If the two major US candidates don’t float your boat, and Jill Stein isn’t your cup of tea, you may be looking to Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, to throw some support behind. He may have an interesting backstory and folksy demeanor, but foreign policy is not his strong suit. From Politico:
Asked what he would do about the Syrian city of Aleppo, the region at the center of that nation’s civil war and refugee crisis, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson responded by asking, “what is Aleppo?”
“What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?” MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panelist Mike Barnicle asked the former New Mexico governor during an in-studio interview Thursday morning.
“And what is Aleppo?” Johnson responded.
“You’re kidding,” a stunned Barnicle replied, to which Johnson answered that he was not.
Barnicle explained to the Libertarian candidate that Aleppo is “the epicenter of the refugee crisis” in Syria, giving Johnson enough information to finally answer the question.
One would think even a non-interventionist like Johnson would have at least been familiar with one of the key cities at the center of the Syrian Civil War that has produced the refugee crisis.
Jill Stein may have the endorsement of the Green Party here in America, but her apologies for Putin puts her at odds with Greens in Russia.
Russian activist Yevgenia Chirikova penned the following as an open letter to Stein on her Facebook page.
During the last few years, Russian authorities have continued the destruction of the rich and unique Russian environment. The Kremlin is heavily contributing to global climate change and the destruction of global biodiversity by over-using Russian natural resources and promoting unsafe nuclear energy. Corruption and anti-democratic behavior of the current Russian government has also led to negative impacts on Russia’s unique forests and natural heritage. Russian eco-activists and human rights defenders are also facing an increasingly repressive system which was constructed under Putin’s regime. The list of the victims of this system is unfortunately becoming longer and longer. Russian environmentalist Yevgeniy Vitishko spent 22 months in prison for a non-violent action. Journalist Mikhail Beketov was violently attacked in 2008, suffered serious injuries, and died in 2013. Our personal cases are also symbolic: because of our activism, and in order to protect our children, we were both forced to leave Russia and to seek political asylum in the European Union.
After your visit to Moscow and your meeting with Vladimir Putin you said that “the world deserve[s] a new commitment to collaborative dialogue between our governments to avert disastrous wars for geopolitical domination, destruction of the climate, and cascading injustices that promote violence and terrorism.” We agree with you. But how can this new “collaborative dialogue” be possible when Mr. Putin has deliberately built a system based on corruption, injustice, falsification of elections, and violation of human rights and international law? How is it possible to have a discussion with Mr. Putin and not mention, not even once, the fate of Russian political prisoners, or the attacks against Russian journalists, artists, and environmentalists? Is it fair to speak with him about “geopolitics” and not mention new Russian laws against freedom of speech, restrictions on NGOs and activists, or the shameful law that forbids “homosexual propaganda”?
By silencing Putin’s crimes you are silencing our struggle. By shaking his hand and failing to criticize his regime you are becoming his accomplice. By forgetting what international solidarity means you are insulting the Russian environmental movement.
Proud to Kill
Mr Ahmed is the man who murdered Glasgow shopkeeper and Ahmadi Muslim Asad Shah in March of this year.
His motive? Religious hatred, proudly displayed. Ahmed simply waited for the police to arrest him after killing Shah, keen to tell them why he did it.
Then he pleaded guilty, doubtless certain of reward from his Allah, with the words “no one has the right to disrespect the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad”.
As he was led from the dock on Tuesday, Ahmed raised a clenched fist and shouted in Arabic: “Praise for the Prophet Muhammad, there is only one Prophet.”
Yet Ahmed is not alone. His words were echoed in the court by supporters as he was led away. And there are many more in the world.
Hanif Qureshi – A Preacher for Murder
It seems that one of them is prominent Pakistani preacher Hanif Qureshi.
This is no surprise when one considers Qureshi’s background. He is not simply a passionate supporter of Mumtaz Qadri, another religious fanatic who murdered Pakistani politician Salman Taseer in 2011. One of Qureshi’s tirades actually inspired Qadri to commit his foul crime. It got the crowd going too:
“We know how to trigger a gun, how to shoot somebody dead and how to behead those who commit blasphemy against our beloved Prophet [Muhammad].”
