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This is a MUST watch.
‘Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, proved once again Thursday something that everyone who has been paying attention knows by now: you don’t go to an American university to get an education but to be indoctrinated into Leftist dogma and recruited for Antifa. Cole, who has written a hagiographical and whitewashed biography of Muhammad and is a Leftist go-to authority on Islamic issues, published an article in Foreign Policy In Focus entitled “Islam Wasn’t the Threat — Islamophobia Was.” If this sounds like nonsense, that’s only because it is, but that’s what sells on the Left these days.
Concern for Islamic terrorism, in Cole’s view, has been greatly exaggerated, in part for “racist” reasons (of course), while the rampant terror threat of “white supremacy” has been downplayed or ignored outright. Those who have suffered the most from this lack of focus, he insists, have been Muslims in America, who have borne the brunt of “Islamophobia” in America’s misguided quest to protect itself from a largely nonexistent threat of jihad terrorism.
All this is designed to inculcate the hatred and contempt for the United States that the Left is working to instill everywhere these days, and of course, Cole’s chief targets are conservatives. He begins his ridiculous piece by whining that “Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as ‘a devout Christian.’ It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American.” Aside from denigrating Tucker Carlson, Cole’s point here is that the Jan. 6 “insurrection” was a manifestation of “Christian terrorism,” equivalent to the Islamic terrorism we saw on 9/11.
To drive this point home, Cole has to ignore numerous inconvenient facts, including these: that no one has been charged with insurrection in connection with Jan. 6, the protestors were unarmed, the police opened the doors of the Capitol and invited them in, and no one was killed except one of the protestors, by a rogue cop who has faced no punishment, since he is safely anti-Trump.
Cole also has to ignore the fact that nearly 3,000 people were murdered by Islamic jihad terrorists on 9/11 and that those attacks were just one day’s worth, with 40,000 more jihad attacks coming worldwide since then. He sees 9/11 solely as the impetus for the victimization of Muslims in the United States: “Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, Muslim Americans have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.”
That would be a shame if it were true, but it isn’t. In reality, FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Muslims are rare, far more rare than hate crimes against Jews. No hate crime is justified, but the idea that Muslims in the U.S. have been unique victims of discrimination and harassment since 9/11 is simply without foundation.
And then there’s the larger picture.
On June 1, 2009, a Muslim named Abdulhakim Muhammad shot a soldier to death at a Little Rock military recruiting office, explicitly in the name of Allah. On November 5, 2009, in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered thirteen unarmed soldiers while screaming “Allahu akbar.” On April 15, 2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev exploded two bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring many more in the name of Islam. On Sept. 25, 2014, Alton Nolen, a convert to Islam, beheaded a coworker at Vaughan Foods in Moore, Oklahoma and had publicly supported jihad violence.
Related: Berkeley Professor of ‘Islamophobia’ Claims ‘the Muslim Is Presumed Guilty’ on U.S. Campuses
On July 16, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn., a Muslim named Mohammad Abdulazeez went on a shooting spree at a military installation, murdering five soldiers. On Nov. 4, 2015, at the University of California, Merced, Faisal Mohammad stabbed four people “in the name of Allah.” On Dec. 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, Calif., a Muslim couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a Christmas party, murdering fourteen people. On Jan. 7, 2016, a convert to Islam named Edward Archer shot Philadelphia police officer Jesse Hartnett because “police bend laws that are contrary to the teachings of the Qur’an.” On Feb. 11, 2016, a Muslim named Mohammad Barry entered the Nazareth Restaurant & Deli in Columbus, Ohio, and began stabbing patrons because the owner of the restaurant was an Israeli.
On June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Fla., a Muslim named Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and injured 58 at a gay bar. He insisted that he was doing this out of loyalty to the Islamic State. On November 28, 2016, at Ohio State University, a Muslim student, Abdul Artan, intentionally rammed a car into pedestrians and then began stabbing people with a butcher knife, injuring 11 people. On Oct. 31, 2017, a Muslim named Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov rented a Home Depot pickup truck and intentionally drove it down a bicycle path, killing eight people and injuring twelve.
