Islam, Judaism & Democracy

Paul Gottfried writes:

During the last few months I’ve seen on TV and read in Newsmax the views of an earnest American patriot, Zudhi Jasser. A onetime naval officer, distinguished cardiologist and more recently, an inspired leader of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Dr. Yasser has been second to none in denouncing Islamicist terror and in exhorting his fellow-Muslims in the US and throughout the West to turn in suspected terrorists. It pains me to criticize such a decent fellow, but much of what I hear him saying about purifying Islam of Sharia and making Muslims accept “human rights,” “gender equality” and “secular governance” as part of their belief system is arrant nonsense. I make this point not because I wish to savage Islam, in either its Sunni or Shiite form, but because it is hard for me to imagine that anyone who accepts the claims of a traditional religion could in good conscience adopt Yasser’s position. Biblical or Koranic religion antedates by many centuries the modern principles or attitudes around which Yasser proposes to restructure his faith tradition (Yes, I have availed myself of this insipid commodified term).

A believer may try to accommodate himself to the new order but it is foolish to insist that his millennial faith and the rules that it enjoins are entirely compatible with the latest version of American liberal democracy. Why should a devout Muslim care if Dr. Jasser wishes to put him “on the right side of History”? Like Rabbinic Judaism or Canon Law, Sharia dictates a way of life for those who accept the authority of their faith. Are we to say, as Dr. Yasser sometimes seem to be suggesting, that pious Muslims should now accept only those of their precepts and injunctions that don’t conflict with the concept of democratic equality and with the ongoing feminist revolution?

I once had friends who were members of the American Council for Judaism. These friends would insist that Judaism, at least as they understood it, was a universal ethical religion that had nothing to do with accepting Israel as a homeland. From my own more thorough knowledge of the subject, it seemed to me that what they said was hot air. Being Jewish is about observing complicated dietary laws and rituals, which only in some cases have a relation to ethics. Moreover, there is no way that national identity can be viewed as extraneous to being Jewish. Jewish prayers and Hebrew Scriptures abound in references to Israel as the Jewish homeland. Jewish messianic hopes center on having all Jews return to Zion. While my friends in the American Council for Judaism were expressing feel-good sentiments, these sentiments do not belong to traditional Rabbinic Judaism. Like Yasser’s plan to make secular democratic equality the basis of Islamic religion, the ACJ was (and is) equating an inherited religious and communal faith with certain modern notions.

There is of course nothing wrong with groups disputing our late modern form of democracy or our current worship of the equality principle. I myself have been ripping into these idols, as an old-fashioned American constitutionalist, for many decades and can cite other authors who do the same. But there is a critical difference between me and those devout Muslims who are waging Jihad. My contrarian views do not lead me into being violent; nor do I have any desire to set up a caliphate on this continent or in Europe. What makes Muslims different from others who question certain modernist dogmas is the possibility that they may turn violent and that they may want to impose their way of life on others by force.

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NYT: India’s Call-Center Talents Put to a Criminal Use: Swindling Americans

I received countless calls from this particular scam. I never answered.

New York Times:

THANE, India — Betsy Broder, who tracks international fraud at the Federal Trade Commission, was in her office in Washington last summer when she got a call from two Indian teenagers.

Calling from a high-rise building in a suburb of Mumbai, they told her, in tones that were alternately earnest and melodramatic, that they wanted to share the details of a sprawling criminal operation targeting Americans. Ms. Broder, who was no stranger to whistle-blowers, pressed the young men for details.

“He said his name was Adam,” she said, referring to one of the pair. “I said, ‘Your name is not Adam. What does your grandmother call you?’ He said, ‘Babu.’”

Babu was Jayesh Dubey, a skinny 19-year-old with hair gelled into vertical bristles, a little like a chimney brush. He told her that he was working in a seven-story building and that everyone there was engaged in the same activity: impersonating Internal Revenue Service officials and threatening Americans, demanding immediate payment to cover back taxes.

If they reached a person who was sufficiently terrified or gullible — this was known in the business as a “sale” — they would instruct that person to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of iTunes cards to avoid prosecution, they said; the most rattled among them complied. The victim would then send the codes from the iTunes cards to the swindlers, giving them access to the money on the card.

As it happened, the United States government had been tracking this India-based scheme since 2013, a period during which Americans, many of them recent immigrants, have lost $100 million to it.

