A man accused of murdering four people, including 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin, of Livingston NJ, says he is retaliating against the U.S. for action in the Middle East.
According to court documents from Seattle where his two previous murders occurred, Ali Muhammad Brown was allegedly on a “bloody crusade” for two months.
Court documents show Brown says his “mission is vengeance” on the United States’ involvement in the Middle East. “All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government,” he says. “So a life for a life.”
The two men Brown killed in Seattle earlier in the summer, before being arrested for another murder in NJ just last week, were a gay male couple, returning from a gay club. It’s reportedly being investigated as a hate crime. [Sources: newjersey.news12.com 8/21/14 and nydailynews.com 8/21/14]
Blogger Pamela Geller, like myself, wonders where the gay and lesbian advocacy groups are on this issue. At her website on 7/3/14 she wrote:
Seattle has a problem. They won’t run our ads highlighting Muslim oppression of gays, despite this savage reality. If you recall, a devout Muslim set fire to a packed Seattle gay bar during a New Year’s celebration shortly after midnight on January 1. Seattle’s largest and longest-running gay nightclub was doused in gasoline and set aflame by Musab Masmari. He was arrested on his way to the airport. Where are the left-wing, the gay and LGBT [Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender] organizations denouncing the Islamic texts that inspire such mayhem and murder of gays? Where is that fierce gay leadership condemning Muslim oppression of gays under the sharia [Islamic law]? The silence is deafening.
Organizations such as the ones Geller mentions generally stress opposition to hatred as their central purpose. But what movement offers a more principled and organized system of hatred than militant Islam? And given this overt hatred of gay people, why don’t LGBT organizations come out against militant Islam at least as strongly as they do against fundamentalist Christianity, on this issue?
My own take on this is that progressive movements have an internal contradiction. On the one hand, they oppose hatred against racial minorities and gay people, particularly when that hatred takes the form of murder. (No argument here.) On the other hand, they view Islam as one of their fellow oppressed groups. As a result, they are simply silent or baffled when it comes time to condemn Islam-inspired violence. If they come out against Islam, they can oppose this movement for its overt hatred and desire to commit violence against gay and lesbian individuals. Yet if they come out against Islam, they risk looking like “haters,” because according to the conventional progressive line, we’re not supposed to hate Islam–or really anything, or anyone.
Making matters more complicated: Islam condemns the West for capitalism, material progress and income inequality — among many other things. These are the same ideological positions that the Obama-supporting people who run LGBT organizations usually hold themselves. Islam and the progressive left do not see eye-to-eye on things like gay marriage, obviously. But Islam, like those on the progressive left, detests American “imperialism,” which they view as arrogant and intolerant of impoverished nations. In this tired narrative, America is always the victimizer, even when its only offense was (historically) to be a freer, more rational and more productive society than nations who went a different route, ideologically and politically. No, this is not how all gay and lesbian people feel; but it is generally the attitude and political bent of people who run such organizations.
Another example of anti-gay Muslim violence underreported by the media:
Another Muslim from Seattle, Musab Mohamed Masmari, was sentenced several weeks ago [reports pjmedia.com] to ten years in prison for pouring gasoline onto a stairway in a famous gay nightclub, Neighbours, and setting the stairway on fire last New Year’s Eve, when the club was crowded and – if the fire had not been put out – the carnage would have been great.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg said:
“One of Masmari’s close associates was interviewed by investigators and reported that Masmari confided in him that he ‘burned a gay club’ and that he did it because ‘what these people are doing is wrong.’” In another report from February, we learn that an informant told the FBI before this attack that Masmari could be planning “terrorist activity,” and that he had “opined that homosexuals should be exterminated.”
PJMedia.com [8/25/14] comments: This incident should have been the impetus for a national discussion of violent Sharia [Islamic law] enforcement in the U.S., and an examination of what could be done to stop Sharia vigilantism. Instead, the mainstream media largely ignored the obvious motive; in this report, it is discussed as “homophobia,” with no hint that this was one of the first incidents of violent Sharia enforcement in the U.S.
The problem with LGBT groups, as with the civil rights organizations they modeled themselves on, is that they don’t focus on individual rights. Instead, they focus on rights for people as a group. But rights are not concepts which depend upon one’s status as a perceived/actual victim, or membership in a minority group; if they were, gays/lesbians and Sharia law enforcers would enjoy equal status (an impossible contradiction).
Rights define and sanction an individual’s freedom of action in a social context. [Ayn Rand’s definition, which I share]. Note that a right applies to an individual. It’s not possible to claim group rights (for any group) as equivalent or superior to any individual right. A group is nothing more than some number of individuals.
The concept of individual rights solves the whole problem. Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, or anyone else are entitled to believe and practice whatever they wish — so long as they do not impose force on others. That’s the moment they’re breaking the law. And yes, the secular government (divorced from any church) is the final authority, legally speaking. Unfortunately, progressive types in our government and academia are so caught up in their moral and social relativism that they have nothing to say when Sharia Law demands, “Who are you to claim your secular law is any better than ours?”
You cannot attempt to apply a Christian ethic (“love, don’t hate”) to the protection of individual rights. Barbaric advocates of “Sharia law” (nothing more than literal lawlessness) illustrate this more clearly than anyone.
Instead of asserting an equal individual right to live free from force, LGBT and civil rights groups instead focus on moralism and shaming, usually by calling people “hateful” and trying to inspire them (coerced sensitivity seminars, and the like) to their better selves. But truly hateful people will not be inspired to anything, other than to continue hating. It’s regrettable, but true. And Islamic haters are truly the father of all hate groups.
When you have an entire religion which believes in merging government and state, gaining ground militarily in the Middle East and starting to assert itself with violence in mostly civilized American cities, you’ve got a very serious problem on your hands.
The progressive types are not ready for such a challenge; nor is most of America, not yet at least.
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