Robert Spencer picks up on an important unreported detail from the horrifying story of the Christmas morning murders-suicide which left six relatives dead. The father and murderer, it seems, disliked that his daughter was dating a non-Muslim [Spencer's emphasis]:

Neighbors said the family was Muslim but had always hung Christmas lights on their home — except this year.

Terri Baum, who lives three homes down from Yazdanpanah, said she had seen him around the neighborhood in the last couple of weeks.

“They were pretty quiet, but kind, very kind,” Baum said. “They were sweet, good parents, and they loved their kids very much.”

Baum’s daughter, Allison, attended Colleyville Heritage High School with Nona, where the girls were part of an academic team focused on developing business leaders. They graduated together in May.

“Allison would take her to school from here, and then when they moved out she would pick her up from the apartments,” Baum said. “It’s unbelievable because of the people we knew them to be, and their children were good kids, very focused.”

Baum said she was horrified at the possibility the killings had been a murder-suicide.

“All I want to say is, it is so unbelievably shocking because they loved their kids,” Baum said.

“She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion,” Reed said.

Yes, loved them to death.

But a more ominous portrait emerged of Yazdanpanah in interviews with some of his daughter’s other classmates.“She would come to school crying and telling us her dad was crazy,” said Lacie Reed, 18. “He wouldn’t let her wear certain things. He was always taking her phone away, checking her call history and checking her text messages.”

Friends said Nona’s father had installed cameras all around the home so he could watch the family’s comings and goings. Others said he nailed her bedroom window shut so she could not sneak out at night and see her boyfriend.

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Fareed Zakaria showcased what some are calling a questionable report from the EU on terror attacks. From Breitbart.tv:

The European Union released a report documenting what groups in Europe were responsible for terror attacks on the continent. He points out that only three attacks were from Islamist groups. “the rest,” he said “are from right-wing and left-wing groups.”

There’s something very wrong about Zakaria’s set up here.

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- French magazine offices torched because it parodied The Religion of Peace’s Mohammed:

Its latest edition carries a cartoon image of a bearded Mohammed – something which is blasphemous under Islamic law – and pretends that it is being ‘guest edited’ by the Prophet.

- The debate schedule is announced:

NBC News and ABC News can finally add their upcoming pre-New Hampshire Primary debates to their schedules, now that the state has officially made January 10 primary election day.

The ABC News debate will air in primetime Saturday, January 7, with an abbreviated replay the next morning. The NBC news/Facebook debate will be televised that same Sunday morning, Jan. 8, in the “Meet The Press” time period. That debate will be simulcast and replayed on MSNBC, as well as New England Cable News, the regional news channel owned by NBCU parent Comcast.

- MOST EXCELLENT: “America’s Most Wanted” returning to television on December 2nd:

“America’s Most Wanted,” the long-running crime series that was effectively canceled by Fox in May, has found a new home. Lifetime, the network arguably best-known for its female-focused original movies and series, has acquired the rights to the series, which will produce new episodes for the cabler starting later this year.

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In his recent assessment of his year since he was unceremoniously — and illicitly in many folks’ estimation — fired by NPR, Juan Williams indulged one of those fallacious assumptions that just screams left-wing spin. It is the sort of straw man argument that casts aspersions on others — this time against Christians — while pretending to be the logical adult in the room, not to mention while pretending not to be casting aspersions. It is a logical sleight of hand that many liberals use.

First, let me say that I am 100% on Williams’ side in that his firing by NPR was a real breach of journalistic ethics: theirs. The comments he made a year ago that got him fired did not in any way harm his veracity as a journalist, nor were they racist or even incorrect. Heck, they weren’t even injudicious except when taking the brain dead political correctness that infests the left into consideration.

Though that was the discussion of a year ago and really is not something worth rehashing here, Williams did say something outrageous in his review of that year-old issue that deserves to be highlighted. In essence, Williams made an illogical argument about how we should think of radical Islam, and he did so by assuming that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City Bombing could be considered as representative of Christianity as the Saudi 19 were of radical Islam.

Here is what Williams said [my bold for emphasis]:

… we have to keep in mind that America is a country founded on the ideal of religious liberty. We can’t stereotype any group on the basis of the behavior of extremists among them. We don’t indict all Christians because of Timothy McVeigh.

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Via Fox News, the Media Research Center has published a report examining a three-hour, online journalism course offered by Poynter:

A new course on Islam designed for journalists tries to minimize the impact and importance of ”jihad” by comparing it to the number of murders in America each year. That same course claims ”right-wing activists” tried to tie American Muslims to terrorism and doesn’t mention examples of Islamic attacks on press freedom.

