Analyst's note: A simple headline check will likely help you with your decision. If you need more then consider the facts in these articles by their author Robert Spencer and let common sense prevail. If your still having trouble, then I suggest an internal search on the terms "Muslim Brotherhood", "CAIR", "Taqiyya". and "Gaubatz". Good luck with your decision. Your decision and actions are important since YOU and YOURS could be the next target of those who would "misunderstand" the teachings of Islam.
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Obama's Justice Department to prohibit agents from considering religion in counterterrror investigations
Because who ever heard of Muslims being involved in terrorism? The very idea is preposterous! Why would anyone get the idea that counterterror surveillance was ever needed in Muslim communities?
"U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents," by Matt Apuzzo for the New York Times, January 15 (thanks to Linda Sarsour):
The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a government official said Wednesday.
The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations and Latinos for immigration investigations.
The Bush administration banned profiling in 2003, but with two caveats: It did not apply to national security cases, and it covered only race, not religion, ancestry or other factors.
Since taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been under pressure from Democrats in Congress to eliminate those provisions. “These exceptions are a license to profile American Muslims and Hispanic-Americans,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in 2012.
President George W. Bush said in 2001 that racial profiling was wrong and promised “to end it in America.” But that was before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. After those attacks, federal agents arrested and detained dozens of Muslim men who had no ties to terrorism. The government also began a program known as special registration, which required tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim men to register with the authorities because of their nationalities.
“Putting an end to this practice not only comports with the Constitution, it would put real teeth to the F.B.I’s claims that it wants better relationships with religious minorities,” said Hina Shamsi, a national security lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
It is not clear whether Mr. Holder also intends to make the rules apply to national security investigations, which would further respond to complaints from Muslim groups.
“Adding religion and national origin is huge,” said Linda Sarsour, advocacy director for the National Network for Arab American Communities. “But if they don’t close the national security loophole, then it’s really irrelevant.”
In other words, she even wants it to be forbidden for Muslims are placed under surveillance in the interests of national security.
Ms. Sarsour said she also hoped that Mr. Holder would declare that surveillance, not just traffic stops and arrests, was prohibited based on religion.
The Justice Department has been reviewing the rules for several years and has not signaled how it might change them. Mr. Holder disclosed his plans in a meeting Wednesday with Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, according to an official briefed on the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because the conversation was private.
Mr. de Blasio was elected in November after running a campaign in which he heavily criticized the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic, which overwhelmingly targets minorities and which a federal judge declared unconstitutional. The mayor and attorney general did not discuss when the rule change would be announced, the official said. A senior Democratic congressional aide, however, said the Obama administration had indicated an announcement was “imminent.”
The Justice Department would not confirm the new rules on Wednesday night but released a short statement saying that the mayor and the attorney general discussed “preventing crime while protecting civil rights and civil liberties.”
In the past, Mr. Holder has spoken out forcefully against profiling.
“Racial profiling is wrong,” he said in a 2010 speech. “It can leave a lasting scar on communities and individuals. And it is, quite simply, bad policing — whatever city, whatever state.”
Officials in the Bush administration made similar statements, however, which is why civil rights groups have eagerly waited to hear not just Mr. Holder’s opinion, but also the rules he plans to enact.
As written, the Justice Department’s rules prohibit federal agents from using race as a factor in their investigations unless there is specific, credible information that makes race relevant to a case.
“Authorities may never rely on generalized stereotypes, but may rely only on specific race- or ethnicity-based information,” the rules say....
The rules cover federal law enforcement agencies such as the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They do not cover local or state police departments.
That is significant because Muslim groups have sued the New York Police Department over surveillance programs that mapped Muslim neighborhoods, photographed their businesses and built files on where they eat, shop and pray....
