For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil– 1 Tim. 6:10
By PATRICK WOOD
Either global bankers are seducing Islamic dictators, or vice versa.
Even if they are seducing each other, the result will be the same: Islamic/Sharia banking is coming to the United States and other Western nations, thanks to global banks such as Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
With Great Britain pledging to become the Islamic banking center of the world, the stampede by global banks to enter the world of Islamic banking is well underway.
Western banking met Islam many decades ago, but only began to sleep with her a few years ago. Since then, it is has become a wanton and open affair.
The implications for the West, and especially for the U.S., are staggering. Because all Islamic banking products must be created and offered according to strict Sharia law, global banks are doing for Islam what it could never do on its own: Give legitimacy to Sharia and infiltrate it into the fabric of Western society.
How many times has a Muslim migrant attacked innocent Americans and the Council on American-Islamic Relations or some other advocacy group swoops in to suggest that the attack was a result of mental illness?
It happened in the attack that killed 14 Americans in San Bernardino in December 2015 by Syed Farooq and his migrant fiancée.
It happened in Chattanooga in July 2015 when five U.S. servicemen were shot and killed by Kuwaiti-American Mohammad Abdulaziz.
And when Amina Ali Ahra, aka Iesha Ibrahim, a female refugee from Somalia, attacked and beat a Lawrenceville, Georgia, woman and her daughter with their own flagpole in 2016 the FBI refused to charge Ibrahim with a hate crime because it said she was mentally impaired.
Well, it happened again on Saturday, April 28, in Johns Creek, a suburb of Atlanta, where Somali refugee Shukri Ali Said, 36, was threatening her family members with a knife.
Said’s sister called 911 and two officers responded to the scene near Northview High School. They ordered the woman to drop her knife. When Said refused to drop her weapon even after being Tasered, the officers opened fire. She died at a local hospital.
He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. — Revelation 13:17
By LEO HOHMANN
There’s no denying that digital cryptocurrencies have captured the imagination of Gen-X’rs and millennials throughout the Western world in recent years.
But amid the excitement surrounding this new virtual money, questions have arisen about whether bitcoin and other cryptocurrency will ever evolve into a stable, reliable form of money that is accepted everywhere.
While there has been nary a peep from Christian leaders on this subject [I will explain later why they should get their heads in the game] there have been serious reservations about cryptocurrency coming from the Islamic world.
As long as the world’s fastest-growing religious-political system — now encompassing one-fifth of the world’s population – considers digital currency haram, or forbidden, it is unlikely that such a system would gain widespread global acceptance.
As recently as December a popular Saudi cleric ruled that cryptocurrencies are prohibited under Islamic Sharia law, citing their speculative nature and the ease with which the virtual coins can be used for money laundering and criminal enterprise.
“We know that bitcoins remain anonymous when you deal with it… which means that it’s an open gate for money laundering, drug money and haram (forbidden) money; you can just put it there and no one can trace you… so there is a lot of ambiguity,” said Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem on his TV programAsk Zaad. [Digital Currency ‘Forbidden in Islam,’ Rules Saudi Cleric, The New Arab, Dec. 6, 2017].
Watch Saudi Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem talk in cautionary terms about crytocurrencies.
“It’s not backed by governments or central banks, so you cannot say it is a currency because no one deals with it except a handful of people [in a network on the Internet],” the Sheikh said.
But what if cyrptocurrencies now considered haram by Muslim leaders could be made halal, or acceptable, under Sharia law?
And what if I told you efforts are underway to do exactly that?
Islamic scholar Muhammad Abu Bakar of Malaysia.
It seems all that Islamic scholars had to do was say the word, giving a few details on why they didn’t like cryptocurrencies, and the financial industry started working overtime to deliver a product that assuages their concerns.
Several companies, after consulting with Islamic financial gurus, have launched new digital coins backed by physical assets, proving just how important they consider the Sharia stamp of approval.
