A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Last Wednesday we learned that the Iranian regime had seized a second oil tanker recently in the Persian Gulf, forcing it to dock at an Iranian port under orders from the regime’s “judiciary.”
It was seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Go-fast boats in the Strait of Hormuz. This remains the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, according to the US Energy Information Administration, where roughly 20% of the world’s oil transits every day.
The Pentagon subsequently informed us that these two incidents were just the latest of fifteen cases since Biden came to the White House where Iran has threatened or attacked international shipping in the Persian Gulf region.
These kinds of attacks are unacceptable. The Iranians know that, and I guarantee you our enemies and adversaries know that. And yet the Iranians act with impunity. Why?
For starters, they know the current U.S. President. Biden has been taking money and supporting pro-Tehran regime lobbyists since at least 2002 when a group of Tehran supporters threw a fund-raiser for him in California that brought in $30,000.
From then on, Biden became a reliable vote (along with Senator Chuck Hagel) when it came to opposing sanctions on Iran. He railed against President George W. Bush and his “axis of evil” because it included the Iranian regime.
Since becoming president, he has tried hard to re-invigorate the bad Iran nuclear deal, a deal that not only gave Iran a date certain to become a nuclear weapons state with impunity but lifted all sanctions on the regime’s ballistic missile programs as well.
Just think how many people in Israel, Ukraine, Yemen, and Iraq – including US soldiers and contractors – have been victims of those missiles since 2015.
One reason the Iranians may have chosen the Niovi, a Panama-fragged tanker, as their latest target was specifically to embarrass the United States. Over the past year, the Treasury Department has sanctioned over one hundred Iranian-owned ships laundered through various owners and reflagged in Panama.
The Panamanian government responded in January by de-flagging 136 Iranian vessels. So hitting a Panamanian registered vessel was pay-back by Iran to Panama, as well as an embarrassment to the U.S.
In the days when America still commanded a 600-ship navy, we would have sailed an aircraft carrier – or even two – through the Strait of Hormuz to put the Iranians on notice.
Not today. We used to have sixteen carrier battle groups; today, we have just eleven carriers still in service. Of those eleven, eight are in dry dock or on extended home port duty in San Diego or Norfolk, VA.
Only two are actively deployed, and both of them are in Asia. (The USS George Washington is off the west coast of Australia, and the USS Nimitz is off Thailand). A third, the USS Ronald Reagan, is idling off the coast of Japan under “Restricted Availability.”
When the United States shows weakness, it creates vulnerability. Weakness invites attack.
There is only two ways to respond to Iranian regime aggression: forceful military action, and by empowering the Iranian pro-democracy movement.
In 1988, after a spate of similar maritime piracy incidents (including the mining of international sea lanes), President Reagan ordered Operation Praying Mantis on April 18, 1988, the fifth anniversary of the Iranian suicide bomber attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
In roughly twenty-four hours, U.S. forces sank one-third of the Iranian navy. Iran didn’t dare attack us again openly until 2004-2005 in Iraq, and even then they initially acted through proxies. (They also acted through proxies – al Qaeda – in attacking U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001).
Fast forward to New Year’s Eve 2020. Iranian-backed militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during the final days of 2019. President Trump responded immediately by redeploying hundreds of U.S. Marines from Kuwait to protect the embassy in Baghdad, to prevent another Benghazi from occurring.
And when he learned that the initial attack on the embassy was just the beginning and that Quds Force commander Qassem Suleymani was flying into Baghdad to supervise the next wave of attacks, President Trump ordered him taken out.
Iran responded by launching a half-dozen missiles on the al-Asad air base in Iraq, after warning the base commander so troops could take cover. And while regime officials including Ayatollah Khamenei have claimed they intend to assassinate President Trump and other U.S. leaders in retaliation, until now they have been unable to do so. To date, Iran has not found a successor with anywhere near the charisma, contacts, and capabilities.