That’s the way a prominent news organization is teaching journalists in a three-hour online course. The Poynter News University, part of the Poynter Institute, launched the free course ”Covering Islam in America” to guide the media on their coverage of Muslim communities.

The George Soros-funded Social Science Research Council, which received $50,000 from the Open Society Institute ”For Initiative on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation,” is one of the groups behind the initiative, along with the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. That fits with a theme for liberal financier Soros, who has spent more than $52 million on influencing the media. The Islamic course also links to another Soros-funded entity, the well-financed Center for American Progress.

[...]

This course is “A project of The Poynter Institute funded by The Knight Foundation.” Soros’s Open Society Foundations have worked closely with The Knight Foundation. They partnered up to start the Investigative News Network, which received $200,000 from the Knight Foundation and$100,000 from the Open Society Foundations. The Knight Foundations President and CEO, Alberto Ibarguen, is also on the board for AOL and yet another key Soros backed group, the progressive investigative reporting start-up ProPublica.

What can journalists expect to “learn?”

Besides learning basic facts about Muslims and their history, the course adds ways to put ”jihad” into perspective, attack conservatives, and provide a list of liberal groups that can be contacted for expert advice and quotes.

[...]

One question asked, ”What grievances might sources associated with ‘Political Islam’ hold against Western journalists?” The answer is that ”Western journalists are seen as all of the following: ”hostile to Islam,” ”focus too much on Islamic violence,” ”viewed as water carriers for Western government agendas,” and ”thought to be unable to understand Islam unless they embrace Islam.”

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By now we’ve all heard the reprehensible remarks made by Congressional Black Caucus Whip Andre Carson (D-IN) where he told the audience at a CBC Jobs Fair Town Hall in Miami that Tea Party Congressmen would like to lynch black people. Given the opportunity to revise or retract his remarks, Carson instead stood by “the truth” of his comments.

So now it seems pretty fair to say that Andre Carson is a race-baiting bigot who has brought shame upon the U. S. House of Representatives. But any regular reader of Big Government knows that this is not new information. In fact, Andre Carson’s despicable, divisive slander of August 22nd is just the latest of bogus attacks made by the 2nd term congressman against the Tea Party. Andre Carson is the man who told the mother of all race-baiting lies against the Tea Party: That racial slurs were screamed “fifteen times” at he and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in Washington DC on the day before the ObamaCare vote in 2010.

The headlines at the time (as well as Topic #1 on cable news and Sunday talk shows) was “Racist Tea Party Yells ‘N-Word’ at Civil Rights Icon John Lewis”. Andre Carson’s name was hardly mentioned in any of the stories. But a Big Government investigation revealed that it was he, in fact, who gathered Capitol Hill reporters around himself on March 20, 2010 and breathlessly told them what had happened “outside of Cannon (Congressional Office Building)” just moments before. (audio courtesy Kerry Pickett, Washington Times)

By now you know the story become part of Democratic Party lore showing up in talking points as recently as just last week as Alan Colmes mangled the “facts” but still was able to perpetuate the lie on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor”. You should also know by now that Andrew Breitbart offered a $100, 000 reward for anyone who can produce video proof o the supposed racial hatred. The only videos uncovered were found by the Big Government staff. They show the exact moment Carson described, “down the steps of Cannon”, from four different angles. Not only were there no slurs heard on any of the videos, but the scene is not at all how Carson described it to Capitol Hill reporters.

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Thank you, Bill Maher. On this we agree.

“All this talk about the people who burned the Koran and nothing about the people who reacted in such a stupid way. We’re always blaming the victim and not holding them, not most Muslims, but at least a large pat of muslim culture that doesn’t condemn their people …”

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In another example of a sort-of cultural suicide where western media types assume that all Muslims are blameless – while all Americans are at fault in this clash of civilizations between Islamism and the West – we have a recent episode of MSNBC’s Hardball with one-time Democratic operative Chuck Todd standing-in for host Chris Matthews.

Todd was discussing the riots in Afghanistan sparked by Islamist ire over the burning of a Koran by a Florida pastor. During the interview Todd and a guest stated that the Christian Bible was just a book written by men while the Koran was the “direct word of God.” The two implied that this excuses Muslims from murdering people over the book burning.

