School District Allows LGBTQ Lesson Opt-Outs After Legal Threat by Muslim Parents

Christian, Jewish and Muslim families in suburban D.C. are waiting for a federal appeals court to determine whether their school district can continue requiring their children to read LGBTQ “storybooks” without parental knowledge or consent.

Eleven hundred miles away in a similarly blue jurisdiction led by the United States’ first known Somali-American mayor, Muslim immigrant families who escaped a war-torn country didn’t have to go to court to have their parental rights honored.

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Arizona Chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations Pushes Form Letters Aimed at Silencing Support for Israel

The Arizona branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has prepared form letters to help Arab- and Muslim-Americans shut down expressions of support for Israel from their colleagues at workplaces and schools.

“Your team, here at CAIR-AZ, has prepared templatized documents to advocate for you and your loved ones at work and school. Your voice is powerful. Use these letters to keep that power in your hands. Please reach out to CAIR-AZ if you feel you have been discriminated against,” said Azza Abuseif, executive director of the Mesa-based chapter.

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School District Misled Court on Why It Banned Opt-Out for LGBTQ Lessons, Religious Groups Say

Newly revealed teacher-training materials and sworn affidavits show Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools misled the federal court hearing a lawsuit by religious families against the district’s no-exemptions policy for gender and sexuality instruction in the English Language Arts curriculum, a national Muslim group claims.

School officials in the affluent suburb bordering Washington, D.C. told a judge last month it rescinded opt-outs and parental notification this spring because of the logistical challenges created by too many families choosing to remove their children from the “Pride storybooks,” which teach children as young as 3 about sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and prepubescent same-sex romance.

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Bloomington Middle School Students Allowed to Leave Class for Ramadan ‘Reflection’: Report

Middle school students in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, have reportedly been given the opportunity to step out of class for “reflection” time during Ramadan.

An online form asks parents of students at Valley View Middle School if their child has permission to leave class for 15 minutes throughout the month of April. The story was first reported by the Center of the American Experiment.

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Second Facebook Whistleblower Offers to Testify in Congress

Another former Facebook employee says she is willing to testify before Congress on the tech giant’s business practices.

Sophie Zhang is a former Facebook data scientist and whistleblower who, in September 2020, revealed “influence” operations perpetrated by “authoritarian regimes” that took place on Facebook. Zhang told CNN in an interview Sunday that she provided information regarding “potential criminal violations” by Facebook to a U.S. law enforcement agency at the time. Zhang also said that she is willing to testify before Congress about her allegations of criminal conduct by Facebook.

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Ilhan Omar Comes to Rashida Tlaib’s Defense in Backlash Over Holocaust Comments

  Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) has repeatedly defended her colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI-13) against criticisms related to comments she made about the Holocaust on a podcast over the weekend. “There’s always kind of a calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways have been wiped out, and some people’s passports,” Tlaib said on a Saturday episode of the podcast “Skullduggery.” “And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time,” she continued. Tlaib immediately faced backlash for the comments, and was accused of engaging in revisionist history. “She ignored the fact that Palestinian leaders at the time allied themselves with Hitler and that total war is how the Arab world reacted to the declaration of Israeli independence,” CNN anchor John King said on his Monday show. Writing for The New York Post, Lahav Harkov, contributing editor…

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Ilhan Omar Scheduled to Headline Another CAIR Fundraiser

  Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) is scheduled to headline another fundraiser for the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR’s Washington state chapter announced last week that Omar would be speaking at its May 25 fundraiser along with Motiva Johnson-Harrell, a state representative from Pennsylvania and the first Muslim woman in its State Legislature. TICKETS ARE HERE! 🎟️ https://t.co/rr2d40XKSm#IlhanOmar #Muslim2020 #Ramadan2019 pic.twitter.com/r59xRUcirx — CAIR_WA (@CAIR_WA) May 2, 2019 The fundraiser is titled “Unapologetically Us: Building Muslim Power for 2020 and Beyond.” “The coming year will be pivotal for our community and for the nation as a whole. There are many challenges from violent Islamophobia to xenophobic policies, but there’s also hope,” an event description states. “American Muslims have seen political representation like never before, including the election of Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American and one of two American Muslim women elected to Congress.” CAIR goes on to invite its supporters to “join us for an evening of conversation, inspiration, and strategizing on how we can best defend our community everyday while building power for 2020.” In March, Omar headlined CAIR’s Fourth Annual Valley Banquet in Los Angeles and faced widespread backlash for comments she made during her speech. At one…

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Ilhan Omar: ‘This Is Not Going to Be the Country of White People’

A group of Black Lives Matter founders and communist activist Angela Davis organized a rally in support Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) Tuesday on Capitol Hill. According to Democracy Now, the rally was organized to “defend Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and to urge Congress to censure President Trump for his attacks on her.” Omar made an appearance at the rally and spoke to the crowd of supporters about the “occupant of the White House and his goons in the Republican Party.” “They can’t stand—they cannot stand—that a refugee, a black woman, an immigrant, a Muslim shows up in Congress thinking she’s equal to them,” Omar said. “The occupant of the White House, as my sister Ayanna [Pressley] likes to call him, and his allies are doing everything that they can to distance themselves and misinform the public from the monsters that they created that is terrorizing the Jewish community and Muslim community.” Omar elaborated on the comments by saying that when “we are talking about anti-Semitism, we must also talk about Islamophobia.” “It’s two sides of the same coin of bigotry,” she said. “What we are fighting for is not for the few but for the many. Every single one…

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Ex-Muslim Turned Christian Pastor Speaks at Minnesota Capitol Ahead of Court Hearing

A group of Minnesotans gathered at the State Capitol Wednesday night to host a prayer rally for Pastor Ramin Parsa, who was arrested at the Mall of America in August on charges of misdemeanor trespassing. As The Minnesota Sun reported in November, Parsa visited Minnesota in August and was invited by one of his hosts to see “the biggest mall in North America.” While there, Parsa said he “randomly ran into some Somalis, we had a random conversation.” “They asked me where I’m from. I told them and the conversation led to whether I was Muslim or not. I replied, ‘I used to be but I’m a Christian now,’” he said. Parsa claims that “another woman who was not part of the conversation went and complained to the security,” and he was ultimately charged with trespassing. Parsa, who runs Redemptive Love Ministries in Los Angeles, returned to Minnesota Wednesday evening ahead of his Thursday morning hearing. His supporters organized a prayer rally Wednesday night at the State Capitol where Parsa spoke about the religious persecution he’s experienced in other countries. “I’ve been through this before in other countries,” he said during the rally. “The only thing that made me sad…

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Commentary: The Numbers Support Trump’s Decision to Leave Syria

by Gunnar Heinsohn   Proclaim victory and pull out! On December 19, Donald Trump tweeted his own version of this classic military maxim as the president announced the withdrawal of America’s 2,000 soldiers from the war against the ISIS caliphate in Syria. Allies reacted with shock. Enemies mocked and gloated. Neither reaction should come as a surprise. The president’s defenders emphasize that America has nothing to show for the $7 trillion it has spent on this war. The United States, they say, has much greater concerns at home and in East Asia. Few analysts, regardless of how they feel about America’s withdrawal from Syria, understand why such conflicts drag on and on, despite enormous losses. Historians and journalists rarely examine the demographic data that explain why deadly wars can last for decades or centuries. Even the killing ground of Europe from 1500 to 1945 escapes their attention. And when it comes to Syria, they are utterly clueless about the link between rapid demographic growth and the long and bloody wars that have devastated this region. Explosive population growth results in explosions on the battlefield. Between 1900 and 2015, Islam’s global population increased by a factor of nine, from 200 million…