The United States has never taken vigorous action to empower the pro-democracy forces inside Iran. Voice of America and Radio Farda have paid lip service only to anti-regime protests, and Biden administration officials have lashed out at the regime’s cruel repression with diplomatic wet noodles.
I have no expectation the Biden regime will change its approach. But how long will it take for Congress to start demanding an accounting of the administration?
Here’s my suggestion for an opening salvo: what kickbacks did U.S. government officials eventually receive from Iran for the $1.7 billion in cash Obama sent to Tehran in 2016?
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
A new inspector general’s report released Tuesday gives us the latest evidence of the perfidy and anti-Americanism of the Biden regime: even after the Taliban took over in that country in the wake of the regime’s catastrophically botched withdrawal of American troops, the American taxpayer remains the world’s largest donor to Afghanistan. This is beyond absurd, as the Taliban, which is inveterately hostile to the U.S., is inevitably going to obtain some or all of that money, and could conceivably use it to finance attacks on Americans and U.S. interests. Is that what the traitor class that is running the Biden regime wants?
The Washington Timesreported Wednesday that “some $2.1 billion has flowed to Afghanistan since August of 2021.” Biden regime officials, of course, insist that this is humanitarian aid that is “going to assist Afghans and not feed into the Taliban’s treasury.” The obvious problem with this, however, is that “the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction said officials can’t say for sure that the Taliban isn’t siphoning some of the money away from the groups the U.S. is funding.” Of course. Why wouldn’t they? And what could conceivably stop them? In light of that, and the nefarious uses to which the Taliban could put the money, we shouldn’t be sending a penny to Afghanistan. But clearly, Biden’s handlers have different priorities from those involving the safety and well-being of the American people.
Inspector General John F. Sopko stated: “Since the Taliban takeover, the U.S. government has sought to continue supporting the Afghan people without providing benefits for the Taliban regime. However, it is clear from our work that the Taliban is using various methods to divert U.S. aid dollars.” He “pointed to reports that the Taliban levies fee charges on nongovernmental organizations still operating in the country. And in some areas, Taliban officials have ordered NGOs to provide assistance to Taliban personnel before others.” And of course, the Biden regime’s State Department “doesn’t know how much assistance has been siphoned off in that manner.” Why would they? They’re too busy implementing Critical Race Theory and putting on drag shows.
Meanwhile, the Christian news organization Mission Network News reported on April 3 that “the Taliban are offering money for Afghans to turn in any Christians they know. And Afghans are desperate, further heightening the security risk [to] Christians.” This might lead some to think that the U.S. should continue the humanitarian aid, so as to relieve the Afghans’ plight and ease the pressure on the country’s tiny and embattled Christian minority. But U.S. taxpayer money appears to be going straight to the Taliban.
Evidence for this was provided late last year. Da Afghanistan Bank, Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled central bank, tweeted the images on Nov. 29, Dec. 5, Dec. 6, and Dec. 14, 2022: massive stacks of American hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in plastic, bar-coded, and placed in boxes or blue plastic bags on the tarmac at the Kabul airport. The bank said this was $40 million in “humanitarian aid,” but said nothing about who had sent it, and one observer said that judging from the photos, there looked to be much more than $40 million flowing into the Taliban’s coffers. So who was funding the Taliban with tens of millions in untraceable cash?
The prime suspect, of course, was Old Joe Biden and his handlers.
On Aug. 31, 2021, Old Joe declared, “We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid.” Then in January 2022, National Security Council spokes wonk Emily Horne said proudly: “The United States is announcing a new contribution of more than $308 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Afghanistan. This brings total US humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $782 million since October 2021, and we remain the single largest donor of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.”
Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi, whom the Australian Broadcasting Corporation identifies as “an international relations lecturer and Afghanistan expert from La Trobe University,” said that it would not be difficult at all for the Taliban to hijack this aid money: “The distribution and dispersal of the money are not very transparent. There is very little that we know about how this money is used in Afghanistan and the mechanisms of control over aid delivery.”
