Tag: islam

Crazed Portland Leftist Who Converted to Islam Charged with Threatening to Kill Federal Agents, Sexually Assault Their Wives, and Hurt Their Children

A 45-year-old far-left extremist has been charged with making violent threats against federal law enforcement officers, including promises to kill them, sexually assault their wives, and hurt their children.

John Paul Cupp, who also uses the aliases “Walid” and “Abu Nusaybah al-Amriki” following his conversion to Islam, was arrested after a series of repeated threats against agents and their loved ones.

On October 14, Cupp allegedly yelled threats directly at law enforcement personnel outside the Portland ICE building.

The leftist militant followed up with similar online videos on November 3 and November 13, repeating his intentions to target federal agents and their families.

According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, “Cupp is a prolific producer of online content and regularly posts aggressive rhetoric, calls for war against the United States, antisemitic threats, and threats of violence.”

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Italy moves to follow European neighbors in banning religious garb like burqas that hide identity

Italy has long been one of Europe’s strongest defenders of religious freedom despite the influence of the Vatican.

But now, the country is poised to outlaw the use of traditional Islamic attire like burqas, a move the government says will strengthen its tradition of religious liberty by requiring all faiths to operate with “full transparency” and within the limits of Italian law.

The proposed law, which is set to be debated in Italy’s parliament before the end of this year, would ban “religiously motivated garments that obscure identity or impose non-transparent forms of [religious] affiliation,” according to a draft of the proposal published in the Italian media.

While the text does not mention Islam or any other faith by name, all indications are that it is primarily aimed at banning the use of headscarves, niqabs, jilbabs, burqas, and other attire that commonly obscure the identity of Muslim women.

The proposal is the latest in a series of steps from the Italian government led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to regulate the public expression of religion. Officials insist the plan is part of an effort to modernize the Italian framework on religious practice that has not seen substantial change since the 1980s.

Supporters of the law say that a person’s visible identity – in schools, businesses, or in public – is essential for security and civic cohesion.

“This is not about limiting religious freedom, but about preventing it being used instrumentally in order to justify practices that are incompatible with the principles of our constitution and our society,” Galeazzo Bignami, a member of parliament from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, told reporters last month.

“No community in our country can claim exemptions from the laws of our Republic,” Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said via social media.

Other European countries including France, Belgium, and Austria have issued nationwide restrictions on traditional Islamic garb. And in Italy, local temporary bans on some kinds of Islamic face coverings have appeared on the municipal level, usually on grounds of public order or security. But the new proposal would be the first to be imposed nationally.

Muslim leaders responded with alarm, and some have vowed to appeal the measure if it is enacted.

“This law tells Muslim women they cannot appear in public as themselves,” said Yassine Lafram, head of the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy. “It sends a message that we are a problem to be managed rather than citizens with the same rights as other citizens.”

It is unclear whether the proposal will stand up to legal challenges if it becomes a law. Article 19 of the Italian Constitution guarantees the right to “profess one’s faith in any form, individually or collectively.” Critics say that the focus on “transparency” is too vague to merit an exception to that standard.

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Islamist groups in Texas rake in $13M in taxpayer-funded grants amid Abbott’s battle against Sharia law

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has taken aggressive action this week against Sharia law, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Yet critics are demanding to know why, during his time in office, millions in taxpayer-funded grants have been allocated to alleged Islamist organizations based in Texas.

Abbott announced on Tuesday that he had designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations. The following day, Abbott urged local district attorneys to investigate potential Sharia “courts” operating in Texas and defying state and federal laws to push Islamic codes.

Despite Abbott’s recent actions, some have faulted the governor for allowing taxpayer dollars to be used to fund the uptick in Islamic mosques in Texas, citing a June report from the Middle East Forum. The article claimed Texas gave “over $13 million of federal and state monies to mosques and community groups aligned with Islamist movements such as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Jamaat-e-Islami, as well as hostile foreign regimes.”

Of the 18 organizations that received funds, a dozen were said to have “extremist links.”

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Three charged for shouting slurs at praying Muslim students while waving bacon in Florida

Three men stormed a University of South Florida parking garage and harassed Muslim students during dawn prayer on Tuesday — an incident captured in videos that showed the group shouting slurs, waving bacon and crowding worshipers as they bowed, reports said.

