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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From Fox Nation:

The New York Times downplayed the arrest of an AWOL Muslim soldier charged in connection with a plot to attack Fort Hood soldiers. The newspaper all but ignored the role Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo’s religious faith may have played in the alleged plot.

Abdo was arrested in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. He was found with weapons, explosive, and jihadist materials. Sources said he was attempting to purchase more weapons at the same gun store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased weapons allegedly used to gun down 13 people and would 30 others in a 2009 terrorist attack at the military base.

But the New York Times downplayed Abdo and Hasan’s Muslim faith – and ultimately the entire story.

The foiled plot appeared on page A-11 of the newspaper’s print edition. The word “Muslim” was mentioned once – in paragraph nine of the 13-paragraph story. The newspaper’s top national story was a feature piece about a boy who is following his dream to be a circus clown. That story had 28 paragraphs.

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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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The media told us during the 2008 election that the world would love us if we elected Barack Hussein Obama to the White House. Certainly the Muslin world would adore us after we got rid of Evil Bush.

We were shown fabricated videos like these as proof that all we had to do was elect Dear Leader and we would have everything we wanted as Americans, we would have true value because others would love us.

Forget the fact here that it’s dysfunctional as a nation, or as an individual to always seek justification from others, this is just about the Promise of 2008.

Democrats and the Obama administration often like to say the media set unrealistic expectations on the young World Emperor, certainly the media continues its slobbering love for Dear Leader, but Obama also made this promise of global unity. He did it during his first speech in Cairo as President and during the campaign in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate.  Obama declared himself a “citizen of the world” (whatever that means) and promised he would “remake the world.” Politico called it a “manifesto for the planet” and that he would “unite Christians, Muslims and Jews in a safer, more united world.”

Whoops.

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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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So, NPR canned Juan Williams (yeah, like I wasn’t gunna do this story). If you aren’t familiar with NPR, simply imagine yourself, on a bus, sitting next to Judd Hirsch.

Anyway, it’s all due to comments Juan made on the “The O’Reilly Factor,” last Monday. There Bill asked him to respond to “The cold truth [that] jihad, aided …by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Williams replied, “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot….But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Racist.

He also brought up the Times Square scumbag – who had no problem saying that the war with America is just beginning.

But as Slate points out, the passage quoted by NPR was a spoon-fed clip that dumps out before Williams says his worry reflects the problem of generalizing about groups of people.

I doubt Media Matters will cover that.

But anyway, you could say NPR fired him for being honest. For saying what everyone with a brain is thinking (which eliminates Media Matters). (more…)

I’ve been sifting through hundreds of emails, stories, reactions to Juan Williams’ sensational firing by NPR over his remarks on Bill O’Reilly’s show, covered on Big Journalism for the past 24 hours. I’ve also read Slate’s ridiculous comparison of Williams to Sherrod. Williams didn’t call everyone a racist and help bilk taxpayers of billions for unfounded claims, but hey.

Those defending NPR’s reactions say that Williams “smeared” Muslims and portrayed them in a bad light.

Does not a group of men hijacking planes and flying them into the World Trade Center killing over three thousand people in the name of Islam portray Islam in a bad light?

Does not men hijacking a plane to fly into the Pentagon in the name of Islam portray Islam in a bad light?

When individuals strap bombs onto their bodies and detonate in public thoroughfares, killing men, women, and precious innocent children, all in the name of Islam, does not that paint Islam in a bad light?

When men bomb the USS Cole in the name of Islam, does that not portray Islam in a bad light?

When a Chechen group terrorizes school childrenin Beslan in the name of Islam, does that not portray Islam in a bad light?

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NPR terminated its contract this evening with Juan Williams, who worked with them as a senior political analyst, after Williams appeared on Bill O’Reilly and spoke of a “Muslim dilemma:”

The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

A taxpaying-funded organization fired someone over their free speech? No! Shocker!

