protecting their businesses from BLM rioters.

"We do not condone any acts of violence, and as an agency we don't take sides," she argued.

Lori Lightfoot’s victory was supposed to calm the radicals in Chicago who had bedeviled Rahm Emanual. The city, for the first time in its history, had a number of firsts, a black female lesbian leader, who represented everything that the identity politics slate wanted or could possibly want.

But the pandemic and the riots left her hopefully outmatched and outclassed. Like many other leftist city leaders, Mayor Lightfoot was forced to ban BLM rioters from rallying on her block.

Black Lives Matter activists were soon accusing Lightfoot of "creating problems in black and brown communities to protect white people" and having "bloodied people for their disobedience to white supremacy", by which they meant taking the minimum possible steps to stop the riots.

And so the black lesbian mayor of Chicago had officially become a white supremacist.

The speed with which the ‘firsts’ who break glass ceilings become the enemy is breathtaking.

Los Angeles DA Jackey Lacey went from being hailed as "the first woman and first African-American to serve as Los Angeles County District Attorney" to having her house besieged by Black Lives Matter racists and when her husband waved a gun to get them to leave, he, like the McCloskeys, was charged by the connivance of the Democrat machine.

Rep. Schiff, Mayor Eric Garcetti, and other Democrats quickly pulled their endorsements from Lacey. The first black female DA was now officially a racist oppressor of black people.

“A lot of the cases that people shout the loudest at me about are those cases where the man who was killed had a gun or was shooting someone or harming someone,” Lacey pointed out.

But, like the right to rape in Suffolk County, harming and shooting someone is a right in LA.

You can be the first black DA of Los Angeles, the first gay mayor of South Bend, the first lesbian mayor of Seattle, the first black female police chief of Portland, Philadelphia, or Seattle, you can even be the first black lesbian mayor of Chicago, and you still won’t be radical enough.

You can even run on a pro-crime platform backed by George Soros and it’s still not enough.

That’s because the problem isn’t racism: it’s radicalism.

If the problem really were racism, it would be solvable. But radicalism has no stopping point. As soon as a mayor, a DA, or police chief seems to fit the bill, they’re not radical enough.

Mayors, DAs, and police chiefs who try to actually do their jobs are the first to fall.

Just ask Danielle Outlaw, who was hounded out of Portland, or Carmen Best, who was forced to resign in Seattle. Checking the right identity politics boxes doesn’t matter if you’re not a radical.

But no amount of radicalism is ever enough. Just ask Rachael Rollins.

History is full of examples of revolutions where the radicals ate each other. The story of CHOP and of Portland’s over 100 days of rioting, the guillotines and people’s committees, is the familiar one of the French and Russian revolutions, of the radicals killing anyone less radical until there’s no one left except either a tyrant or a populace who is tired of the endless violence.

What the revolutionaries want is a society so unlivable that it even horrified a Soros DA.

When they say that they want to free all the criminals, they really mean it. And when they say that they want to defund the police, they mean that too. These aren’t bold slogans for anything more moderate as their defenders among the Democrats and the media have falsely insisted.

The most obvious symptom of a political movement’s descent into extremism is its inability to describe the problem. Extremism has no language for criticizing its own extremism except by warning that it’s undermining the larger cause. And that’s been the Democrat response. The riots and the crime, they keep warning, are eating into Biden’s lead in some swing states.

That’s a compelling argument for those making it and a contemptible one to those it’s made to.

Not only the Democrats, but even the Left, and even the radicals are losing control of a movement that is turning on them for not being radical enough. And no amount of identity politics can stop the crackup of a movement that has lost its mind and its brakes.




Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

The Rising Islamic Terrorist Threat in Austria Strikes a Synagogue

By On September 23, 2020

On a summer Sabbath day, Elie Rosen, President of the Jewish Community of Graz, spotted a suspicious man hanging around the synagogue. The synagogue had recently been vandalized and the man had a backpack full of rocks that he was about to start throwing at the synagogue.

After the synagogue had been vandalized a few days earlier, Rosen had warned that in the Austrian city, “we are dealing with a stronger left wing and anti-Israel antisemitism,”

Rosen's concern was understandable since some of the graffiti smeared on the wall around the synagogue read, “Free Palestine” and "Our language and our country is Palestine". A second attack by the same perpetrator on the Sabbath Eve had smashed the synagogue’s windows.

The wall that the Islamic attacker had vandalized was made out of bricks from the ruins of the original Graz synagogue that had been destroyed by the National Socialists. The synagogue, which had been rebuilt only two decades ago, serves Graz’s tiny surviving Jewish community.

Austrian Jews know better than to take such slogans lightly. One of the worst episodes of antisemitic violence after the National Socialist period had been an assault by two PLO Islamic terrorists on a synagogue where a Bar Mitzvah was taking place. The terrorists had opened fire with machine guns and thrown hand grenades into the synagogue. A woman who had rolled on a hand grenade to protect the children died. A number of other congregants were wounded.

When Rosen asked the bearded man what he was doing, the vandal attacked him with a chair leg, and fled on a mountain bike. When the police caught him, he expressed no remorse.

The Syrian Muslim refugee justified his actions by citing his religion: Islam, and Islamic law.

The Syrian refugee had come to Austria in 2013 during the height of the so-called refugee crisis by traveling through Turkey. The Islamic tyranny which had once besieged the Gates of Vienna with an army has dispatched a different kind of army against Vienna. And that army, sent by Erdogan, has often been welcomed with open arms by European countries like Austria.

When the migrant who attacked the synagogue came to Austria, he was granted asylum.

His capture didn't just solve the mystery of the attack on the synagogue, but also an attack on a church and a gay club.

There were a total of 7 attacks committed by this one single refugee.

This has become the new normal in Graz, an Austrian city the size of Pittsburgh, which has seen a surge in violence.