Police identified the men as Christopher Svochak of Waco, Texas; Richard Penskoski of Canyon, Okla., and Ricardo Yepez of Tampa, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

All three face a felony count of disturbing schools and religious assemblies under Florida’s hate-crime enhancement statute, along with misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and disrupting a school or lawful assembly.

None have ties to the university, police said.

The charges followed a multi-day investigation sparked by footage showing the men approaching students during fajr prayer on the roof of the Collins Boulevard Parking Garage.

One man carried a cardboard box reading “Kaaba 2.0 Jesus is Lord,” while another wore a thobe emblazoned with “Jesus is God.”

Students said the group stood inches away as they prayed, shouted insults including “Bow down to lord Jesus Christ” and “Your prophet married a 6 year old,” and taunted them with bacon immediately after the prayer ended, according to a Reddit post.

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Are the Grooming Gangs a Muslim Phenomenon?

The many prosecutions of grooming gangs have shocked the UK public. There is the sheer scale of the abuse, in which thousands of abusers have raped, intimidated, controlled, tortured and sexually exploited thousands of underage girls. Also shocking are the repeated failures of both the criminal justice system and numerous reviews to bring about lasting change.

The expression ‘grooming gangs’ has been challenged, as it could be taken to imply some kind of consent. Although ‘rape gangs’ is not inaccurate, ‘grooming gang’ does capture the element of psychological control over victims, many of whom have been subjected to repeated rapes over an extended period of time. 

Is ethnicity the key to this epidemic? The 2014 Jay report about grooming gangs in Rotherham stated that “the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage”. At the time around 3% of the town’s population was Pakistani. However, while it is true that most of the convicted gangs have consisted of men of Pakistani heritage, for example in Oxfordshire, Rotherham and Telford, the published lists of members of Pakistani gangs have shown that the ‘Pakistani’ men are all also Muslims.

Moreover, several non-Pakistani grooming gangs have been made up of men with Muslim names, including two Somali gangs in Bristol, a gang composed mainly of Africans in Banbury, a gang of three Iranians in Chelmsford, a gang of three Syrians and a Kuwaiti in Newcastle, a pair of Turkish men in Somerset and a gang of 17 men in Newcastle of Albanian, Kurdish, Bangladeshi, Indian, Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Pakistani heritage. In the last case, all the men’s names were Islamic, with the exception of one Hindu. Although there have been a handful of smaller gangs made up of non-Muslim perpetrators, the clear majority of gangs overall and all the larger gangs have been made up of Muslim men. Peter McLoughlin, who compiled a list of grooming gang convictions from 1997 to 2018, found that 87% of those convicted had Muslim names.

The label ‘Pakistani’ for these gangs is both too narrow and too broad. Too broad because overwhelmingly it has been Muslim Pakistani men involved in these gangs, not Pakistani Christians, Hindus or Sikhs. Too narrow because of the gangs made up of non-Pakistani Muslims. The label ‘Asian’ is also a misnomer: there has been no Indian, Japanese or Chinese grooming gang. 

Trevor Phillips, writing for the Telegraph in 2017, rightly said: “What the perpetrators have in common is their proclaimed faith. They are Muslims, and many of them would claim to be practising.” This has become apparent despite the best efforts of the authorities to conceal any connection of these crimes with Islam.

Unfortunately, Western secular people are handicapped by a deeply entrenched religious illiteracy which can make it hard for them to discern and analyse the influence of religions. Rafael L. Bardají, former National Security Advisor to the Spanish Prime Minister, put his finger on the issue: “A population that has fundamentally turned its back on its faith cannot understand the religious motivations of others.” At the same time some Western people are blind to certain features of Islam because they project their impressions of a benign Christianity onto it. There is also is dominant strand of Western thought which dismisses the influence of religions altogether, relegating faith to the domain of private spirituality.

Another handicap impacting public officials’ understanding has been the fear of being labelled Islamophobic. 

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Trump’s New Islamic Extremist “Allies” — Syrian and Qatari Regimes

Is the ghost of Dick Cheney (CFR) haunting the Trump administration? During the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Cheney and a coterie of CFR neocon war hawks known as “The Vulcans” (Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Hadley, Robert Gates, and Paul Wolfowitz) dragged America into a series of “forever wars” and “regime change” interventions. Accompanying these misadventures was the continuation of the policies of previous Democratic and Republican administrations’ musical-chair alliances, in which yesterday’s “terrorist” becomes today’s “noble ally” (and then tomorrow turns on us and is again designated a terrorist).

