I’m Jus’ Sayin’

Prayers alone will not reduce mass shootings. Closing mosques and profiling Muslims will not solve terrorism. To protect 2nd Amendment rights of crazies do not infringe on the 1st Amendment rights of law abiding citizens.

MUSLIMS around the world more specifically in USA MUST unite and #GOTV in every election from Court House to The White House. Strong Voter overpowers the influence of big money in politics. Dollars can’t vote, YOU CAN. When we encourage other people to vote, we make sure that the voice of the people are heard. When we demand that candidates commit to politics that benefit the 100%, we can hold them accountable when they are elected. When the people vote, POLITICIANS and people like Donald Trump LISTEN. It is time for Muslim to take front seat. Many of us Muslims seem to be more focused on talking about hate incidents that have occurred in relation to those acts than we are on denouncing the Islamic State attacks and ideology. We need to understand that we can counter those hate-related incidents more effectively by creating trust with our fellow citizens. We need to demonstrate through our actions that we are not only against ISIS, but we are also against its ideology. We must show that we are only loyal to our country, wherever it is we call home.

D’awa to non-Muslims is a necessity and a tool of survival. Imam Fakhri Al Razi said 500 years ago “that we should cease to divide the world into Darul Kufr and Darul Harb but, divide is according to Darul Islam and Darul D’awa”. If any part of the earth is not Darul Islam, they are all in need of D’awa. Islam is a colorless religion. It does not endorse one color of skin over another; one language over another; one type of food over another. Islam is like a flower garden with roses and other flowers of different colors and smell. Diversity among Muslims in their origin of tribes languages are signs from Allah. We should forget our differences and remain united in love and service to each other only for the sake of pleasure of Allah.

Change is the inescapable driver of history in the United States. Year after year, we have evolved, innovated, and overcome the major challenges of our time. America’s genius throughout has been its ability to renew our promise to provide citizens the opportunity for a better life—and though our own history isn’t perfect, we didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness or by letting those with the most influence write their own rules. We got here by rewarding hard work and responsibility, by investing in people, and by growing our country from the bottom up.

Why does the NRA have so much power? It’s not just because of the money they spend on elections, though that’s significant. it’s also because they have a big group of active members who engage in politics. “What the NRA has that relatively few other DC interest groups have is a genuine mass membership. The NRA’s 5 million members give it ground troops who mobilize to call congressional offices, volunteer in campaigns, and share political views with friends and neighbors. The mere fact that a person would bother to have voluntarily joined a political advocacy organization sends a powerful signal to politicians that he or she is an engaged member of the electorate who will pay attention to political events and show up on Election Day.”

In America, “There is a mass shooting – defined as four or more people shot in one incident – nearly every day.” Yet virtually no congressional hearings and no legislative effort to combat what is without doubt a significant threat to the nation. Why mass shootings don’t convince gun owners to support gun control? This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the cognitive and emotional dynamics at work. It presumes that mass shootings constitute an argument against guns, to be weighed against arguments in their favor. But to gun enthusiasts, mass shootings are not arguments against guns but for them. The rise in mass shootings is only convincing both sides that they’re right, causing them to dig in further.

We have to go to DMV to get our driver license, register vehicle, I don’t see any one complaining about that so why we can’t have gun owner register their gun, why civilian needs Automated assault rifle. I am a gun owner and I don’t have problem registering my gun in national data base that can be maintained by law enforcement. Assault rifle should not be in public hands. With such compelling data why no action? Why the media frenzy over terrorism and proforma coverage over mass shootings? Why congressional investigations of Benghazi but not even an effort to collect data on gun deaths? Are we really a culture that values life? Guns killed more Americans in 12 years than AIDS, war, and illegal drug overdoses combined. Just look at the map of Mass shootings since Sandy Hook.