Though India had no reputation as a large-scale exporter of fraud in the past, it is now seen as a major center for cyberfraud, said Suhel Daud, an F.B.I. agent who serves as assistant legal attaché at the embassy in New Delhi. Several trends have converged to make this happen, he said: a demographic bulge of computer-savvy, young, English-speaking job seekers; a vast call-center culture; super-efficient technology; and what can only be described as ingenuity…

But those who believe that the drop is permanent should consider this: In the weeks after Mr. Poojary and Mr. Dubey left the call center, several lucrative job opportunities were presented to them. Each involved a telephone scheme targeting Americans, they said. There was the Viagra scam, in which the callers offered to sell cut-rate Viagra; there was a low-interest loan scam, in which people were asked to deposit $1,000 as proof of income. There was a tech scam, which warned Americans that their computer had been infected by a virus, and an American Express scam, which involved gathering personal information to break through security barriers on online accounts.

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LAT: The pressure’s on the Federal Reserve to make a diverse pick for Atlanta post

Yeah, I notice that pressure all around me. Almost everyone I know is loudly pushing for the Federal Reserve to make a diverse pick. Diversity on the Federal Reserve is the most important issue of our time. It is time for the Federal Reserve to allot its posts to Gentiles according to their share of the population.

Well, looking at the story, the Gentiles get no love. But if diversity is the issue, then you wouldn’t want Jews occupying a disproportionate number of seats, would you?

How about we make the NFL and the NBA use players according to their race’s share of the general population? How long will we tolerate black supremacy? And what about bus drivers? It seems like more than 90% of bus drivers in American cities are black. Don’t non-blacks know how to drive a bus?

Los Angeles Times:

selection of a regional Federal Reserve bank president normally takes place in relative obscurity, followed only by local business leaders, financial executives and analysts who track monetary policy.

But amid concerns about a lack of diversity at the highest levels of the nation’s central banking system, great attention is being focused on who will be chosen as the next head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The search is being watched closely by members of Congress and advocacy groups that have complained publicly in recent months that the Fed’s top leadership is nearly all white.

The Atlanta region, which has a large African American population, presents the perfect opportunity to start changing that, they said.

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Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin insists anti-Semitic demonstration in Whitefish will happen, names nonexistent “Jewish center” as location

Blog post:

Neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin says he plans to make good on threats to stage an anti-Semitic armed march through Whitefish next month, despite dismissive comments this week by Richard Spencer, the white nationalist and part-time Whitefish resident who inspired the idea.

Anglin’s insistence comes after Spencer said he doesn’t believe the march will take place, describing Anglin’s scheme as simply a “troll” of Whitefish residents. In an email Thursday, Anglin said Spencer is wrong, and that Anglin plans to apply for a permit that would allow him and a cohort of fellow skinheads to demonstrate in the streets.

“This is not about backing up Richard Spencer,” Anglin wrote of his proposed march, “this is about justice, and making it clear to the Jewish mafia that we will no longer tolerate their criminal gangsterism, their attacks on the families of those they disagree with politically.”

The proposed march was spun out of a recent dispute between Spencer, his mother, and local real estate agent Tanya Gersh, with the Spencers accusing Gersh of a “shake down” aimed at forcing Sherry Spencer to sell a commercial building she owns in Whitefish. Anglin took up the cause, calling for a “trollstorm” against Gersh, who is Jewish, and other Jewish residents of Whitefish. That threat later escalated when Anglin began promoting a “March on Whitefish” for which he would recruit California skinhead groups to carry assault-style rifles through the town.

The situation garnered international attention, prompting Spencer on Wednesday to tell the Daily Interlake and Missoulian newspapers he thought Anglin’s call to arms was just a joke—much as Spencer dismissed his own “Hail Trump” salute at a recent white nationalist conference as ironic play. Spencer did not, however, explicitly call for Anglin to call off the march, saying only that he is powerless to influence the blogger, but has become weary of the spotlight the controversy has put on Whitefish.

“I’m not telling Anglin to do anything,” Spencer now tells the Indy. “I just assumed it was a troll. Can he really bring out people for a march on a ski village in remote Montana?”

…Earlier this month, Anglin and Spencer appeared together on a right-wing podcast. An excerpt reported by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights shows the two men’s difference in approach.
Spencer: “They [Jews] kind of need us in a way… But in a weird way, it’s the people that shall not dwell alone, to borrow a title from Kevin McDonald’s book. They do need us.”

Anglin: “It’s a virus. They’re a human disease” [laughter].

Spencer: “Somewhat inflammatory language, but I understand what you’re saying.”

This week, Spencer told the Daily Interlake that Anglin is “totally wild—that’s not my kind of thing,” while also calling him a “rational” person who wouldn’t engage in physical violence.

Asked Friday morning whether he would call upon Anglin to stand down, Spencer offered this statement: “It’s time to bring this to an end.” He then pointed the Indy to a Youtube video he posted on Friday in which Spencer says that Whitefish residents can end the controversy by renouncing Love Lives Here, and specifically the Jewish rabbis involved.

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I wonder why Amazon.com recommends David Duke’s books to me when I log on to their home page?

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