In the segment Time Magazine’s World Editor Bobby Ghosh told Chuck Todd that the riots and murders perpetrated by Muslims in Afghanistan were obviously understandable because the Koran is apparently more holy than the Christian Bible. Ghosh averred that it’s important to “keep in mind” that the Koran is “not the same as the Bible to Christians.” Why, you might ask? Why it’s because the Koran is “directly the word of God.” On the other hand, the Bible is just a book “written by men.”

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At least, it says as much in the headline:

Eleven people–including several officials of the United Nations–were killed in Afghanistan today, and ABC News is reporting the killings may have been motivated by the burning of a Koran by Florida pastor Terry Jones.

Jones is the Gainesville, Florida pastor who made headlines for his plans to burn a Koran last September in protest of the planned Muslim community center near Ground Zero.

Last month, Jones presided over a “trial” which found the Koran “guilty,” and another pastor soaked the book in kerosene and set it on fire. The Afghanistan killings followed a protest march against Jones in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. According to ABC News, “among the dead were U.N. staff and security guards who were trying to protect the staff.”

For his part, Jones has expressed no remorse …

ABC’s headline wasn’t much different.

Terry Jones must have the longest arms of anyone on the planet to have been able to reach all the way to Afghanistan from Florida. Dude apparently had his Wheaties that morning because after burning the Koran, he Go-Go-Gadgeted his arms halfway around the world and riled up a completely peaceful protest of totally peaceful people. His arms then apparently took knives from the peaceful protesters and thumbed it to the Afghan UN office where he stabbed and beheaded people. Why? What motive? Stop asking silly questions.

Is there a finder’s fee associated with turning stuff like this into the “Guinness Book of World Records?”

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In Great Britain, the historic cradle of liberty and sanctum of freedom of expression,  it appears that you can no longer refer to Arab depravity in the slaughter of an Israeli family — including a three month-old baby — as they slept without someone going to the police to get you arrested for racism.

This is what happened to me. I wrote on my blog about the ‘the moral depravity of the Arabs’ who had murdered Udi and Ruth Fogel and their three children, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas in their home in the Samarian neighbourhood of Itamar, near Nablus, by cutting their throats while most of them were asleep.

I also pointed the finger for this atrocity at the ‘savagery’ of the Palestinian Authority, whose educational materials along with the mosques and TV stations under its control incite frenzied hatred of Jews; which teaches its children that the highest aspiration is to murder Israelis; and which glorifies those who perpetrate such unspeakable acts by naming squares and public places after them.

Next thing I knew was that the Guardian ran a story saying I was being investigated by the UK Press Complaints Commission, which had received two complaints about my remarks – and I had also been reported to the Bedfordshire police for racism.

This came as something of a surprise. If I was indeed being investigated, no-one had seen fit to tell me about it. Indeed, at time of writing I still have not heard whether either of these bodies is investigating these complaints at all.
Stranger still was the involvement of the Bedfordshire police. I do not live in Bedfordshire, an area north of London. I have never had anything to do with the place. What could my remarks about the Itamar massacre possibly have to do with Bedfordshire?

A clue lay in the involvement in the Guardian story of a prominent British Muslim activist named Inayat Bunglawala. It was he who had reported me to the Bedfordshire police – and he lives in Bedfordshire.

It would appear that having taken exception to my blog, Bunglawala went to his local police force to complain about my views and expected them to take action against me as a result.

His complaint was that I had made a ‘generalised racist outburst against Arabs as a whole’.  But this was ridiculous. I was obviously referring specifically to the perpetrators of the Itamar massacre and to the Palestinian Authority which incites such deeds Bunglawala claimed that if anyone had referred to the ‘moral depravity of the Jews’ and described them as being ‘savages’ they would face prosecution for racist hate speech.

Does one really have to spell this out? Jews don’t go round murdering innocents in cold blood and cutting the throats of three-month old babies. And this was not a one-off. The Arab and Muslim world glorifies the killing of Jews.
Sweets are routinely handed round in rejoicing at the murder of Israeli civilians. And from Arab and Muslim society pours an unstoppable torrent of deranged, Nazi-style vilification of Jews which fuels the genocidal hysteria behind such attacks.

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From the Huffington Post:

Juan Williams says NPR is an “all-white organization” that exhibited the “worst of white condescension” in its handling of his firing last year.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, conducted before the most recent controversy surrounding an NPR executive’s comments about the tea party (and CEO Vivian Schiller’s ousting), Williams blasted the organization for its treatment of him.

