No hope’n change to see here. Just another Wally promoting his Muslim brother for the job of POTUS.
Race & religion trumps all:
(Keith Ellison’s) selection would be a beautiful reminder to concerned citizens everywhere that the USA is not only the inward-looking America of Donald Trump, but that it is also the America of this outward-looking, progressive black Muslim from Minnesota, who swore his Congressional oath of allegiance on the Holy Quran.
“Keith Ellison Is a Muslim—and the Man to Lead the Democrats Into the Future”, — Maajid Nawaz,
BY
Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) formally announced his run for Chair of the Democratic National Committee early this week, and one of his big surprise endorsements came from the well-known British “reformist” Maajid Nawaz, who has at times been refreshingly honest about the jihad threat. Following the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Florida that many tried to deny was religiously motivated, wrote an article with this headline: “Admit it, These Terrorists are Muslims.”
Odd, then, that he would endorse Ellison, given the latter’s well-known and disreputable backgroundof receiving funding and support from Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups, and openly supporting them in turn. Yet instead of denouncing this, Nawaz stated of Ellison:
Keith Ellison is an African-American and currently co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Despite being elected in a post 9/11 world, he was the first Muslim Congressman. And all of this sends a perfect message to President-elect Trump, symbolizing the opposite of the worst excesses of the Trump campaign.
Sam Harris, the prominent neuroscientist, atheist spokesman and writer, coauthored a book with Nawaz: Islam and the Future of Tolerance. The two are known to be sparring partners over contentious Islamic issues regarding the hadith, the Quran, literal interpretations, whether Islam is a religion of peace and the like. Yet despite their differences of opinion, Harris and Nawaz have demonstrated in the past that intellectual disagreement is a time-honored feature of pluralism and democracy, while Islamic supremacism is the antithesis of the diversity of thought. Now given the news that Maajid has openly declared his support for Ellison, one wonders where this will leave the Nawaz/Harris collaboration, and where, in fact, it leaves everyone who trusted Maajid Nawaz as a model of Islamic reform and openness to Western values.
An outstanding question remains: why Nawaz would make such a move. Could it possibly be a panicked reaction to his inclusion on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of “anti-Muslim extremists,” which threw him into a fit of rage and anxiety? In Nawaz’s words:
They put a target on my head. The kind of work that I do, if you tell the wrong kind of Muslims that I’m an extremist, then that means I’m an target….They don’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t have any protection. I don’t have any state protection. These people are putting me on what I believe is a hit list.
I’m the one who’s a Muslim in this!…..I’m listed there with people such as Pam Geller? It’s unbelievable.
Perhaps a thing or two can be learned about Maajid Nawaz in his own self-description on how he developed “skills” of maneuvering in a democratic society, drawing from past lessons acquired “within an extremist organization”:
Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world — by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. We felt that they were out of date. I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected.
Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state. The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances.
In the same haughty fashion, Maajid now delivers advice to Ellison:
In terms of values, I’d advise Ellison to focus the Democratic Party on the future. In a post-Brexit, President-Trump world, liberals must move beyond post-modernism. Identity politics, censorship, and “feelings based” policy are in danger of rendering liberals as post-factual as the populist right.
Whatever the reason, the revelation of Nawaz’s support Keith Ellison has surprised many. Electronic media is unsurprisingly buzzing. One letter found its way into my inbox today outside of the US from the leader of the Montreal chapter of the American Congress for Truth (ACT). Its leader, Valerie Price, gave me permission to publish her note of disappointment in Maajid Nawaz:
I am very upset by this statement of support from Maajid for Keith Ellison. How could he possibly support someone with his history; his relationship with CAIR and the support and financing of organizations like Hamas?
I had long been an admirer of his. I knew about him LONG before most people. I actually flew to London after I saw his interview on 60 Minutes many years ago – that was how impressed I was. I signed up to Quilliam. And I believed in his work – even though everyone else said he was not to be trusted and told me I was a fool. I defended him and said that he was true and honest and that his work was very important.
By endorsing Ellison, Maajid Nawaz is suggesting that for him, race and religion as paramount above all, even the preservation of democratic values. He states about Ellison:
His selection would be a beautiful reminder to concerned citizens everywhere that the USA is not only the inward-looking America of Donald Trump, but that it is also the America of this outward-looking, progressive black Muslim from Minnesota, who swore his Congressional oath of allegiance on the Holy Quran.
“Keith Ellison Is a Muslim—and the Man to Lead the Democrats Into the Future”, by Maajid Nawaz, The Daily Beast, November 15, 2016:
LONDON—Love did not Trump hate. Whichever way you voted, that statement stands, because even some of those who may have raised this pro-Hillary slogan have been out on the streets doing a disservice to peaceful anti-Trump protestors, by rioting.
Fear has won. We are all scared. But as this mourning process moves from denial, to grief, and on to acceptance, we liberals, not just in the United States, but globally, must begin to consider how to regroup, reform, and resurrect.
That resurrection cannot come without a realization that the Democratic Party establishment has had its day. They blew it, big time.