The crowd shouts: “We are the protectors of the dignity of the holy Prophet. We will sacrifice our lives for the dignity of the holy Prophet.”
Allama Muhammad Qureshi says: “Let them know those who consider Sunnis are coward that Allah has honored us with the courage and power to strangulate those involved in blasphemy, to cut their tongues, and to riddle their bodies with bullets. For this, nobody can arrest us under any law.”
Allama Muhammad Qureshi leads the audience: “The death of the blasphemer?” and the audience replies: “Death, death, death”.
This is the video. It is a terrifying scene of wild fury.
Mr Qureshi visits the UK frequently. He has spoken six times since 2014 at the Jamia Islamia Ghousia mosque in Luton alone. He was last there in May. Other recent destinations include Birmingham, Blackburn, Derby, Dewsbury, Glasgow, Ilford, Leicester, London, Manchester, Oldham, Oxford, Slough, Stoke, Walsall, and Warrington.
Hanif Qureshi preaching at the Jamia mosque in Luton. The man sitting to his right is Abdul Aziz Chishti, the mosque’s senior imam.
Tanveer is Mumtaz
Turning back to Tanveer Ahmed, here is an image from one of Qureshi’s Facebook accounts featuring Mumtaz Qadri and Ahmed side by side. Both are acclaimed as heroes and Allah is beseeched to show mercy to them.
Here is another post. What an honour – Tanveer becomes Mumtaz.
There is even a “tribute” video.
It is one of the most awful and frightening videos I have seen in this field. It is nothing less than a joyous celebration of religious murder. If you want to see for yourself how bad it can get in these circles, a copy is available on Youtube.
There is more where all this came from.
Now one cannot be entirely certain that Hanif Qureshi himself wrote these posts. Perhaps they were published by enthusiastic supporters.
Yet it is a distinction which is ultimately of little importance. Religious hatred is his mission. If every one of the posts in his name on this topic was written by others, he is evidently rather good at it.
Stop This
Like Tanveer Ahmed, one Hanif Qureshi is too many on these shores. Why has this man been let into our country, again and again?
Labour MP Siobahn McDonagh has spoken up. Here she is in Parliament in late June:
Members may well be aware that Khatm-e-Nubuwwat is well known for its anti-Ahmadi views and regularly invites preachers from Pakistan to visit the UK on speaking tours to spread the message of hate. Qureshi is just one example. His words have incited violence in Pakistan and they will incite violence in this country, too. He should be banned from ever travelling to Britain. Given the context of anti-Ahmadi sentiment in the UK and growing religious violence throughout Europe, his message of hate has no place here. How on earth could he have been granted entry clearance?
Indeed, Qureshi attended a Khatm conference at the Jamia mosque in Luton just last year. Four other speakers at that conference are fellow supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, as is the mosque itself.
The normal Home Office line is that it cannot comment on individual exclusion cases. In his capacity as Minister of State for Security and Immigration, James Brokenshire did just that in his answers to Siobahn McDonagh:
As I have already stated, I am unable to comment on those who are or are not subject to exclusion orders or on individual cases, for sound legal reasons.
Exceptions can be made and have been in the past to send very clear messages, for all to see.
People are fed up with hate preachers. Very fed up. The preachers’ targets are scared. With chilling reason. If any case cries out for another exception that is “conducive to the public good”, as the bureaucratic border language goes, surely it is Hanif Qureshi.
Alec adds: Despite wishing for rewards in the hereafter, Ahmed is less keen on the 27 year minimum sentence his expansive flesh is to endure. He is appealing. Cue chorus “actually he looks more like a degenerate savage”.
Following Ahmed’s conviction, Police Scotland issued a statement:
“There is a consensus across all of our communities that there is no place in Scotland for religious or cultural intolerance which generates crimes of hatred, intimidation or violence. Religious or cultural beliefs, no matter how strongly held, do not entitle anyone to commit murder or acts of aggression.
“There are a number of ways in which members of the public can report hate crimes to the police and I would encourage them to do so.
“The response by Scotland’s communities to the murder was one of unity; I am confident that the same response will be displayed in light of today’s guilty plea.”
Following the murder, other Muslim groups remembered a prior engagement when asked to attend an Ahmadi-led multi-faith event [1]. Shah’s family now have been reported to have fled the welcoming and unifying Scottish scene fearing for their own safety.