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

Who could forget NPR’s cute guide to all things teabag? NPR had no problem with this: NPR’s “Learn to Speak Teabag:”

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The Chicago Tribune, a publication normally as dedicated to championing women’s issues as anyone in the MSM, tossed Muslim women under the bus in the other day. A feature story by Patty Pensa, running under the headline “Many faces under the hijab; photographer aims to educate about those who wear Muslim headscarf,” managed to ignore all of the abuses that Muslim women suffer throughout the world while living under Sharia law, focusing instead on the relative freedom that some Muslim women living in the United States enjoy.

CAIR had to be thrilled with the publication of such misleading propaganda in a once-great American newspaper. For the rest of us, and especially for the millions of abused Muslim women living abroad, this latest example of creeping-Sharia in the United States should be very disturbing.

Pensa’s story championed a book recently published by Muslim photographer Sadaf Syed entitled: “iCover: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl.” In it, Syed shows successful American Muslim women who enjoy happy and free lives while living in this country, and who also choose to wear the hijab. For Syed, the hijab isn’t a symbol of oppression at all, it’s rather a celebration of her religion, at least as far as she understands her religion (and she obviously doesn’t understand it very well).

That’s great – for Syed and the women she profiles – but nowhere in the Trib’s story does Pensa even hint at the possibility that Syed’s experience and her views about the hijab don’t come close to representing Islam’s official views about women in theory or in practice. (more…)

Please Larry King, retire already and take Al Sharpton with you. Blind leading the blind (that’s a Christian reference, by the way) as King and Sharpton discussed Barack Obama’s religion last night.

Of course, they mentioned that Obama “cleared things up” in his interview with Brian Williams on NBC, but the Cold Hearted Social Engineer in the White House did anything but clear things up. Williams never asked him for answers and Obama never gave them. That interview goes down in history as one of the most vague and innocuous ever. Nothin’ asked, nothin’ said and nothin’ learned. Watch the part about religion and you will know exactly what I mean. It’s about 2:30 in and you will agree. Nothin’ said.

But, my point here is not about Obama’s religion (he did have a Christian cross covered with a black sheet during a speech at Georgetown University) but about why Al Sharpton is still the source the media goes to when searching for answers about anything.

Anybody remember Tawana Brawley? (more…)

Thursday during the 1 p.m. hour, CNN’s “Newsroom,” this exchange took place between CNN reporter Ali Velshi andTime Magazine’s deputy international editor Bobby Ghosh:

VELSHI: The name Cordoba- some people are associating it with Muslim rule and bloody battles, when, in fact, Cordoba was one of the finest times in relations between the major religions.

GHOSH: Exactly right- in interfaith discourse-

VELSHI: Yeah-

GHOSH: And the great mosque of Cordoba that people are talking about and that Newt Gingrich was talking about- the man who built it, the Muslim prince who built it, bought it from a Christian group- paid money for it and bought it from a Christian group. And there was not a lot of alarm and anger raised then.

These statements are journalistic malpractice—ahistorical, whitewashed drivel—compounded by Ghosh’s ad hominem attack on Newt Gingrich. (more…)

Another of the former Tiffany network’s correspondents whose career was made by the Kennedy assassination — in the aftermath of the shooting, he gave Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother, a ride to the Dallas police station, where he pretended to be a detective in order to be able to work the phones and file dispatches back to his paper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Of such luck and gumption and guile were great journalistic careers once born:

By the time I got to the city room every phone in the place was ringing, and I just picked up the phone. The, the city editor had literally panicked when news came of the president being shot. He had sent everybody in the city room to Dallas and there was nobody there to answer the phones on the rewrite desk.

So I just answered a phone and a woman said, “Is there anybody there who can give me a ride to Dallas?” And I said, “Lady, you know, the president has just been shot, and besides, we’re not a taxi service.” And she said, “Yes, I heard it on the radio.” She said, “I think the person they’ve arrested is my son.” And it was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother.

Folksy, smart and funny, Schieffer’s down-home Texas persona was a welcome contrast to that of his fellow Texan, “Kenneth, what is the frequency,” who also came to national prominence on that fateful day in Dallas.

