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Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Shot Fired in a Russian Church

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 01:00 PM PST

The roundup begins with what might be Russia's own Fort Hood Massacre as a Russian priest, Daniil Sysoyev was gunned down in his own church. While there is still no word on the killer, but Daniil Sysoyev had made his reputation by preaching to and trying to convert Muslims... and had received many death threats over it.

34 year-old Daniil Sysoyev was shot at least four times at in the head and chest in the Church of St. Thomas Thursday night by a masked gunman, according to the Prosecutor General's Investigative Committee. The assailant also wounded the church's choirmaster, Vladimir Strelbitsky.

Sysoyev routinely denounced Islam and actively reached out to Muslims and various religious sects to convert them. In a recent interview with a Russian newspaper, Sysoyev boasted that he had baptized 80 Muslims.

"They've threatened to cut my head off 14 times," Sysoyev told Komsomolskaya Pravda in the interview. "The FSB [Federal Security Service] got in touch with me a year ago to say they had uncovered a murder plot against me."

He told a television interviewer in February 2008 that he considered it a sin not to preach to Muslims, according to the Interfax news agency.

Sysoyev was originally from Russia's republic of Tatarstan, where a large majority of the population is Muslim. He published books titled "An Orthodox Response to Islam" and "Marrying a Muslim," which were critical of the faith and drew fierce responses from Muslim organizations.

There is as of yet no word on the killer, but in Russia a masked shooting usually means the mob or the FSB\KGB. Neither are terribly likely in this case, though the same parties who rise up to defend Chechen Muslim terrorists will likely claim that it was a KGB operation.

But in a largely religious country, the murder of a priest in his own church is all but certain to touch off a firestorm of anger. However Islam in Russia occupies a peculiar position.

While Muslims are on track to become the majority in Russia, for now much of Islam in Russia is controlled by the government, in the same that the Saudis control America and European mosques. As such this government controlled form of Islam is free to preach radicalism and terrorism... so long as it is directed at foreigners, particularly Americans, Europeans and Israelis.

But at the same time the killing of Sysoyev may be another demonstration that Putin's grip on Russia's growing Muslim minority is slipping. Since the Russian press is also government controlled, a good way to see the "party line" on the Sysoyev killing is to examine the Russian press's position.

Pravda blames Muslims and provides more details of the killing. RussiaToday however ignores any mention of Islam. The Moscow Times by contrast writes a fairly careful story that nevertheless mentions Sysoyev's conflict with Islam.

Sysoyev was from Tatarstan, a predominantly Muslim region of Russia on the Volga river. He was threatened after preaching to Muslims and Christians from other denominations.

Russia is home to Europe's largest Muslim community and Islam is the country's second-biggest faith, something which Sysoyev criticized.

"Islam is far from being a religion in the way we understand it," he said in one of his video lectures posted on YouTube

"Islam can be rather compared with projects like national socialism or the Communist Party seeking to create God's kingdom on Earth using humanly instruments," he added.

ITAR-TASS, which I believe remains an official agency of the Russian government, however fails to mention Islam.

The mixed signals suggest that the Russian authorities have not yet decided how to deal with the matter. It is also a strong sign that this was not an intelligence operation, as the Russian media would be running with a regular story. And since the Russian police tend to make arrests for political reasons... we may never know the real story behind the Sysoyev killing.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that both the Russian Orthodox Church clergy and the official Islamic mosques are controlled by the Russian government. While Russia has fought aggressively against Islamic separatists, it has also banned criticism of Islam at home, with one editor threatened with jail for running the Mohammed cartoons. For now Russia is determined to keep a lid on any conflict, and it is entirely possible that even if this was a Muslim attack, the authorities will never admit it.

Jawa Report provides me with a hat tip on the story

Meanwhile back in America, over in Chicagoland, an American woman is facing 3 years in prison for tugging on a Muslims's headscarf in what is described as a "hate crime".

A suburban Chicago woman has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly yanking the head scarf of a Muslim woman in Tinley Park two days after the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.