There had been an arson attempt at a church in July when a nameless perpetrator threw burning newspapers into the building after smashing a window with a rock.

Last year, an Iraqi migrant had started multiple fires in government buildings in Graz.

In 2015, a Muslim refugee had killed 3 people and injured 36 others when he ran his car into a crowd and then got out and began stabbing the survivors. The dead included a 7-year-old boy.

The mosques of Graz have been used to recruit ISIS terrorists. Some of the Islamic State's killers died in its wars against its enemies, but others came back and are living in Graz.

After multiple police raids and arrests that involved as many as 800 officers, part of the network of ISIS and Al Qaeda recruiters was broken up, only to be reunited in prison.

A Muslim Brotherhood prison Imam from Graz who was brought in to help deradicalize some of the prisoners, instead plotted a jailbreak by the terrorists.The Brotherhood Imam had planned to have the terrorists pray in the yard as a distraction, and then attack the guards with shivs.

The arrested Syrian refugee adds to the growing Islamic population in Austria’s prisons.

Three years ago, it was estimated that a quarter of Austria's prison population is Muslim. That’s a startling number in a country of almost 9 million with a Muslim population of around 700,000.

While Muslims make up less than 10% of Austria’s population, they’re filling up its prisons.

The situation is so bad that Austria's top prison Imam wrote a book warning that the prison system was a breeding ground for terrorists and urged putting Islamists in solitary confinement.

One of those prisoners, an Albanian Muslim from Graz, has been accused of continuing to recruit for ISIS from prison using a smuggled smartphone and his Instagram account.

The terrorist, who is already serving a 9 year prison sentence for encouraging a 12-year-old boy to plant a nail bomb in a Christmas market in Germany, allegedly had links to Abu Tejma, the Islamist preacher in Vienna, whose large family had been living on welfare, while he drove a sports car and recruited some 160 Muslims,including teenage girls, to join ISIS,

"The blonde mouse, the Austrian, should be torn apart like a bag of crisps," Tejma had bragged.

The Albanian Muslim from Graz had plotted his own attack on an American military base.

In prison, DERAD, a Confederation of European Probation project to deradicalize Jihadists, claimed that he was being successfully deradicalized, while he continued recruiting for ISIS.

All of this makes Austria in general and Graz in particular into ticking time bombs for terror.

A survey of Muslim refugees in Graz conducted by a professor of Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna found that about half of them had strongly antisemitic views.

“It was noticeable that more than half had internalized antisemitism as part of their religiosity,” Professor Aslan observed.

He also noted that a number of Graz mosques were controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Austrian authorities are trying to belatedly withdraw their asylum to the Syrian refugee who attacked the Graz Synagogue.

Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, warned that, “Muslim anti-Semitism is a serious threat”. He also pointed out that the Jewish community spends three million euros a year on security for synagogues and schools.

Antisemitic incidents in Austria doubled in the last five years, and while many of the perpetrators have National Socialist motives, the Jewish community's report noted that, "Muslim anti-Semitism is conspicuous when it comes to incidents with a high threat potential."

The Austrian government has announced that it's dispatching uniformed and undercover police officers to protect the country's handful of Jewish synagogues. But the antisemitic violence is part of a larger trend of Islamist attacks against both churches and synagogues. And against the symbols of non-Islamic values and political life.

The Syrian refugee believed his religion gave him the right to attack anything un-Islamic.

Susanne Raab, the Minister of Culture and Integration, urged a campaign to stop the overlap of "political Islam" and antisemitism. But that overlap is innate to Islam.

"The act shows that you have to take Muslim anti-Semitism seriously," Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, warned.

But truly taking it seriously would mean hitting the brakes on Islamic migration into Austria.

The attack on the Graz Synagogue is grimly symbolic. The synagogue had been destroyed in the year of the Anschluss by the country’s new National Socialist masters. It is ominously fitting for the country’s new invading theocratic Herrenvolk to once again target the synagogue.

A new Islamic fascism is rising in Austria. When the National Socialists marched into Austria, they were often met with cheering crowds of supporters. The cheering crowds who met the migrants marching into Austria are allowing a dark history to repeat itself one more time.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Monday, September 21, 2020

America Can’t Breathe

By On September 21, 2020



A Soviet citizen goes to the dentist. He lies back in the chair. The dentist tells him to open wide.

“But I’m afraid to open my mouth,” he replies.

The old joke has a new resonance in the age of lockdowns and masked pedestrians, cancel culture and self-criticism sessions when Americans are the ones fearful of opening their mouths. Fear is the common denominator. A nation has spent the year holding its breath. And waiting.

Americans used to laugh at Soviet anecdotes without really understanding them. Now Americans are too afraid to laugh because they are coming to understand them all too well.

Mobs stalk the streets of American cities loudly bellowing, “We can’t breathe!” Sometimes they shoot or stab someone who then actually can’t breathe. Or they set a building on fire and anyone breathing in the smoke quickly discovers what it’s like to really be unable to breathe.

When you actually can’t breathe, you can’t shout and you can’t tell anyone. The people who actually can’t breathe or speak are the victims of the ones shouting that they can’t breathe.

There are two reasons why people can’t open their mouths or breathe, as in the joke with the Soviet dentist, literal and figurative. In a year when mouths are being shut with masks and censorship, the literal and the figurative things that people are afraid of have come together.

2020 is one long Soviet anecdote in which the only people allowed to disregard social distancing by gathering to protest in the thousands and tens of thousands do so to complain about their oppression. It’s a mock dystopia in which corporate CEOs berate their employees about their privilege and fire anyone who won’t confess their privilege, and government officials and agencies lecture the people they rule at length about the terrible evils of systemic racism.