A funeral home in Roanoke, Virginia, placed this advertisement in the Roanoke Times on September 7, 1941– three months before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II.
But even if you weren’t a German Nazi or an Italian Fascist– $75 for a funeral? At those prices, you couldn’t afford to live.
Paddy Ashdown recently caused a stir with this tweet:
His subsequent explanation for comparing Conservative Brexiters to Nazis was pretty feeble. He excused it as a metaphor and then explained that brownshirts was essentially a synonym for extremists. Calling any group ‘brownshirts’ is always a metaphor in the sense that it’s not literally true. However it’s clearly a far more charged word than ‘extremists’ (not that extremist seems the mot juste for the average Tory Brexiter) and unambiguously invokes Nazism. Insisting that he was only referring to the Brexiters in May’s cabinet, not the entire group didn’t help much either:
He should withdraw the comment rather than seek to justify it.
Unfortunately for the University of California system, anti-Semitic incidents have increased in recent years. According to a report from the AMCHA Initiative, five of the UC campuses ranked in the top 10 nationally for anti-Semitic incidents. The Aggie states:
This surge in anti-Semitism comes on the heels of the recent passage of ASUCD Senate Resolution (S.R.) #9, which passed on Jan. 29, 2015 with an 8-2-2 vote. The resolution called for the UC Board of Regents to divest from “corporations that aid in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and illegal settlements in Palestinian territories, violating both international humanitarian law and international human rights.”
This negative trend culminated last week in an anti-BDS student leader leaving UCLA due not just to harassment from activists but from the university itself. The Algemeiner noted:
Earlier this week, now former UCLA Graduate Student Association (GSA) President Milan Chatterjee announced that he was leaving the university over the “hostile and unsafe campus climate” fostered by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) groups and the UCLA administration.
Kenneth Marcus — president and general counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law who provided legal aid to Chatterjee — told The Algemeiner, “This is a very dark day for the University of California, and a bad day for America.”
He continued: “The Milan Chatterjee affair reflects the insidiousness of the anti-Israel movement’s new strategy, which is to suppress pro-Israel advocacy and intimidate not only Jewish pro-Israel students but also anyone who even remains neutral. Good, conscientious students will be driven away from student government and replaced by extremists of the sort who victimized Mr. Chatterjee.”
What did Chatterjee do to bring about the scorn of anti-Israel activists? Opposing having a diversity event on campus directly associated with BDS.
Chatterjee — who is Indian-American and a Hindu — became the focus of a four-month investigation by the UCLA Discrimination Prevention Office (DPO) for distributing GSA funds for a November 2015 diversity event based on a stipulation that the event not officially associate itself with the BDS movement and the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter.
Over the course of the investigation, BDS groups began a “deadly, malicious campaign against me,” Chatterjee told The Algemeiner. “They wrote defamatory articles in the media, circulated petitions and tried to remove me as GSA president three times. A lot of venom was spread around campus against me.”
None of this should surprise readers at Harry’s Place. The BDS movement has been using these bullying tactics to smear anyone who does not support their cause for years. What should give us pause is the capacity this movement has to manipulate bureaucratic levers in the university system to achieve its ends.
Keith Vaz, the Member of Parliament for Leicester East, has done something objectionable – morally, ethically, whatever you want to call it. And beyond personal taste, there’s the suggestion of real wrongdoing, and something resembling real moral decay hanging about his person. This particular characterisation could be made in reference to innumerable things the man has done. But his past is past; all that seems to matter right now are the contents of a tabloid tale or two.
Vaz has been accused by the Sunday Mirror of a litany of transgressions, ranging from the purely moral to the likely illegal; there is the suggestion of his procuring drugs for prostitutes and all that comes with that. I am not going to detail the fundaments of the story; you can read those, as many millions no doubt have done, in newspapers and on the internet.
What surprised me, as I read the results of the Mirror investigation, was the real inanity of the story at hand. These things are always terribly pedestrian, I suppose. But this was especially banal: people – even those in public life – have shady aspects to their characters. Still, the drug angle gives this particular piece of tabloid fare a more genuine connection to the public interest. There’s no point, therefore, in saying that it’s a non-story, or that those who reported on it should have let it slide. To do that is to misunderstand both the essentials of journalism and what the public wants to read.