Valerie Kenney, 54, a bank teller from Tinley Park, appeared at the Bridgeview Courthouse today and was released on $5,000 bail. If convicted of the felony, Kenney faces up to 3 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. She is due back in court Dec. 3.

...

Amal Abusumayah, 28, told police she was shopping at a Tinley Park grocery store Nov. 7 when a middle-age woman passed her in the aisle and made a loud reference to the killings at Fort Hood.

"She said, 'The man that did that shooting in Texas was from the Middle East,' in a really loud and angry voice," Abusumayah told the Tribune last week. Minutes later, while Abusumayah was paying for her groceries at a self-checkout, the woman approached her from behind and tugged hard on her blue and beige head scarf, she said.

"I turned around and looked at her, and she walked out of the store," she said. "My scarf didn't come off because it was on very tight, but my head was tugged back."

Let's be clear about this, Valerie Kenney is facing 3 years in prison for TUGGING on a Muslimette's head scarf. The madness here is completely incredible.

Nidal Hassan was able to openly deliver lectures inside the US Army supporting and defending terrorism. That was not considered a hate crime. He massacred 13 US soldiers, and that is not considered terrorism or a hate crime. But don't tug of a Muslim woman's headscarf. For that you'll go to jail for 3 years.

Of course if Valerie Kenney were to claim PTSD, the same media talking heads like Dr. Phil, Joe Klein and Larry King, who rushed to proclaim that Nidal Hassan was the innocent victim of Pre-PTSD or PTSD by Proxy, would never accept that. The difference of course is that like so many Americans, Europeans and Israelis, she actually was traumatized by Islamic terrorism.

While the only thing Nidal Hassan was traumatized was by the hate for Non-Muslims embedded in the pages of the Koran.

Someone should start a legal defense fund for Valerie Kenney, because she's likely to be made a target by Chicagoland authorities looking to establish proof of equivalence between Muslim terrorism and American oppression of Muslims.

Sure Nidal Hassan murdered 13 US soldiers, but look Valerie Kenney in Chicago tugged on a Muslimette's headscarf/symbol of oppression.

But of course some types of bigotry are more acceptable to the left than others. Case in point, radical left wing director Ken Loach who in response to statistics showing the rise of anti-semitism in Europe stated, "If there has been a rise I am not surprised. In fact, it is perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism."

Naturally dislike of Muslims is not "perfectly understandable" in response to Muslim terror. But anti-semitism is "perfectly understandable" in response to Israel defending itself against Muslim terrorism.

Ken Loach has pushed for a boycott of Israel in the past and defended himself against charges of anti-semitism by screaming that "From the beginning, Israel and its supporters have attacked their critics as anti-semites or racists". Which is a charge that on Ken Loach's case has an obvious basis.

Oily's Onions responded to Ken Loach thusly

Ken Loach should be ashamed of himself. He, as a film director, should understand more than most why rubbish films like High School Musical 3, or anything with Tom Cruise, anger decent, law-abiding, liberal people. And if the entirely understandable anger of those people at, say, a Robin Williams movie were to cause them to punch Mr Loach in the face, we at Olly's Onions would not condone that violence, but we would understand it. For he is a film director, and Patch Adams was also made by a film director. So was the new Pink Panther film. And if cinema enthusiasts scream in his face, "Why can't you leave Inspector Clouseau ALOOONE? Don't you realise that Steve Martin is JUST NOT FUNNY ANYMORE?!" while burning effigies of Mr Loach, and boycotting his films, and daubing obscenities on his house, and beating up his children, can he blame them? We certainly could not. If Mr Loach complains that these attacks are unjustified, that is merely a distraction from the fact that he is an idiot.

We look forward to Mr Loach's next film, which is expected to "understand" discrimination against black people because of all the shitty things African governments do.

Ken Loach's support for Islamic terrorism however is not purely constrained by his anti-semitism. There was Ken Loach's contribution to 11' 09" 01, a collection of short films about the attacks, arranged by the French. So what's coming next can't be too much of a surprise.