A company called OneGram obtained a ruling that its cryptocurrency conforms with Islamic law from Dubai-based Al-Maali Consulting.
In Malaysia, HelloGold launched an initial offer of its gold-backed cryptocurrency, receiving approval from Islamic scholars at Kuala Lumpur-based Amanie Advisors.
The most recent evidence of Islamic warming to the boom in bitcoin came in a 21-page paper published April 5 by Islamic scholar Mufti Muhammad Abu-Bakar, who declared that bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general, are indeed Sharia compliant.
Where are the Christians?
Christians, who should also be concerned about the advent of digital money, are as usual asleep at the wheel. Ask your pastor if it’s OK to start trading in bitcoin and you are likely to get a blank stare.
But if we receive no guidance from our spiritual leaders, does that get us off the hook of responsibility before God?
White nationalists showed up in Newnan, Ga., April 21, where they were met by throngs of protesters and an army of police in riot gear.
By LEO HOHMANN
I live right outside the city limits of Newnan, Georgia, and my hometown became a media spectacle this past Saturday, April 21.
One of my friends called it a protest rally for the “dumb and dumber.”
I must say, our fair city did resemble a no-go zone for normal folks.
Antifa sent us busloads of anarchists, Marxists and common criminals, who took to the streets with naïve college students and some well-intentioned locals. They came to protest a rally by a small band of neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Movement, which had been granted a permit by the city to hold a rally in the Greenville Street Park.
In the past, back when folks were a bit more tolerant of those holding divergent political views, such a rally would have come and gone without so much as a glancing notice. At worst, it might have sparked a good old-fashioned political debate in the park.
But in today’s America, when a group espousing controversial views decides to exercise its First Amendment rights in a public space, the left goes berserk and marshals its own, much larger army of extremists to turn out and make mischief. This creates a toxic environment that can devolve quickly into mayhem, vandalism and death.
The city of Newnan found itself in just such a situation this weekend.
But Newnan was prepared. More than 800 officers from 42 law-enforcement agencies across Georgia, many of them covered from head to toe in black-armored riot gear, lined the streets of this small Southern town of 38,000.
There were police barricades and check points all over. Helicopters and drones circled overhead, some armed with listening devices and electronic eyes with facial-recognition software.
What have we become as a people when it takes this kind of military presence to keep the peace on the streets of small-town America?
The cost to the taxpayer must have been astronomical.
Yet, I have no doubt that were it not for this massive police presence, we very possibly could have had another Charlottesville on our hands. [Recall that one person died and several were injured at a white-supremacist rally and antifa counter-rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, last August].
I could have gone downtown Saturday and witnessed the spectacle first-hand but I didn’t.
Though the weather was a perfect sunny and 75 degrees, this was not my idea of a Saturday afternoon in the park. I, like most Newnan-area residents, decided to sit this one out.
Publicity for the event was shoved down our throats for weeks by the Atlanta media, which then cascaded into national media coverage from the likes of CNN, the New York Times, New York Post, Time magazine and USA Today.
This put the city on edge with genuine fear. The big, bad Nazis were coming to get us!
Church leaders gathered the night before to pray for peace.
The white nationalists were hyped to the point where you almost expected them to march into town with jack boots, side-arms and a contingent of panzer tanks. What we got instead were a couple of dozen white guys, some with grizzled grey beards, armed with a megaphone.
They showed up about 4 p.m., shouted a bit of their supremacist ideology through the loudspeaker and by 5 p.m. were finished, led out of town by police escort, probably never to be seen again in these parts.
Ten people were arrested, all of them antifa demonstrators who refused to remove their face masks, pushed officers and refused to get out of the streets and onto the sidewalks. In a confrontation with police, one antifa group dropped bags that were later found to contain smoke grenades and fireworks. At another location on Jackson Street, antifa thugs were found dropping cans of wasp spray capable of shooting 25 feet, and a shield with screws protruding from the front was also recovered.
