Democrats and Jihadists: A Love Affair
The Beltway Right is a comical farce. But like the blind squirrel that occasionally finds an acorn, it is right about one thing: Liberal Democrats simply cannot be trusted on national security. That truth was no more apparent than in early April, when an A-list of Virginia Democrats were named “invited guests” on a flyer advertising the annual fundraising banquet of the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church. Perhaps you have heard of the place, which is also called the September 11 mosque because two of the hijackers who attacked America that fateful day nine years ago sought spiritual guidance within its walls. It also ministered to Army Maj. Nidal Hasan before he killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood in November.
As neoconservative national-security guru Frank Gaffney reported on March 30 at BigGovernment.com, the nawabs expected to appear at the dinner included former Gov. Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Reps. Jim Moran and Gerry Connolly; Sen. James Webb; Del. Kaye Kory; and Fairfax County supervisors Sharon Bulova and Penny Gross. You might remember Kory. As I reported in these pages in May (“Dominion Mosque,” Cultural Revolutions), Kory was one of two delegates who invited an imam from this very mosque to offer the opening prayer at Virginia’s General Assembly.
Following pressure from Gaffney and the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force, Webb and Kory elected not to participate in the event. Moran and Kaine did not attend; the other three would not comment when task-force activists asked their offices whether they broke bread at the September 11 mosque. Why Gaffney & Co. pushed these left-wing politicians to drop their support is obvious: The Democrats’ participation conveys legitimacy on a terror-connected mosque that ought to be shut down.
Muslim money flows into Democratic coffers like a Saudi gusher. Space does not permit a detailed accounting of Islam’s network in Virginia and what its members have accomplished, largely with the help of Democratic Party diversicrats such as Kaine. A few short examples, involving one politician and a few jihadists, must suffice.
The politician is Rep. Gerry Connolly. As reported in these pages last year (“Fairabia,” Vital Signs, December 2009), Connolly was the Fairfax County supervisor who became nothing less than an agent for the Saudi government. Connolly pushed through the renewal of the Saudi embassy’s lease of county property in Alexandria for the campus of the Saudi Islamic Academy. In addition, he rammed through the county’s approval of the academy’s 100,000-square-foot expansion at its second campus. Despite the academy’s use of virulently antisemitic and jihadist textbooks, and despite heavy opposition from county residents worried not only about the school’s ideology but about its effect on traffic, Connolly prevailed. Anyone who stood in his way was a “bigot.” That’s standard Democratic fare. But Connolly’s gung-ho fight for the academy, whose most illustrious graduate was convicted of trying to assassinate President George W. Bush, smelled more than a little funny.
According to Muslim Mafia, written by Paul Sperry and mosque infiltrator P. David Gaubatz, Saudi Arabia’s top p.r. firm “pumped at least $10,000 into Connolly’s local campaign.” The money “started appearing when the Saudi madrassa started attracting national headlines and continued to flow through the end of Connolly’s run for Congress” in 2008. Connolly bagged $18,758 from the Saudis. “Thanks to Connolly,” the authors conclude, “the Saudis have been allowed to maintain an incubator for jihadists in the shadow of the nation’s capital.”
That would be bad enough. But some of the contributors to the campaigns of Connolly and other Democrats have not only attracted the interest of the FBI but landed in federal prison for terrorist connections. Among them are Yaqub Mirza, Esam Omeish, Nihad Awad, Abdelhaleem Ashqar, and Abdurahman Alamoudi.
As Sperry wrote at WorldNetDaily.com, Yaqub Mirza worked, and may still work, at the SAFA Group, which the federal government has investigated for terrorist financing. DiscoverTheNetworks.org reports that the SAFA Group was connected to a Saudi sheikh’s foundation known as SAAR. In 2002, the FBI raided SAAR’s offices and found that $26 million of $54 million raised for “charity” went to the Isle of Man, a notorious tax haven and money-laundering center. Just $20 million wound up in charitable hands. The agent who led the raid said SAFA’s and SAAR’s purpose was “to route money through hidden paths to terrorists, and to defraud the United States by impeding, importing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the IRS.”
As I reported here, Esam Omeish is the physician whom Kaine kicked off a state immigration panel after videos of the doctor’s jihadist, antisemitic rants surfaced on YouTube. Omeish also put his home up to post bond for Ismail Elbarasse, the former comptroller of the Saudi Academy nabbed for taking surveillance photos of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Elbarasse was never convicted in that case, but in 1998 he spent some time in prison for refusing to testify in a terror-financing case. Yet the Democrats are so taken with Omeish that they permitted him to run in their 2008 primary for delegate from Virginia’s 35th district in the General Assembly. (He lost.)