Senate Republicans voted down legislation against barring suspected terrorists, felons and the mentally ill from buying guns on Thursday afternoon, parroting National Rifle Association arguments that doing so would strip some innocent people of their constitutional rights to gun access just a day after yet another massacre on U.S. soil.

A pair of Democratic measures – one to close background check loopholes to make it harder for felons and the mentally ill from buying guns, another to ban those on the terror watch list from buying guns – both went down in flames against near-unanimous GOP opposition. The Price We Pay for Liberty? America must not value the liberty to own a gun over the liberty to live free from violence.

Weeks ago Donald Trump wants to register Muslims, now he wants to ban Muslim but more Americans favor a government list of gun-owners than Muslims. Republicans and Donald Trump is out of touch for what it’s worth, Trump’s claims are not accurate. Very little fact-checking is needed to see that his words are both out of touch and inflammatory. And in a sense, that’s on par with his reputation. He has branded his entire public persona as a brash, attention-hungry mogul willing to toe the line of controversy for a few ounces of free publicity.

Republicans are too afraid to throw Trump out of the party, and republican politicians are afraid of talking about it except few. And of-course every time Trump says jump, the media responds, how high this time? There is no reason for the media to give him wall-to-wall coverage. Media needs to denounce his hate speeches by stop covering him.

I’m sick and tired of being told not to make this political. The only people who benefit from “not making this political” are those who don’t want anything to change. Former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley said Why Do Americans Hate Beheadings But Love Drone Killings? The answer lies in human psychology. And probably like the old observation about history, people who refuse to understand human psychology are doomed to be victims of psychological manipulation.

One may contend that the genesis of ISIS (or ISIL) dates back to U.S. invasion of Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who broke away from al-Qaeda and on whom the U.S. government once had a $25 million reward for any tip leading to his arrest, can be considered the ideological godfather of ISIS. However, the group entered into the consciousness of most Americans only after gruesome beheading videos made media waves. This has tipped a slight majority of Americans to now support yet another war in the Middle East.

It bears reminding that in 2003, 72 percent of Americans supported going to war with Iraq, titillated by spurious claims of mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction. Yet a decade later, most Americans wanted U.S. troops out of Iraq. The fickle public is once again the victim of fear mongering. The unsuspecting public cheers on as bombs and missiles generate shock and awe. As the media echo chambers glorify the sounds and fury of war, the public is assured that only the “bad guys” are dead. If anyone dares to question the death of civilians, they are branded as propagandists for terror. Very little time is spent questioning the efficacy of the war, and there is virtually no discussion about what happens the day after, assuming that the war on terror can actually be won anytime soon.

The Global Terrorism Database (GDT), a service provided by National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, records approximately 125,000 cases of terrorist incidents committed by 2,437 groups between 1970 and 2013. Over the past four decades, nearly half of the incidents of death from terrorism have occurred in the 12 years since the declaration of the so-called “war on terror” in 2002. Data also show that terrorism is not only being committed in the name of Islam, by well-known groups such as al-Qaeda; just as ominously, it is also being perpetrated in the name of Christianity by lesser-known groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, and by non-religious actors such as the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Between 2002 and 2011, the Lord’s Resistance Army ranked fourth in the number of fatalities linked to it, while the Communist Party of India (Maoist) ranked fifth. Ranking at the very top of the list are the Taliban, with whom the U.S. launched “peace talks” in 2013.

Undoubtedly, ISIS gained currency in the cauldrons of Syria’s bloody civil war, which has killed nearly 200,000 people, with of half of them being civilians. The conflict has displaced 6.5 million people, and over half of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million is in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.

Bombs and missiles cannot defeat terrorism, because they play into the narrative of the terrorists that the only effective response to state monopolization of violence is more violence. And so the cycle repeats. In the words of Admiral Mullen, the U.S. must prepare for a multi-decade military entanglement in the Middle East. And yet there is hardly much will to debate this generational commitment to an open-ended war. Tragically, there’s only the fervor to cheerlead.