Coweta County Sheriff Mike Yeager told the local Times-Herald that antifa came to Newnan “with a purpose. They came here to antagonize, take control of our community and incite fear.”
From the livestream video I watched on Facebook, the police were disciplined and professional, even as the antifa anarchists hurled insult after insult their way, punctuated in most cases by vile and filthy language.
“Cops, pigs, murderers, you’re the real fascists!” some shouted.
“Cops and Klan go hand in hand!” others cried out.
Clockwise from top left, the antifa activists arrested Saturday, April 21, in Newnan, Ga., were: Katherine Lyons Ogilvie, Daniel Sean Hanley, Jeremy James Ortega, Christopher Deon Render, Jose Eduardo Osorio-Hernandez, Alan Edward Hutzel, Hector Barraza, Dannielle Jelayne Shochet, Noah Peretz and Erin Marie Galvin-McCoy.
Parents, pastors, politicians and educators will join a Muslim imam at a mosque Friday in Oakland County, Michigan, to pray and discuss how to make their schools and community safer in an era of mass school shootings.
The Muslim Unity Center, a mosque in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, is hosting an “Interfaith Prayers and Symbolic Walkout Vigil” April 20 that feeds off of the anti-gun fervor created in the wake of the mass-shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that killed 17 students in February.
The Muslim Unity Center, led by Shaykh Mohamed Almasmari, will host the event at 6 p.m., after its Friday afternoon Jummah or “call to prayer.”
Imam Shaykh Mohamed Almasmari
Almasmari is heavily involved in the interfaith movement in Michigan. He has an outreach program, featured on the mosque’s website, called Building Bridges with our Neighbors.
A regular part of his presentations to Christian churches is a segment on “Islamophobia and its impact.”
“Islamophobia” is essentially a Western version of the Islamic blasphemy laws, where non-Muslims are not allowed to speak critically of Islam without incurring severe social penalties. Actual violence against Muslims is rare in the United States, and many such claims have turned out to be fake. [See Fake Hate Crimes, by Kevin Williamson, National Review, March 5, 2017]
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has made a huge priority of promoting Muslim Americans as persecuted religious minorities struggling to survive as victims in the oppressive society of America.
Many Christian writers and thinkers, from journalist Rod Dreher all the way up to Pope Francis, seem to have bought into the oppressed Muslim theme.
Churches helping resettle Muslim refugees
Pastors of at least two Christian churches in Oakland County — First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham and Christ Cranbrook Episcopal Church — plan to join Shaykh Almasmari at his mosque Friday for interfaith prayers.
Christ Cranbrook works with Samaritas, a partnership of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services with Episcopal Migration Ministries, to help resettle refugees into southeastern Michigan, according to the church newsletter.
Michigan has been a popular destination for refugees making hijra, an Arabic term for migration, from the Islamic world with the help of government contractors like Samaritas. The state has received 32,401 refugees from Muslim-majority nations since 2002, resettled primarily by Catholic Charities and Samaritas, according to data at the U.S. Refugee Processing Center.
Libertarian philosophy and Islam might seem like an odd mix, but in Minnesota politics, anything is possible.
The Liberty Caucus of the Minnesota Republican Party will hold its annual convention May 12 at the Dar al-Farooq Community Center, part of the notorious hardline Bloomington mosque that has been at the center of controversy for years.
Many Minnesota Republicans are expressing their dissatisfaction with the decision by Caucus Chairman Zavier Bicott to hold the convention at Dar al-Farooq. At least half a dozen known terrorists have attended the mosque, including Adnan Farah and brother Mohamed Farah, who pleaded guilty in April 2016 to providing material support to the Islamic State, also called ISIS.