Nihad Awad is executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. The foundation was pumping money into Hamas. “Before helping launch CAIR,” the Investigative Project on Terrorism reports, Awad
worked as public relations director for the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) in 1993 and 1994. A 2001 Immigration and Naturalization Service memo documented IAP’s support for Hamas and found that the “facts strongly suggest” that IAP was “part of Hamas’ propaganda apparatus.”
Awad can be seen in a photo with then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and in another standing next to Bush at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., a few days after the September 11 attacks.
Abdelhaleem Ashqar is a suspected Hamas leader who is serving 11 years for obstruction of justice in a case involving Hamas. Again, the case was about financial aid originating in the United States. Ashqar refused to testify before a grand jury. The Associated Press recorded his comments to the sentencing court: “The only option was to become a traitor or collaborator and that is something that I can’t do and will never do as long as I live.”
Then there’s Abdurahman Alamoudi. He was the founder of the American Muslim Council and the American Muslim Foundation. Part of a plot to kill a Saudi prince, Alamoudi pleaded guilty to three federal crimes involving terror financing via Libya, tax fraud, and lying on his citizenship application. A federal prosecutor said Alamoudi’s conviction was “a milestone in the war on terrorism.” Alamoudi had worked his way right up to the Clinton White House. According to DiscoverTheNetworks.org, “in 1995 Alamoudi helped President Clinton and the ACLU develop a presidential guideline entitled ‘Religious Expression in Public School,’ which paved the way for the abolition of Christian symbols, such as the Nativity scene, from public school grounds.” Yet he was a major backer of Hamas and Hezbollah and a million-dollar fundraiser for Al Qaeda who claimed that Muslims would one day rule America. This naturalized American must have forgotten to assimilate.
All these men appear in the Federal Election Commission’s online database as contributors not only to Moran or Connolly or both but to others obviously sympathetic to their cause, such as Rep. Cynthia McKinney. Regardless of a candidate’s sympathies, these Muslims tossed around the moolah. In 2000, Alamoudi gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and George W. Bush’s presidential effort. In 2002, he gave $2,000 to Moran. (Bush and Moran returned the money.) Mirza gave Virginia gubernatorial candidate James Gilmore $2,300 in 2007. Mirza even hit Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr with $500. Although Republicans have received some Muslim money and are to some extent compromised, Muslims clearly favor Democrats.
Indeed, the FEC records show that Muslim fanatics have thoroughly penetrated Virginia’s Democratic Party. Such was their monetary influence that real Virginians could not stop the expansion of a school that preaches hatred of Jews and employs and graduates terrorists. The party permitted a fanatical jihadist to run for the General Assembly. This penetration is eerily reminiscent of what the communists accomplished in the 1950’s, when Democrats called anyone concerned about spies a McCarthyite or witch hunter. Today, Democrats call those concerned about Islamic terrorism racists and Islamophobes.
Islam hangs like Muhammad’s scimitar over a neck of Virginia that includes Robert E. Lee’s Arlington and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Falls Church is the “Wahhabi Corridor.” The Old Dominion’s suburbs outside Washington, D.C., are “Northern Virginiastan.”
When the scimitar falls, Virginians will know whom to blame.
This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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"Islam hangs like Muhammad’s scimitar over a neck of Virginia that includes Robert E. Lee’s Arlington and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Falls Church is the “Wahhabi Corridor.” The Old Dominion’s suburbs outside Washington, D.C., are “Northern Virginiastan.”"
I had the misfortune to have to pass through the DC area, heading South recently passing through Arlington and Falls Church and some of the areas made me wonder what strange country I had just entered. Ostensibly, this was supposed to be my trip through the South although northern Virginia resembles more a cross of Dubai and Hong Kong.
If R.E. Lee in April 1865 could have glimpsed at Northern Virginia today he and the ANV would have fought to the death.
I am not a scholar of nominalism; I am not even a learned student thereof; therefore, I must yield to the correction of those who are as they might find fault with this post.