On December 6, 2019, at the Naval Air Station Pensacola, a second lieutenant of the Saudi Royal Air Force, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, murdered three U.S. sailors. On May 21, 2020, at the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, a Muslim named Adam Alsahi crashed through a gate, got out, and opened fire, shooting a Navy police officer. On Aug. 29, 2021, in Plano, Texas, a Muslim named Imran Ali Rasheed murdered a Lyft driver, stole her car, and drove to Plano police headquarters, where he shot two people. He left a note explaining his Islamic motivations.
Longtime readers of my news site Jihad Watch know that this is only a partial list of jihad terror acts in the U.S. since 9/11. Then there are also all the foiled plots.
Meanwhile, how many people were killed or injured in the U.S. in “Islamophobic” attacks? None. None at all. That in itself should have made Cole too embarrassed to publish his piece, but of course, his objective isn’t accuracy, but propaganda and indoctrination.
“Islam wasn’t the threat — Islamophobia was,” says the pseudo-academic Juan Cole. Alas for his students at the University of Michigan! His article is a neat summation of the sorry state of American academia today.’https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/02/07/university-of-michigan-professor-claims-islamophobia-bigger-threat-than-islamic-terrorism-n1557098
The ungodly dream up some of the most bizarre programs supposedly to help the disadvantaged. ‘When Biden regime tyrants sit around a table brainstorming how to help Black people in America, they come up with insane ideas like, “Let’s give out free crack pipes!” Probably followed by absurdly racist confirmations like, “Yeah! That’s what Black people need!”
The $30 million program to hand out free crack pipes to Black Americans is being launched to achieve “racial equity.” Apparently, unknown to the rest of us, there is some sort of race-based “inequity” in the distribution and ownership of crack pipes. And so a federal government that would never even consider the idea of giving out free vitamin D to Black Americans to prevent cancer (because most African-Americans are vitamin D deficient to begin with) is now funding the handing out of free crack pipes, thinking this is a great idea for achieving “progress” in America.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on this program:
The Biden administration is set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance “racial equity.”
The $30 million grant program, which closed applications Monday and will begin in May, will provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to help make drug use safer for addicts. Included in the grant, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, are funds for “smoking kits/supplies.” A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and “any illicit substance.”‘https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-02-09-racist-biden-regime-distributing-30-million-to-blue-cities-for-crack-pipes.html
The West is capitulating to China at a rapid pace. ‘A few days before the 2022 Winter Olympics kicked off in Beijing, China, on Feb. 4, Amnesty International released a bombshell report calling the only free democracy in the Middle East an “apartheid” state and igniting a global media firestorm.
Since then, the dominant image and lead story on Amnesty’s home page has been “Israel’s Apartheid Against Israel.”
This media diversion must have made one group very happy and one group very depressed. The happy group was surely China’s ruthless leaders, delighted to see the world focusing on Israel instead of China’s war crimes against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
The depressed group, obviously, were the Uyghurs themselves. Can you imagine how demoralized these poor people must be to see this unique chance at world exposure squandered?
But here’s the crazy part—Amnesty International is more than aware of these Chinese war crimes. It even released a report on June 10, 2021, titled “‘Like We Were Enemies in a War’: China’s Mass Internment, Torture, and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang.” And in an open letter to UN member states on Oct. 11, 2021, it called on the international community to “strongly condemn the ongoing serious human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) and pave the way for justice and accountability.”
But then, four months later, when the eyes of the world were fixed squarely on the Winter Games in China, when Amnesty could have lived up to its call to hold China “accountable,” what did it do?
It chose to focus on Israel.
Never mind that Amnesty’s report on “Apartheid Israel” has been universally condemned, with even the moderate Union for Reform Judaism rejecting it as “replete with discredited and inaccurate allegations, including a deeply wrong accusation of apartheid.”
The key point is this: While the world was distracted by Amnesty’s libelous attack on Israel, it failed to focus on one of the worst human crimes of the century.
WHILE THE WORLD WAS DISTRACTED BY AMNESTY’S LIBELOUS ATTACK ON ISRAEL, IT FAILED TO FOCUS ON ONE OF THE WORST HUMAN CRIMES OF THE CENTURY.
