Published on Mar 15, 2019
By Joel B. Pollak
The attack, which occurred during Friday prayers, has killed 49 people as of this writing, and wounded dozens of others.
In two tweets, Ocasio-Cortez mocked the idea of sending “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the shootings. After significant pushback, clarified that the target of her criticism was the NRA.
“At 1st I thought of saying, ‘Imagine being told your house of faith isn’t safe anymore.’,” she tweeted.
“But I couldn’t say ‘imagine.’ Because of Charleston. Pittsburgh. Sutherland Springs.
“What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don’t even keep the pews safe?” she concluded.
Advocates of gun control on the left have begun to mass shooting events by disdaining the expression “thoughts and prayers,” treating it as an excuse for legislative inaction rather than as a genuine expression of sympathy and anguish.
Left-wing critics have also taken to using the phrase “thoughts and prayers” as a way to mock the NRA even outside the context of a shooting event. Last year, for example, liberal celebrities wished “thoughts and prayers” to the NRA after reports that it was having financial trouble.
In that vein, Ocasio-Cortez added a subsequent tweet to clarify her meaning in the original one:
The NRA had not (and, as of the writing, still has not) reacted to the Christchurch attacks. There is also no evidence that it invented the phrase “thoughts and prayers.”
Moreover, New Zealand already has gun control measures similar to those Democrats want to pass into law in the United States, including the universal background check bill that the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed last month.
The NRA has argued that a better way to stop mass shootings would be to encourage responsible gun ownership and make armed guards available to vulnerable targets like schools.
Early reports from Christchurch indicated that an armed Muslim man helped chase away assailants from the second mosque that was attacked.
Ocasio-Cortez also retweeted an attack blaming President Donald Trump for inspiring the New Zealand terrorists.
MARCH 15, 2019
28-year-old Brenton Tarrant went on an anti-Muslim rampage, targeting two Mosques in the city of Christ Church, New Zealand.
What has been dubbed a terrorist attack by the authorities and described as such by the shooter’s manifesto, has so far claimed the lives of 49 and wounded roughly the same number.
Tarrant was arrested after targeting a second mosque.
Additionally, three other people were arrested in connection with the shooting, but the details of their involvement remain unclear.
Tarrant announced his intent to attack the mosque on 8chan and then live streamed the 17 minutes of terror on Facebook.
The footage quickly spread on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto titled, “The Great Replacement,” rants on topics regarding mass immigration, low European fertility rates and Tarrant’s explanation for committing the attacks.
For the most part, Tarrant makes it clear that the attack intends on adding fuel to the fire of division in the United States, accelerating the left’s clampdown on Second Amendment rights.
Digging deeper, the manifesto reveals a self-avowed eco-fascist with communist leanings that have more in common with Norway mass shooter Anders Breivick and fascist Oswald Mosley, while referring to Charleston Church shooter Dylan Roof as an apparent means of continuing to troll the left into responding.
By Chris Menahan
From the Free Beacon:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left nonprofit known for its “hate group” designations, has surpassed a half billion dollars in total assets and now has $121 million parked offshore, according to the group’s most recent financial statements.
[…]According to the filings submitted to California’s Office of Attorney General, the group reported total assets of $518 million from November 2017 to the Oct. 31, 2018, an increase of $41 million from the $477 million in total assets it reported on its previous year’s tax forms.
The SPLC’s assets increased despite its total revenue falling by $15 million last year. The SPLC hauled in $136 million in total revenue throughout 2017. This number fell to $121 million in 2018. Its contributions and grants also fell by more than $20 million from 2017 to 2018, from $132 million to $111 million.
Despite the fall in revenue, the SPLC’s vast investment portfolio expanded in 2018, which included a drastic increase in the amount of money it has parked overseas. By the end of 2018, its non-U.S. equity funds rose to $121 million, an uptick of nearly $30 million from the $92 million it had parked in offshoreinvestments throughout 2017.
The SPLC pushed the Jussie Smollett story:
They also pushed the Covington Catholic hoax:
“Fighting hate” is big business.
MARCH 14, 2019
From The Hill:
Three Democratic lawmakers reintroduced a Journalist Protection Act that intends to designate “certain attacks on those reporting the news” as a federal crime.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.).
[…] “The Journalist Protection Act makes it a federal crime to intentionally cause bodily injury to a journalist affecting interstate or foreign commerce in the course of reporting or in a manner designed to intimidate him or her from newsgathering for a media organization,” reads the Tuesday press release. “It represents a clear statement that assaults against people engaged in reporting is unacceptable, and helps ensure law enforcement is able to punish those who interfere with newsgathering.”