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Muslim cleric who endorses jihad/martyrdom suicide bombings on 11-city US tour
And the Board Chairman of the sponsoring group is none other than the sinister, vicious and cynically disingenuous Hussam Ayloush of Hamas-linked CAIR. Why does this man have any audience at all? Why are the peaceful, moderate Muslims of the U.S. giving him a hearing? Why aren't they standing up at his talks and barraging him with tough questions about how Islam forbids suicide, and asking him why he is twisting and hijacking Islam?
"Radical Syrian Cleric Secures US Visa Despite Endorsing Suicide Bombings," by John Rossomando for Breitbart, January 14:
A Syrian sheik who labeled all Jews as legitimate targets for suicide bombers and who supports the death penalty for homosexuals is the latest extremist Muslim cleric raising money for Syrian-American groups supporting dictator Bashar al-Assad's ouster.
Sheik Mohammad Rateb al-Nabulsi is in the middle of an 11-city tour across America on co-sponsored by the Syrian American Council (SAC) and the Wylie, Texas-based Shaam Relief.
A promotional announcement hails al-Nabulsi as "an internationally-known Muslim scholar, renowned for his scholarship of Islam, who has lent his formidable clerical authority to support human rights, tolerance and respect for all."
But tolerance is not part of his preaching when it comes to perceived enemies.
Asked about Palestinian suicide bombings in April 2001, al-Nabulsi said he was "too insignificant to give a Sharia ruling or fatwa." Instead, he extensively cited from two previous fatwas from radical clerics which bless such attacks.
"All the Jewish people are combatants" acceptable as targets for attacks in Israel, al-Nabulsi wrote in his "ruling on martyrdom operations in Palestine."
"They do not have a career that a military rank does not encounter: doctor, pilot, engineer, for example, is a tank commander. Every civilian, citizen," he wrote. "They do not have a regular army; they have a reserve army, and all the people can fight, so this is essentially an entirely aggressive entity from A to Z. This is the Sharia ruling."
Al-Nabulsi's comments on suicide bombings remain on his website.
Suicide bombings are acceptable because of the overwhelming disadvantage Palestinians have in fighting Israel, he said. And they are effective.
"Therefore beware, the enemy calls the operations suicide, they say: suicide operation to deceive
Muslims, that this is suicide, but we should call them martyrdom operations. A young man in the prime of his years sacrifices his life and shakes an entity," he wrote. "There is frightening talk. Soon tourism in Israel has become zero; soon immigration to Israel became thirty percent from the impact of these actions. It fell thirty percent. The real fact us that it began now. By God Almighty it was proven to them, It gives victory over them, and inspires us to help them in any way."
He called Jews the "worst enemies of God" and Islam and "a hotbed of vices and evils."
The scope of his fatwa is limited to Israel. But it is not his only call to violence. Al-Nabulsi believes that Muslims should violently fight those who "impose their culture … and pornography" on them, as well as those who humiliate Muslims, occupy their lands and take their money, an August 2006 sermon shows.
Yet, al-Nabulsi apparently obtained a visa from the State Department allowing him to conduct his fundraising tour. Under current policy, a foreign national applying for a U.S. visa who is known to have promoted jihad and suicide bombings would be ordinarily deemed "undesirable" and denied a visa, government officials who have been involved in deciding who gets a visa from hostile countries told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
The State Department declined to comment. "Visa records are confidential under U.S. law under the Immigration and Nationality Act," State Department spokeswoman Katherine Pfaff said in response to an IPT query.
Al-Nabulsi already has visited Spring Hill, Fla., near Tampa; Orlando; Charleston, W.Va.; Milwaukee; Paterson, N.J.; and Falls Church, Va., for the two groups. Shaam Relief raised $65,000 during the Tampa-area stop, according to the charity's Facebook page.
In Tampa, al-Nabulsi posed for a photograph with Hatem Fariz. In 2006, Fariz pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide goods or services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In doing so, he admitted communicating with Ramadan Shallah, who has been the PIJ secretary general since 1995, about a shipment of tapes of Shallah's statements about the PIJ.
