Oregon

The War on the War on Terror-the ACLU teams up with Portland to Fight Joint Terrorism Task Force (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Religion of Conquest has a great post on this topic and quotes Pamela Geller on the ACLU and Portland’s city council:

What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

ACLU Applauds Portland City Council Ending Role in FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force

Money Quote from Video
“what it really points out… is that, on this Thanksgiving day weekend we can’t allow the ACLU to make terror policy in this country.”

April 28, 2005 – PORTLAND, OR Citing the need for greater oversight over its own police officers, the Portland City Council voted 4-1 in support of Portland Mayor Tom Potter’s revised resolution that will end Portland’s participation in the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Potter and FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Jordan have said the two agencies would continue to cooperate in terrorism investigations and that the Mayor will be seeking secret clearance to allow him access to some classified information.

The vote came after weeks of negotiations between the City and the Justice Department which failed to resolve the City’s concerns regarding police officer oversight. In a City of Portland proposed resolution, the mayor would have been given the necessary clearance to provide meaningful oversight of the officers who worked directly on the JTTF. At the U.S. Attorney and the Mayor’s request, ACLU representatives took part in discussions of the resolution….

FrontPage Magazine has a newer article connecting the ACLU’s push to support terrororists and to fight the War on Terror. IN their post, “Collaborating With the Enemy in the War on Terror,” we find the following:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have injected themselves into the war on terror as never before, leaping to the defense of the man often described as the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula: Anwar Al-Awlaki. There’s little doubt that Al-Awlaki provided aid and inspiration to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian “underpants bomber,” and to the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. He has also called for the murder of civilians like Salman Rushdie and the young Seattle cartoonist who initiated “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Yet, despite the danger that Al-Awlaki continues to represent to the free world, the ACLU and the CCR filed suit in federal court to protect the radical cleric’s “rights.”

Al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser Al-Awlaki, asked the two groups for help after he learned that the Obama administration has targeted his son for assassination. Because the cleric was born in New Mexico, the ACLU and CCR maintain that he is entitled to due process in America’s legal system. Defending his organization’s decision to defend Al-Awlaki, Vincent Warren, the executive director of the CCR, said:

That’s what we do. We file lawsuits. …[W]e don’t believe the US should be wreaking violence for political reasons. It should be up to a court, not just the US government, to decide whether al-Awlaki poses a threat. The US should not be conducting the killing of US citizens outside the legal process, far away from any battlefield.

The proposition that the US is “wreaking violence for political reasons” is patently ludicrous. The United States is at war with a determined enemy and the fact that this particular conflict involves asymmetrical warfare does not relieve the president of the United States from his duties as commander in chief. Al-Awlaki isn’t “far away from any battlefield” because he and his fellow terrorists have defined the battlefield as the whole planet earth.

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It is ironic that while the ACLU has fought Christmas celebrations and the Christmas holiday while supporting terrorists — this has come to “The Christmas Tree Bomber.”

The Christmas Tree Bomber and Oregons Culpability (Robert Spencer Article)

Published by Papa Giorgio

FrontPage Magazine h/t:

….II. The local mosque: Mohamed who?

Yet despite Mohamud’s avowedly Islamic motivations, the Imam Yosof Wanly of the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, followed a predictable and oft-repeated pattern when he downplayed Mohamud’s connection to the local Muslim community. Every jihadist who has ever lived for any time in the United States has been simultaneously a devout and informed Muslim by his own account, and by the account of the local mosque leaders, someone they seldom saw and who was at odds with the larger community when he did show up. It raises a large question that no journalist ever has the wit or courage to ask: if these jihad terrorists really had little or nothing to do with their local mosques, and if their understanding of Islam differs so sharply from that of the area Muslims, where did they learn the version of Islam that impelled them to attempt mass-murder of infidels?

In the course of various media interviews, however, Wanly did end up revealing that he had more of a relationship with Mohamud than he would be likely to have with a peripheral member of his congregation whom he seldom saw. He said that he and Mohamud had “average teacher-student” discussions, and characterized Mohamud, a dropout from Oregon State University, as, according to the Associated Press, “a normal student who went to athletic events, drank the occasional beer and was into rap music and culture.” Even though this statement seems calculated to give the picture of anything but a devout, observant, serious Muslim, it also shows that Wanly knew Mohamud better than one might expect a busy imam in a major city to know a sometime college student who attended his mosque only occasionally.