Speech is violence and violence is speech. Throwing firebombs is in the First Amendment, but saying All Lives Matter is literally killing people. The only people who don’t have privilege are the ones who have special privileges. Criminals have a right to be safe from the police, but people don’t have a right to be safe from criminals. Public safety is now about keeping criminals safe from the police by defunding the police so that no one except the criminals can be safe.

Everyone has to wear masks, except the government officials telling them to do it. The only people who don’t have to worry about being able to breathe are the ones mandating the masks. Democrat governors like Cuomo and Murphy who killed tens of thousands are the heroes of the pandemic, while the villains are the Republican governors whose red states have few deaths.

The Communists called the newspaper in which they printed all their lies, Pravda or Truth. Soviet anecdotes hinged on the central irony that everything was a lie, everyone knew it, and no one could say it. The joke wasn’t in what was said, but in the mutual recognition of the unsaid.

Or, “I’m afraid to open my mouth.”

We live in the world of the unsaid, of the human shadowlands where people who go around with their mouths closed and faces covered, and in that world we know what is said is meaningless.

That which can be said is, by definition, a lie, and that which can’t be said, becomes the truth.

The real news is what’s read between the lines of the lies. What people say is the opposite of the truth. At struggle sessions, academics and executives confess that they’re racist to prove that they’re not racist. The only people who can safely claim not to have privilege, have that privilege. No one at work will admit to voting for President Trump, but someone must have.

The more speech is banned, the more worthless is the speech that is still allowed.

Polls become useless when people are too afraid to tell partisan pollsters the truth. Democrats and their media demand censorship of social media to protect the integrity of democracy from the speech of the demos, and then are caught by surprise when they suddenly lose elections.

Censorship creates a culture of lies. The more restrictive the censorship, the worse the lies. In a totalitarian system, no one believes anything, and no one trusts anything that they hear. And that culture of mistrust leads to a deep rot that corrupts everything and everyone it touches.

People retreat behind masks, literal and figurative, to protect themselves against a masked system which lies to them and spies on them. And the system thinks that it’s in control because it hears its own lies repeated back to it, not realizing that it’s the one now being lied to.

The irony of the Soviet anecdote was that it was a joke that could only be told by not telling it.

To breathe, to open your mouth and fill your lungs with air, requires a sense of freedom. American tourists visiting the USSR noticed the tension, the invisible weight, the closed faces of the people they met. To the Russians, Americans seemed an open and free people. Freedom was not just a legal condition, a matter of elections and constitutions which on paper the Russians had. Being truly free meant not even being able to imagine the loss of freedom.

Now it’s Americans who walk the streets, when they dare, their faces closed off, invisible weights bowing them down, wary that anything they say might end their careers and lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been cut off from their families and thrust into a national conversation mediated by giant monopolies set up to enable the informants of cancel culture.

The perfect panopticon that the KGB could have only dreamed of is here and we’re living in it. There is no telling when someone might be watching you, taping you, provoking a confrontation that will be posted on social media, made to go viral, and lead to permanent unemployment.

Not to mention possible arrest and prosecution, or even violent assault and murder.

It’s safer for millions to put on their masks and not say things. And if there seem to be few Biden yard signs and little enthusiasm for the political program of the ruling class, that’s also unsaid.

And it is in the realms of the unsaid where the movements that really matter take place.

Everyone, from top athletes to corporate executives, knows that they have to kneel and mouth the words. And the little people holding down jobs at some Fortune 500 company that assigns Robin DeAngelo as mandatory reading know it better than anyone else. They wear their masks.

Free people breathe. Unfree people hold their breaths. They put on masks and close their mouths. They push the fear and the anger behind their eyes. They repeat the lies until the entire world around them seems made of lies that they believe and don’t believe at the same time.

A nation has put on its masks. And it’s waiting for November to find out if it can take a breath.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

3 Synagogue Arsons in 1 Month in the Most Progressive US Cities

By On September 16, 2020
After an arson attempt at The Way Christian Church church in Berkeley, the pastor and the media blamed it on a racist who was lashing out at the church's Black Lives Matter banner.

"McBride is now considering whether his decades long work challenging police brutality, registering people of faith to vote, or speaking out against white supremacy irritated the suspected arsonist, or whether they were angered by the Black Lives Matter sign hanging from the church," a press release from The Way Christian Church announced.

“As our nation continues to confront our dark history of racism, I am glad that the parishioners of The Way and Pastor Mike McBride, who have been at the forefront of social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, are safe,” Mayor Jesse Arreguín declared.”Anti-Black hate, and all forms of racism, has no place in Berkeley.”

A week later, Shameka Latoya Adams was arrested for a similar arson attempt against the Congregation Netivot Shalom synagogue on the same block. It’s unknown if Shameka had also tried to set the fire at The Way Christian Church, but the synagogue fire received far less attention. Nor did anyone suggest that trying to set fire to a synagogue might be antisemitic.

The Berkeley synagogue arson was another incident in a violent year, but not an isolated one.






In August, that same month, the Chabad Jewish Center in Portland suffered two arson attempts in 5 days. The first fire had been dismissed as an electrical issue, but afterward, the gas and power had been shut off, and the building had been boarded up with no one inside.

The second fire was deemed suspicious and led to an FBI investigation.

This was not the first time Chabad centers had been targeted. Last year, two fires were set at the Chabad Center for Jewish Life in Arlington, Massachusetts, and a third fire at the Chabad Jewish Center in Needham.

The third synagogue arson in August took place at the University of Delaware Chabad’s Center for Jewish Life. After firefighters battled the blaze for three hours, the estimated damage stood at around $200,000. The fire marshall deemed it a case of arson and launched an investigation.

Three synagogue arsons in one month are as notable as the lack of interest in the pattern.

Berkeley and Portland are notorious incubators of leftist radicalism, and the University of Delaware takes pride in being both diverse and progressive.

