http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/12/27/thomas-aquinas-distrusted-islam/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

Why Thomas Aquinas Distrusted Islam

The 13th-century scholar Thomas Aquinas, regarded as one of the most eminent medieval philosophers and theologians, offered a biting critique of Islam based in large part on the questionable character and methods of its founder, Mohammed.

According to Aquinas, Islam appealed to ignorant, brutish, carnal men and spread not by the power of its arguments or divine grace but by the power of the sword.

Aquinas, a keen observer of the human condition, was familiar with the chief works of the Muslim philosophers of his day–including Avicenna, Algazel, and Averroes–and engaged them in his writings.

Since Islam was founded and spread in the seventh century, Aquinas—considered by Catholics as a saint and doctor of the Church—lived in a period closer to that of Mohammed than to our own day.

In one of his most significant works, the voluminous Summa contra gentiles, which Aquinas wrote between 1258 and 1264 AD, the scholar argued for the truth of Christianity against other belief systems, including Islam.

Aquinas contrasts the spread of Christianity with that of Islam, arguing that much of Christianity’s early success stemmed from widespread belief in the miracles of Jesus, whereas the spread of Islam was worked through the promise of sensual pleasures and the violence of the sword.

Mohammad, Aquinas wrote, “seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure.”

Such an offer, Aquinas contended, appealed to a certain type of person of limited virtue and wisdom.

“In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men,” he wrote. “As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity.”

Because of the weakness of Islam’s contentions, Aquinas argued, “no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning.” Instead, those who believed in him “were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms.”

Islam’s violent methods of propagation were especially unconvincing to Aquinas, since he found that the use of such force does not prove the truth of one’s claims, and are the means typically used by evil men.

“Mohammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms,” Aquinas wrote, “which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”

At the time Aquinas was writing, Islam was generally considered a Christian heresy, since it drew so heavily on Christian texts and beliefs. Aquinas wrote that Mohammed “perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law.”

According to the noted historian Hilaire Belloc, Islam “began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was—not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing.”

In his Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas ends his argument against Islam by offering a backhanded compliment to Mohammed, noting that he had to keep his followers ignorant in order for them to remain faithful.

It was, Aquinas wrote, “a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity.”

“It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly,” he wrote.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome

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http://pamelageller.com/2015/12/nonie-darwish-the-invalidity-of-the-moderate-muslim-concept.html/

Nonie Darwish: The Invalidity of the Moderate Muslim Concept

AFDI Geller Fellow Nonie Darwish explains the trouble with moderate Muslims:

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims are peace-loving and reject jihadist Islam. This is a common statement by many of the so-called “moderate Muslims” in my country of origin, Egypt. That statement is incorrect in many ways, and is designed to confuse Americans and save face of Muslims and their defenders.

It is hard to believe that President Obama believes what he says about Islam, because the day Osama bin Laden was killed was a day of mourning all over the Muslim world. When Obama realized that, he had bin Laden’s body buried at sea so the Muslim world could not erect a monument in Mecca for him. So why is Obama so passionate about telling us how wonderful Islam is? What does he mean by defending Islam as moderate and peaceful?

It defies logic that only 0.1% percent of Muslims are causing all this never-ending worldwide havoc, and unspeakable mayhem, torture, burning and beheading of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. If they are only 0.1% of the Muslim population, how come the brutal Islamic legal system is unable to round the jihadists up and behead them in the infamous public squares of Saudi Arabia? How come moderate Muslims, the 99.9%, are unable to explain away their passivity with jihadists while those jihadists are brutalizing, honor killing and terrorizing apostates?

How many jihadists have been declared apostates by Saudi Arabia? How many were beheaded in the Saudi or Iranian public squares? Why has the “moderate” largest Islamic university in the world, Al Azhar, never issued a fatwa of death against ISIS fighters and anyone who joins ISIS? They issue fatwas of death on apostates and women who have sex outside of marriage all the time, so how come none against those jihadists who supposedly ruined Islam’s reputation and caused the world to fear Muslims?

How come President Obama did not demand just that from Al Azhar or from Saudi Arabia, to prove to the anxious American people that the 99.9% of Muslims are on our side?

Obama claims to have the support of a coalition of moderate Muslim governments to fight ISIS. But we see no Muslim armies moving to Syria to rid the world of the 0.1% Muslim jihadists in ISIS. In fact, the real reason why Muslim leaders are not waging war on ISIS, even though they are capable of doing so, is because at least half of the Muslim army will defect and join ISIS. Those nice moderate Muslim armies do not want to violate Sharia law and destroy the newly declared Caliphate, which is at the center of Islam’s religious goals.