Indeed. But no one seems to mind, and the money just keeps flowing in. What could possibly go wrong? Ask Afghanistan’s Christians.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
The least honorable president in American history had a softball interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Friday, in which he uttered one of the most outlandish lies of his entire life, which has been filled with his outlandish lies: “I think I’ve proven myself to be honorable, as well as effective.” As Matt Margolis noted Sunday, this was in the course of a paean of boasting from Old Joe Biden that included praise of his own wisdom and experience. But now Joe Biden would have us believe that he is honorable, too? Come on, man! This guy lies every time his lips move.
The part about Old Joe being effective, however, was actually true. If Biden wanted to weaken America (politically, militarily, and economically), erase the Southern border, antagonize our friends as well as our enemies worldwide, and advance the Left’s socialist, authoritarian agenda at the expense of the American people, then he has indeed done a bang-up job. If, on the other hand, he is really as America-First as he has been pretending to be lately, now that the 2024 campaign season is approaching, then he has been a galloping disaster as president, and just the opposite of effective. It all depends on your point of view, you see, and since Old Joe’s administration is dedicated to calling opposing views “disinformation” and silencing them accordingly, pretty soon we will all have to agree that his presidency has been remarkably effective.
But honorable? That Old Joe would even dare say this is staggering. The man is the most dedicated and relentless liar ever to occupy the Oval Office, and we’re talking here about a job that has been held by such skillful prevaricators as Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Richard M. Nixon. Biden has lied throughout his political career and long before it even started: on Dec. 1, 1965, the faculty of the Syracuse College of Law published a report about Young Joe, stating that Biden “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” and recommended that he fail a legal methods course because of his plagiarism.
For years, Biden was so craven as to lie about the central tragedy of his life, the auto accident that took the life of his first wife Neilia. Old Joe repeatedly claimed that she was killed by a drunk driver; the driver, however, was not drunk, and the real story was that Neilia drove into the path of the oncoming truck. The driver’s daughter repeatedly asked Biden to apologize for lying about her father, who was driven into a deep depression by Biden’s public lies. True to dishonorable form, Old Joe never did apologize. Then in Sept. 1987, Biden torpedoed his own presidential campaign when he delivered a speech that lifted an entire story of his early life from a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
The lying has continued since Old Joe began pretending to be president, and has gotten so bad, and so obvious, that the New YorkTimes felt it necessary back in Oct. 2022 to do some damage control, informing us that “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel.” That’s all it is, see. It’s not as if he were a deeply dishonest man or anything like that. But even the Times couldn’t make Joe look good when it started ticking off some examples: “The exaggerated biography that Mr. Biden tells includes having been a fierce civil rights activist who was repeatedly arrested. He has claimed to have been an award-winning student who earned three degrees. And last week, speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, he said he had been ‘raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.’”
The lies have gone on and on. On the campaign trail in 2019, he told a story about a Navy captain who tried to refuse a Silver Star after trying and failing to save a wounded comrade. The story wasn’t true, as even the Washington Postadmitted, but instead of discarding it after it was publicly revealed to be false, Old Joe made it about his family. In Dec. 2022, Biden retold the same story, but this time it was about his uncle Frank being awarded a Purple Heart. That version was a lie as well. And most recently, Biden has been insisting that his notorious son Hunter has “done nothing wrong.”
Old Joe Biden is a lot of things. “Honorable” isn’t even close to being one of them.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
After claiming that he was going to be holding a “major press conference,” Old Joe Biden sat down for a scripted, carefully filmed, heavily edited softball interview with MSNBC sycophant Stephanie Ruhle on Friday, in which he addressed the allegations against his notorious son Hunter for the very first time. As you’d expect, Old Joe was no more disposed to admit any wrongdoing than he ever is, so unwary viewers would come away from the MSNBC interview with the idea that Hunter is a choirboy, as pure as the driven snow and doted on by his proud father as he goes around helping little old ladies across the street.