Dar al-Farooq’s former imam, Waleed Idris al-Maneesey, is a fire-breathing anti-Semite who preaches that Sharia law is superior to man-made law and that Allah sanctions the slaughter of Jews whenever they cause “corruption” on earth. [See Islamic University of Minnesota A Hotbed of Extremism, by John Rossomando, IPT News, April 8, 2016]
The Egyptian-born Maneesey authored a paper for the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, or AMJA, where he sits on the fatwa committee. Muslims should refrain from participating in non-Islamic courts that do not follow Sharia, he wrote, particularly those in the West guided by “man-made” law.
“The authority to legislate rests with Allah alone,” he wrote.
Imam Waleed Idris al-Maneesey of Bloomington, Minnesota.
Maneesey remains tightly connected to Dar al-Farooq and in fact is scheduled to be one of two “honored guest speakers” there on April 23, according to the mosque’s Facebook page.
“This is very likely the most dangerous mosque in the upper Midwest,” said Debra Anderson, who heads up the Minneapolis chapter of ACT For America, a national organization that opposes the advancement of Sharia at the state and local levels.
But for Bicott, it’s all about spreading his libertarian philosophy to a segment of American society that he admits has little experience with the fruits of individual liberty.
“The Republican Liberty Caucus is the conscience of the Republican Party in Minnesota,” Bicott told me in a phone conversation Tuesday. “Individual liberty is what brings us together, the idea that we all want to live free. We need to find ways to grow the party and give courage to Muslim Republicans to stand up in their community and say: ‘I’m a Republican and I believe in individual liberty.’”
Critics say that’s naïve.
Why would Muslims listen to a 33-year-old Republican over their own imam, who is trained in the principles of Sharia? Few rank and file members of the mosque will likely even show up for the Liberty Caucus convention, they say, and those who do will likely not be voting Republican anytime soon.
Democrats ‘come talk to us with a smile on their face’
Bicott, 33, chairs not only the GOP’s Liberty Caucus but also the party’s Senate District 50, which includes east Bloomington where Dar al-Farooq is located. He said he has visited the mosque five times in recent years, strictly on party business, and has developed “a good relationship” with the leaders.
Bicott said he has never read the Quran or the hadiths, and recently started reading the Bible for the first time. He has no religious leanings whatsoever.
“I’m on Leviticus now and when I’m done with the Bible I plan to read the Quran. I don’t follow any particular faith. It’s not a part of my life,” he said. “But I want to know the stories and be able to relate to people to whom it is important.”
The decision to have Dar al-Farooq host the convention was announced in a press release Monday and by Tuesday morning Bicott said his phone was ringing off the hook with irate Republicans.
Christian broadcaster Brannon Howse on the set of his Worldview Weekend radio and Internet podcast show.
“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. ” – Jesus Christ, [John: 15:18-19]
By LEO HOHMANN
It’s no secret that the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, scour the country looking for Christians who dare to speak or write about their beliefs that Islam poses a threat to our constitutional freedoms — especially the freedom of speech.
When these intellectual gangsters find a Christian who dares to speak the forbidden thoughts in public, they pounce like ravenous wolves. They inform Antifa, #Ungovernable, #Resist and other Marxists and Anarchists who flood social media with disparaging comments about the speaker and show up at the advertised venue to cause chaos.
But before employing any of these disruptive tactics, they first try to get the speaker’s event canceled.
That’s what happened this past weekend in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Christian radio host Brannon Howse had scheduled a five-city Worldview Weekend speaking tour. Howse had enlisted speakers including former Muslim-turned Christian Pastor Shahram Hadian and Bible-prophecy teacher Jimmy DeYoung, and booked venues months in advance, only to see those reservations canceled at the last minute.
Sebastian Gregerson, left, had help from Maryland imam Suleiman Bengharsa in purchasing an arsenal of military-grade weapons.
By LEO HOHMANN
The number of mosques operating in the United States has exploded by more than 150 percent since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to the point where more than 3,200 now operate in all 50 states.
But who is leading these mosques?
Almost without fail, the imams in mainline Sunni mosques are not Americans. They come from the Middle East and, to one degree or another, would like to see America transformed into a society more akin to the one they left.