[….]

Former Classmates Input
Another of Mohamud’s former classmates remembered a fight the two had over a messy locker. “The main thing was, the way he said he hated Americans,” said Andy Stull. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life – ‘I hate Americans!'” (Jihad Watch)

V. The portrayal of Muslims as victims

Generally after a jihad attack in the United States, whether successful or not, mainstream media outlets run multiple stories about how Muslim communities fear a “backlash” against innocent Muslims from enraged “Islamophobic” rednecks. Of course, such “backlashes” never materialize, but the purpose of such stories is to shift the public’s attention away from the reality of Islamic jihad and onto the fiction of Muslims as victims, living in fear of vigilante attack in the United States. In reality, hate crimes against Muslims accounted for only eight percent of crimes thus classified in the U.S. in 2009, according to a recently released FBI report (see below). Blacks and Jews were far more likely to be victimized – and far less likely to be the subject of fawning media reports featuring hand-wringing over a “backlash” against them.

FBI REPORT — Numbers:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Blacks and Jews were the most likely victims of hate crimes driven by racial or religious intolerance in the United States last year, the FBI said Monday in an annual report.

Out of 6,604 hate crimes committed in the United States in 2009, some 4,000 were racially motivated and nearly 1,600 were driven by hatred for a particular religion, the FBI said.

Blacks made up around three-quarters of victims of the racially motivated hate crimes and Jews made up the same percentage of victims of anti-religious hate crimes, the report said.

Manufactured Victimhood
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have risen sharply in the U.S. since 9/11. In fact, the rate of such crimes has actually dropped, and as this new study shows, it is quite low compared to hate crimes against other groups. CAIR exaggerates the number and seriousness of hate crimes against Muslims because it knows that victimhood is big business: insofar as it can claim protected victim status for Muslims in the U.S., it can deflect unwanted scrutiny and any critical examination of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism. (Jihad Watch)

Anti-Muslim crimes were a distant second to crimes against Jews, making up just eight percent of the hate crimes driven by religious intolerance….

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More from Spencer:

IV. The search for alternate explanations

If he wasn’t really an Islamic jihadist, despite the testimony of his own words, then why did Mohamud try to blow up the Christmas tree lighting ceremony? Wanly said that he had a difficult childhood after moving with his parents to the U.S. from Somalia when he was five years old. According to the New York Daily News, “neighbors say Mohamud was doted on by his family but embraced militant Islam not long after his parents split up. ‘He was a quiet kid, but with his folks splitting up, who knows?’ Adam Napier, who lived next door to Mohamed Osman Mohamud for years told the newspaper.”

Yes, who knows? The divorce of parents has driven many an unhappy child to try to set off a bomb in a crowded place and murder hundreds, if not thousands, of people, hasn’t it?

Of course, many more terrorist attacks have been committed by Islamic jihadists who read and took seriously the Qur’an’s commands to wage war against infidels than by children traumatized by their parents’ divorce, but never mind: when it comes to exonerating Islamic texts and teachings of any responsibility for motivating violent jihadists, government, law enforcement and media officials join Islamic spokesmen in grabbing hold of any alternative explanation, no matter how implausible.

In the following video you will see how this last section (#IV) is mentioned next to how Oregon rejected FBI and multi-city help to its law enforcement. Thank Fox & Friends for this nugget:

Another Islamic Terrorist Caught

Published by Papa Giorgio

The video is a h/t to The Religion of Peace:

Libertarian Republican h/t. Eric Dondero points out a few important things that I would agree is a HUGE problem:

Another Muslim terrorist attempt on a major US City took place just days before Thanksgiving.

From the AP story (via Fox News) “Somali-Born Christmas Car Bomber Stopped in Oregon”:

The Somali-born teenager who was arrested in a sting operation while trying to blow up a van he believed was loaded with explosives at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., e-mailed an alleged terrorist last year, authorities said…

the sting operation began in June after an undercover agent learned that 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud had been in regular e-mail contact with an “unindicted associate” in Pakistan’s northwest, a frontier region where Al Qaeda and Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are strong.

An FBI document reveals that Mohamud had contact with the suspected terrorist in Aug. 2009. In Dec. 2009, Mohamud discussed the possibility of traveling to Pakistan to engage in violent jihad.

Mohamud wanted “maximum carnage,” kill plenty of children

[….]