Federal prosecutors are considering charging Hunter with tax and firearm offenses, and there are numerous other, more serious things for which he could be charged, but Proud Papa was nevertheless adamant: “My son has done nothing wrong,” Old Joe insisted. “I trust him. I have faith in him, and it impacts my presidency by making me feel proud of him.” Gee, that’s touching, but it’s also even more separated from reality than the rest of the Biden “presidency.” It’s easier to accept that Old Joe himself is competent and coherent and that Rachel Levine is a woman than it is to buy the idea that Hunter Biden is an upstanding individual, as honest as the day is long.
Whatever Hunter Biden may end up being charged with or even if he is charged with nothing at all there is a massive “appearance of impropriety,” as Bill Clinton, a man who knows all about impropriety, used to call it. Back in Sept. 2020, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Senate Committee on Finance issued a report noting that while his father was vice president, Hunter Biden was “paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch” for his presence on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Hunter’s presence on this board caused a great many problems. The report notes that “the Obama administration knew that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” What’s more, “in early 2015 the former Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, George Kent, raised concerns to officials in Vice President Joe Biden’s office about the perception of a conflict of interest with respect to Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board. Kent’s concerns went unaddressed, and in September 2016, he emphasized in an email to his colleagues, ‘Furthermore, the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.’” It was more than just awkward. It was inexcusable, and it was clear evidence of corruption.
No one seems particularly concerned about Hunter’s presence on Burisma’s board now, yet it is a clear red flag. Hunter Biden had no educational background or experience in the natural gas industry. What’s more, he was a dissolute crack addict who consorted with prostitutes. If he had not been the son of the vice president of the United States, does anyone really believe that Burisma would have offered him this lucrative job? Hunter’s very presence on Burisma’s board is prima facie evidence of influence-peddling, as is his new career as an artist.
To be a struggling artist is a cultural cliché going back to Vincent Van Gogh shivering in a garret while producing world-historical masterpieces that the public wouldn’t come to appreciate until after his tragic death. Artist Hunter, however, has paid no such dues. Even though he took up painting late in life and you can find more compelling artworks on sale for a hundred bucks at the local frame store, Hunter’s paintings have commanded eye-watering prices up to $500,000, although the latest batch was positively bargain-basement stuff, going for only $85,000.
How many real artists are there out there who don’t happen to be the son of the president and who are struggling to get any attention for their artwork? How many competent artists are there on the scene today who would be grateful to be paid a tenth of what Hunter Biden gets for a painting? What are the people who buy these paintings getting? Why were the paintings in Hunter’s first exhibit so sharply divergent in style from those in his second exhibit (did he switch ghost painters)?
“My son has done nothing wrong,” says Old Joe, but it sure looks otherwise. And I haven’t even mentioned the laptop, the child support imbroglio, and all the rest. Will we ever know the full extent of the corruption of the Biden crime family?
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Why does this keep happening? Yes, sexual molestation happens all over. But we see Muslim migrants involved in this kind of story is seen on a not-infrequent basis. Why? One reason may be because such treatment of infidel women is sanctioned in the Qur’an.
In France, a Muslim quoted Qur’an while raping his victim. A survivor of a Muslim rape gang in the UK has said that her rapists would quote the Qur’an to her, and believed their actions were justified by Islam. Thus it came as no surprise when Muslim migrants in France raped a girl and videoed the rape while praising Allah and invoking the Qur’an. In India, a Muslim gave a Qur’an and a prayer rug to the woman he was holding captive and repeatedly raping. And the victim of an Islamic State jihadi rapist recalled: “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God…He said that raping me is his prayer to God.” In India, a Muslim kidnapped and raped a 14-year-old Hindu girl, and forced her to read the Qur’an and Islamic prayers. In Pakistan, another Christian woman recounted that her rapist was also religious: “He threw me on the bed and started to rape me. He demanded I marry him and convert to Islam. I refused. I am not willing to deny Jesus and he said that if I would not agree he would kill me.” Rapists demanded that another girl’s family turn her over to them, claiming that she had recited the Islamic profession of faith during the rape and thus could not live among infidels.