Donald Trump pledged that he would cease these disastrous policies. However, his recent policies with regard to Syria and Qatar call that pledge into question. Are Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth channeling the Cheney/Vulcan spirit? It seems so.

The recent White House reception for Syrian “President” Ahmed al-Sharaa was odd, to say the least. Our government had previously designated him as a terrorist, with a $10 million bounty on his head.

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Texas governor declares Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday declared one of the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy groups in the U.S. a “foreign terrorist organization” under a proclamation that he said allows the state to try shutting them down.

He also designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations “a transnational criminal organization” and said it would not be allowed to buy land in the state. The proclamation also included the Muslim Brotherhood.

Neither the CAIR nor the Muslim Brotherhood are designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.

CAIR told Abbott in a letter that his announcement had no basis “in law or fact.” The group accused his office of stoking “anti-Muslim hysteria.”

“You do not have the authority to unilaterally declare any Americans or American institutions terrorist groups, nor is there any basis to level this smear against our organization,” wrote Robert S. McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs director.

Months ago, Texas Republicans moved aggressively to try to stop a Muslim-centered planned community around one of the state’s largest mosques near Dallas. Abbott and other GOP state officials launched investigations into the development tied to the East Plano Islamic Center, saying the group is trying to create a Muslim-exclusive community that would impose Islamic law.

EPIC City representatives called the attacks about Islamic law and other assertions misleading, dangerous and without merit. Earlier this year, the Justice Department closed a federal civil rights investigation into the planned community without filing any charges or lawsuits.

In his proclamation, Abbott cited a law he signed this year that he said prohibits “foreign adversaries” from purchasing or acquiring land. The Republican author of that bill praised the governor’s declaration.

“Today proves exactly why that law was needed,” Republican state Rep. Cole Hefner posted on X.

The Muslim Brotherhood was established in Egypt nearly a century ago and has branches across the world. Its leaders say it renounced violence decades ago and seeks to set up Islamic rule through elections and other peaceful means. Critics, including autocratic governments across the Mideast region, view it as a threat.

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MN: Half of Islamic immigrants found to have committed Ilhan-style immigration fraud…

ABC 5 in Minnesota just aired a story that should be front-page news across the country, but of course, it’s barely making a ripple. Nearly half of all Islamic immigrants reviewed during a Department of Homeland Security sweep in Minnesota were found to have committed some form of fraud: immigration fraud, marriage fraud, tax fraud, loan fraud, bribery, forgery, perjury, bigamy, and even incest.

And yes, if this all sounds a little familiar, it’s because a certain Minnesota congresswoman has faced her own allegations of immigration fraud, too.

The rumors have been swirling for years now.

But Ilhan doesn’t seem the least bit bothered. She’s brushed all of it off, saying she doesn’t care; deport her if they want, she can live anywhere.

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Vienna Teachers Warn Of Rising Radical Attitudes Among New Immigrant Students

Viennese teachers are reporting growing challenges with students from immigrant backgrounds who are increasingly unwilling to learn German or adapt to local values, according to teachers’ union representative Thomas Krebs of the Christian Trade Unionists Group (FCG).

Speaking to Heute, Krebs said many of those arriving from conflict or crisis regions now bring radical beliefs that pose problems in Austrian classrooms.

“In the past, people fled from extremism. Now, many people come to us radicalized by extremism and spread these ideas here as well,” said Krebs.

He cited incidents of female teachers being disrespected or assaulted by male students and parents, saying such behavior reflects imported attitudes that reject gender equality.

“This disrespect ranges from refusing to shake hands to insults and physical assaults,” he added.

Krebs said the problem also affects staff relations, with reports of some male teachers refusing to shake hands with female colleagues for similar reasons. He warned that children from Western or secular families are sometimes treated as inferior by classmates, while those from conservative backgrounds who wish to integrate face pressure to conform.

“Students from Western cultural backgrounds are not seen as equals,” Krebs said, adding that liberal democratic values are often dismissed in favor of religious rules.

According to the union, teachers frequently encounter resistance to Austria’s educational standards.

“Our educational principles are often rejected. For example, religious content is prioritized over the content of the curriculum prescribed by Austrian law,” Krebs stated.