What I know of Islam, Mohammad and Allah is that Allah is a god which Mohammed embraced or perhaps created to meet the changing demands of Mohammad changing circumstance. Allah is an irrational god, capable one moment of redeeming saints and condeming demons and the next of condemning saints and redeeming demons. He is not the God in whom there is no shadow or turning, the rational God. I suppose he might be a neo-platonic god, thus, distant but irrationally meddling. In short, Allah is the god of relativism; he is what he wants to be or what one needs him to be to carry out the agenda.
If, as I have read, there is an Islamic influence on nominalism; if nominalism had a marked influence on humanism, the Reformation and the Englightenment; and if liberalism, its classical version and its currently quite radical version, has its roots in the Enlightenment, then there might be a memetic link between Islam and the radical left, since relativism is a weapon which they both use to confound, deconstruct and ultimately destroy their enemies.
I do not suggest that there exist a conspiracy between the mullahs and the agent of the left, which have possessed the corpse of the Democratic Party. I do suggest that there is an affinity, rooted if my assertions are correct, in a common history of the deep past, likely unrecognized by either party.
It would suggest, if correct, that a heresy, like a witch, cannot really be killed.
The Lukacs/Gramsci left and Islam are the two enemies of what is left of the West. Even without the historical affinity which I suggest, they, despite their differences, are making war on a common enemy: us.
Republicans and Democrats cannot be trusted with anything. National security (whatever that means) is no exception.
Jeremiah,
Thank you for speaking the obvious truth about Dems and Republicans. What's the difference between the Bush Doctrine of 2000 and the Obama Doctrine of 2010? Only the number of young Soldiers, Sailors and Marines who have died.
"It’s already being called the “Obama Doctrine” – a notion that foreign policy is a struggle of good and evil, that American exceptionalism has blunted the force of tyranny in the world, and that U.S. military can be a force for good and even harnessed to humanitarian ends.
The remarks drew immediate praise from a host of conservatives, including former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin."
@Mr. Peters
Actually, Islam had two schools of thought. (Stuff Muslims have told me)
One was led by Algazel.
The other by Averroes.
Algazel was more of a moral absolutist - a man who believed that science and rationalism could only speak of events, but never explain those human drives and inner human nature that are responsible for social realities of people.
Averroes was the relativist - a man who demanded strict skepticism and rationalism and secularism on talking of more earthly matters, and criticised the idea that general moral principles could be deduced to discuss to day-to-day matters.
Obviously, the latter was the school of thought that won and defined Islam for years to come, and in all moments of history, people like the former are always discarded aside. The exact same things were happening independently in Europe too - the power of the Catholic Church was being pushed aside by Catholic secularists and rationalists who believed that priests should only discuss strictly "theological" matters and can't generalise their ideas onto daily human life. Through these means, power and tyranny came about in Europe.
Among liberals and leftists, however, it would be hard to generalise them as being among strictly in the camp of those rationalists. They are often scattered across both sides, and some Viennese liberals did criticise the idea that one can talk of human matters in the same way as one does atoms and planets.
Yesterday morning Joe Biden telephoned the Serbian president to warn him not to over-react to what was surely to be a ruling against Serbia's interests (and against the precedent of state sovereignty) that was to be announced at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Sure enough the court later in the day announced its advisory opinion that the Albanian secession of Serbian territory in the region known as Kosovo was not in and of itself illegal.
That western politicians, and big-time Democrats like Joe Biden, support the dismemberment of traditionally Christian European states in favor of creating what are nominally Muslim-inspired gangland states like "Kosova" is the international variant of what Mr. Kirkwood describes is happening in Virginia. The two paralellel policies are seemingly working hand in glove.
I would only add that Republicans have themselves played along in this sadistic game of de-civilizing traditionally western areas of the globe and using Muslims as a tool in destablizing rivals and keeping Europe in its place. To be sure, I do recognize that much of this originated with Democrats such as Zbig Brzenski.
From Chechnya to the encouragement of Turkish EU aspirations to Kosovo to our own shores in places like Virginia, our masterclass seeks to dismantle traditional communities of the West which they seemingly despise.
The Falls Church/Baileys Crossroads mosque is bad enough, but to make matters worse an even larger "islamic cultural center" in under construction on Hilltop Ave in Merrifield -- a mere 6 miles away. I find it difficult to believe that the tithes and offerings of mohammedan 7-11 cashiers and taxi drivers can finance such ambitious undertakings. I suspect Saudi petrodollars stashed in New York banks are hard at work providing construction jobs for both Virginia good ole boys and their illegal immigrant helpers.