In Paterson Thursday, al-Nabulsi spoke at the Islamic Center of Passaic County. That mosque is led by Mohamed Qatanani, who is fighting deportation efforts based on a 1993 arrest in Israel in which he admitted being a member of Hamas. In addition, Qatanani advocates for blasphemy laws, saying free speech does not give Americans the right to mock things holy to Islam.
Al-Nabulsi will be making two stops in the Detroit area this coming weekend before concluding his tour Jan. 25 in Dallas.
In November, a similar fundraising tour featured Sheik Osama al-Rifai, who endorsed a coalition of jihadist groups called the Islamic Front. He helped raise $3.6 million for the Syrian Sunrise Foundation, which shares several board members with the SAC.
The SAC is one of the major groups lobbying in Washington for support against Assad in Syria.
Many of the Syrian American Council's members are former members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Molham al-Droubi, a member of the Syrian Brotherhood's executive committee told the IPT in an exclusive interview. Al-Droubi, however, said there were not any institutional links between the SAC and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
SAC President Talal Sunbulli is among the current or former members of the Muslim Brotherhood who enjoy a role in the organization, according to an international phone book of Muslim Brotherhood members seized by federal investigators. Hussam Ayloush, who runs the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) Los Angeles office, serves as chairman of the organization's board of directors.
The SAC's leaders have a history of minimizing the radical Islamist threat in Syria.
Its government relations director Mohammed Ghanem criticized the United States for classifying Jabhat al-Nusra, one of al-Qaida's two Syrian affiliates, as a terrorist organization in a December 2012 column published in the Washington Post. Ghanem said the move was "disastrous" for how "mainstream" Syrians viewed the United States.
Jabhat al-Nusra's connection with al-Qaida was known about several months before Ghanem wrote his piece.
Meanwhile, al-Nabulsi's calls for violent jihad are not limited to Jews in Israel. He includes the Western push for same-sex marriage among the things Muslims need to fight in their jihad.
"So as they would not impose their pornography, and so as not to give us a lesson that marriage is a contract between two persons; not necessarily a man and a woman; it may be between two men or two women," he wrote in 2010. The message is followed by a verse from the Quran: "And fight them until there's no more fitnah (disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah). And (all and every kind of) worship is for Allah (Alone). " [Al-Baqarah : 193]
Al-Nabulsi took his jihad against homosexuals a step further during an April 2011 talk on Hamas's al-Aqsa TV.
"Homosexuality offers a filthy place and does not generate offsprings. Homosexuality leads to the destruction of the homosexual," Al-Nabulsi said. "That's why homosexuality carries the death penalty."
Inviting Nabulsi to speak on behalf of the SAC is ironic considering Ayloush's past statements.
"[I]t is also extremely important to remember that even one person's support for targeting civilians is one too many. Regardless of one's religion or belief system, any support for violence should never go unnoticed or unaddressed," Ayloush wrote in a June 2007 commentary in the Los Angeles Daily News.
Yet Ayloush has been silent about al-Nabulsi's visit on his Facebook page and in his Twitter feed. Ayloush did not respond to an IPT question sent to his Twitter account asking if he had any objections to al-Nabulsi's invitation.
But Ayloush is quick to dismiss anyone who connects Islam with violence and hatred as a bigot or an "Islamophobe."...
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Related articles:
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Beheadings, Bombings and New York’s Little Bangladesh
Canada: Convert to Islam killed waging jihad in Syria
9/11 mastermind says Qur'an "forbids" violence to spread Islam
Hamas-linked CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper whitewashes jihad in the US
Al Qaeda behind 95% of world's suicide bombings
Raymond Ibrahim: The Hound of Jihad
Pakistani commentator prays to Allah that Americans leave Afghanistan, so that Muslims can massacre Hindus there
Libya announces timetable for Sharia implementation
Volgograd train station jihadist: "I have come here only to make Allah pleased with me...I am not inventing anything from the Koran, I am reading"