There is no doubt that some Leftist Western leaders, who constantly defend Islam, also do not want to go down in history as the ones who destroyed the Caliphate. The war against ISIS is obviously a defensive one, but somehow Islamic history will eventually portray it as an invasion by the West, the same way Muslims today have twisted the mission of the Crusades to portray them as an aggression, when in fact they were a reaction to Islamic terrorism at the time.

If jihadists and terrorists were only 0.1%, we would not have the worldwide Islamic terrorism of today. The number of the criminal population in most societies, Western and non-Western, is certainly more than 0.1%, and most societies, especially in the West, are perfectly capable of controlling their criminal population, and are capable in creating law and order and safety and security for their own citizens.

How come the 0.1% of radical Muslims is capable of causing millions of Muslim refugees, and how come rich Arab countries are not taking care of them?

Survey after survey keeps confirming our fears that the majority of Muslims are for killing apostates. A majority supports Sharia and believes in jihad as a main requirement and obligation for Muslims. Muslim citizens keep electing Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to power. The majority of the commandments of Islamic holy books command Muslims to kill, terrorize, humiliate and subjugate non-Muslims. Over 64% of the Quran is obsessed with non-members of the religion.

Now let us examine the so-called “moderate” Muslims in the West, who keep accusing jihadists of being un-Islamic, and insist, “not in the name of my religion,” or “they do not speak for Islam.” But what they fail to tell America is that many of the so-called Muslim reformers in America are considered apostates throughout the Muslim world.

Even the eloquent and well-intentioned Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is considered an apostate in many parts of the Muslim world and the Arab media. I once saw an Arabic-language article written about him, Walid Phares, Walid Shoebat and me. The headline of the article says in Arabic: “Four Arab Americans were accused of leading a media campaign to promote hatred of Muslims in America.” The article stated that 42 million dollars were allocated to these four Arab Americans to promote this hatred. The article said it got this information from “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of The Islamophobia Network In America” — which is a Leftist propaganda piece defaming foes of terror.

Such an article is not unusual. The Arab media is full of similar articles, so as to encourage fatwas against the four people mentioned in the article and any other critics of Islam, simply because we speak the truth about Islam and express our love for America.

I have yet to see fatwas of death against jihadists in the Arab media or from Muslim political and religious leaders. It is clear where the heart of those who call themselves moderate Muslims is. It is not against jihadists, but against those who speak against jihad.

Moderate Muslims are confused people, and have been violently and harshly trained over centuries to never think for themselves. Moderate Muslims are suffering from a pathology that allows them to believe in two opposite ideas at the same time and feel perfectly comfortable with them. In their minds, there is no contradiction at all when they say: “Islam is a religion of peace,” and they have no problem with commandments in the Quran to kill and terrorize the infidels.

The confusion in the West about moderate vs. radical Islam is not by accident, but by design, because no one wants to do anything about it; not Western leaders, and not even the 99.9% of nice Muslims.

AFDI Geller Fellow Nonie Darwish is the author “The Devil We Don’t Know” and president of “Former Muslims United,” a program of the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

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Why Demographic Trends Spell Trouble For China And Russia -- And Prosperity For US

http://www.forbes.com/sites

OracleVoice: Why Demographic Trends Spell Trouble For China And Russia -- And Prosperity For US - Forbes

Looking at population trends 20 years into the future, which countries and regions are best positioned to prosper economically?

Anyone who says he can predict what the world will look like in 2035 risks being viewed as either a “lunatic or a charlatan,” conceded the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt in his presentation on that very subject at Oracle OpenWorld 2015. But Eberstadt, one of the world’s leading political economists and demographers, brought lots of data and research to his world population outlook.

And one of Eberstadt’s assertions was immediately validated by breaking news.

He noted during his Oracle OpenWorld presentation that the demographic fundamentals of the emerging economic superpowers, particularly China, aren’t nearly as good as they’ve been hyped to be. A day later, on October 28, China announced that it would end its decades-old “one-child” policy, a tacit acknowledgement that the country’s aging population threatens its economic rise.

Source: iStockphoto

Eberstadt said he sees “tremendous demographic headwinds” in China, the world’s most populous country (1.36 billion people) and second-largest economy (GDP to top $10 trillion in 2015). The data shows that China’s working-age population will contract by about 100 million by 2035, he said. Between the late 1970s, the start of the economic revolution led by Deng Xiaoping, and 2012, China’s working-age population grew about 2% a year. Today, that population is starting to decline, as the long-term effects of China’s one-child policy kick in.

China continues to have a population explosion—of old people. The number of its citizens age 65 or older is growing 4% a year, making China the most rapidly graying population in world history, rivaled today only by Japan, Eberstadt said. But Japan established a sturdy social security system well before it got gray; China is in the opposite position. “And the other way around is so much less fun,” he said.