The FCG union is calling for new measures to address what it describes as a widening integration gap. It wants not only mandatory German-language instruction but also compulsory integration programs held outside of school, with attendance monitored by authorities.

“Effective teaching is only possible if there is also a willingness to integrate,” Krebs said. “The values of our democratic society must be conveyed in such a way that fundamental rights and culture are understood as an enrichment and not opposed.”

Recent data and testimony have reinforced concerns about language barriers and integration in Vienna’s schools. Of the roughly 16,700 first-graders enrolled in the city, more than 44 percent — about 7,400 children — do not have sufficient German skills to follow lessons. In the 2018/2019 school year, the proportion was 30 percent. Officials note that around 60 percent of these students were actually born in Austria, suggesting that many are growing up in what commentator Andreas Mölzer described as “closed parallel societies that simply refuse integration.”

“This means they grow up in families and closed parallel societies that simply refuse integration. Integration into our social system and our cultural fabric depends primarily on language acquisition,” Mölzer wrote in the Austrian daily Krone, warning that many such children risk “entering life without a qualification and with limited career prospects.”

Statistics from Austria’s middle schools show the same pattern. According to STATcube last October, only about 8,500 of Vienna’s 26,800 middle school students use German as their primary language, while 76 percent speak another language at home. In some districts, including Margareten, Hernals, and Alsergrund, that figure exceeds 90 percent.

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Islam in America: Sanctioned Intolerance and Indifference

When prejudice targets Black, Jewish, or Latino communities, Americans respond with collective outrage. But bigotry against Muslims? It’s far less taboo and routinely brushed aside – even openly condoned in certain circles. Islamophobia isn’t fringe; it’s woven into the fabric of American society and etched into its national identity.

With few avenues for recourse, millions of Muslim Americans have grown accustomed to thickening their skin and weathering the backlash stemming from their faith – a belief practiced by nearly two billion people worldwide, a quarter of humanity. Why is such blatant partiality tolerated? Is Islamophobia truly born of fear, as its name suggests, or have Americans been conditioned by political and foreign interests determined to barricade the U.S. from the Muslim world?

I have witnessed this reality firsthand since the fall of 2001 – at the onset of a career in federal law enforcement that intersected with a personal relationship that would forever reshape my life. On the morning of 9/11, I was driving to the Pentagon for scheduled interviews as a background investigator, unaware of how profoundly that week would alter both history and my ideology. At the time, I knew little about Islam, but days later I would meet – and eventually marry – a Palestinian-American whose perspective enlightened my understanding of faith, humanity, and the world’s uneven balance of power.

Structural bias against Muslims is especially entrenched within military, intelligence, and law enforcement sectors. While employed as a Special Agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, I’ll never forget attending a terrorism seminar hosted by former CIA officials who propagated widespread misconceptions about Islam: that Muslims sought the annihilation of all Jews and Christians, that martyrs were literally promised “72 virgins,” and that Muslim women were universally oppressed – forced to wear hijab, denied higher education, and coerced into arranged marriages. Yet through my wife, colleagues, and countless Muslim families I’ve known for decades – the reality is quite the contrary. Muslim households are like any others, with women often serving as the anchors that hold the family unit together.

Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve recognized dynamics that are part of a larger-scale phenomenon: Islamophobia has evolved from individual prejudice into institutionalized bias – embedded in communities, workplaces, government agencies, and the media alike. Policies framed as patriotism or security measures routinely single out Muslim Americans, while political rhetoric and news coverage reinforce caricatures that bear little resemblance to reality. This is not merely ignorance or fear – it is systemic, sustained because it serves political, geopolitical, and territorial interests.

That distorted perception permeates institutions and communities alike: mosques, like other minority places of worship, are routinely subjected to harassment and vandalism. Yet unlike attacks on other religious communities, these incidents rarely prompt meaningful accountability, and public response is strikingly muted. According to the ACLU, “anti-Muslim sentiment has spiked” in recent years. Rawand Abdelghani, a board member at the Nueces Mosque in Austin, Texas, noted, “Since October 2023, we’ve definitely seen a rise in Islamophobia.” This prejudice, more than any other, has become America’s tolerated bigotry.

Further illustrating this resentment, coordinated efforts to block the construction of new mosques have emerged across the United States – prompting an uncomfortable question: would the same tactics be used to obstruct the building of new synagogues or churches?

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