There’s an understandable discomfort when talking about why attacks against Jews keep happening in some of the most “progressive” parts of the country. And there’s often just as much discomfort when confronting the perpetrators of some of the attacks on synagogues.

Shameka Latoya Adams has been described as a black woman, but the booking report lists Shameka as male. In May of last year, a man was caught on video hurling molotov cocktails at Congregation Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel in Chicago. The arson attempt failed and the suspect was apparently never caught, but the police were looking for a black male.

Last March, Andrew Costas, a Satanist, and his girlfriend, had plotted attacks on 13 churches and synagogues in Maryland. Costas was caught after he firebombed a Catholic church and defaced a synagogue with Nazi swastikas as part of a ritual to prove he was the antichrist.

While white supremacists have carried out the deadliest attacks on synagogues in recent years with mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and an attack in Poway, California, the ongoing drumbeat of violence often comes from the blight of a failed society.

In March 2020, a homeless woman was arrested after starting a fire at Temple Emanuel in Pueblo, Colorado. The temple had been previously targeted in a white supremacist bomb plot in November of last year.

A homeless man had previously started a fire that destroyed the 119-year old Adas Israel Synagogue in Duluth, Minnesota, in the fall of last year. Also in the fall, a man had set fire to a backpack on the steps of the Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn, New York on Yom Kippur.

While targeted antisemitic violence is very much a reality, the collapse of law and order, the political philosophy that turned over public spaces to mentally unstable vagrants and junkies has a heavy ongoing cost. The idea that there is a firm dividing line between racist violence and social instability, between hate and dysfunction, is politically appealing to liberals, but not true.

Social collapse hurts everyone. Especially those who are vulnerable and have a lot to lose.

An unstable society is more likely to spawn violent fanatics, white and black nationalists seeking meaning and purpose in a world that no longer seems to offer them one, not to mention criminals and crazies who will follow their impulses, instincts, and the voices in their heads.

The wave of Black Lives Matter violence already resulted in multiple attacks on synagogues. But, even further out of the spotlight, the rising extremism and instability is taking its toll.

And that’s one reason why the media and liberal organizations don’t want to talk about it.

When California Jewish organizations thought that a black church had been attacked because it had flown a Black Lives Matter banner, they issued outraged statements blasting racism.

But when the nearby Congregation Netivot Shalom suffered through an arson attempt and the alleged perpetrator inconveniently proved to be a black transgender person, the JCRC and the other organizations that had rushed out statements earlier maintained an uncomfortable silence.

This double game is being played after the fires in Portland and at the University of Delaware as the federations and their local papers wait to find out who the perpetrators of the arson are.

Not all burning synagogues are created equal. Some are condemned, many are ignored.

A white supremacist planting a bomb is firmly condemned, but a black man throwing molotov cocktails at a synagogue is carefully not discussed. The rising tide of homeless violence, and its spillover into synagogue robberies and arson is not a fit subject for social justice temples.

The country’s “progressive” cities are becoming wastelands of violence. And leaders who care more about social justice and the buzzwords of the political moment can’t afford to notice it.

But meanwhile, synagogues are burning.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Black Lives Matter Led to Record Number of Mass Shootings

By On September 15, 2020



Even as gun violence breaks records in New York City, Chicago, and Philly, the Democrats don’t have much to say about the epidemic of shootings or their pet cause, gun control. While activist Democrat prosecutors like Attorney General Letitia James have neglected to deal with the violence and are instead targeting the NRA, they aren’t really talking about gun control.

Mass shootings are rarely mentioned anymore even though there are more of them than ever.

A Washington D.C. mass shooting at a cookout last month that wounded 20 people was treated as another local crime story. And there are a lot of these local crime stories as shootings rise.

New York City has blown past 1,000 shootings, of all kinds, individual and mass, Philly hit 1,300, and Chicago is approaching 3,000 shootings.

3 Democrat cities alone will soon account for some 5,000 shootings.

These are the kinds of numbers we used to see out of Iraq. Now we see them in America.

The Gun Violence Archive recently tweeted that it "had never totaled more than 60 mass shootings in a single month - it has now eclipsed that number for four straight months, and September is on pace to do the same."

From 2014 to 2019, there was an average of 348 mass shootings. 2020 is far from over, but there have been 438 mass shootings, and the Gun Violence Archive estimates it will hit 590.

In just the first 8 days of September, there were 21 mass shootings.

And these mass shootings are inescapably tied to the Black Lives Matter violence that crippled police, wrecked public safety, and led Democrats to call for an end to cops.

Every full month in which Black Lives Matter riots and rallies took place has recorded more mass shootings than the first three months of the year combined.

There were 25 mass shootings in January and 95 mass shootings in June, the first full month of Black Lives Matter riots.

There were a total of 70 mass shootings in the first three months of the year and a total of 260 mass shootings in the previous three months which were filled with BLM violence.

Beyond the violence of the riots, which have included firebombs, shootings, stabbings, and multiple assaults on police officers, random drivers, shopkeepers, and anyone in the way, the Democrat political movement led cities to pull back police or tied up officers with the riots.

Gang members got the message and ramped up looting and territorial battles.

Between 2008 and 2018, murder was the leading cause for black men between the ages of 15 to 34 with over 55,000 dead. That’s over 10 times the numbers of US casualties in Iraq.

These are not normal numbers and they’re what we don’t talk about when it comes to gun violence. Gun control activists are eager to make suburban school shootings into the face of gun violence. Gun violence doesn’t come out of suburban schools, but urban ganglands.

That’s why the Democrats aren’t talking about gun control during the worst epidemic of gun violence in years. That and the reality that gun violence is associated with their support for BLM.

Cities that had fairly low levels of crime and were at the epicenter of the riots, Portland, New York City, and Austin, have achieved staggering increases in shootings and murders.