Meantime, China’s demographics are shifting male, the outcome of sex-selective abortions. At the start of the one-child policy in the late 1970s, Chinese women gave birth to about 103 boys for every 100 girls, Eberstadt said. The ratio is about 120:100 today, creating an enormous sub-culture of “unmarriagable,” socially alienated young men who tend to be poor, poorly educated, and “slightly frustrated”—demographics that correlate to “extreme right wing” behavior, he said.

On Rabbits And Flies

Eberstadt’s observations went well beyond China. Some of his findings and conclusions also defy conventional wisdom.

For example, he said that over the next 20 years, the world as a whole won’t have the demographic ingredients to keep the global economy humming at a “pre-2008 tempo.” The main reason: not enough educated people with the necessary skills.

He also argued that the demographic fundamentals of the US and Canada look “quite positive” through 2035—perhaps the best in the world. (More on why later.)

Before laying out his country-by-country, region-by-region demographic outlook, Eberstadt provided a snapshot of the twentieth century. The world’s population quadrupled between 1900 and 2000, increasing by 4 billion people, a growth rate and scale unprecedented in human history.

The reason? “It’s not that we were breeding like rabbits,” he said, “but we stopped dying like flies,” as healthcare advances reduced mortality rates.

Now, however, that population explosion is slowing down (populations are declining in some countries, even amid continued healthcare advances) because of lower fertility rates. About half the world is below a “replacement-level” fertility rate, and that fraction is getting larger, Eberstadt said. This trend is particularly important as it applies to working-age populations.

In the next 20 years, the working-age population, roughly defined as those between the ages of 15 and 64, will grow by about 800 million, half as fast as it grew in the previous 20 years, Eberstadt said. And almost half of that 800 million will come from the 50 or so countries of sub-Saharan Africa—the poorest, least-educated region of the world.

Shrinking Japan, Resting Europe

Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, is also its oldest. The average age is 46, among the oldest in the world, due mostly to low fertility rates (only about eight births per 1,000 people) and long life expectancies (to age 84 on average).

Traditional “Asian family values are so yesterday in Japan,” Eberstadt said, noting that there’s only a 50/50 chance for a young Japanese woman to marry and then stay married through age 50, similar to the situation in many Western countries.

Japan’s total population fell by a record amount last year, down 271,058 from the prior year to 126.2 million, and the pace of decline is expected to accelerate until 2060 and beyond. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assembled an advisory panel of cabinet members and population experts last Thursday with the goal of setting policies to stabilize the country’s population at 100 million people within 50 years, but even that goal is considered highly ambitious.

Meantime, Japan’s working-age population has been declining since the late 1990s and is on track to shrink by more than a third by 2035. That decline is a function not only of its low birthrate, but also its lack of immigration, a factor that continues to augment the working-age populations of most Western countries.

Western Europe’s population is aging rapidly as well, mostly for the same reasons as in Japan–low birthrates and long life expectancies—but immigration has propped up the workforces in many EU countries.

Still, Eberstadt worries that “all of Europe’s health explosion has been translated to vacation and retirement and then some,” alluding to policies that encourage Europeans to leave the workforce and put further strain on government coffers. “You don’t have to be a demographer or an economist to know where this is going,” he said. For an extreme example, look at Greece, though rampant corruption and tax evasion in that country have added to its fiscal mess.

Eberstadt, however, sees “tremendous opportunity” ahead in Western European countries if their aging, healthy, well-educated people decide to work and earn longer. Moving in that direction would require a “social consensus” in each country, he said, not government mandates.

Turning to Russia, Eberstadt sees “good news and bad news in terms of its demography. Only there’s no good news.”

He called Russia (population of 144 million) a “demography disaster,” especially among men, mostly for health reasons. The life expectancy for males in Russia is about 64 years, putting it among the lowest 50 countries. The two reasons cited widely: high levels of alcohol consumption and smoking. Consider that a 15-year old Russian male has a life expectancy three years shorter than his counterpart in Haiti.

Eberstadt also pointed to a “knowledge-creation catastrophe” in Russia, whose people are awarded fewer US patents than those in the state of Alabama, he noted, despite the fact that Russia has a population that’s 30 times larger. Lest you think there’s a US domestic bias there, Russia’s share of international patent applications is just two-tenths of 1%, despite its having 2% of the world population and 5% of the world’s college graduates.

While Russia “punches well below its weight” when it comes to technical innovation, Eberstadt singled out Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel for their superior innovation.

If poor health is Russia’s main demographic problem, lack of education is the main challenge for India, the world’s second-most-populous country (1.25 billion people) and seventh-largest economy (GDP of $2.3 trillion). Almost a third of India’s working-age population never went to school and are assumed to be illiterate, he said, though on a positive note that demographic should improve to almost a fifth by 2035.

How The US Stacks Up

Eberstadt sees US demographic trends as mostly positive. The US, the world’s third-most-populous country (321.4 million people) and largest economy (GDP of $18.1 trillion), is projected to have modest population and working-age population growth over the next 20 years.