The Qur’an teaches that Infidel women can be lawfully taken for sexual use (cf. its allowance for a man to take “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.” (33:59) The implication there is that if women do not cover themselves adequately with their outer garments, they may be abused and such abuse would be justified.
“Eleven men charged in Rochdale grooming investigation,” BBC, May 3, 2023:
Eleven men have been charged in connection with investigations into the grooming and sexual abuse of teenage girls.
The men from Greater Manchester are accused of abuse against three girls in Rochdale between 2000 and 2006….
Tahir Rashid, 52, of Rochdale, charged with 13 offences, including rape and penetrative sexual activity with an underage girl Mohammad Salim, 44, of Rochdale, charged with eight offences, including rape and sexual activity with an underage girl Suklene Shah, 44, of Rochdale, charged with two counts of sexual activity with an underage girl Mohammed Shazad, 42, of Rochdale, charged with 16 offences, including rape, trafficking persons within the UK for sexual exploitation, and sexual activity with an underage girl Nisar Hussain, 39, of Rochdale, charged with three offences, including making indecent images of a child and trafficking persons within the UK for sexual exploitation Naheem Akram, 46, of Rochdale, charged with 10 offences, including rape and sexual activity with an underage girl Mohammed Zahid, 63, of Crumpsall, charged with 32 offences, including rape, trafficking persons within the UK for sexual exploitation, sexual activity with an underage girl, gross indecency with an underage girl, procuring an underage girl to have unlawful sexual intercourse with unknown males Roheez Khan, 37, of Rochdale, charged with three offences, including rape and sexual activity with an underage girl Arfan Khan, 39, of Rochdale, charged with four offences, including rape and sexual activity with an underage girl Mustaq Ahmed, 65, of Oldham, charged with six offences, including rape and gross indecency with an underage girl Kasir Bashir, 48, of Oldham, charged with six offences, including rape and gross indecency with an underage girl
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
On Twitter, a user by the name of Messianic Apostate posted athread about how a form of homosexuality, specifically homosexual hebephilia, was not only tolerated, but widely accepted and practiced in Muslim civilization for over a thousand years. Hebephilia is when an adult has a sexual preference for pubescent children in early adolescence, between ages 11 and 14.Messianic Apostate’s source was a scientific study that Islamic preacher Daniel Haqiqatjou (who has been featured in articles at Jihad Watch before) had been misusing to defend child marriage. Little did Haqiqatjou know that he shot himself in the foot by citing a study that not only defends a form of homosexuality, but reveals how rampant it was in Islamic history. Haqiqatjou used this study in a recent debate with Christian apologist and YouTuber InspiringPhilosophy, also known as Michael Jones, “Is Child Marriage Acceptable? Islam vs Christianity.” Haqiqatjou’s arguments for child marriage were absolutely insane.
Here is a paraphrase of Messianic Apostate’s thread:
Is Islam a solution to Western degeneracy, as Muslims such as Daniel Haqiqatjou claim, or are they just playing a con game? A thread on how homosexual hebephilia was widespread in Islamic civilization:
In his debates, Haqiqatjou has been using a scientific paper by Bruce Rind as his go-to source whenever the subject of child marriage, or “minor marriage” as Daniel prefers to say, is brought up. The abstract of the paper is available here.
In the recent debate between Haqiqatjou and InspiringPhilosophy, Haqiqatjou got exposed for misusing Rind’s paper to sell the idea that child marriage isn’t harmful to girls (or at least pubescent girls, which is what Bruce Rind was considering).
As InspiringPhilosophy points out, Bruce Rind’s paper doesn’t just focus on heterosexual hebephilia. Rind’s paper also focuses on homosexual hebephilia, and even defends it for the same reasons he defends heterosexual hebephilia!