“I think when it comes to NPR’s decision to, without any reason, throw me out the door, I think that for them, especially for some of the people who created NPR, it’s an all-white operation,” Williams said. He added that he thought NPR “felt they had never had much success” with black or Hispanic journalists, and that they had had “more success with white women.”

[...]

“I think they acted very unfairly, and largely in a condescending manner,” Williams said of NPR’s handling of the situation. “If you stop and think about some of the things that were said in the midst of that controversy, the idea that I should have a relationship with a psychiatrist or that I need a publicist to tell me what to say. It just suggests to my mind that they think that I was some sort of infantile mentality, or childlike person. (more…)

This has to qualify as one of Media Matters’ longer, more bizarre and unfounded attacks against an individual -  physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. They must be chasing Wahhabist petro dollars. Their attack makes no sense at all given what we know of the Left. But that doesn’t stop them from attempting to smear Jasser repeatedly. I suppose community activism is suddenly out of vogue, provided the activist in question disagrees with the Left at MMFA.

Rep. Peter King plans to begin hearings on March 10 to investigate the “radicalization of the American Muslim community,” allegedly with the aim of shining a light on the supposed failure of America’s Muslim communities to cooperate with law enforcement officials investigating terrorist plots. His star witness is Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a physician and former U.S. Navy medical officerwith no background in law enforcement or public policy.

What Jasser is, is engaged, active and interested in calling out fellow Muslims perceived as not having America’s best interests at heart. We know this from simply observing the behavior of organizations such as CAIR, and others. Though often subtle, what those groups do is trumpet a Muslim identity politics, or Islam, over an American identity and straight-forward dedication to American exceptionalism and our Constitution. Jasser offers a competing view. For that and that alone, the Left now seeks to silence him.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D. is the President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). A devout Muslim, Dr. Jasser founded AIFD in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States as an effort to provide an American Muslim voice advocating for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Consitution, liberty and freedom, and the separation of mosque and state. He is leading the fight to shake the hold that the Muslim Brotherhood and their Network of American Islamist organizations and mosques have on organizxed Islam in America.

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Even the Devil can quote Scripture.

Oh! Well that’s good to know. I guess we can all go back to what we were doing before and pretend that the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just last week call for war with Israel:

A leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt told the Arabic-language Iranian news network Al-Alam on Monday that he would like to see the Egyptian people prepare for war against Israel, according to the Hebrew-language business newspaper Calcalist.

Muhammad Ghannem reportedly told Al-Alam that the Suez Canal should be closed immediately and that the flow of gas from Egypt to Israel should cease “in order to bring about the downfall of the Mubarak regime.”

“The people should be prepared for war against Israel,” he said, adding that the world should understand that “the Egyptian people are prepared for anything to get rid of this regime.”

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I can’t make this up.

Inspired by the YMCA when it was founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has been under a ban since 1948, and its real size is difficult to gauge. The group was brutally repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, it has at times been propped up as a foil – especially for Western audiences – with periodic crackdowns that have sent many of its members to prison.

In what way was the Muslim Brotherhood “inspired by” the YMCA? By the way the YMCA doesn’t assassinate leaders? Or that it’s comprised of people whose Christian faith would get them killed in many Arab countries? The Brotherhood was aligned with Nazis during the 30s and, after the fall of the Istanbul caliphate, filled the void of Muslim unity. It wasn’t “inspired” by the YMCA; it was “inspired” by the hole left after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

I love the editorial buffing the author of this piece gives the Muslim Brotherhood. Will Englund goes out of his way not to trip up the “peaceful Muslim Brotherhood” narrative with any pesky facts about murder or riots.

But as Egyptian society begins to weave a whole new cloth, the Muslim Brotherhood, alternately used and demonized by Mubarak over the years, has been slow to contribute. An organization dedicated to the creation of a more thoroughly Islamic Egyptian state …

That last sentence is kitten-speak for sharia law. And the reason they opposed Mubarak and that there existed such contention in their relationship? Mubarak stood in their way.

For most of its existence in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has refrained from violence against the state. It is not the organization of radical jihadists that it is sometimes made out to be.

Really? Remember this guy?

Anwar Sadat

He was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Good on the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin for batting away the warnings of “Islamaphobia” in the wake of the 911 mosque:

Hate crimes are up 14 percent across the state, but those against Muslims are a tiny fraction. Of the 683 reported to police in 2009, only 11 targeted Muslims. Yes, 11. In 2008, there were eight.