In Portland, where there have been over 100 days of Black Lives Matter riots, shootings shot up from 299 for all of 2019 to 488 for the year so far. In the first month of BLM protests, shootings nearly doubled from 31 in 2019 to 61. In August, the shootings nearly tripled relative to 2019.

In Austin, the murder rate rose 67%. At the end of August, the city recorded 3 murders in 24 hours. A homeless woman was shot when 60 hurricane evacuees began fighting in the street and shooting each other.

"We know we have at least 23 rounds discharged last night,” Chief David McKichan mentioned at one press conference.

In New York City, shootings rose 140% since the period roughly overlapping with BLM riots. And murders rose by over 50%. Behind those numbers are 90 murder victims. They’re part of the political price that Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Democrats paid for their support for BLM.

In the first full month of Black Lives Matter rallies and riots, the number of daylight shootings in New York City more than tripled. Daylight shootings are a mark of brazen gang violence.

By August, 43 people had been shot in 48 hours, and 3 people had been killed in one day.

Democrat leaders have responded to the wave of violence by decriminalizing it and attributing it to the effects of the pandemic and to social inequities.

“Gun violence is a symptom of social ills," Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who had falsely blamed police for setting fires, insisted.

“It’s been an exhausting 100 days for our city. But may I remind everyone just how exhausting it is to live while Black in America. Let me remind folks that the civil rights movement lasted a lot longer than 100 days and make no mistake – today’s struggle against police violence and creeping fascism is the new civil rights movement,” she wrote, cheering 100 days of BLM terror.

Exhausting is one way of putting it. July was Portland's deadliest month in three decades.

The BLM riots aren’t just a struggle session or cancel culture. They’re doing a lot more than terrorizing diners or burning down stores. The BLM riots and movement are killing people.

Democrats had spent years falsely claiming that guns, rather than criminals, kill people. Now they’ve moved on to blaming gun violence on social ills that will be remedied by defunding police and shifting even more money into the same broken and corrupt welfare state.

Crime, like homelessness, will just become another fact of life, if they have their way. Every increase in crime will be met with more welfare spending and less police until every major city becomes an unlivable war zone where only the poor and the foolhardy still make their home.

Even now the cities that have gotten behind police defunding are suffering massive violence.

Not all that long ago, the Democrats ran on vowing to stop mass shootings. Now they don’t want to talk about them. And who can blame them? Few murderers want to confess their crimes.

Democrats lied about crime and the cops, and thousands of people were wounded or died.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Monday, September 14, 2020

Cuomo, De Blasio Go After Jewish Weddings, Cheer Black Lives Matter Riots

By On September 14, 2020



Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose horrifying move forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients may have killed between 6,000 and 11,000 senior citizens, has vowed to crack down.

On Jewish weddings.

“Whether it’s young people at a bar or religious people at a wedding, it’s the same thing to me. It’s ignorant, it’s disrespectful and it violates the law,” Cuomo fumed.

Religious people being ignorant, disrespectful, and violating the law by attending a wedding is awful. But when celebrities want to perform at MTV’s VMA awards, they get a special exemption from quarantine regulations because Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and Miley Cyrus gyrating on a stage is respectful, whereas the communal celebration of G-d and family life is disrespectful.

Cuomo then vowed that if Mayor de Blasio wouldn't crack down on the Jewish weddings, he would come after the Jews.

But De Blasio, who has a history of targeting the Chassidic Jews of Brooklyn, is no slouch and had blamed a rise in coronavirus cases on a Jewish wedding even before Cuomo kvetched.

"We were looking at two solid months of rallies and demonstrations and violence, not a word, not one spike? And he’s going to tell me that he’s not picking on somebody or he’s not selecting a particular group?" a Chassidic community activist had responded.

New York City’s government, which can’t manage to keep stores from being looted, is dispatching personnel for “proactive inspections of event spaces” for weddings.

“We’ve had super spreader events in New Rochelle with the Jewish community, we’ve had them in the Catholic community,” Governor Cuomo claimed. “This is an equal-opportunity situation. So we police it in every circumstance.”

Equally policing events doesn’t mean cracking down on Catholics and Jews, while allowing massive Black Lives Matter events, like the Times Square protest after Kenosha, which saw marchers crowded tightly next to each other, to protest for their violent and hateful cause.

The New York Post decided to help out De Blasio with a dubious “investigation” which claimed to have found “celebrations involving as many as around 200 people each”.

One of the people whom the Post hacks decided to harass, dismissively asked them, “You work for de Blasio?”

Later in the story, it turned out that the 200 number came from an anonymous source, while the tabloid hacks claimed to have obtained video from somebody of a wedding with 100 people. The only wedding the New York Post's intrepid Jewish wedding investigators actually personally witnessed involved "about 20 men and boys."

Shocking stuff.

Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter rally in Manhattan over Kenosha involved over 700 racists.

“In the case of New York City, if there’s any evidence, or plans of weddings that would violate the law, they should forward those complaints to the NYPD or the mayor. If the mayor is not doing any enforcement actions, then the state will,” Cuomo warned.

While Cuomo encourages concerned bigots to inform on any Jewish weddings, there’s no need to inform on any of the planned massive rallies and protests by his political allies like Sharpton.

Sharpton, a De Blasio and Cuomo ally, had announced a 100,000 racist rally in Washington D.C. with many attendees coming from New York. That’s like a thousand Chassidic weddings.

Beyond the constant Black Lives Matter protests, the teachers' union decided to hold a massive protest against having to do their jobs.

"We don't die for the NYC Dept. of Education," a sign being held up by a woman in a Black Lives Matter t-shirt read, as she marched in a crowd of public union activists protesting for the right to get paid without actually having to teach children. The crowd dragged along a guillotine and caskets which the union activists, many of them wearing the BLM slogans of the racist hate group, claimed would be their fate if they had to go back to school.