And its population will age more slowly than in other OECD countries. The US still has a positive replacement-level fertility rate, augmented by continued immigration, including an influx of highly educated immigrants at a rate above the OECD average, he said.

African-Americans and non-Latino whites pull the average US life expectancy (79 years) below the average level in Western Europe (81 years), though the country’s growing Latino-American and Asian-American populations are “fantastically healthy,” Eberstadt noted. In fact, if Latino-Americans were the country’s only ethnic group, the US would be the healthiest nation on earth. “We need to figure out how Latinos are doing this, and bottle and sell it,” he said.

The demographics of the so-called NAFTA zone—US, Canada, and Mexico—compare favorably to those of the EU, Eberstadt said. Mexico gets bad press for its drug wars and political scandals, but a little known fact, he said, is that its 20-somethings have a higher level of education than their counterparts in Germany (perhaps in part because of Germany’s extensive apprenticeship trade programs).

Eberstadt sees immigration in the US and Canada as a “fantastically positive experience” for those countries, but one threatened by public backlash. He noted that immigration has always been an “explosive political issue” in the US, dating back to the German and Irish immigration waves of the middle half of the 1800s.

Get more on Oracle.com:

• Watch Oracle OpenWorld 2015 Keynotes on Demand
• Oracle CEO Mark Hurd: Vision 2025
• Oracle Cloud Solutions

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http://pamelageller.com/2015/12/cnn-san-bernardino-office-holiday-party-may-have-been-offensive-to-muslim-gunman.html/

CNN: San Bernardino Office Holiday Party ‘May Have Been Offensive’ to Muslim Gunman

I warned of this post-Garland. It would not end with a prohibition on Muhammad art. It begins there. It ends with complete submission or death. The Crescent News Network has chosen the former. They blamed me for the Garland, Texas jihad. Charlie Hebdo should not have drawn Muhammad. The concert goers in Paris were insulting Islam. “Music… is the flute of the devil.” – Osama bin Laden

MEMRI: About the Bataclan concert hall, where the majority of the attack’s victims were attending a concert by the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal, ISIS wrote that the place had been packed with hundreds of “polytheists” at a party of “fornication and debauchery.” Thanks to Allah, it said, the simultaneous attack had succeeded in shaking Paris and its streets, and killing more than “200 Crusaders.”

The choice of the Bataclan is in line with ISIS’s hatred for the West. It included an American band, a packed concert hall with intermingled sexes, women in Western dress, alcohol, and live music – all things it considers un-Islamic and forbidden.

And the Crescent News Network airs this depravity: the Christmas party might have offended this devout murderous Muslim. His co-workers had made him a party when he returned from paternity leave. He slaughtered them in the cause of allah.

CNN Guest: San Bernardino Office Holiday Party ‘May Have Been Offensive’ to Muslim Gunman
By Curtis Houck | December 3, 2015 | Newsbusters:

Just when the liberal media’s extrapolations concerning the motives of the San Bernardino gunman couldn’t grow any more jaw-dropping, an expert appearing during the 11:00 p.m. Eastern hour of CNN Tonight predicted late Wednesday that the office holiday party where the shooting occurred “may have been offensive” to the Muslim gunman. Criminologist Casey Jordan was called on by host Don Lemon and began by suggesting that the “[d]isgruntled employee” appeared to “have Arabic or Middle Eastern names, but the key is that from the beginning everything that was reported about him, going into this conference room where there was a holiday party which may have been offensive to him.”

Jordan further opined that “the bottomline is the motivation always appeared to be intrinsic not, extrinsic” and “he was prepared for this” because “it was almost like he was looking for an excuse to go get the guns, get the female getaway driver — you know, put on his fatigues and let it look like terrorism.”

She agreed with other guests in analyzing the situation as “a mash up” or “amalgamation” of “terrorism and disgruntled employee” and reaffirmed her belief that “his motive was very intrinsic,” “personal,” and “about a grudge and it looks like terrorism and he might like that, but it isn’t what it’s about.”

Overall, it’s been quite a day of rushing to conclusions on CNN. As this writer wrote earlier, CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes predicted in the 4:00 p.m. Eastern hour that it was likely carried out by “an anti-government domestic militia group” while fellow law enforcement analyst Harry Houck pointed out in the 7:00 p.m. Eastern hour that those responsible “could be some right-wing group, for all I know.”

The relevant portion of the transcript from CNN Tonight on December 2 can be found below.