I have a feeling Amnesty is aware of its vulnerability. That must be why, beneath its loud “Israel’s Apartheid Against Israel” graphic that dominates its home page, you can see down below a secondary story dated Jan. 14, 2022, titled, “China: World must use Winter Olympics to demand human rights improvements.”
It’s as if Amnesty kept that piece somewhere on its home page so it can say, “Hey, just because we released that report on Israel at the start of the Beijing Games doesn’t mean we forgot about China!”
No can do.
Amnesty’s report bashing Israel just before the Beijing Games was bad enough for fueling rising antisemitism around the world and endangering the lives of Jews.
Now it must answer to an additional charge: that it failed at a unique moment to draw attention to the hundreds of thousands of Muslim minority men and women arbitrarily detained and subjected to mass internment, torture and persecution by Chinese authorities in Xinjiang.
Just when the world would have paid maximum attention, Amnesty gave the oppressors in China its own version of amnesty.’https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/columnist/editors-note/344924/the-beijing-olympics-was-a-singular-chance-to-expose-chinas-war-crimes-instead-amnesty-international-chose-to-single-out-israel/
‘DARWIN’S ABOMINABLE MYSTERY SOLVED YET AGAIN as scientists have found a fossil plant with leaves, a fruit and a flower bud in rocks from Inner Mongolia. These are distinctive features of angiosperms, the scientific term for flowering plants. The fossil plant has been named Florigerminis jurassica and is the oldest dated flowering plant found so far. The fossil is dated as 164 million years old, placing it in the Jurassic period of the evolutionary timetable. Until recently angiosperm plants were believed to have evolved in the Cretaceous, (65 – 145 million years ago) but scientists have speculated they must have evolved far earlier so they had time to evolve the great diversity of flowering plants that exists now and in the fossil record. This problem was noted by Darwin, who called the origin of flowering plants an “abominable mystery”. The research team who studied Florigerminis jurassica commented that their specimen along with two other recently discovered Jurassic fossil flowers “demands a rethinking of angiosperm evolution”.
Sources: Science Alert 16 January 2022, Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 6 January 2022, doi: 10.1144/SP521-2021-122
ED. COM. Every time someone finds a fossil flowering plant in Jurassic or early Cretaceous rocks they claim to have solved Darwin’s abominable mystery. However, finding a fully formed flowering plant never solves the mystery of how non-flowering plants turned into flowering plants because, like this new fossil, it is already a flowering plant. In fact, this “mystery” will never be solved because it exists only in the minds of Darwin and his followers. Flowering plants have always been flowering plants – the evidence supports that just as Genesis explains it – because God created all green plants according to their kinds, which included the plants we now classify as angiosperms. See Genesis 1:11-12. It’s seen in both the fossil record, and in our observations of living plants, which always reproduce after their kind.’https://mailchi.mp/creationresearch.net/creation-research-email-update-9th-february-2022?e=ce21bf0337
RICH DIVERSITY OF FOSSILS FROM “THE ‘DEAD’ HEART OF AUSTRALIA”. A team of researchers in Australia have been studying a mass of exquisitely preserved fossils found in the Central Tablelands in the Australian state of New South Wales. The deposit contains a great variety of plants and animals, including insects, spiders, fish and a bird feather. The fossils are so well preserved that microscopic structures and soft tissues can be clearly seen. Scientists were also able to identify pollen grains on the insects, and the stomach contents of fish. According to Matthew McCurry, of the Australian Museum, who led the study, “Our analyses suggest that the fossils formed when iron-rich groundwaters drained into a billabong, and that a precipitation of iron minerals-encased organisms that were living in or fell into the water.”
The rich diversity of the fossils, including many rainforest plants indicate they lived in a warm, moist environment. McCurry commented: “The fossils we have found prove that the area was once a temperate, mesic rainforest and that life was rich and abundant here in the Central Tablelands, NSW.” The fossil site is dated as 16 million years old, putting it in the Miocene epoch, considered to be a time when Australia was starting to dry out, and the landscape was changing from widespread rainforest to scrubland and arid regions.