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Tennessee’s Muslim Advisory Council and Vanderbilt MSA Align With Avowed Anti-Semite Linda Sarsour

This year, the aggressively vocal anti-Semite and anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour was invited by the Vanderbilt Muslim Students Association and the Middle Eastern Students Association to talk about “Intersectionality and Allyship.” Two years prior, Tennessee’s AMAC invited Sarsour to speak in Knoxville alongside AMAC board member Drost Kokoye and Islamic Society of North American (ISNA) fundraiser Faheed Tasleem. Sarsour, an Obama “Champion of Change” and CAIR “American Muslim of the Year,” is well known for her overt hatred of Israel and all things Jewish. Born in New York to Palestinian immigrants from the West Bank, she self-identifies as a Palestinian-American and uses every opportunity including the Ferguson “intifada” to piggyback alleged oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli government. Nothing is creepier than Zionism.Challenge racism, #NormalizeJustice. Check out this video by @remroum http://t.co/q282BYT8 — Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) October 31, 2012 Sarsour is a vocal promoter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and a prolific tweeter of anti-Israel messages telling Muslim audiences that they shouldn’t “humanize” Jews whom she characterizes as oppressors of Arabs. According to Sarsour, she is “deeply involved in the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement” which was birthed from the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson that…

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Muslim Celebration of ‘Unity and Power’ at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minnesota, With Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’

More than 20,000 Muslims are expected to gather at U.S. Bank Stadium Tuesday morning in celebration of the Islamic holiday known as Eid al-Ahda commemorating the sacrifice of Abraham. As such, the holiday, known as the “Feast of Sacrifice,” often involves the ritual sacrifice of an animal, though organizers of Tuesday’s event set to be held in the new Minnesota Vikings stadium have assured the public that no animals will be slaughtered inside the stadium. The two-day event was first announced to the public August 7 on Somali TV of Minnesota when a group of local imams gathered outside the stadium, calling the celebration an opportunity to display the “unity and the power of our community.” In attendance at the press conference was Dr. Waleed Idris al-Maneese, who leads the Islamic University of Minnesota and serves as the imam of a Bloomington mosque. His mosque has produced at least five Islamic extremists who have gone on to fight with either ISIS or al-Shabaab, according to WND. Leo Hohmann, an author and journalist who has spent much of his career covering radical Islam, had former imam Dr. Mark Christian translate Maneese’s comments made during the press conference. According to Christian, Maneese…

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Girl Dies After Undergoing Female Genital Mutilation

Tennessee Star

by Gabrielle Okun   A 10-year-old girl in Somalia died on July 14 after complications from female genital mutilation. Deeqa Dahir Nuur, the young girl from the village of Olol, bled to death after a traditional cutter in her town severed a vein causing hemorrhaging, according to The Guardian Friday. She was then taken to a hospital, where she died of blood loss. While FGM is constitutionally illegal, pressure from religious groups have prevented political figures from enacting any legislation to punish cutters, The Guardian added. Somalia has 99.8 percent Muslim population as of 2010, according to Pew Research Center. “The woman who performed the operation has not been arrested, but even if she was, there is no law that would ensure she is punished for the act,” said Hawa Aden Mohammed, the founder of an NGO that raises awareness against the dangers of FGM. “It is difficult to estimate the number of girls who die due to FGM per month or per day because they are [sworn] to secrecy, particularly in rural areas. We only get to hear of the few cases of those bold enough to seek medical treatment in towns. But from the stories we do hear, they could be in their dozens,” Mohammed added.…

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NBC News Writes First Muslim ‘Backlash’ Story 6 Hours After New York Terror Attack

NBC News began constructing a favorite media narrative in the hours following Tuesday’s terror attack in New York City, posting a story about potential “backlash” against Muslims just six hours after a Muslim man mowed down tourists on a bike path in Manhattan. Shortly after police identified the suspect as 29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbekistan…

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