That said, I was slightly amazed by my own ambivalence. To be honest, I felt rather conflicted about this whole thing.
I’ve never liked Vaz. He seems genuinely difficult to admire or even respect, and not just in a presentational way. Rather, he appears to be a person whose entire public persona is built upon the pursuit of something not immediately understandable: is it an unvarnished desire for fame, for example, which made him call Russell Brand – an inherently unserious person – to give evidence before the Home Affairs Select Committee on the fairly serious subject of drug rehabilitation?
Did his bizarre and self-regarding decision to greet Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants at the airport at the beginning of 2014 originate as an attempt to be considered noble, or was it an organic wish to appear welcoming? Was it a desire to be appreciated by his constituents which compelled Vaz to deck his office and person out in Leicester City garb when they won the Premier League last season, despite never having shown any interest in the club before?
Was all this just the hunting of publicity for its own sake, spurred on by the dictates of vanity? Or was there a deeper reason at work – something motivated by a sincere wish to do his best for the causes and people he believes in? With Vaz, that just seems rather unlikely.
But even after considering the massed events of a faintly tasteless career, this latest scandal seems, well, a bit much, really. Who cares about his sexual predilections? My day was worse for having read about them. Sexual impropriety is such a human failing, I thought; it’s not like he’s embezzled money, or done anything to compromise the safely of the realm. (There’s little point in trying a ‘who among us’ point here – especially for vulgar rhetorical purposes – but there is something to be said about how, even among public figures, we cannot expect all of them to be immune, and distinct, from the dissolute and the debauched.)
I must admit, though, that after the initial outpouring of pity, my heart hardened somewhat.
Vaz can still be ‘got’ for hypocrisy; that’s pretty clear cut. And for being duplicitous in general: that much is in evidence by any number of comments like that of Patrick Mercer, a fellow MP, who called the former ‘a crook of the first order’.
The full quote, as rendered in a report by the House of Commons Committee on Standards reads:
You’ve got some right bad boys there, you really have. … [Vaz is] a crook of the first order and you have to be careful because his name carries mixed reactions but I have never met an operator like him. … I mean it’s not always completely ethical but it’s stunning, he is an operator.
Mercer defended his comments during an investigation into his own person by relating that ‘[h]ere was a man [Vaz] who – pun – who was extremely cold, there was no warmth of character with this man. I found it impossible to form a relationship of any sort with him’.
It would be wrong to derive an entire character study from these two instances, which contains, after all, one man’s opinion. But here is another example, a dishonourable episode drawn from a trying time: the Rushdie affair – February 1989 to the present – where the novelist Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by a foreign and theocratic dictator, a leader whose name only held authority in Britain because of his ability to decree the rightful murder of a writer of fiction.
The role of Keith Vaz in this episode is particularly ignominious. First he rang up Rushdie to, in the latter’s telling, say ‘that what had happened was “appalling, absolutely appalling” and promised his “full support”.’ Then, after the weight of public opinion had been assessed and found ambiguous, Vaz reinvented himself not as a defender of the life and liberty, but rather as a vulgar rabble-rouser. ‘A few weeks later’, Rushdie writes in his memoir Joseph Anton, Vaz ‘was one of the main speakers at a demonstration against The Satanic Verses attended by over three thousand Muslims, and described that event as “one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain”.’
If there’s anything to be criticised about Vaz – and there seems to be a lot – it’s this: a remarkable moral flexibility in the face of questions of extreme importance and simplicity. He was willing to whip up murderous sentiment against a novelist for no reason, it seems, other than the possibility of improving his own image. If his political career is ended by this scandal, let us hope that the story of that betrayal is not lost amid a haze of lurid details and contrarian defences of his character.
If Jeremy Corbyn ever gets gloomy, he needs to remember that he is “sunshine” for so many people.
The notorious racist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, for example.
Last September Duke invited James Thring, a fellow antisemite, to a radio interview.