CNN Tonight with Don Lemon
December 2, 2015
11:48 p.m. Eastern

CASEY JORDAN: Disgruntled employee. They can have Arabic or Middle Eastern names as well, but the key is that from the beginning everything that was reported about him, going into this conference room where there was a holiday party which may have been offensive to him. But the bottomline is the motivation always appeared to be intrinsic not, extrinsic. Still, he was prepared for this. He didn’t — you know, it was almost like he was looking for an excuse to go get the guns, get the female getaway driver — you know, put on his fatigues and let it look like terrorism. So, I’m in total agreement that terrorism and disgruntled employee can be a mash up. This can be an amalgamation of both, but I really do think his motive was very intrinsic. It was personal. It was about a grudge and it looks like terrorism and he might like that, but it isn’t what it’s about.

Stay on top of what's really happening. Follow me on Twitter here. Like me on Facebook here.

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VIdeo - Trump 100% Vindicated: CBS Reports ‘Swarm’ On Rooftops Celebrating 9/11

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/12/02/trump-100-vindicated-cbs-reports-swarms-on-roofs-celebrating-911/

Trump 100% Vindicated: CBS Reports ‘Swarm’ On Rooftops Celebrating 9/11

The DC Media has spent the last two weeks attempting to destroy Donald Trump with lies. Outright lies, and they are doing so in order to protect a 14 year-old cover up. Not only have eyewitnesses and contemporaneous reports proven Donald Trump 100% correct about Muslims celebrating 9/11,  a just-uncovered  local CBS News (WCBS-TV in New York) report completely vindicates Trump’s claim of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center.

The video below is from a September 16, 2001 news report:

—

—

Just a couple of blocks away from that Jersey City apartment the F.B.I. raided yesterday and had evidence removed, there is another apartment building, one that investigators told me, quote, was swarming with suspects — suspects who I’m told were cheering on the roof when they saw the planes slam into the Trade Center. Police were called to the building by neighbors and found eight men celebrating, six of them tenants in the building.

The F.B.I. and other terrorist task force agencies arrived, and the older investigators on the task force recalled that they had been to this building before, eight years ago, when the first World Trade Center attack led them to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, whose Jersey City mosque lies between the two buildings getting attention today. And the older investigators remember that the suspects that eventually got convicted for the first Trade Center case … lived in the building where these same eight men were celebrating the destruction that they saw from the roof. Calling this a hot address, the task force investigators ordered everyone detained.

“Swarms.”

“Swarms.”

“Swarms.”

ADDED: People are arguing falsely that the fact that only 8 suspects were apprehended contradicts the “swarm” claim. Read it again. An “investigator” told CBS about the “swarm.” The fact that a certain number were brought into custody does not change the fact that there was a “swarm.”  The obvious impression is that of the “swarm,” only eight were brought into custody. Eight people do not swarm on all those rooftops. They “gather.” Look at the video of the rooftop and picture “swarming.” 

You want to get into semantics about how many people make up a swarm?

But that’s not all.

You have to add up all of the contemporaneous news reports. You are Donald Trump. You are taking in all the news during that awful week. You are told by the media that “swarms” of Muslims in a known terrorist’s neighborhood were seen on rooftops celebrating 9/11. Just two days earlier you have read this in the New York Post:

Here in New York, it was easy to get angry listening to Egyptians, Palestinians and the Arabs of nearby Paterson, N.J., celebrate as they received word of the murderous attack in New York and Washington. But Mayor Giuliani (who has been tireless and magnificent in this crisis) rightly warned New Yorker-ers that is would be wrong to take their anger our on the city’s Arab and Muslim residents. Attacks on Arab-Americans in Paterson or elsewhere are utterly indefensible.

You hear radio news reports about Muslims celebrations.

MTV runs a news report about Muslim celebrations.

From all of those news reports, it is perfectly reasonable and nothing close to lying to put together a picture of “thousands”.

FACT: Donald Trump is now 100% vindicated.

If these celebrations did not occur, the only thing Trump did wrong was to believe the same media that is now calling him a liar — and doing so to cover up the truth about American Muslims celebrating 9/11 and their own covering up of that fact.

Numerous times I’ve suggested Trump exaggerated the “thousands” claim, and for that I apologize.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

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http://m.clarionproject.org/analysis/radical-mosques-america-there-one-near-you

Radical Mosques in America: Is There One Near You?

Clarion has identified over 80 Islamist orgs/mosques in the US, resulting in prominent media coverage on FOX News and the Daily Caller website. 

The Clarion Project has identified over 80 Islamist organizations including mosques in the United States, resulting in prominent media coverage on FOX News Channel's "Fox & Friends" and the Daily Caller website.