Compare that with the 251 against Jews, or 37 percent of the total. Anti-black crimes were down slightly, to 144, or 21 percent of the total.

The biggest rise was in crimes against gays, from 70 to 107.

Remember those numbers the next time someone, maybe someone in City Hall or the White House, warns against a rising tide of Islamophobia. Use the facts to shut them up.

I hope the White House reads this. There have been more honor killings or other related violence, perpetuated by Muslims, in the United States as NYC Muslim “hate crimes” yet I don’t see the President warning of such violence – in fact, Eric Holder can’t even identify terrorism as being statistically associated with Islam.

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I can’t wait to see the Soros elves at MMfA scramble to spin this:

Remember Glenn Beck’s fuzzy math, which calculated that 10% of Muslims are actually terrorists? Well, according to one of those WikiLeaked diplomatic cables, the man may have been wildly underestimating. At least when it comes to British Muslim students, one-third of whom “believe killing in the name of religion is justified,” according to a survey reported in the Daily Mail.

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To the Editor:

Yesterday’s feature, “Monitoring America,” by Dana Priest and William Arkin, intentionally distorts the role of outside experts training local law enforcement in matters related to terrorism.

In an effort to smear the Center for Security Policy, Arkin and Preist erroneously describe the Center’s book, Shariah: The Threat to America, as “expanding on what [Walid] Shoebat and [Ramon] Montijo believe.”

This is false. In fact, Shariah: The Threat to America is an independent work of nineteen national security experts, including the former Director of Central Intelligence, former directors of military intelligence agencies, a former counterterrorism agent in the FBI, experts in Shariah law, and many others. Each of the authors is an expert in his own right on a diverse array of national security issues; in that capacity, they can authoritatively address the nexus between America’s national security and Islamic law, called Shariah.

The study of Shariah is important to the nation’s national security because America’s Islamist enemies—from the inhabitants of al Qaeda-linked training camps in Yemen and Pakistan to homegrown American “lone-wolf” bombers—declare, above all other concerns, that they fight to install Islamic law and in furtherance of its explicit dictates.

Shariah: The Threat to America demonstrates that the mainstream legal code understood by many of the world’s Muslims to be divinely sanctioned law (Shariah) is a knowable system of law, making the practice of Islam possible in an organized way.  Its foundational rulings—on issues like jihad, relations with non-Muslims, mandatory punishments for adultery and apostasy, and more—are objectively knowable. The book takes great pains to present the most mainstream Islamic sources, like the classic of Shafi’i law, Umdat Al-Salik (or Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law) and, in describing the tenants of Shariah, use texts written by Muslims for an Islamic audience.

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It seems like just as the Ground Zero mosque controversy was receding, NBC has decided to stoke the flames of passion again by naming the project’s developer Sharif El-Gamal a “Person Of The Year“.  Gee, NBC once again demonstrates how far out of touch it is with mainstream America?  There’s a shock.

Having not seen the interview which airs Thursday it would be irresponsible of me to make a blanket assertion that it was a softball slug-fest.  But knowing the political leanings of the interviewer Matt Lauer, and then folding them into the decidedly left of center overview of NBC itself, it’s pretty safe to say that Gamal was not exactly reduced to tears by the time the cameras stopped rolling.

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Of course you did, NBC.  How could you resist?

NBC will apparently be naming the remarkably shady developer of the Ground Zero Mosque one of its “People of the Year.”  NBC released a preview of what appears to be yet another slobbering, softball interview of Gamal this time performed by Matt Lauer.

Here is an impromptu summary of some issues regarding El Gamal’s from Robert Spencer at JihadWatch.org:

Marisol summarized part of the problem with this here: “Meanwhile, the thug Sharif el-Gamal has been sued for an unpaid loan, and faced eviction from his SoHo office over $39,000 in back rent. He was found to owe $21,000 in fines on a property with 13 violations. And there are other unanswered questions.”

El-Gamal has also threatened a Muslim opponent of the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero; spoken at an event for Hamas-linked CAIR; and has a history of thuggishness, including a recent comment about how beating people up is “exercise & stress relief.”

So why is NBC honoring this thug? Because the mainstream media is avid to get this Islamic supremacist mosque built, and the will of the people be damned.

Could NBC make it any clearer what they think of the opinions and sensitivities of their viewers or 70% of the American public at large?  I think we are all looking forward to seeing both the rest of the list and who NBC passed over in order to bestow this honor on El Gamal (other than Imam Rauf).

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