Duke flags the interview this way:
He then brought on Dr. James Thring from Britain, who talked about the new leader of the British Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn was elected over the weekend despite a massive smear campaign by Britian’s Zio-establishment over his association with anti-Zionist activist like Dr. Thring. Corbyn’s landslide victory in the leadership election can be viewed as a positive sign that understanding of the harm being done to the world by Zionism is spreading.
Duke was certainly well pleased, telling Thring in the interview:
We must keep looking for the sunshine and I do believe we are going to find the sunshine in this world. I think things are opening up. And one encouraging thing that I see, now this, let’s go into this, Dr Thring. I know that you’re a friend of Mr Corbyn and I know you respect his positions on the Middle East.
Duke then laments the “Marxist roots” in Corbyn’s circles, naturally, but overall Corbyn is good because he must be bad for the Jews:
It’s a really good kind of evolutionary thing, isn’t it, when people are beginning to recognise Zionist power and ultimately the Jewish establishment power in Britain and in the western world, isn’t it.
Thring, who has introduced himself as a “long-standing friend” of Corbyn, agrees with Duke. There is much to celebrate – the Jewish plots are failing and left and right can unite, Thring says:
We’re beginning to realise, because people like me and people like Jeremy are coming together over Zionism and the Jewish power, well, he’s not really terribly, he doesn’t mention Jewish power actually but, you know, it’s obviously behind in his mind. Because of that, I think it’s beginning to dissolve the differences that naturally exist between those people who are wealthy and those people who aren’t, which generally characterised the Conservatives over here in England and the Labour party.
And so that’s quite a useful thing because by characterising us in one or other of those camps they’ve managed to keep us fighting each other rather than them. So by dissolving those artificial divisions, I think it’s quite possible that we’ll see an opening of the eyes on who’s really behind the scenes.
I mean, I do see it already. I think it’s quite clear from people like Jeremy and some of the people he’s chosen for his cabinet, like John McDonnell and people in the Lords as well. They do know who’s really running the country and they’re itching for an opportunity to both make it open to the public and b) to do something about it.
The whole interview can be heard here. The exchange noted above starts at eight minutes in.
Thring, you may recall, is also the man who spoke at an event in Parliament hosted by Corbyn in 2014. He was introduced at the event by name and applauded by the audience.
James Thring
Don’t let them get you down, Jeremy “Sunshine” Corbyn!
It’s interesting to see what entertainment the Bristol and the West of England Momentum branch lays on to tempt supporters to its Corbyn phone bank.
There’s to be a screening of a film by George Galloway. George Galloway was of course the leader of a quite different party (until it dissolved a few weeks ago) and has been expelled from Labour.
And the topic of the film? What else but a hatchet job on Labour’s most successful Prime Minister.
It’s perhaps not surprising that among those providing the music are a band called ‘Fellow Travellers’.
Another well known Islamist to speak will be Yasir Qadhi from the notoriously hardline Al Maghrib Institute. He has expressed numerous vile views including killing gays, blasphemers, adulterers etc. He has appeared at the last dozen ISNA conventions, and is advertised as a star turn on their promo video for this upcoming event where he is doing eight talks. Incidentally one of those talks Qadhi is participating in is titled “Addressing LGBTQ Issues”.
Ramadan, Qadhi, Mogahed and Khan together are listed as the four panellists for the headline Saturday night talk “Carpe Diem: A Call to Action”. Listed beside those four as “Honorary Guests”, are Gold Star parents Ghazala and Khizr Khan, who leapt to prominence after their eloquent speech at the DNC which Donald Trump took exception to.
That the Khan family has been persuaded by ISNA to star at this event is one of the most disappointing things about it. Following their DNC speech, genuine anti-Muslim bigots from the nutjob Alex Jones conspiracy sector of the internet desperately tried to maliciously and falsely smear the Khan family with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Now they are set to appear at a convention by an organisation with well documented Muslim Brotherhood links, and do so being photographed and featured on the same poster alongside some of the most notorious Islamists around like Ramadan and Qadhi.
Surely the Khan family has been misled to appear at this convention as many of the speakers at this event directly contradict the values they stood for. Just take for example Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of CAIR-SFBA.
And of course another “featured speaker” is US fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, who as previously mentioned in this article, has been attending and speaking at these sorts of events and offering warm praise for numerous Islamist speakers for some years.