Watch Clarion Project's National Security Analyst, Prof. Ryan Mauro, on "Fox & Friends" discussing four of the radical mosques and the need to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization:

The four organizations discussed in the segment are: 

• Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia. Shocking video showed its imam preaching that Muslims should be first in line to pick up weapons for violent jihad and characterizing the West as an adversary. The Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is involved in prison outreach in Washington, D.C.
• Islamic Society of Boston (and its Cultural Center), which have significant Muslim Brotherhood links and extremist histories. A Muslim activist who fled Egypt to get away from the Brotherhood's radicalism told the Clarion Project how he was shocked to find its ideology at the mosque.
• Masjid At-Taqwa of New York, led by the extremely radical and influential cleric Siraj Wahhaj. In 2011, he advised Muslims to stop talking about sharia because "we're not there yet."
• North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), an organization that owns many mosques across the country. The Justice Department says it is an "entity" of the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine Committee, a sub-division secretly established to support the Hamas terrorist group.

The segment follows the Daily Caller's creation of a map of over 80 radical mosques based on Clarion's research. This is about four percent of the estimated 2,106 mosques in the U.S., the news site wrote.

In addition to those 83 sites, there are many other Islamist organizations operating in the U.S. and mosques due to be written about. You can learn about Islamist groups in your state by searching the Islamist Organizations in America section of our website that is continuously updated.

The North American Islamic Trust's (NAIT's) website says it owns mosques in 42 states and has stated that it owns the titles to over 325 properties.

Click here for a partial list of mosques owned by NAIT

In January, a prominent Muslim leader in the United Kingdom with links to the Muslim Brotherhood estimated that half of the mosques in America were founded by Brotherhood members.

Senator Ted Cruz has introduced important legislation to help get the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The House version of the bill was introduced by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and is now endorsed by five additional representatives.

We encourage readers to ask their congressmen and Senators (and presidential candidates) for their statements on this legislation and/or their general position on designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.

Please send us any written or recorded statements so we can update our website to document where our leaders stand.

Ryan Mauro is ClarionProject.org’s national security analyst, a fellow with Clarion Project and an adjunct professor of homeland security. Mauro is frequently interviewed on top-tier television and radio. Read more, contact or arrange a speaking engagement.

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New Study: Smoking Marijuana Causes Brain Damage

Think smoking pot is harmless? Well, check this out. Most pot these days is high potency so you need to be aware of what you’re really looking into.

King’s College London reports,

Smoking high potency ‘skunk-like’ cannabis can damage a crucial part of the brain responsible for communication between the two brain hemispheres, according to a new study by scientists from King’s College London and Sapienza University of Rome.

Researchers have known for some time that long-term cannabis use increases the risk of psychosis, and recent evidence suggests that alterations in brain function and structure may be responsible for this greater vulnerability. However, this new research, published today in Psychological Medicine, is the first to examine the effect of cannabis potency on brain structure.

Exploring the impact of cannabis potency is particularly important since today’s high potency ‘skunk-like’products have been shown to contain higher proportions of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than they did around a decade ago. In experimental studies THC has been shown to induce psychotic symptoms and ‘skunk-like’ products high in THC are now thought to be the most commonly used form of cannabis in the UK.

So, as long as you want to claim that smoking pot is just another lifestyle choice, an adult decision without no ramifications, remember studies like this. While you or your family/friends are getting high, you might want to show them this study. Maybe it will make them slow down, or maybe even reconsider destroying their brains for a brief period of pleasure.

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http://dailysignal.com/2015/11/24/senate-republicans-gear-up-to-block-obamas-climate-pact/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tdsfacebook

Senate GOP Plan to Use Budget Process to Block Obama's Climate Change Pact

Senate Republicans, girding for another budget battle in early December, are vowing to use the process to undercut President Barack Obama’s chances of brokering an international climate pact expected to emerge from negotiations in Paris.

The GOP lawmakers want to leverage their appropriations power to block $3 billion pledged by the Obama administration to help developing countries manage climate change.

“We want to make sure that any of these countries that think they’re going to have a check to cash … that they shouldn’t cash the check just yet,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Politico.

The threat arrives less than two weeks before U.S. diplomats are set to join representatives from nearly 200 nations in Paris to finalize a climate deal intended to cut carbon emissions.

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Negotiators are expected to sign the final agreement Dec. 11 during the United Nations summit, running parallel with a deadline for Congress to submit its 2016 spending bill to Obama.

Barrasso and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., sent a letter last week to the White House pledging to use the budget legislation to prevent U.S. tax dollars from flowing into the climate plan unless the president submits the deal to Congress for review.

Obama is said to be devising a strategy to avoid sending the agreement to Congress because of near inevitable rejection from the GOP-led legislature.

“While the executive branch and Congress both play an important role in the foreign policy of our nation, Congress ultimately holds the power of the purse,” Barrasso and Inhofe wrote.

The senators demanded that Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy for climate change, relay to foreign counterparts that “Congress will not be forthcoming with these funds in the future without a vote in the Senate on any final agreement, as required in the U.S. Constitution.”

Rachel Bovard, director of policy services at The Heritage Foundation, said the Obama administration plans to cast the pact as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, which requires two-thirds approval in the Senate, because it would not attract the votes required for ratification.