The most forceful contribution is by Ken Loach, a letter to the relatives of the Twin Towers victims from the exiled Chilean singer Vladimir Vega, the star of Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird. It consists of newsreel material of the vicious coup, arranged by Kissinger and the CIA, that overthrew Allende's socialist government on 11 September 1973 and put Pinochet in power. Loach's message is that the Americans had it coming or, as he has puts it in a production note: 'This was a symbolic attack on a power represented by the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.'

Sadly Ken Loach has yet to meet Larry Clark for a friendly lunch, the way Tartan Metro boss Hamish McAlpine (yes that's a real name) did, and was left with a broken nose after suggesting that American had 9/11 coming.

In Commentary Magazine, the always excellent Jonathan Tobin writes that Obama’s Stand on Gilo Gives Palestinian Snipers a Moral Victory

Though the administration has backed off a bit on its determination to pressure Israel into a total settlement freeze — a policy that only incited Palestinians to be even more intransigent than before — Obama made a point of personally opposing the construction of 900 new apartment units in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Obama condemned the new housing in an interview with Fox News during which he stated that the apartments could embitter Palestinians in a way that was “very dangerous.”

The president’s decision to speak as if this part of Jerusalem was a “settlement” where Jews had no right to live and build is not just a provocative escalation of the administration’s hostile attitude toward Israel. It also gives the Palestinian terrorists who made the apartment complexes in this neighborhood their personal shooting gallery throughout the second intifada an unexpected boost. Palestinian Authority–backed snipers based in the neighboring Arab village of Beit Jala regularly shot into Gilo during that conflict. Gilo also became more than just a middle-class Jerusalem neighborhood. It assumed the role of a symbol of Israeli tenacity and courage, and the area became a regular stop for visitors to the city. At the time, the United States condemned the attacks on Gilo. The presence of Jewish homes there was not an issue. Even media outlets that were far from supportive of Israel, such as the New York Times, were wont to describe it as a Jerusalem neighborhood, as this report from 2001 by Clyde Haberman during the height of the fighting illustrates. The word settlement is never used once in the article. Today, however, the Times used that word to describe Gilo in the headline of the story about Obama’s broadside.

Though I doubt the White House even thought of it in this context, Obama’s decision to treat as illegitimate Gilo’s existence as a Jewish community is, in a very real sense, a moral victory for those al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade killers whose goal was to make the neighborhood a place where Jews could no longer live. So just as visitors who wanted to bear witness to the determination of Israelis to not yield to terror needed to go to Gilo in 2001, anyone wishing to see just how far the United States has drifted from a position of support for the Jewish state must today go to the same place.

Meanwhile New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind condemned Obama as the real "Obstacle to Peace".

In defiance of President Barack Obama’s demands that Israel cease building in sections of Jerusalem annexed following the 1967 Six Day War, New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (Dem.) laid the cornerstone for the second phase of the Nof Tzion neighborhood near Jabel Mukabar. Together with Likud MK Danny Danon, Hikind spoke with reporters about the Jewish right to build in Israel’s capital city. Hikind explained that banning Jews from building in a neighborhood was segregation. He expressed wonder that an African-American president should endorse such a policy in the 21st century

Meanwhile the increasingly deranged Joe Klein, over at Time Magazine's appropriately named Swampland blogs, used the occasion for blatant Jew baiting and double loyalty accusations.

Dov Hikind is not only a U.S. citizen, but also a member of the New York state legislature...and he wants to buy property in an illegal Jewish settlement, in an East Jerusalem neighborhood that the U.S. government considers a disputed area where no additional construction should be taking place? Indeed, it is an area that would be the capital of Palestine, if and when we achieve a two-state solution.

The news that the Gilo neighborhood, home to 50,000 Jews would be the capital of the Palestinian Authority, would be news to its residents, the Israeli government and just about everyone else, but as had been established previously, Joe Klein has a track of just making stuff up at this point.