They are on “hijra,” the Arabic term for migration, just as their prophet Muhammad made hijra from Mecca to Medina in the seventh century to spread his new religion and legal system.
While President Trump has talked about gaps in our immigration system with regard to the border wall, the refugee program, the diversity visa lottery and chain migration, he has yet to say anything about what may be the most dangerous open gate of all for Islamic radicals.
The “R” class of visas for so-called religious workers apparently flies completely under the radar of the Trump administration. Shockingly, the number of such visas issued grew during Trump’s first year in office and was 3.7 percent higher than under President Obama’s final year.
In the guest article below, technocracy expert Patrick Wood weighs in on ‘smart cities.’ The U.N. has made a push in recent years to bypass national governments and implement global governance through cities [Recall how when President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate pact the mayors of many major U.S. cities said they would ignore his decision and proceed to comply with U.N. regulations, not U.S. laws]. Also remember that the UN biosphere project seeks to drive ranchers and small farmers off their land and push more people into cities. Wood’s Technocracy News and Trends provides daily updates on how technology in the hands of technocrats are driving us toward a new age of total surveillance where everyone is watched and all activity is monitored in real time. -Leo Hohmann
Computer processing capacity is about to overtake data storage capacity. This is the point of inflection that I have warned about for several years, and it promises a very dangerous and unpredictable near-term future. Most people will not know what hit them, being unable to understand the implications of it.
Data is to Technocracy as blood is to your body. For many years, it has been easier to collect and store data than it has to process it for meaning. To make this point, consider that your your personal computer might have a data storage capacity of 1 Terabyte, but your computer’s processor can only open and run a few programs at a time; most of the data on your storage disk is just sitting there doing and meaning nothing.
Who collects data? Just about everyone. Cities, counties, states, national governments, intelligence agencies, corporations, the United Nations. The express intent of the word ‘Smart” – Smart Cities, Smart Grid, Smart Growth, etc. – is to collect data in order to manage and control.
In 1965, the founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, wrote a paper suggesting that the number of components per integrated circuit would double every year. By 1975, he revised the doubling factor to every two years, and it was finally settled that the most accurate representation was eighteen months. This became known as Moore’s Law and it has been shown to be accurate year after year for the last 40 years.
That’s history now, and Moore’s Law is officially dead and buried.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s emblem and slogan is focused on spreading Islamic law through both the sword and peaceful jihad, also known as cultural or ‘civilization’ jihad.
“When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.”
–Jesus Christ, Matthew 12:43-45
By LEO HOHMANN
When President Trump was on the campaign trail, he made Islamic immigration and terrorism a focal point of his candidacy.
He at one point expressed his desire to end all Muslim immigration “until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
He said he wanted to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, potentially cutting the legs out from under this shadowy network of seditious Islamists whose self-described mission is the worldwide spread of Sharia law.
I don’t think Trump knows all that much about the Brotherhood’s history, its tactics or its deceptive, two-pronged strategy of using both terror and peaceful political warfare against the enemies of Allah. He was simply responding to the global rise in terrorism that was coinciding with a mass population shift from the Islamic world into the Western democracies.
Western Europe, which has allowed the largest influx of Muslim migrants, has experienced the most terrorism, not to mention a huge spike in sexual assaults on its women. Then, to make matters worse, European governments sided with the migrants against their own people, clamping down on the free speech of any non-Muslims who complained about the Muslim atrocities. Trump saw what was going on in Europe and, rightly, wanted to stop it from coming here.
This is why the establishment elites hate Trump. He came out of nowhere to disrupt their plan to divide and conquer the last bulwark against global governance, America, using Islam as the battering ram that would crush the decaying remnants of Western Christianity. Upon the ashes of Christendom these elites would build their long-awaited new world order. This new order would feature a monstrous surveillance state watching the activities of every human being all the time, and a new religious fervor slanted toward Islam, the fastest-growing and most intolerant religion on earth.
LeoHohmann.com 