Portland – Headquarters for Nation’s AntiWar Movement

Now it is being revealed that the City of Portland was not even aware of the bombing plot until after the Muslim terrorist was arrested.

Anti-War Movement Hub
Portland – Headquarters for Nation’s AntiWar Movement

From OregonLive.com:

Five years ago, Portland became the first city in the nation to withdraw from the FBI-led task force.

Adams did not know about the plot to detonate a bomb at the tree lighting at Pioneer Courthouse Square until after Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s arrest Friday night.

Adams, who serves as police commissioner, said he wasn’t aware of the case until 9:15 p.m. Friday when he was called to Portland’s FBI headquarters for a briefing. The mayor said he would have been notified if the bomb threat had been real.

Sanctuary City
A Sanctuary City for all Illegal Aliens

In April 2005, the City Council… voted 4-1 to withdraw its two police officers from the federal task force.

A Sanctuary City for all Illegal Aliens

Libertarian/conservative columnist Michelle Malkin (via LA Times) pointed out at the time in, “Portland vs. America”:

If the Bush administration had guts, it would withdraw all federal homeland security funds from the city immediately. After 9/11, the city refused to cooperate with federal efforts to conduct voluntary interviews of of local Muslims in order to uncover terrorist plots. Portland is also a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. This despite several signs that al Qaeda and pro-Islamists have infiltrated the area.

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To Sell Lemonade Or Not To Sell-That Is The Question

Published by Papa Giorgio

From Independent Women’s Forum:

It’s not uncommon to read about heavy regulations and licensing requirements burdening small business across America, but one in particular caught my eye this week.  In Portland, Oregon, a state health inspector shut down a 7-year-old’s lemonade stand.  She was told she needed to leave or face a $500 fine.  Under state law, even a lemonade stand in your front lawn must obtain a $120 license to operate.  Another small business bites the dust.

To be fair, this lovely young girl did go to a large event and set up shop, the story tells of this:

…Technically, any lemonade stand — even one on your front lawn — must be licensed under state law, said Eric Pippert, the food-borne illness prevention program manager for the state’s public health division. But county inspectors are unlikely to go after kids selling lemonade on their front lawn unless, he conceded, their front lawn happens to be on Alberta Street during Last Thursday.

“When you go to a public event and set up shop, you’re suddenly engaging in commerce,” he said. “The fact that you’re small-scale I don’t think is relevant.”…

In my mind’s eye its sorta like the regulations about smoked covers over break lights on cars. Yes there is a danger in dimming these lights, but this isn’t enforced widely. However… it serves the police well when they want to pull someone over whom they suspect for trouble. (If only the crack houses would have lemonade stands.) I do recommend a book for parents about this very issue, where some kids set out to make some money by setting up a lemonade stand in front of their house, and they run into Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and others along the way. Very funny.

More Word of Faith Related Deaths Coming from The Followers of Christ Church in Oregon

Published by Papa Giorgio

To read more on this topic and to start and look for help to escape such bad theology that leads to death instead of life, visit The Word on the Word of Faith’s group blog, especially their recovery forums.

Religion News Blog:

An Oregon City couple will face charges of second-degree manslaughter in the faith-healing death of their newborn son, the third such fatality involving the Followers of Christ church in the past two years.

Dale R. Hickman and Shannon M. Hickman, both 25, were booked about 1 a.m. Friday at the Clackamas County Jail. Dale Hickman’s father, Phillip Hickman, posted 10 percent of their $500,000 bail, and they were released about two hours later. They will be formally charged Aug. 30.

Their infant son was born in September, 2009, about six weeks premature. He weighed 3 pounds, 5 ounces and lived nine hours.

No one with medical training attended the birth, and no one called a doctor or ambulance. An autopsy determined the infant died of staph pneumonia and complications from a premature birth, including underdeveloped lungs….

….Members of the Followers of Christ church rely on Research resources on faith healing”>faith-healing rituals – anointing with oil, prayer and the laying on of hands – rather than secular medicine. Church members have testified that they would not go to a doctor or hospital even if it meant the difference between life and death, preferring to put their faith solely in God’s power to heal.

The Hickman and Wyland indictments underscore a pledge by Clackamas County District Attorney John Foote to aggressively prosecute church members who fail to provide necessary medical care to their children, as required under Oregon law.

Foote reached out to church members earlier this year, urging them to seek common ground that would assure that their children receive adequate medical care….

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