Joe Klein then tops himself by delivering a lecture accusing Hikind of being unpatriotic and an enemy of the United States.

Therefore, Dov Hikind is acting against the best interests of the United States, as defined by Presidents of both parties over the past 40 years. He has, of course, every right to disagree and campaign against those policies. But I wonder, as an American citizen, what it means when he acts against our national interests, by seeking to buy property in a Palestinian area.

Now the same party that insisted for the last 8 years that dissent was patriotic and that questioning anyone's patriotism was the same thing as McCarthyism has suddenly gotten very enthusiastic at the idea of branding anyone they don't like, an ENEMY OF THE STATE.

Somehow it's apparently in the interests of the United States to ban Jews from living in Jerusalem. But somehow I don't think that had an American President said that supporting South African Apartheid was in America's best interests, that Joe Klein would be climbing on that bandwagon.

Furthermore has Joe Klein laid similar charges at the door of Jimmy Carter who travels around the world supporting the likes of Iran and North Korea? Or the anti-war activists who have openly campaigned with the likes of Hugo Chavez?

Joe Klein's cynical Jew baiting while trying to masquerade a left wing agenda as a patriotic agenda is simply sickening. And shows that we have no shortage of Loaches of our own.

Meanwhile Carl at IsraelMatzav looks at the numbers if Giuliani chooses to go for the New York Senate seat.

Giuliani has passed up a shot at the Governor's mansion, so it's the Senate or nothing. Despite the generally poor opinion of Gillibrand, it will not be as slam dunk as it looks, since the White House is likely to take a guiding hand, and we'll be rolling in voter fraud. But then again if the Democrats lose a supposedly safe Senate seat in New York, it will be an even worse blow.

And of course watching the heads of liberals and 9/11 Truthers swell and explode with rage at the prospect of Giuliani in office again, is worth the price of admission alone.

In other news in the roundup, Brazil's left wing mini-Chavez, Lula will welcome Ahmadinejad.

MSNBC's Ed Schultz is giving Keith Olbermann some competition in the race for the craziest MSNBC talking head by suggesting that Wall Street banks were deliberately losing money because they were racist and wanted to see Obama fail. In Schultz's defense, he's not a crazy liberal elitist, he's a crazy local radio personality who's trying to adapt his rhetoric to fit liberal propaganda, part of the devil's bargain that saw him make his transition to fame and fortune.

The liberal goal was to get a local radio personality to switch sides and bring someone on board their payroll who can appeal to the "common man". How's that working out for you guys?

Breath of the Beast views the new breast cancer regs as Progressives for Breast Cancer: A Preview of the Medical Gulag

Ok now picture a stage in the middle of the field. As the lights dim and the applause fades, a spotlight beam centers on the thin, serious figure of the future President of the United States and he lifts the microphone and pronounces his words very carefully.

“Ok, now, I have something to tell you that is very upsetting and I don’t want you to panic or get hysterical. Thirty-six of you women here tonight, and we don’t know who you are yet, are going to agree to reduce your chance of living for another five years by 72%. That means instead of 33 of you living at least five more years, only 9 of you will live. Not only that, you are going to give your consent to putting your self through a comparable amount more suffering and pain than you would otherwise have to endure. Also you will be saddling your husbands, parents, friends and children with infinitely more sorrow and desolation than they would have had to bear if you had not come to support my presidency tonight.”

In his usual style, the President is actually understating the case by a factor of ten. An astute friend of mine has pointed out that the 1900 to one ratio is a "yearly" crop of diagnoses based on yearly screening. so the actual loss of early diagnosis will be multiplied by the ten years of delay in receiving mammograms. This makes the actual death toll from that fateful rally more like 270 women.

It sounds like a non-starter doesn’t it? Do you think he would have gotten any of those women's votes that night? But the fact is that those 68,756 women (including the 36 doomed ones) have already been hoodwinked in to agreeing to that deal. Because, if Obama has his way and forces the single payer system down our throats, government then recommendations like these will assume the force of law for all but those are so wealthy that they can pay for medical services out of pocket.