"Close the classrooms, close the doors!" the rally goers chanted while crowding together in a Brooklyn park 15 minutes from where dreaded chassidic weddings are allegedly taking place.

No word on whether Mayor De Blasio will be dispatching the “disease detectives” that he sent after a Jewish wedding to track the spread of the virus among teachers’ union members.

If that’s not enough, after Democrats invented a vast conspiracy against the Post Office, hundreds of leftist activists held rallies at post offices to save them from President Trump.

In Park Slope, De Blasio's hipster neighborhood, hundreds of activists crowded together outside a post office while holding up signs falsely claiming that Trump was coming after their mail.

But no “disease detectives” were dispatched to stalk their food co-ops, coffee shops, and bars.

It’s okay to gather in mobs in New York City for any reason, as long as it’s political.

Memes had long been spreading through the Chassidic Jewish community of the hypocrisy of a Democrat establishment that licenses mass gatherings as long as they’re for Black Lives Matter. Chassidic wedding comedy routines had even featured dancers shouting, “Black Lives Matter.”

"When we talk about a Justice Agenda, we want to fight the systemic racism, inequality and injustice in our society," Governor Cuomo claimed in a speech earlier this summer.

Mayor De Blasio announced a Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission to tackle systemic racism.

Meanwhile their administrations engage in systemic antisemitism.

“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed,” De Blasio had infamously tweeted.

That tweet was followed by a barrage of tickets that community members testified had singled out religious Jews.

Had any politician issued a warning to the “black community” and then targeted it for harassment, we would be having a national dialogue about it, instead of a media embargo.

De Blasio’s discriminatory actions led to a letter from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division warning him against employing one standard for Black Lives Matter rallies and another for religious gatherings.

But very little has changed.

In June, at the height of the BLM riots, Cuomo was photographed signing his anti-police bill, closely surrounded by Al Sharpton, and a number of activists and politicians, with no masks, and no trace of social distancing. Photos and video shows a scrum of photographers and attendees converging in a tight group to get the best shot of Cuomo and Sharpton at the event.

Nobody was enforcing regulations or masks at this indoor gathering by Governor Cuomo. And there were no lectures by the corrupt politician about his own disrespectful, ignorant behavior.

The essence of systemic racism isn’t different outcomes, a key tenet of the anti-racist movement, but different standards applied to different groups based on their identity.

Black nationalists and their allies have insisted on redefining racism as access to power. The Cuomo event and the Chassidic wedding crackdown speak volumes about racism and power.

In New York, you can riot and protest by the thousands and the hundreds, as long as it’s for the right political cause, but a wedding, religious service, or protest for the wrong cause will be treated very differently. Systemic discrimination, and in particular systemic antisemitism, is real and it’s being practiced by the Democrat politicians lecturing us about systemic racism.

It’s their system and their racism. And you don’t have to look very hard to see it.

Just go to a Black Lives Matter rally and an Orthodox Jewish wedding, and see which one Cuomo and De Blasio attend, and which one they lecture about “disrespectful” behavior.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Wednesday, September 09, 2020

Who's Really Looting America?

By On September 09, 2020


A hardcover copy of "In Defense of Looting" will run you 21 bucks at Amazon and 28 bucks at Barnes and Noble. That’s just how capitalism works for the distribution and sales of a product from one of the biggest publishing companies in the world that’s part of the Lagardère empire.

Why is the largest publishing company in France pushing what Publishers Weekly called, “a provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting” to Americans? Because it makes money.

Learn why private property is just a social construct for only 21 bucks.

"In Defense of Looting" quickly ended up a major topic of conversation on social media.

And that means Arnaud Lagardère, the head of the French empire that swallowed Little, Brown and Company, adds to his $220 million net worth and keeps the model he married, half his age, in the style she expects at his country estate. So what if a whole bunch of small businesses, many owned by immigrants and black people, get trashed and put out of business.

"In Defense of Looting" was published by Bold Type Books, a Lagardère subsidiary imprint in partnership with what used to be Nation Books. The Nation, a hard lefty magazine, is partly owned by Katrina vanden Heuvel, the daughter of an MCA heiress who was worth over $38 million when she jumped out of her apartment window.

And then there's Vicky Osterweil, the author of “In Defense of Looting”, who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell, where he tried to make his own movie, before moving to Brooklyn to live out the hipster dream of playing in a punk rock band while aspiring to become a novelist.

Two years later he was being profiled in the New York Times attending an Upper East Side party. Such are the hobbies of the worthless dilettante brats of the New Left.

The son of a professor and a producer from a wealthy suburb of Boston, Willie, his original name joined the Park Slope Food Coop, and scribbled terrible movie reviews, “capitalism is built on the bones of the witch, her magic the first threat against capitalist rationalization”, followed by equally terrible leftist screeds for The Paris Review, Jacobin and The Nation. In 2011, he was in Barcelona, taking part in protests there as training for his work on Occupy Wall Street.

Fast forward to the present, Willie had married Sophie Lewis, a British lesbian feminist who has two degrees from Oxford, had translated “Communism for Kids”, and had her own book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family”, which attacked the existence of the family. Willie, her new “wusband”, now appeared to be Vicky Osterweil.

The happy young white couple both had major books with radical Marxist premises.

Sophia was calling for the elimination of the family and Vicky was defending looting. And the upscale couple was doing it in the name of destroying capitalism.

"Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family," The Nation headlined a review of her book.

All of this made marriage a little awkward, but there was nothing that couldn’t be overcome.

A splashy Vice profile mentions that at their wedding, instead of vows, the happy couple gave speeches disavowing the institution of marriage and the biological family.

And then they headed to Boston where Willie's mother wanted a more traditional wedding.

You can disavow the institution of marriage, but you’re still going to get married. And you can write a book attacking the existence of the biological family, but when your ‘wusband’s mommy wants a traditional wedding she can invite her friends to, you drop the nonsense and go.

