Just about all voters, everywhere where there are elections, tend to vote their pocketbooks. That means they generally back whichever candidate they rightly or wrongly believe will help them to prosper. For liberals, that generally means getting the government to help them to prosper at the expense of their fellow citizens. For the American conservative base and for many independent voters as well, it’s all about curbing runaway taxation and spending, rolling back government regulation, and getting a grip on the skyrocketing national debt.
After that come other ‘hot-button’ issues. For the US voting bloc sometimes known as the ‘conservative base’, the two biggest issues have historically been the Second Amendment and pro-life. The Second Amendment makes the difference between freedom and slavery, and it provides the only real bulwark against government tyranny. As we have seen with Barack Hussein Obama, a politician who shows his contempt for the unborn is all too likely to feel the same way about the rest of us, except insofar as he thinks he can use us for his own purposes.
What else is important? For me and a growing number of other conservatives, the counterjihad counts as much as pro-life and the Second Amendment.
Some conservatives have spoken hopefully about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as a potential presidential candidate. While he seems to be good on curbing the budget, and he has taken a pro-life stance to some degree, he is somewhat equivocal with regard to gun rights, and he certainly does not get the counterjihad. For me, that’s a deal-breaker.
First of all, Gov. Christie is in bed with a known Hamas operative:
(h/t: orangecrush)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s nomination of Sohail Mohammed to be a state judge shows the governor’s tin ear for radical Islam. Not only did he appoint a longtime mouthpiece for radical Islamists to be a judge, but Christie has also turned a blind eye to the activities of one of Mohammed’s clients – radical imam Mohammed Qatanani, head of one of New Jersey’s largest mosques.
Qatanani has a history of Hamas support and was related by marriage to a leading Hamas operative in the West Bank. This fall, Qatanani will return to a New Jersey immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to have him deported. In his initial application for a green card filed in 1999, government lawyers say Qatanani failed to disclose a conviction in an Israeli military court for being a Hamas member and providing support to the terrorist group.
Oddly, Christie – a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey – sided with Qatanani against DHS, allowing a top lieutenant, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness at Qatanani’s first immigration trial, and publicly embracing the imam at a Ramadan breakfast at his mosque. Christie later appointed McKenna as New Jersey’s head of homeland security..
As general counsel to the American Muslim Union (AMU), Mohammed often represented clients subject to government allegations concerning terrorists. The AMU often is highly critical of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.
One online newsletter even included a claim that a “Zionist commando orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks” and shows support for a “Rabbi” from the extremist Jewish organization Neturei Karta, which denies the right of Israel to exist and supports its dismantling.
The AMU has criticized some of the response to the September 11 attacks, especially regarding the PATRIOT Act. Explaining why the AMU had become more politically active and was holding voter registration drives, one employee of AMU said: “Right now, the Patriot Act—basically it’s unconstitutional…I believe it targets Muslims unfairly. If someone’s going to come out with a bill that’s discriminatory, I’m not going to vote for them.”
As general counsel, Mohammed bucked several high-profile terror support prosecutions. After authorities shut down the Holy Land Foundation near Dallas for alleged Hamas support in 2001, Mohammed told the Record of Bergen County, N.J., that the government was unjustly singling out Muslim organizations.”People see this as another example of how heavy-handed the administration has been thus far,” he said.
The move was newsworthy in New Jersey because an HLF officer, Mohammed El-Mezain, preceded Qatanani as imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County. El-Mezain and four fellow defendants were convicted of illegally routing millions of dollars to Hamas in 2008.
During a lecture given a year earlier, Qatanani included the HLF defendants in a prayer for relief from oppression. “Oh Allah assist our brothers and sisters in Philistine [Palestine], and Iraq and Chechnya,” he said. “O Allah remove occupation and oppression and o Allah improve the matters of our community … to assist our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land Foundation, ask oh Allah … to assist them and to remove the difficulty that they have been inflicted with all of the brothers and sisters in this country, oh Allah to prove them non-guilty.”
Additionally, Mohammed publicly defended Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian following a 2003 indictment which alleged he was a North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Appearing on MSNBC, Mohammed criticized the fact that it took years of investigation before the indictment was issued. “It all points out to the distrust that the Muslim community have, which is this is nothing but a witch-hunt,” he said. “This is nothing but a politically motivated indictment, and all you are waiting for is the right opportunity to indict the person, the climate is right.”
Al-Arian, a longtime professor at the University of South Florida, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide goods and services to the PIJ. In sentencing him, a federal judge said the evidence made it clear he was “a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You were on the board of directors and an officer, the secretary. Directors control the actions of an organization, even the PIJ; and you were an active leader.”
Much more here.
Gov. Christie’s behavior in this regard is no fluke. Unlike other prominent Republicans, he has refused to take any position with regard to the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque”:
The Republican governor of New Jersey chastised Democrats and Republicans for using the proposed Islamic center near the site of the 9/11 terror attack as a “political football,” in a sharp departure from members of his own party who are intent on making the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” an issue in fall election campaigns.
Gov. Chris Christie’s comments contrast those of prominent national Republicans, including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin who kept up their attack on the proposed project two blocks from where the World Trade Center was destroyed by Islamic militants.
Palin, who previously criticized the planned mosque, took to the airwaves Monday to attack President Obama for saying the Muslims had a right to build there.
“He just doesn’t get it, that this is an insensitive move on the part of those Muslims who want to build that mosque in this location. It feels like a stab in the heart to, collectively, Americans who still have that lingering pain from 9/11,” the former Republican governor of Alaska said on Fox News.
Her comments echoed those of New Gingrich who compared the Islamic Center’s backers to Nazis.
But Christie warned against politicians “overreacting,” and he spoke as someone with a closer connection to the tragedy.
Christie served as New Jersey’s attorney general following the attacks, and many of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers were from New Jersey. New Jersey was also a co-owner of the World Trade Center.
“Given my last position, that I was the first U.S attorney post 9/11 in New Jersey, I understand acutely the pain and sorrow and upset of the family members who lost loved ones that day at the hands of radical Muslim extremists,” said Christie at a bill-signing ceremony. “And their sensitivities and concerns have to be taken into account. Just because it’s nearly nine years later, those sensitivities cannot and should not be ignored.”
He included Obama as among the politicians who he scolded for playing politics with the emotional issue and called for tolerance for Muslims.
“We cannot paint all of Islam with that brush. …We have to bring people together. And what offends me the most about all this is that it’s being used as a political football by both parties. And what disturbs me about the president’s remarks is that he is now using it as a political football as well. I think the president of the United States should rise above that.”
The govenor said he would not take a public stance on the Islamic center because “I don’t believe that it would be responsible of me to get involved and comment on this any further because it just put me in the same political arena as all of them,” he said.
Read the rest.
What’s more, Gov. Christie refuses to stand up for for free speech for the counterjihad:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday backed the controversial firing of a transit worker who burned pages of the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero.
NJTransit fired assistant train coordinator Derek Fenton Monday, just two days after he ripped pages from the Koran and torched them with a lighter on the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
“We’re supportive of the action taken by NJTransit,” Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak told the Daily News.
Read the rest.
Waffling and compromising with Islam just does not work. Until such time as Gov. Christie is willing to recognize that Islam is an expansionist, totalitarian enemy ideology that seeks to rid the world of everything but itself, he is not ready to be Commander-in-Chief.