The lawmakers said they were introducing the bill as a response to President Trump’s “climate of extreme hostility” toward the media.
In effect, this is the same process as making it a federal “hate crime” to attack a journo.
You can read the full text of the bill here. The text says anyone who “intentionally commits or attempts to commit … bodily injury to a journalist” shall be “fined under this title or imprisoned” for 3 to 6 years.
Sen. Menendez claimed on Twitter that “threats of violence” alone would classify as a federal crime under the bill.
It’s not enough that journos are a protected class on social media who can get all their critics banned merely for tweeting “learn to code” at them — they need it enshrined in federal law that they’re a class above us.
Incidentally, while Rep. Swalwell claims to be deeply concerned with protecting the First Amendment rights of journos, last year he suggested he would use nuclear weapons against American citizens who resisted his plan to gut the Second Amendment through mandatory gun confiscations.
By DAN LYMAN
Ulf-Arvid Mejlænder, a former journalist himself, penned a scathing op-ed titled, “Say It as It Is,” which was surprisingly published by NRK, Norway’s government-owned media organization.
Mejlænder called out tactics employed by much of the Western press, asserting that key details about crimes are manipulated or left out completely when the perpetrators are migrants or have foreign backgrounds.
“We rarely get to know who commits gang rape, uses a knife or beats up casual victims in the new Norway,” Mejlænder wrote. “I get embarrassed when the media’s clouding of criminal ethnicity is so predictable that ‘the Norwegian’ and ‘Norwegian citizen’ become the code words for foreign origin.”
Mejlænder cited multiple recent examples of misleading coverage of stories involving migrant crime, concluding, “There is no pressure on politicians who repeat their ‘sleep in peace’ message, citing better integration as the solution to everything.”
“The gap between the risk of our multicultural experiment and the storytelling of the mainstream media must not grow larger.”
He also pointed out that major cultural and economic shifts are taking place due to Islamic migration, with very little accurate coverage by the press.
“Immigration costs are increasing, cultural conflicts are building up and Islam is gaining more and more space,” Mejlænder wrote. “The danger signals of our greatest social change process are clearly visible today, but traditional media show limited interest in exploring them. It weakens the press’s relevance and credibility.”
“…one has to go mainly to alternative media to gain knowledge about studies that show that anti-Western attitudes and intolerant interpretations of the Qur’an are relatively widespread among Muslims in Western countries.”
You can read Mejlænder’s full piece with English translation here.
MARCH 13, 2019
The once mighty group tried to define itself for the future ahead of the end of its once vaunted “caliphate”, depicting its crumbling domain as the one place ruled by “God’s law” and promising it would one day be victorious.
The exhortation came in an audio recording and video released online by militants said to be inside the village of Baghouz, where they have been besieged for weeks and, in the past few days, under stepped up assault and bombardment by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
In one minute and a half long message, an unidentified Islamic State militant calls on Muslim “brothers, in Europe and in the whole world” to “rise against the Crusaders and … take revenge for your religion.” As the man speaks, cracks of gunfire can be heard in the background, apparently meant to suggest that he is in Baghouz. He said men, women and children in Baghouz are being subjected to a “holocaust by the Crusaders,” which is militant jargon for the U.S.-led coalition against IS.
In another video, a militant identified only as Abu Abdul-Azim talks the camera as he and his comrades eat soup — likely intended to show that the fighters still have food. A young boy sits next to him.
By the “standards of this world,” IS may seem to have been defeated, Abu Abdul-Azim says. “If we used to hold thousands of kilometers and now only a few kilometers remain, it is said that we lost. That is by the standards of this world. But the standards of the Other World and Almighty God are different,” he says.
“What is our crime? Why are we bombarded by war planes? Why has the entire world of infidels come together to fight us? …It is because we wanted to implement God’s Law,” he says with a smile. “There is no group in the world that ruled by the Quran and Sunna except this select group. That is victory. .. So we are patient. Victory and endurance means sticking to what God Almighty loves.”
Contrary to claims of its terrorist backers, Islamic State has suffered devastating losses in Syria under U.S. President Donald Trump that have decimated the group’s territorial caliphate, ultimately squeezing the jihadists into ever-shrinking pockets of land in Syria.
During its four year reign, the Islamic terror group became notorious for its atrocities, including massacres of opponents, enslavement and rape of Yazidi women and beheadings and vicious killings of those who violated its rules. For its supporters, the brutality was confirmation that the group would not compromise in its vision.
That is now in the past.