In fact, not only does Rind defend it, but he also has an entire table about how homosexual hebephilia was widespread and accepted through so many cultures and civilizations, which not only goes on for four pages but even includes Islamic civilizations (page 15)!
Notice how homosexual hebephilia is not only described as “highly romanticised” in Albania under Ottoman rule, but was noticed by visitors, who said that Muslim men and Muslim boys aged 12-17 “frequently cultivated passionate, enthusiastic erotic relations” with each other…
Rind also mentions that Muslims in Albania had “boy-brides,” a practice that spread to others… Does this mean that Muslims endorsed gay marriage, or at least some form of it, long before the Western world did? Haqiqatjou and his fanboys sure have a lot of explaining to do.
Granted, Rind does also say that this was also practiced by Albanian Christians, but he implicitly blames this on the Muslims in Albania (who were the majority population) by saying that it spread it to the Albanian Christians, which speaks volumes about how widespread it was.
Homosexual hebephilic attractions were also “pervasive” in Islamic societies from the eighth to nineteenth centuries, and “were seen as just as normal as heterosexual ones.” Rind notes “staggering amounts of love poetry show an obsession with boyish beauty, seen as comparable to women’s.”
Homosexual hebephilic attractions and love poetry were literally a norm in Islamic societies for over 1,000 years. What embarrassing levels of degeneracy for Muslims! What’s worse is that this only ended in the 19th century due to “Western abhorrence and efforts to modernize.”
Rind also notes that for Islamic societies from the eighth to nineteenth centuries, there was “particularly extensive documentation” that showed “men’s attraction to boys was considered as natural to their attraction to women” in these Islamic societies.
Rind states that “it was widely taken for granted” that “beardless youths posed a temptation to adult men as a whole, and not merely to a small minority of deviants,” which again emphasizes that homosexual hebephilic attractions were very widespread in Islamic societies.
It gets even worse! Rind also cites J.T. Monroe, who quotes a 12th century jurist who says ‘‘He who claims that he experiences no desire when looking at beautiful boys or youth is a liar, and if we could believe him, he would be an animal, not a human being.’’
What’s also worth mentioning is that when you check Bruce Rind’s citation of J.T. Monroe in the references (of which there are hundreds), you can see that Monroe contributed to a book entitled Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. Monroe’s contribution has a hilarious title: “The striptease that was blamed on Abu Bakr’s naughty son: Was father being shamed, or was the poet having fun?”
On page 20, Bruce Rind once again notes that homosexual hebephilic attractions, which were expressed through “boy brides” in Albania and “love poetry” in North Africa, Western and Central Asia (as mentioned on page 15), continued for a thousand years.
Bruce Rind once again notes that the practice of homosexual hebephilia in Muslim societies and other non-Western societies got abolished because of Western influence, such as colonial rule or internal pressures to reform by their own leaders to please the West.
What’s also worth mentioning is that when homosexual hebophillia was widespread in societies such as Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, guess which group of people ended this degenerate practice, while Muslims indulged in it with no shame? Christians!
The fact that such rampant levels of degeneracy occurred throughout Islamic history does not surprise me, because there still seem to be traces of this in the Muslim world. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s known as “bacha bazi,” and there is plenty of documentation of this.
Keep in mind that I’m using the same scientific paper that Haqiqatjou has been citing to defend child marriage. He’s been using it as a smoking gun whenever child marriage gets brought up in his debates, but the paper defends heterosexual and homosexual hebephilia.
This raises numerous questions: Did Haqiqatjou even read the entire paper that he cited, or did he just read the abstract? How many of the sources that he cites does he actually read thoroughly?
How do Muslims explain the fact that for a thousand years, their own civilizations had a rampant homosexual practice that was not just tolerated, but widely accepted, despite the fact that Islam, like Christianity, regards homosexuality as a sin? Why did it take external influence from the West to end such a practice?
