CAIR Wants Us to Hate CAIR

CAIR's behavior is so odd. There is only one way to understand it. CAIR wants non-Muslims to hate CAIR so CAIR can complain about hate. Here is the latest example of CAIR's irrationality:

A Muslim advocacy group said today that it is asking the FBI to investigate an attack on worshippers outside a Columbus mosque on Friday.

A group of teenage boys threw rocks at the Masjid AsSahaaba mosque, 795 E. Hudson St. in South Linden, hitting one worshipper and breaking mosque windows, in what police said was a “biased attack on Muslim men leaving the mosque after prayer during the Ramadan season.”

Ramadan is a holy month in which Muslims fast during daylight hours and say extended evening prayers at mosques.

The mosque's imam, Abdiiaziz Abdi, and a witness, Robert, who would give only his first name, say the boys were simply looking for trouble. They don't think they were targeted as Muslims.

But Romin Iqbal, staff attorney for the Council on American- Islamic Relations in Ohio says he's asking the FBI to investigate it as a hate crime.

Columbus police are investigating, said spokeswoman Amanda Ford.

The Muslims witness say it was not a hate crime, but what does CAIR do? Demand a hate crime investigation. Based on nothing.

There is certainly nothing lovable about CAIR's behavior.

Abukar Arman and Support for HAMAS

Akubar Arman was a member of the Franklin County, Ohio justice commission which has oversight of homeland security in Franklin County. After Patrick Poole exposed Akubar Arman’s support of HAMAS, the Franklin county officials discovered that Mr. Arman was not a United States citizen and therefore prohibited from serving on the commission.

About the same time, Barbara Carmen, a Columbus Dispatch reporter, wrote an article about how Mr. Arman had been “cleared” of terrorism charges. That was of course absurd, because no one had charged Mr. Arman with any terrorism charges.

There is no doubt that Mr. Arman is a HAMAS supporter. He is not shy about his support having written one or more supportive published articles.

Memo to Barbara Carmen: The Clinton administration accurately identified and designated HAMAS as a terrorist organization. Mr. Arman, therefore, is a supporter of a terrorist organization. That does not mean he is about to strap bombs around his own waist. But if he supports a terrorist organization, he necessarily and logically supports terrorism.

Mr. Arman says it is his constitutional right to free speech to support HAMAS. Maybe so, but speech has consequences. And the consequences of his speech are that he supports terrorism, so I don’t want him anywhere near my government. This is not about hate. It is about right and wrong, and supporting terrorism is wrong.

Message to Muslims: if you support HAMAS, you support terrorism. Conversely, if you wholly reject terrorism, you must wholly reject HAMAS.

Immigration Reform

I have only minor quibbles with the article quoted in Chuck Muth's blog. This one come the closest to reality that I have seen published.

The article outline a framework for immigration reform that woudl work so much better than anything Congress has put on the table.

We Return

No posts for two and a half months. but ther is simply too much going on in the world to shut up now.

I am frustrated by immigration reform. I don't think either side gets it really. Immigration reform needs to be based upon principles. but no one articulates the principles very well. The immigration problem is not about cheap labor or letting people get away with something. It is about real human problems and about our national security. Here is my humble attempt to articulate the principles upon which immigration reform should be based.

1. National Security. We need to keep terrorists out. At least we need to make it difficult for foreign terrorists to enter the country. Our borders need to be secure. Bear in mind that we are not seeing any Catholic terrorists in recent years.

2. Compassion. We need compassion for those within our borders, however they arrived, who are here to work hard, assimilate and achieve the American dream. Many who arrived here "illegally" did so at great risk and with great hardship, because they wanted a better life. We need to have compassion, not condemnation, even if they jumped to the head of the line. Many conservatives falsely assume that entering the country illegally is a crime. I found no such crime in the United States Code.

3. We need to cease giving away our social services from our tax dollars, to those who arrive illegally. We need to be a magnet for the right reasons: Be productive and succeed. Not the wrong reasons: Free health care and welfare.