The Islamic State domain has been reduced to a tiny patch of land hardly a mile (1.6 kilometers) across. Several hundred fighters are believed to remain inside along with an unknown number of civilians, running out of food and ammunition among blasted houses and burned tents, cornered between the Euphrates River and a desert cliff near the Iraqi border.
Those who could escape, have. They are thought to be on the move and part of the giant diaspora seeking havens in sympathetic countries in the Middle East or moving in the human flow of “refugees” trying to get to Europe.
AP contributed to this report
CNN reports that the number of asylum seekers and other immigrant detainees, being held along the border in towns like El Paso, Texas, has spiked since last year, and that ICE and United States Customs and Border Protection are dealing with more seriously ill immigrants than every before.
“As of March 7, 2019, there was a total of 2,287 detainees cohorted for exposure to a detainee with a contagious condition,” an ICE spokesman said in a statement to media made earlier this week.
“In the past 12 months, there have been health investigations at 51 ICE detention facilities for mumps, chickenpox and influenza, according to [ICE officials],” CNN reports. “There have been 236 reported cases of mumps, with another 16 suspected cases during this time period.”
At least three children have died in CBP custody since November, after contrating life-threatening illnesses and infections on their journey north to the United States-Mexico border from their homes in Honduras or Guatemala. In at least two cases, border patrol tried to provide emergency medical care but they were simply too late; the childrens’ illnesses had advanced too far.
American immigration authorities are used to illegal immigrants and asylum seekers showing up to border patrol facilities exhibiting signs of illness, but over the past several years, most have eventually been disagnosed with influenza or the chicken pox — diseases that are still fairly common in the United States.
This past year, however, ICE and CBP officials have seen a major uptick in migrants with more serious, life-threatening illnesses, and dangerous communicable diseases like the mumps, which is spread through contact with bodily fluids and which could begin an outbreak among Americans if infected people are allowed to enter the general population.
The most serious outbreak has been in Texas, where around 200 people, aged 13-66, in a single border patrol facility are currently under quarantine for the mumps.
The situation poses problems not just for Americans, but also for migrants, and for the border patrol, whose facilities can’t withstand an influx of illegal immigrants with serious medical issues.
The New York Times reports that border facilities are already woefully understaffed to handle the sharp increase in asylum seekers — border patrol can now see up to 2,000 people crossing the border per day — and the facilities lag even further behind when called upon to handle hundreds of patients with life-threatening illnesses.
Border patrol knows the situation is critical, and is expected to announce major medical facility expansions “in the coming days,” the NYT says, and the Trump Administration is looking for a major health care provider to contract with the CBP to provide medical services — a contract they may be willing to pay more than $47 million to complete.
But the problem is that Border Protection isn’t a “humanitarian agency,” and isn’t supposed to be handling major disease outbreaks, leaving it at a loss for what to do about the thousands of criticially ill migrants who are showing up at the border every month.
– The Washington Times – Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Dreamers would be eligible for in-state college tuition and taxpayer-backed financial aid, would get new protections against swift deportation, and would have a “direct” pathway to citizenship.
Even some already-deported illegal immigrants would be allowed to apply to return under the bill, announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow Democrats in a rally at the Capitol.
“There should be nothing partisan or political in this legislation,” Mrs. Pelosi said.
The bill goes beyond the Dream Act, legislation that’s been kicking around for nearly two decades, which would offer a path to citizenship to as many as 2 million illegal immigrants.
The updated version would also grant a pathway to citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people here under Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure.
Those are both types of humanitarian protections designed to give people a temporary safe place in the U.S. — along with work permits and some other taxpayer benefits — while their home countries recover from natural disasters, instability or wars.
Yet over the decades, those protections have become semi-permanent. The average TPS holder has been in the U.S. 20 years at this point.
Democrats said they’ve put down roots, and asking them to return now is unfair.
“We are not going to let Donald Trump send them back, putting their lives in peril or tearing their families apart,” said Rep. Nydia Velazquez, a New York Democrat.
She and fellow Democrats said those to whom they’re offering citizenship rights are already American in most ways, save for their illegal entry or continued iffy legal status.
Dream Act legislation has been on the cusp of passage before, clearing the House in 2010 but defeated in the Senate by a GOP filibuster that year.
Last year, President Trump floated several different deals that would have granted some more permanent legal status to Dreamers, but Democrats and some Republicans said he was asking for too much in return with his demand for border wall money, limits to family-based immigrant visas and an end to the visa lottery.
Those negotiations took place under a GOP-led Congress.
“We are in charge now,” Rep. Mark Takano, California Democrat, said Tuesday, underscoring why Democrats are optimistic they can win a legalization without also having to embrace Mr. Trump’s get-tough policies.
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