Why weren’t Muslim rulers and scholars able to end this practice themselves when Christians ended it in Greece, Rome and Renaissance Florence? Can you honestly even condemn such a practice when so many of your ancestors didn’t for centuries?
I am open to hearing answers. The only answer I can think of is that Muslims in the past didn’t consider this practice as sexual, and that it wasn’t supposed to be sexual, but this is incoherent and desperate.
Anyway, I want to credit InspiringPhilosophy for being the first one to bring this to people’s attention, and also to credit Haqiqatjou for giving us such a goldmine. If it wasn’t for them, this information would still be buried in obscurity.
In conclusion, I’ll end this by saying that Haqiqatjou and his colleagues and followers are playing a con game with people when they try to sell Islam as a solution to Western degeneracy. Whether it be out of ignorance, deception of stupidity, that remains to be seen.
This thread is important to read because in recent times, Muslims have been taking advantage of the ever-increasing degeneracy within the Western world by trying to sell the idea that Sharia is a solution to this degeneracy. But this is nothing more than a diabolical con game. Many Westerners have been deceived by this ploy, not realizing that Muslims are playing a con game with them, because there’s also degeneracy in traditional Muslim civilization and the modern Muslim world to this day. Trading one form of degeneracy for another is akin to trading one poison for another poison.
Daniel Haqiqatjou was defeated in the debate and has been doing nothing but damage control since his defeat.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Sanctuary cities are money pits for taxpayers — who knew? Care of illegal aliens is costing cities — and thus local taxpayers—across the country billions of dollars.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) recently whined about having to care for too many illegals being bused from Texas, and New York City is also struggling. New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) angrily noted in April that the illegal migrant crisis has “destroyed” NYC. Ironically, both New York City and Chicago are or were sanctuary cities, run by radical Democrats. It turns out woke emotionalism gets very expensive to maintain. And who has to pay the most for it? Taxpaying citizens, of course. That’s the Biden border crisis.
Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) explained last week how illegal migrants are costing municipalities up to $451 billion yearly. That’s obscene. You can read his detailed computations, but I want to highlight a few key points. Remember too that there are tens of thousands of criminals and potential terrorists crossing illegally into the U.S. But, criminal or not, why should Americans who are already struggling in a bad economy pay billions of dollars a year for these non-citizens who are only here because they violated our laws?
Arthur made several estimates, one based on the NYC comptroller’s March report for money estimates and official statistics of illegal migrants for the number of individuals being paid for. If “got-aways,” or illegals who evade Border Patrol, and releases are included, municipal costs for single adults alone are $521,397,090 daily, “or a yearly total of $190,309,937,850,” Arthur estimated. That doesn’t include migrant families, which cost an estimated $89,378,706 per day, Arthur said.
Arthur then made a very conservative estimate of annual costs if not all migrants need the funding for an entire year:
If you assume that 30 percent of family migrants and 75 percent of the single adults don’t require care and housing, that brings the daily cost for families down to $89,378,706 ($32,623,227,690 per annum) and the adult costs down to $44,839,466 ($16,366,405,090 per annum), for a total per annum cost of $48,989,632,780. If they go to some place where the cost of living is 30 percent cheaper than New York, that cost drops to $34,292,742,946.
This does not include costs for education, hospitalization, or unaccompanied alien children (UACs). Meanwhile, the federal government is making what Arthur calls a “paltry contribution,” offsetting a mere “2.3 percent of… municipal costs,” at a hopeful estimate.
Using another estimate from RealClearInvestigations as the basis, Arthur noted municipal costs could be $451 billion annually.
Whether the total costs to cities and towns for caring for migrants is $451 billion or my most conservative estimate of more than $34 billion, it’s a lot of money for municipalities that are already trying to figure out how to pay for ordinary, day-to-day services and infrastructure for the non-“newly arrived”.