It’s unknown what Sophia’s parents, journalists who had given birth to her in Vienna and raised her in Switzerland and France, places that speak to her oppressed background, thought.

Sophia might be gay and Vicky might be transgender but they were a conventional enough couple living the hipster dream in a gentrified area of West Philly, and touting a gift certificate to an antique shop that they had received as a wedding present. The sort of thing you do when you’re trying to smash capitalism, and abolish the family along with private property.

Right after you get married and pick up something nice at the antique shop.

The Black Lives Matter riots and the looting trashed parts of West Philly, but it doesn't seem to have done much to disturb their idyllic world of community gardens, social justice yoga studios and punk hair salons. And even if it did, unlike their proprietors, Vicky and Sophia can move on.

The ugly truth about Marxist capitalism-smashing hipsters is that they are the least exposed to the consequences of their theories. When a third of Philly pharmacies were robbed in a coordinated campaign by gangs coming in from outside the city, it had a major impact on black senior citizens getting their prescriptions, but not on an upscale white hipster power couple.

Spending your twenties and thirties deconstructing everything is the luxury of the upper class. It’s the hobby of people who don’t really have jobs or a family depending on them for support. That’s why the deconstruction is fundamentally unserious. After writing a book calling for the abolition of the family, Vicky and Sophia got married. Vicky’s living in West Philly where the riots and the looting are going on, shopping for antiques, and writing a book in defense of looting.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness."

A generation of upscale leftists is smashing up everything while knowing that they can retreat to the pricey suburbs that spawned them, to their country estates and condos, while the chaos and destruction happen to someone else. Tom might be calling himself Thomasina and Daisy might be calling herself a lesbian, but they’re still playing games and amusing themselves at other people’s expense in the vast carelessness of theoretical reasons for destroying it all.

Willie/Vicky originally wrote an article titled “In Defense of Looting” in 2014 during the Ferguson riots filled with 1619 Project style nonsense like "American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols", while insisting that, "the idea of private property is just that: an idea."

Of course every idea is an idea. Including the sacrosanct nature of human life and liberty.

Dismissing fundamental concepts on which your existence depends as mere ideas is a privilege. Violence, disorder, and chaos can take away that privilege and show their value.

Leftists deconstruct everything until they realize how badly they need those ideas. But it takes far longer for them to be affected by the destruction than the poorer and more vulnerable people whose lives have been turned upside down for a sensational new talking point at one of Katrina vanden Heuvel’s fashionable parties.

While countless small businesses have been destroyed, Amazon’s business model is booming.

The massive corporation, where many lefties will be shopping for copies of “In Defense of Looting” doubled its quarterly profits. Amazon controls 38% of the e-commerce market and when Black Lives Matter looters burn their way through neighborhoods, more retail moves away and goes online. Small business owners decide that it’s better to be a third party seller for a massive corporation than to try and keep going during the lockdowns and race riots.

Amazon can make money from “In Defense of Looting” and from the actual looting.

The small businesses that Vicky Osterweil ridicules provide their owners with some measure of independence. The looters turn them into subjects of the same sort of massive corporate monopoly that Osterweil claims to hate, yet ultimately champions and makes his money from.

Osterweil preaches in defense of looting in the name of the black community. But the death of small businesses hits black communities hardest. Shopping online is a lot easier if you have a credit card or a checking account. Portions of the black community have neither. Wiping out street retail in urban areas not only guts neighborhoods, it turns retail into wealth privilege.

Upscale areas will still have street level retail once the Black Lives Matter riots die down. But the poorer black areas hardest hit by them won’t. The white leftists promoting looting will still have their quaint cafes, punk hair salons and social justice yoga studios that Vicky and Sophie rave about, they’ll also have local supermarkets like Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, groceries, restaurants, boutiques, coffee shops, and the rest of the hipster detritus of gentrification.

That’s because they have the money and spend the money to make street retail profitable.

When the rioting is done, there will be burned out neighborhoods ripe for real estate speculators to move in, renovate, and peddle to the wealthy white hipsters who want to live there.

Promote enough looting and you too can cash in when the market is right.

There is more than one kind of looting. There are the organized gangs smashing up Philly pharmacies and heading away in vans and trucks. There’s the Soros DA who lets crime happen. And there are the professional white activists who keep shouting Black Lives Matter while promoting the destruction of black neighborhoods to sell their books on Amazon.

While Vice lavishly promotes looting and Marxist deconstructionism as radical chic, its parent company is partly owned by Disney, a private equity firm, and Soros Fund Management.

The street looting is paralleled by an even more massive looting at the top with hipster Marxist deconstructionists as ideological foot soldiers in the trashing of America. Some of the biggest social justice corporations in the country are funding the attacks on capitalism and the country.

Meanwhile in August, Soros Fund Management raised its stake in Amazon by 102%.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Tuesday, September 08, 2020

How an Islamic Terror Sheikh Ended Up Selling Meth in Orange County

By On September 08, 2020
The end of what law enforcement had called the most imminent Islamic terrorist plot since September 11 came when Gregory Vernon Patterson left his cell phone behind at a gas station.

Patterson and his roommate, Levar Haley Washington, had joined Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, a prison Islamic terror group, and had been conducting a robbery spree to finance terror plots against the LAX airport, the National Guard, and local synagogues during the High Holy days.

The shotgun robberies by the organization, whose name meant the Association of True Islam, were going well. The gang of criminal Jihadis had pulled off eleven gas station robberies in LA and Orange County to raise funds for their terror spree until Patterson dropped his phone during a robbery at a gas station in Torrance. The phone led authorities to the South Central apartment being used by Patterson and Washington where they found Bin Laden posters and a target list.

The target list included LAX which was convenient because Patterson already worked there.

Washington and Patterson were busted while trying to rob another gas station in Fullerton.