These new recommendations are draconian, not just because it reminds us of how cold and callous a bureaucracy can be in its disregard for medical prudence and the value of an individual’s life but (even more) because it has given us an ominous forewarning of what the Medical Gulag of single payer, government run health care system would look like if the Blue Dogs and Republicans in congress don’t come to their senses soon and stop Obama’s high-pressure sales blitz for his “health care reform package”.

The entire thing is worth reading.

Meanwhile there's a conflict over a mosque's loudspeaker, this time in the Bronx.

A Bronx mosque that had sought a sound permit to amplify its morning call to prayer has quietly rescinded its application.

But the Jame Masjid mosque's revocation of the proposal didn't hush its neighbors, since the mosque plans to resubmit its request to play the undulating ribbon of Arabic invocation, or adhan, through a loudspeaker during four of five daily prayer times.

Residents called the plan, which was unveiled in October, an imposition on the daily lives of a diverse community. The idea of prayer booming through the streets also touched off cultural resentments.

"When in Rome do as the Romans do," said Gerri Lamb, who lives a quarter mile from the mosque. "If you're not in your own country, in your own culture, then you can't force me to be a part of it"...

The comment, made during a Community Board 9 hearing on the issue (though the proposal was off the table at the moment), seemed to sum up neighborhood tensions. The local advisory board had asked residents to avoid that type of commentary while testifying, but Lamb received uproarious applause.

For those who live around the Virginia Avenue mosque, the daily din threatens their quality of life. Over the course of a year, a muezzin will have sung the call to prayer 1,460 times.

Residents frowned upon the constant disruption. They envisioned life with the incessant sound filling their living rooms. They pictured school lessons pausing as it permeated through local classrooms. They said the prayer would be equally piercing to local businesses.

The mosque has omitted the first in the daily sequence of five prayers. That first prayer is said around 5 a.m. -- a predawn hour that would probably would have provoked a greater outcry.

But locals criticized the need to amplify the call at any time, especially in this technological age where alternatives like an iPhone application with daily prayer time reminders can be used. "Why do we all have to hear it?" asked Gwendolyn Brown, a 20-year resident. "That's imposing their religious beliefs over ours."

Some worried that an approval for this mosque's sound system could set a precedent for other religious institutions seeking permits. "What are you going to say when the next mosque comes?" one reverend asked.

If you're wondering why the article doesn't come packaged with complaints about Islamophobia and bigotry, that would be because most of the area residents are Black and Latino.

And if you can't even get a mosque loudspeaker approved in the Bronx...

At IsraPundit, Yoram Ettinger charges that Clinton is wrong on the demographics while Ted Belman argues that Unilateralism is Israel's Only Option

Muslims Against Sharia has Krauthammer's take on Holder

's perverse logic

KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the courtroom, making KSM a martyr and turning the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within 10 days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former attorney general Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered."

Lemon Lime Moon condemns all the Bowing, Scraping and Kissing

Pesky Emotional Republican passes word that Obama is quietly backing the Muslim Brotherhood

Debbie Schlussel writes on the Coldness of Barack

Religion of Peace has the latest War of the Religion of Peace news including the modern day slavery in Dubai

A Jew With a View exposes Ed Husain, another fake moderate Muslim.

Finally there's the tale of Do Socialism as I Say, Not as I Wear

A video of a Gucci- and Louis Vuitton-clad politician attacking capitalism then struggling to explain how his luxurious clothes square with his socialist beliefs has become an instant YouTube hit in Venezuela.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Pedro Carreno was momentarily at a loss for words when a journalist interrupted his speech and asked if it was not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and a tie made by Parisian luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.

"I don't, uh ... I ... of course," stammered Carreno on Tuesday before regaining his composure. "It's not contradictory because I would like Venezuela to produce all this so I could buy stuff produced here instead of 95 percent of what we consume being imported."