”A lot” is a major understatement. How is this sustainable? Illegal migration is set to spike with the end of Title 42, not improve, which will only mean billions more dollars extorted from American taxpayers to fund the Biden border crisis.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
“Don’t worry about the dishwasher,” our host told us as we checked out the house where my wife and I were staying in the south of France several years ago. “It’s more than two years old.” I had no idea why I needed to worry about this or any other dishwasher, but I was about to find out.
The year was 2017, and new EU regulations had gone into effect, effectively crippling the dishwashers people had long depended on to clean their dishes. A cleaning machine that cleans is a radical idea, I’m sure, to radical EU regulators. Our host had remodeled his kitchen barely in time to install a machine made the year before the new EU rules regarding water and energy use went into effect. The new washers use so little water and energy that EU truth-in-labeling laws ought to prevent manufacturers from calling these overpriced beasts “dishwashers.”
“Dishwetters” might be more accurate. Or perhaps more accurate still would be “Dishmoisteners.”
If it’s a choice between an appliance that’s been over-regulated to the point that consumers have to pay far more than they used to for a dishwasher that does far less than it should or them standing in front of the sink for 30 minutes every night after dinner, singing, “Tonight we’re gonna scrub like it’s 1929,” then Brussels has already made the choice for them: If you want to buy a dishwasher, you’re still going to have to hand-wash those dishes before they go into the machine.
Here’s where Presidentish Joe Biden steps up to say: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Jacque.
If the proposed regulations go into effect — and there’s no doubt that the enviro-cabal running the White House is in favor — water use would be reduced by a third on some standard-sized machines, and energy use would be reduced by more than a quarter.
Consumers already complain that machines that have been made since Obama-era restrictions went into effect a decade ago already don’t properly clean or dry dishes. In the future, they’ll have even less water and energy to work with.
Nobody in Congress voted on these new standards that will carry the force of law. DOE seems to enjoy almost unlimited authority to regulate almost anything that uses energy in the name of reducing carbon emissions.
Under the current rules, dishwashers are limited to five gallons of water per cycle, or 3.5 gallons if they want to wear the federal government’s Energy Star label. Under the proposed rules that snuck out of DOE while everybody was getting ready for the weekend, each cycle will be limited to 3.2 gallons, period. Today’s current five-gallon machines will be “eliminated from the market” unless manufacturers restrict their flow to 3.2 gallons.
Remember what happened when D.C. decided to reduce the amount of water toilets were allowed to use with each flush? Let’s just say it was messy until manufacturers completely redesigned toilet bowls to work with Washington’s whims. I suspect that there won’t be any salvaging today’s five-gallon dishwasher designs, and I know for a fact that increased design and manufacturing costs will be passed directly onto consumers.
Perhaps today’s machines could get away with using less water if they were equipped with more powerful pumps to move it around with more force. That’s going to be difficult, probably impossible since Biden’s new regs also require machines to reduce their average annual energy consumption from 307-kilowatt hours to 223-kilowatt hours. Just like when we spent a good part of the ’90s having to flush the toilet two or three times to “save” water, you’ll run your dishwasher two or three times to clean one load. You’ll probably have to finish drying them by hand, though, given the new energy limits.
Honestly, it will be easier and certainly cheaper just to go back to hand-washing — and I think that’s the point.
Going back to that trip to France a few years ago, we were sharing that home with sci-fi author (and Instapundit contributor) Sarah Hoyt and her husband Dan. Talking about how bad the E.U. dishwasher had become, Sarah said, “That’s the point of all these rules, to get us used to everything being a little bit worse than it was before.”
Robert Spencer: "Both are basically authoritarian, that is the left and the Jihad groups."
On April 26, 2023, Jihad Watch director and Shillman Fellow Robert Spencer appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room to discuss his speech at the American Freedom Alliance conference on April 23, of which Bannon played excerpts. Among other topics, they discussed the congruence of aims, methods, and goals between the socialist internationalist Left and the global Islamic movement.