“In an incredibly bold move, he has decided to subvert the intent of the Constitution—which requires Senate advice and consent for treaties,” Bovard said of Obama:

Essentially he is using legal loopholes to get around the constitutional role of the Senate, and impose this agreement—and its billions of dollars in costs—onto the American people without the say of their elected representatives.

During a hearing last week by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Barrasso said Congress never approved the president’s promise to pour billions of U.S. funds into the Green Climate Fund. That United Nations fund allocates money from developed countries and private contributors to assist developing nations with protections against climate change.

“These actions in the House and Senate send a strong signal that the U.S. will no longer underwrite the global climate change project,” said Steven Groves, a senior research fellow in foreign policy at The Heritage Foundation. “If the poor countries attending the Paris negotiations don’t think the U.S. will make good on its financial pledges, they won’t sign any climate change agreement.”

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http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/11/25/how-progressives-changed-thanksgiving

How progressives changed Thanksgiving

Much of what we know about the first Thanksgiving comes from a letter written by Edward Winslow in 1621. The letter, lost for nearly 200 years, was discovered by Boston publisher Alexander Young and later published in 1841.

The first Thanksgiving, according to the account, was primarily a day of fasting to remember and thank God.

While George Washington held a Thanksgiving as president, it was Abraham Lincoln that made it a national holiday.

Right after the battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving an annual day of remembrance to be observed the fourth Thursday of every November. From 1863 to 1939, Thanksgiving took place on the fourth Thursday, allowing people to stop and to give thanks to God.

As Glenn outlined on radio, the tie between Thanksgiving and God slowly unraveled during the Progressive Era.

In an official statement issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt, a subtle change in wording and tradition began the unraveling.

“I, Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States do hereby designate as a day of general thanksgiving, Thursday the 28th, this present November, and I recommend that throughout the land, people cease from their wanted occupations.”

“Notice the date was still the same [the fourth Thursday of November], but this is the first time the president said we should take the day off,” Glenn explained. “This was unusual because up until the Progressive Era, we thought it was abhorrent to take even Christmas off. …In fact, the Pilgrims and our Founders thought it would be crass to take the day off and make it not a day of work for either holiday, either Thanksgiving or Christmas. We worked on Christmas. But it was the progressives that wanted us to cease from occupations.”

Roosevelt’s statement went on to “thank the giver of all good for the countless blessings in our national life.” Glenn pointed out the subtle, but extreme importance of the language used: FDR said, “our national life,” not “individual life.” 

Woodrow Wilson issued a similar statement, urging citizens to take the day off. 

“I, Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, do hereby designate Thursday the 27th of November as a day of Thanksgiving and prayer and invite the people throughout the land to cease from their wanted occupations.”

At the beginning of the Depression in 1931 when things were really bad, Herbert Hoover followed suit. 

“I, therefore, Herbert Hoover, president of the United States, do hereby designate Thursday, November 26th, as the national day of Thanksgiving and recommend that our people rest from their daily labors, and in their homes and accustomed places of worship, give devout thanks for the blessings which a merciful Father have bestowed on all of us.”

Again, while most people wanted to work, a progressive president told them to stay home and rest. 

So that brings us to the change from the third Thursday to the fourth in November — and its impact on Thanksgiving and American society. The change happened in 1939.

“At the tail end of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, hoping to boost the economy by providing shoppers and merchants a few extra days to conduct their business between Thanksgiving and Christmas, moved Thanksgiving to November’s third Thursday,” explained Glenn. “So the only reason why we changed from the fourth Thursday to the third, was because in the third term of FDR, he officially disconnected it from God and connected it to the God of America, the almighty dollar.” 

That’s right, liberal progressives who purportedly hated business, hated commercialism and despised the power of big business, made Thanksgiving all about money. 

Interestingly, a Gallup poll at the time showed 59 percent of Americans disapproved of the date change. Twenty-two states decided to go along with Roosevelt’s plan. Twenty-three decided to stick with the old date, affirming Thanksgiving should be about thanking God, not shopping. Both dates were recognized by the press, the latter referred to as the Republican Thanksgiving because it was connected to God, the founding and Abraham Lincoln. 

In 1941, the Wall Street Journal looked at a large pool of data and declared the move a bust. It provided no real boost to retail sales. 

It did accomplish one thing, though. It further separated the American people and society from God.

Watch Glenn describe why FDR changed Thanksgiving:

 
Featured Image: Constant Snow walks through the 1627 Pilgrim Village at ‘Plimoth Plantation’ where she and other role-players portray Pilgrims seven years after the arrival of the Mayflower November 17, 2005 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The 17th century replica village was the site of the first Thanksgiving in 1623. Thanksgiving Day, believed to have originally taken place at the end of July, was established as a national holiday by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and is celebrated on the last Thursday of November. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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Blaming white privilege is toxic to actual advancement’

http://eagnews.org/black-pastor-blaming-white-privilege-is-toxic-to-actual-advancement/

Black pastor: ‘Blaming white privilege is toxic to actual advancement’

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a recently published article about racial unrest at the University of Missouri, the Rev. Harry R. Jackson Jr., gave an honest assessment of the concept of “white privilege.”