It reminds me of Anthony Burgess' novel "1985." Once again life imitates art.
Well I guess Virginia still has a touch of class, even as expressed in her new and foreign architecture. But for a real taste of Moslem/American culture, I don't think a guy can beat Detroit. Many Americans I have known over the years have always expressed a blend of astonishment, ignorance, (or simply a waste of practicality and time in talking to one's self or God) towards the ancient Christian practice of praying six or seven times a day. Perhaps their grandchildren will rediscover this immemorial Christian custom and religious practice from these type of folks in Detroit? http://www.balaams-ass.com/alhaj/calltoprayer.htm
PS. A teaching friend of mine recently explained to me how a student group of Catholics were not permitted to use school grounds for activities, while their Moslem counterparts were allowed to use a classroom for their evening after school "call" to prayer. The secular rubric of "expressing diversity, you see, was the real purpose which allowed this apparent inequality, whereas those Catholic kids,so far as school officials knew, might actually still believe in such hocus pocus!!
Even worse, I noticed the Muslims starting to spread out in Richmond. Wouldnt it be symbolic to have Richmond fall...again.
@9: I would like to know who those Catholic children's parents are. For a Catholic in America, sending one's children to a public school is a public scandal worthy of denunciation--and refusal of absolution. I hate the atheist establishment as much as anyone, but I have little sympathy for those who complain. You reap what you sow.
Speaking as one who does not believe in the Resurrection, why is it important to believe in the Resurrection in order to understand God?
#11 NGPM,
It was a private school silly. I have raised 9 children some home schooled, some Jesuit schools, some traditonalists schools, some in small town public school. I haven't found the B. F. Skinner method you describe where the parents put the raw product in the right environment and the result is a given. Teaching is an art like living and there is no way to escape modernity.
Many Americans are uninformed and naive about the dangers of Islam.
That includes Republicans. But it has been mainly Democrats who have paved the way for the growth of muslim encroachment in the United States and other parts of the world. Serge Trifkovic, former editor and contributor to the Chronicles, has documented that encroachment and proposed a way for Western nations to deal with that threat in his books The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.
Political correctness has prevented warnings against jihad in the main-stream media. Thus the suppression of free speech has kept most Americans ignorant of the methods of jihad.
Also citizens are not allowed to raise legitimate questions about President Obama's background and qualifications for the office. I notice that Mr. Kirkwood avoided commenting on Obama's reactions to the Fort Hood massacre and other terrorist acts being committed in the U.S. during his term in office. Also no mention of the evasive excuses offered by members of the Obama administration for favored status for jihadists, nor of a president who bows the King of Saudi Arabia.
@13: Forgive me ; I painted with a rather broad brush. For a private school that would indeed be shocking.
I do understand that there is no one size that fits all children with regard to schools. Still, in the event that it is necessary to send one's children to public schools, one cannot argue that one does not know what lies in store.
I speak from my own experience and that of my family members. I have seen precious little that would make me have a lighter conscience if I sent my children to a public school. Perhaps I am overly cautious, but that is how it is. Of course, I'm not a parent, so perhaps I'm out of place presuming to have an opinion on this matter.
NGPM. "I’m out of place presuming to have an opinion on this matter."
Not at all, my friend. I enjoy your contributions. Please keep them coming.
Neil @ 12 asked "one who does not believe in the Resurrection, why is it important to believe in the Resurrection in order to understand God?"
Christ indicated in his teaching that Moses spoke of the resurrection when he spoke at the burning bush and called the Lord,THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, THE GOD OF ISAAC, and THE GOD OF JACOB. Saying, "he is not a God of the dead but of the living: for all live unto him." This is a mysterious reference for us in these times as most all of us are nominalist or at least breath its unhealthy air. But body and soul are what the incarnation unites and sets at peace. The pagan poets, who had access to such visions, all report it was the desire of the poor souls in hades to be united to their bodies. But this is a huge issue and I hope this small reply will at least get you started on the answer to your simple and profound question. You might want to look and see the early Church Father's commentary of Luke 34 -- 47 for a start but that is only a suggestion. I am no theologian and do not pretend to understand this mystery of the resurrection completely or even remotely. But one can catch glimpses of its truth here and there --- "as through a glass darkly."
Thank you, Robert.
# 17 Robert As another non-theologian, you have nevertheless
shared the Gospel of Christ Jesus which is our work, never
being out of work. Thank you.