Sources: Science Alert and SciTech Daily 7 January 2022, ABC News 8 January 2022 Science Advances 7 January 2022, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abm1406
ED. COM. The description “The ‘Dead’ Heart of Australia” comes from the headline in Science Alert and SciTech Daily. While this may inspire visions of scientists toiling in a lifeless desert in a remote area of outback Australia, the Central Tablelands is a farming and woodland region in the mountain range that runs parallel to the eastern seaboard. This region may not be lifeless, but it is no longer a rainforest. It has a temperate climate with frosty winters, and the areas that are not farmed are dry sclerophyll forest, consisting mainly of gum trees and scrubland. This fossil site, with its rich diversity of plants and animals, is a good reminder that climate change is real and Australia has dried out significantly, but it happened without any human industry.
For those who don’t speak Australian, a billabong is an oxbow lake. However, merely falling into a lake would never preserve the delicate structures and soft tissues found in these fossils. The exquisite preservation of these fossils could only happen if they were rapidly and deeply buried before any decay processes could destroy the delicate structures. Such fine preservation and the huge variety of organisms, including fish, land animals and land plants, fits well however with it being a washed in deposit, where floodwaters have washed across the landscape collecting and mixing whatever was living there and then dumping it quickly.
PS – Climate change has been happening ever since God warned Noah that there would be hot times and cold times as long as the earth endured. See Genesis 8:22.’https://mailchi.mp/creationresearch.net/creation-research-email-update-9th-february-2022?e=ce21bf0337
Theistic evolutionist ‘Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and founder of the evolutionary creation advocacy group BioLogos, has become a lightning rod within evangelicalism for promoting vaccines for COVID-19, especially among pastors and other faith leaders.
In a BioLogos-sponsored webinar last week, Collins chided many of his fellow white evangelicals for not getting the vaccine and alleged “the culture war is literally killing people.”
Collins cited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that vaccine hesitancy or resistance contributed to more than 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, the Religion News Service reported. He suggested vaccine resistance was partly the result of Christians falling for misinformation.
Yet in a recent Daily Wire article that’s been widely circulated, conservative writer Megan Basham questioned why evangelicals haven’t interrogated Collins more rigorously before sharing their platform with the federal official she called “Caesar’s agent.”
Citing news reports, Basham accused Collins of trying to suppress questions surrounding the source of COVID-19 and the efficacy of the federal COVID-19 response. She also accused Collins himself of being “willing to compromise transparency and truth for PR considerations.”
Basham also questioned whether it was appropriate for Collins to recruit evangelical leaders like Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer to help him spread the government’s preferred narratives about COVID-19.
On a podcast with Stetzer in September, Collins said, “I want pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work.”
But Basham asked, “(I)s it truly the pastor’s job to tell church members to ‘trust the science?’”
Spokespeople for the NIH and BioLogos didn’t immediately reply when The Roys Report reached out asking for a response to the Daily Wire piece. TheDaily Wire didn’t receive a response when it reached out to Stetzer, public theologian Russell Moore, and other high-profile evangelicals mentioned in the piece.
‘Misinformation . . . and conspiracies’
Collins regularly cites his faith in BioLogos podcasts and elsewhere, sometimes comparing his path to Christ to that of C.S. Lewis. Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project, is author of the best-selling book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which won a Christianity Today Book Award.
Because of his substantial scientific credentials and professed Christian belief, The Washington Post described Collins as being in an “unusual position to address people of faith.”
In last week’s BioLogos webinar, Collins said he was surprised by how much his shared faith mattered to Christians. Researchers, he said, have found that “unless that truth comes at you from somebody you trust, you’re not going to call it truth at all.”
Collins also highlighted how white evangelicals were somewhat less likely than average to have gotten vaccinated for COVID-19.
About two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants had gotten at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine when Pew Research polled Americans in late August. At the time, 70% of black Protestants had done so, and almost three-quarters of Americans in general.
Collins told RNS he blamed “misinformation and lies and conspiracies” for part of white evangelicals’ hesitancy about COVID-19 vaccination. He also thought his messaging about the pandemic could have been better.
Credibility as an evangelical
However, Basham called Collins’ credibility with evangelicals into question.
Under Collins’ watch, she wrote, the NIH has funded research using abortion-derived fetal tissue and factored in diversity criteria when awarding grants. NIH funding has also gone to research on “sexual and gender minorities,” she wrote.