Jackson, a black man who serves as senior pastor at Hope Christian Church in Washington, D.C., believes that “white privilege” exists. But he also believes that many black people, and well-meaning white people, are wasting their time focusing on the topic.

“The people – white and black – who are shining the light on white privilege must understand that focusing on it will, in and of itself, bring no measureable improvement to the lives of black people or other minorities, “ Jackson wrote.

“Our real focus should be upon how people of every race can set and achieve their personal goals. My grandfather grew up in a level of material poverty that is virtually unknown in our country today.

“Early on he did not have indoor plumbing and only a grade-school education. He did not rise above this situation and make a better life for our entire family by bemoaning the advantages that white people had. He focused wholeheartedly on what he could control, not on how other people thought about him.”

Hard work and social stability are the only reliable tickets to social advancement, for blacks or other minorities, he wrote.

“If blacks and Latinos wish for more than superficial gestures and condescending lip service, they must understand that blaming white privilege is toxic to actual advancement.

“We must envision strategies that will give millions of urban youth incentives and strategies to earn their way out of poverty. Children of color – especially those living in poverty – need stable families, or failing that, dedicated mentors.

“They need rigorous education, strong work ethics and emotional resilience. It is absolutely true that wealthier children can make horrible decisions without facing nearly the level of painful consequences that poorer children do, which is why I continue to advocate for criminal justice reform. But even with second chances, people must learn to live responsibly in order to break the cycles of generational poverty.”

Improving educational outcomes for minority students is a major key, Jackson argued.

“What most black college students need far more than more diversity programs is a stronger academic foundation before they even think about applying to college,” Jackson wrote. “In Missouri, for example, the average African-American high school graduate in 2014 scored between a 16 and 17.7 on the ACT.

“These numbers are more than four points lower than the state average and indicate that the overwhelming majority are not ready for college-level work. Addressing those numbers might prove more productive for advocates who want to see more black students at the flagship state university.”

“At the end of the day, whites who want blacks to listen to them, or support them politically, would do well to develop empathy for those who may have had a radically different experience in America than they have had.

“And those who are serious about improving the lives of minorities in this country must focus on substantive improvements in family stability, job creation and education, recognizing that without these, nothing will get better.”

From Around The Web

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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/24/german-professor-nasa-fiddled-climate-data-unbelievable-scale/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

German Professor: NASA Has Fiddled Climate Data On ‘Unbelievable’ Scale

A German professor has confirmed what skeptics from Britain to the US have long suspected: that NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has largely invented “global warming” by tampering with the raw temperature data records.

Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert is a retired geologist and data computation expert. He has painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to 1881. His conclusion: that if you look at the raw data, as opposed to NASA’s revisions, you’ll find that since 1940 the planet has been cooling, not warming.

According to Günter Ederer, the German journalist who has reported on Ewert’s findings:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.

Apart from Australia, the planet has in fact been on a cooling trend:

Using the NASA data from 2010 the surface temperature globally from 1940 until today has fallen by 1.110°C, and since 2000 it has fallen 0.4223°C […]. The cooling has hit every continent except for Australia, which warmed by 0.6339°C since 2000. The figures for Europe: From 1940 to 2010, using the data from 2010, there was a cooling of 0.5465°C and a cooling of 0.3739°C since 2000.

But the activist scientists at NASA GISS – initially led by James Hansen (pictured above), later by Gavin Schmidt – wanted the records they are in charge of maintaining to show warming not cooling, so they began systematically adjusting the data for various spurious reasons using ten different methods.

The most commonly used ones were:

• Reducing the annual mean in the early phase.
• Reducing the high values in the first warming phase.
• Increasing individual values during the second warming phase.
• Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995.
• Shortening the early decades of the datasets.
• With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.

Ewert’s findings echo that of US meteorologists Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts who examined 6,000 NASA weather stations and found a host of irregularities both with the way they were sited and how the raw data had been adjusted to reflect such influences as the Urban Heat Island effect.

Britain’s Paul Homewood is also on NASA GISS’s case. Here he shows the shocking extent of the adjustments they have made to a temperature record in Brazil which has been altered so that a cooling trend becomes a warming trend.

Unadjusted temperature record: shows cooling trend.

Adjusted temperature record: shows warming trend.

For still more evidence of NASA’s adjustments, check out Alterations to Climate Data at Tony Heller’s Real Climate Science.

Truly, these people have no shame.

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