4. If people arrived illegally and commit crimes, they should be deported. that is a risk of coming in illegally.

5. We need to provide a reasonable path to citizenship for those who are here and are productive and who assimilate into our culture. Making arrangements on any unpaid back taxes on the same basis as any citizen should be a prerequisite.

6. It should be easier to get in the country legally than it is illegally. At least we can keep track of those in the country legally. Issue them credit cards, maybe. Make them really easy to track.

I am sure there are others. I will post as I think of them.

Virginia Tech

The massacre at Virginia Tech has evoked the expected calls for more gun control. But does that make any sense?

How many students lives would have been saved if the professors or some of the students who were attacked or the student victims had been carrying guns? If the campus had not been an official “gun free area,” with the shooter had been stopped by someone else's gun before killing 32 people? We will never know.

The argument in favor of gun control goes like this. If gun control were effective, the shooter would not have been able to obtain the guns that he obtained. It was too easy for him to obtain the guns and the ammunition.

Gun control advocates presume that the shooter would not have been able to obtain the guns and ammunition by illegal means. If the shooter were determined to go on his rampage, what makes us think that he would not be able to get around the law. Just because a law bans some contraband, that doesn't mean that it's not obtainable. Oh yes, usually raises the price. It makes money for black marketeers. But that doesn't mean that the contraband is unobtainable.

On the other hand, the Second Amendment crowd, points out that if one of the students had had a gun, perhaps the shooter would have been stopped earlier. Perhaps fewer people would have died.

How likely is it that there would have been any guns in the classroom even if the school had not been a gun free zone? I suggest that it is pretty unlikely. Unless we were to force a professor to have guns, most people, professors and otherwise, would not carry them as a matter of course. I can't imagine a campus full of people walk around with guns and holsters at their sides. How likely is it that there would have been a student with a concealed-carry permit carrying a weapon to happen to be in one of the question classrooms attacked by the shooter? But, without the "gun free zone" designation, who knows?

One thing is for sure. The gun-free students and gun-free professors had no chance against a well armed and cold-blooded gunmen. How does that balance against the possibility of an irresponsible gun toting student who gets drunk or high on drugs and pulls out his firearm and begins shooting? I suppose that is the purpose of a "gun free zone," isn't it.

I do not think that restricting the sale of guns or requiring registration of guns would have mattered one way or the other to a determined shooter planning to go on a rampage. By all accounts, this was a long-planned rampage. The guns were purchased in March. The rampage occurred in mid April. A determined nutcase had plenty of opportunity to obtain a black-market guns if he wanted them.

The old saying is, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. How true in the Virginia Tech case!

Update: From Glenn Reynolds writing in the NY Daily News:

In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 fromhis truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

Police can't be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it's usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they're armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

Weenie Sailors Dishonor Britain

The story of the British sailors continue. While most of the media give the British sailor a pass for their collaboration in the Iranian propagandization of their capture, there is outrage in Britain over them running to the medial to sell their stories. The Ottawa Citizen opines:

The honourable thing would have been to renounce their coerced behaviour, denounce the Iranians' use of them for propaganda, and acknowledge that anything they endured was nothing compared to the sacrifices others have made.

Instead, some ran to the media with their victim tales. The big moneymaker was 26-year-old Faye Turney, the only woman in the group. The Royal navy member reportedly sold her story for about $300,000 in a newspaper and television deal.

Tales of victimhood? Tales of the lack of fortitude?

What do the Brits teach their military about behavior when captured? Any dishonor to protect themselves? Or instead: give name, rank and serial number only.

To be sure, not all captured Americans soldiers have behaved as trained, but as a previous post has pointed out, American military people taken hostage by Iran did much better than those British sailors in upholding our honor.

Don Imus and Unforgiveness

Don Imus? Not a fan. Saying that a women's basketball team looked like a bunch of nappy-headed hos was uncalled for. so he groveled in apology.

The reactions of the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson? Unforgiveness.

What are these guys, Sharpton and Jackson, reverends of exactly? Certainly not Christianity.

Christians forgive their trespassers.