BioLogos, which Collins founded, also advocates for “an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation.”
According to Pew Research, only about a third of evangelicals think humans evolved and a majority oppose abortion and same-sex marriage.
Basham suggested Collins gained his credibility from “character witnesses” like Stetzer and former Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore, who praised Collins’ “Christian humility.”
After the article’s publication, Basham noted on Twitter that BioLogos suddenly canceled an interview she had scheduled with Collins on a different topic. When she asked why, an organization spokesperson replied that “the tone and claims” of her article were “inconsistence” with BioLogos’ aims.
Responses Mixed
Responses to the controversy have been mixed.
Jay Richards, a research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, urged pastors and religious leaders to apologize for “this naïve propagandizing for Collins.”
Kelley Owens, a kids director at a church in Indianapolis, tweeted: “If nothing else, this pandemic has served to increase my discernment and give me pause before I uncritically accept any position . . . Even if it comes from someone I have previously trusted.”
However, a medical doctor noted on social media that Collins was “far from the only medical doctor urging, masking, vaccination, and reasonable public health interventions. In fact there have been doctors and nurses in churches all across the country giving the same message to evangelicals.”
One reader likened the pushback against Collins to how Christians interacted with former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
Erick Erickson, a conservative Christian pundit, initially said he was “disturbed” by Basham’s article. But later, he published a blog post calling for an end to what he characterized as “infighting” among Christians trying to bolster their own credibility.
“(M)aybe those in positions of leadership need to realize there are others they’re inspiring to tribalism, not to the trials of the Christian life,” he wrote. “Maybe instead of picking sides, pick Jesus.”’https://julieroys.com/francis-collins-draws-fire-vaccine-advocacy-top-evangelicals/?mc_cid=27c313549b&mc_eid=b13d34ad49
If you have read this far Collins is wrong in both his belief on how God created and on the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines. Genesis 1:31 ¶ And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day and THERE IS NO WAY OF GETTING THEISTIC EVOLUTION out of that!
- The Prime Minister, in Parliament, apologised personally to Brittany Higgins for the culture that contributed to what allegedly happened to her, and announced his government’s general acceptance of the Jenkins Report’s recommendations to reform toxic aspects of parliamentary culture. Grace Tame, meanwhile, again highlighted her true personal and blatantly partisan enmity by labelling Morrison’s statement a ‘stunt’. She and Higgins today will address the National Press Club, an address scheduled by the NPC (president, Laura Tingle) to do maximum political damage to Morrison, just as last week’s lynch mob did likewise.
- ABC types are gloating at Morrison’s new funding plan for the ABC and SBS giving them substantial additional funding, and ending a four-year funding freeze. ABC chairman Ita Buttrose purred. The likes of Media Watch’s Paul Barry ungratefully say it’s a political fix that won’t shut them up – it is, and it won’t. But would you appease a perennially-misbehaving toddler by giving him an ice-cream as a reward for his selfish tantrums? That’s the principle being applied to the rent-seeking ABC management by the Morrison government, in a vain attempt to mollify its enemies who talk to its friends.
- Perhaps even to his own surprise, Scott Morrison yesterday got his modified religious freedom legislation package through the Coalition party room, with embattled MPs maybe realising it’s better to hang together than hang separately. One Liberal MP, Tasmanian Bridget Archer, has signalled she’ll likely vote against it because it doesn’t have sufficient protections for her liking, but otherwise the bills’ fate is to be decided by the so-called ‘progressives’ in the Senate, rather than rebellious government MPs and senators
- The late Christian Kerr put greater store on the Left-biased Essential poll in the Grauniad than Newspoll in the Australian. So take note, all those on the Left and Right who fervently wish the Morrison government gone: the Essential poll released yesterday shows Labor and the Coalition neck-and-neck on both primary and two-party preferred votes, with 8 per cent undecided. It also indicates summer’s voter anger with Morrison is cooling, with his satisfaction rating recovering from a recent low. For all Morrison and the government’s faults, is the game still afoot?’ This is from an Email from The Spectator Australia https://spectator.com.au/
whatyareckon 