Too bad, at 73, he doesn’t know when to retire: (more…)

From today’s story, assuring America that, despite what the polls say, President Obama really truly is a Christian:

The White House says Mr. Obama prays daily, sometimes in person or over the telephone with a small circle of Christian pastors. One of them, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who was also a spiritual adviser to former President George W. Bush, telephoned a reporter on Wednesday, at the White House’s behest. He said he was surprised that the number of Americans who say Mr. Obama is Muslim is growing.

“I must say,” Mr. Caldwell said, “never in the history of modern-day presidential politics has a president confessed his faith in the Lord, and folks basically call him a liar.”

Now where would anybody get that idea? (more…)

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is a troubled soul these days. Having seen the triumph of the “narrative” so dear to so many liberal columnists and editors’ hearts, he and they are now forced to witness the disintegration of presidential authority even as the aggrandizement of presidential power continues apace — unchecked either by any decent Democrats or the hapless idiots who pass for the leadership of the Republican party.

His column today is another in Cohen’s occasional series of reflections along his asymptotic way to the truth: “President Obama’s Enigmatic Intellectualism.” That’s one way of looking at it:

It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges — of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama’s approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself.

For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs? The president himself is no help on this score. When it comes to his own image, he has a tin ear…

Or maybe not… (more…)

It wouldn’t be an Ann Coulter appearance without some “controversy,” especially as manufactured by the Pavlovian lapdogs of the MSM, and last week’s appearance by the author and syndicated columnist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., was no exception.

Newsbusters has the scoop:

Conservative author Ann Coulter found herself embroiled in controversy last week after she spoke at a Canadian university.

According to numerous American media outlets, when asked by a seventeen-year-old Muslim student at the University of Western Ontario last Monday, “[S]ince I don’t have a magic carpet, what other modes [of transportation] do you suggest,” Coulter responded, “Take a camel.” (more…)

It would seem that the Associated Press wants to consider its January 25 story by Devlin Barrett (“Feds detail Christmas Day attack”; also saved here for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes) the last word on what occurred in the hours immediately following Flight 253’s landing in Detroit on Christmas Day.

But if that’s indeed the case, Barrett’s report also serves to prove that the wire service had no business revising originally accurate reports to remove what were apparently inconvenient facts relating to the incident.

To refresh by way of my Big Journalism post on January 15, AP’s initial reports on Christmas afternoon and early Christmas evening told readers that “the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil,” and that it had even used the M-word (“Muslim”). But, I wrote, by the middle of the next morning, “The supposedly solid AQ connection somehow became tenuous and unproven,” and the M-word was gone.

This scrubbing conveniently gave the Obama administration precious time during the weekend that followed to regain its bearings after significant initial clumsiness. Ultimately, I noted that AP’s revisions “allowed the President of the United States to inform us (on the Tuesday after the attack), without challenge and as if it was a recent discovery, that — shazam! — the attack might have had something to do with AQ.” (more…)

Back when George W. “Miss Me Yet?” Bush was President, liberals exercised their right of free speech ad naseum to complain about how Bush was taking away their right of free speech. So you might expect that a liberal or two would express at least a little concern when freedom of expression in the western world is threatened in reality, instead of in theory. After all it’s happened just across the border in Canada and it’s happening right now, just across the pond in the Netherlands.

Try searching MSNBC or the Daily Kos for information about the Geert Wilders trial. Find anything? Me neither. Democratic Undergound, to their credit, did run a version of the story, although the fact that it was Al Jazeera’s version is disappointing, if predictable. A commenter or two even dared to suggest that perhaps Wilders should be free to criticize any religion he wants, including Islam. That kind of heresy was, of course, quickly slapped down with replies like this one:

It’s informative that your ideological hostility, towards major religions, leads you to sympathize with this rightwing European xenophobe: the fact, however, that you can patch his anti-Islamic rants into your own simplistic worldview, does not really qualify as evidence that Wilders is “on trial for telling the truth.” He is on trial because a court decided his remarks might violate the criminal law against incitement to hatred. (more…)