Patterson told cops that robbing gas stations was “part of a jihad against the U.S., particularly against American oil companies who are stealing from our countries” and that he wanted to die for Allah. The gas station robberies had been meant to raise money to buy weapons and to provide training to Patterson, who had no criminal record, in how to be a terrorist.




Patterson and Hammad Riaz Samana, a Pakistani, had all attended the Jamaat-E-Masijudal mosque where Washington had recruited the black convert and the Pakistani Muslim. The two terrorists swore allegiance to Washington and the shotgun robberies of gas stations began.

Washington, a former Crip, had done time in Folsom State Prison where he found a copy of the Koran, began calling himself Abdur Rahman, and was recruited by a terror mastermind.

There were two unique things about the 2005 terror plot. As Daniel Pipes pointed out at the time, it was the first “large-scale” terror plot organized by Americans, not Muslim immigrants.

But it was also the first Islamic terror plot in America that was organized from prison.

Kevin Lamarr James, a Crips gang member, had been sent away for a decade for a robbery in 1996. A member of the Nation of Islam, James made the same journey as Malcolm X and many other black Muslims, away from the racist black nationalist UFO cult, and to mainstream Islam.

On one hand, he had gotten a tattoo of Allah and on the other, the star and crescent of Islam.

The charismaic James created Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh or JIS to spread true Islam, recruit prisoners, and set off a wave of Islamic terrorist atrocities against American targets in California.

Members were told to swear an oath of secrecy, to wage war on infidels, especially Jews. In prison, they practiced Arabic, studied Islamic theology, and trained in martial arts. Out of prison, they were told to blend into society and build the Caliphate in America through Jihad.

By the time the robberies began, a Jihadist group had been secretly operating in Folsom Prison for nearly a decade, and was about to make the leap to carrying out attacks on the outside.

One of their target dates for a terror attack was the fourth anniversary of September 11.

“This incident is the first in a series of incidents to come in a plight to defend and propagate traditional Islam in its purity,” James, who had changed his name to Ahmed Binyamin Alasiri, allegedly declared in a press release for the attacks.

“We are not extremists, radicals, or terrorists. We are only servants of Allah.”

But James hadn’t picked the best servants for his deity. When Patterson left behind his phone, the authorities followed the trail right back to Folsom Prison and JIS’ mastermind.

The four-man cell was charged with levying war against the United States.

But James was the one with the brains. While Washington, his patsy, was slapped with a twenty-two year prison sentence, his ‘Sheikh’ who had built an entire terror group in prison, denied everything and then claimed that he suffered from a really bad childhood.

"Your honor, I'm thoroughly embarrassed and appalled by my actions. I don't even recognize who I was three years ago. Never before in my life before meeting these people, did I believe in violence or targeting innocent civilians,” the terror sheikh gushed.

Judge Cormac Carney, who would later illegally declare the death penalty to be unconstitutional, called James' missive “the most powerful letter I’ve ever received.”

The naive judge was also impressed by all of James' prison college classes and his evolution and repentance, and described him as a victim from a disadvantaged background.

In the portion of James’ letter that Judge Carney read out loud in court, the terror mastermind vowed that, “My country need never fear from me again.”

That was in 2009.

He was freed in September 2019. And in August 2020, he was busted selling meth.

James, now living in Orange County and officially being called Ahmed Binyamin Alasiri, had been selling nearly pure methamphetamine for thousands of dollars.

And all of this was going on while James was on supervised release.

The FBI had called the terror plot by Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, "probably the one that operationally was closest to actually occurring".

"Americans watched so-called 'home grown' terrorists unleash multiple bombings in the city of London. Some in this country may have mistakenly believed that it could not happen here. Today we have chilling evidence that it is possible,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said.

The terror plot had been aimed at military targets, as well as a number of Los Angeles congregations, including, allegedly, the ultra-progressive B’nai David-Judea, which would have been struck by armed gunmen pushing their way inside and opening fire on Yom Kippur.

The heavy security presence at Los Angeles synagogues, which includes heavily armed guards and bulletproof vests, is part of the legacy that James and his True Islam terror group left there.

James had built up a terrorist operation in prison backed by manifestos and operational documents making him the closest counterpart to the Blind Sheikh. Instead he was given a lighter sentence because the same charismatic gang member turned preacher, who had convinced hardened criminals from rival gangs to believe in him, had turned a judge.

Selling meth may have been the alleged hobby of a newly freed criminal, or something more. Traffic in certain drugs, including methamphetamines, has been used by Islamic terrorist groups to finance their operations. It’s unknown whether this is the case here, but the FBI, after Obama, is less likely to be looking for it or to even know what to be on the lookout for.

When Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh fell afoul of the FBI in 2005, law enforcement was acquainted with the methodology, infrastructure and strategies of Islamic terrorists. During the Obama administration, a cultural revolution was waged against counterterrorism from the inside.

If James is up to anything these days, the FBI is unprepared and unready to find out.

Fifteen years later, the terror plot, once a major event, has been largely forgotten. And the same is true of most Islamic terrorist attacks except for September 11. As the country enters another September and begins a countdown to 9/11, everything afterward is being forgotten.

During the Black Lives Matter riots, a white Muslim illegal alien stabbed a New York cop, grabbed his gun, and opened fire on other officers while shouting, “Allahu Akbar”. Despite wounding three cops and claiming, “my religion made me do it,” there’s been little coverage.

In the midst of a pandemic and nationwide race riots, we should not forget that there is more than one threat vector. Islamic terrorists don’t go away just because no one is paying attention. And the same prison system that helped produce the wave of BLM violence has also incubated Islamic prison terror cells like the one that plotted to kill Americans on another September 11.

The Nation of Islam has been a feeder for both Islamic terrorism and Black Lives Matter violence. All three are deeply violent, bigoted, and possessed of a feverish hatred of America.




Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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