To have endorsed the ultimate Washington insider when the rebel was there right before you was utter folly. To have backed a paragon of the party establishment during an age of outsider opportunities was sheer naïveté. To have ignored the insurgent in favor of the stagnant was stubborn. To prefer the anointed over the popular was plain hubris. To have coveted the corporate while ignoring the common man was corrupt. Now, we have lost the House, the Senate, and the presidency to possibly the least competent candidate in history. That is our fault. So yes, it is time for reform. And nothing short of a major overhaul of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) will suffice.
This March, the chair of the DNC will be up for grabs. This seat has lately been mired in allegations of debate fixing and question-rigging. The sitting head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democrat and former CNN contributor. Brazile leads in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned amid serious corruption allegations. Hacked emails appeared to show Wasserman Schultz and other now-former DNC officials collaborating to undermine Bernie Sanders’s popular campaign to clinch the Democratic nomination. But Interim Chair Brazile herself has come under fire after another set of hacked emails showed her forwarding questions from a town hall presidential debate jointly hosted by CNN to the Clinton campaign at Trump’s expense.
This is totally unacceptable. Liberalism, democracy, and the reputation of the Democratic Party are just too important to tolerate such cronyism. To regain the trust of disenfranchised millennials—the future of the party, mind you—who were denied the candidate of their choice, a radical change is needed. This requires a total reimagining of the function of the DNC, its purpose, its reach, and its organization. Only a complete overhaul will do.
Vermont governor Howard Dean, who ran the DNC from 2005 to 2009, has announced his intention to stand again for the role. But that would not be an overhaul. It would simply be a rinse and repeat.
There is another option.
Clean, grassroots, and progressive, this option is a party outsider. He is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and a human rights campaigner. As the second congressman to endorse Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, he has shown that he saw what the Democrat-elite fatefully failed to see. This option therefore has the backing of the Sanders revolution that never was, and has the chance to resurrect some of that hope the young then felt when they asked us all to Feel the Bern, and we didn’t listen.
Keith Ellison is an African-American and currently co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Despite being elected in a post 9/11 world, he was the first Muslim Congressman. And all of this sends a perfect message to President-elect Trump, symbolizing the opposite of the worst excesses of the Trump campaign.
In a call Thursday night with members of the liberal grassroots group Democracy for Action, Rep. Ellison said he was keen to help the party move forward: “My shoelaces are tied up tight, and I’m ready to get out on that court.” He announced his candidacy on Monday.
MoveOn.org, a major progressive network, also said in a statement that Ellison would be “an excellent DNC chair.” Bernie Sanders has already declared his hand, backing Ellison by saying, “You can’t tell working people you’re on their side while at the same time you’re raising money from Wall Street and the billionaire class. The Democratic Party has to be focused on grass-roots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties.”
Sanders accepted that the party must continue its high-value fundraising, but suggested a micro-donor model, too……
But will the Democratic establishment pay heed?
Humbly, I put it you them that they must. They have no choice. Ellison will face some resistance. He is not known as a fundraiser. Assuming he would remain a representative, he wouldn’t be able to hold the chairmanship as a full-time job. But this could be fixed by drafting in competent deputies.
In terms of values, I’d advise Ellison to focus the Democratic Party on the future. In a post-Brexit, President-Trump world, liberals must move beyond post-modernism. Identity politics, censorship, and “feelings based” policy are in danger of rendering liberals as post-factual as the populist right.
The rallying cry of new, young Democrats should now be open, inclusive, universalist liberal internationalism. Former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was the closest the U.K. had to this, but he came up politically short. America thirsts for a leader of such assertive, open liberalism.
On the economic globalization front, yes, in the long run the corrective impact of “the market” kicks in through specialization efficiencies. But it was the great John Maynard Keynes himself who retorted to the capitalists, “In the long run we’re all dead.” This is precisely why he argued for softening the blow of market “corrective” forces. In our rush for globalization, we liberals forgot this, and forgot the white working classes in the process.
Keith Ellison could change this. His great value is in what he could come to symbolize to the young voters who supported Bernie Sanders in droves, and yet abandoned Hillary Clinton in equal measure.
Ellison’s value is in the potential for the DNC to show that it has learned its lesson, and that it is finally—better late than never—listening to the outsiders who want change, and who are not stained by spending too many years greasing palms.
And Ellison’s value is in the signal his selection could send to the rest of the world.
His selection would be a beautiful reminder to concerned citizens everywhere that the USA is not only the inward-looking America of Donald Trump, but that it is also the America of this outward-looking, progressive black Muslim from Minnesota, who swore his Congressional oath of allegiance on the Holy Quran.
Doubling down on evil, the DNC may prefer a muslim leader!
Since leftists believe that Islam isn’t evil, why does it need to be reformed? Nawaz is taking Sam Harris on a magic carpet ride. Some of the biggest Islamoapologizers are people who believe themselves to be atheists. Of course, they’re not, just clueless leftists looking for attention.