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I arrived in Chicago during a presidential election year. I am a proud Trump supporter. I want him to be our next president. He will make America great and lead better than crooked Hillary and Lucifer Cruz. Hillary brings chaos. Cruz brings Armageddon.
I have been living in the Middle East for the past ten years. During Bush’s presidency, Iraq was at chaos. Under B. Hussein O’s Administration, six Islamic Arab countries are going through chaos currently. Hussein’s promise in Egypt to open a new chapter with the Muslim world led to opening a Pandora’s box. (so much for the Nobel Peace Prize) Our foreign policy is a disaster, but that is what is expected from a community leader.
America has become a large enterprise. It needs a stronger businessman and leader, and NOT a political prostitute who has been bought by lobbyists, interest groups, and corporations. It’s no different than paying a prostitute for sex. And a leader that has the boldness to call the enemy by its name – radical Islam.
What the people didn’t realize is that Trump is the definition of anti-fragile. The more the media tries to slaughter him, the stronger he gets. As Gandhi said, “First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Chicago was the first part of my trip, followed by Istanbul, Bangkok, and then Dubai before returning to Baghdad. I have many stories from my trips, but I’ve decided to share a story about my uncle, an Iraqi refugee’s service to America.
I had invited my uncle from San Jose to Chicago to spend a week at our house. My mother saw him for the first time in 25 years. Wars in Iraq separated us.
He is an Iraqi refugee who came to America legally. He was qualified to come to the United States, because he worked as a local Iraqi interpreter for the U.S. Army. He came with his wife and daughter leaving his other two kids to go to Sweden through illegal channels to obtain a safe heaven. They weren’t qualified to come to the U.S. with my uncle as a complete family due to an immigration law about being above 18 years old.
Having him and his wife in our house brought extra joy and double blessings. He shared many stories from his days with the U.S. Army. He took pride in his contribution.
Kennedy once quoted Gibran Khalil Gibran in his famous inaugural speech, “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”, from his book “The New Frontier”. Many Iraqi refugees who came to America served America before even becoming Americans.
They risked their lives working for the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Army during the civil war chaos. They protected American soldiers. They helped in the success of U.S. Army missions in which the Army couldn’t accomplish a mission without the aid of the interpreters. They endured public humiliation by being blamed as traitors. Some lost their loved ones. They continued serving America with loyalty and dignity.
As for my uncle, he started to work for the U.S. government more than 25 years ago. He was a driver for the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie during Saddam’s regime. He was taken constantly to Iraqi Intelligence Service for investigation. She is well known for instigating the Iraq-Kuwait war. It’s wildly believed (my father still talk about it) that she gave the green light for Saddam to invade Kuwait when she told him, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.”
When the U.S. Army liberated Iraq from Saddam’s regime in 2003, he worked as a local interpreter for the army. He risked his life every single day. Al-Qaeda and Shi’a militia were killing every person who was found to be working and cooperating with Americans, Muslims or Christians. It didn’t matter.
Iraqi refugees’ path to the United States came at a high risk of being kidnapped or killed by terrorists. Each refugee has a story that will melt the prejudicial ice in America.
Stories connect us and build trust between us. Therefore if someone still has some prejudice toward Iraqis, I suggest asking him about his or her story. I am sure these people have done more for America than millions of Americans who live there.
I took my uncle and his wife on a tour of town down Chicago. I showed them, not Obama’s or Hillary’s tower, BUT the Trump’s tower rising high in the sky. She insisted to take a picture with the tower in the background. She was proud of it. She couldn’t wait to post it on Facebook.
YES…my uncle, along with many Iraqi refugees and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Assyrians are supporter of Trump in California, Arizona, Texas, and Illinois.
It the end, I had an amazing time with my family. I met my nephew Eli for the first time. I attended an Assyrian parade celebrating Assyrian New Year 6766. I took care of my 76 year-old father. But best of all was spending Easter with my family and uncle for the first time after many years.
My father and brother-in-law were taking me to O’Hair airport to catch my return flight to Istanbul. I was holding the tiny fingers of my six-week-old baby nephew. He was sleeping in his car seat. We were sitting together in the backseat. I was looking at him thinking about my next visit – Istanbul.
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Ninos Youkhana 
We need more of this kind of courageous analysis of the world. Anyone can agree with the dominan world view as expressed by the Democrats — there is nothing intellectual bold about that. Ninos refuses to bend the knee and is willing to strike where the truth leads him. Semper Fi, Ninos!
I had a conversation with a man today about “Political Islam.” My friend is an Assyrian Iraqi Christian; his native tongue is Aramaic — the common tongue in Jesus’s day. He said it would be proper to distinguish between Political Islam and religious Islam, but was asking how Americans would understand that. In other words, what phrase would Americans use to distinguish religious Islam from political Islam?
I said that I had a hard time answering that myself because one does not divorce Islam from Politics in the sense that Islam is not like American Lutheranism. Americans perceive “religious” as something akin to a modern American denomination where one attends a religious service, presumably prays to his God, perhaps observes some common religious festivals, but pretty much is indistinguishable from anyone else in America. Religion is an internal matter — that of the imagined ‘soul’ —and comprehending religions as something that can, should, or ought to directly influence political life has become something unacceptable within the Academy — and from there unacceptable to the population in general. Even most Christians are convinced of this.
Years ago I conversed with some young Moslems from Libya. At the time they were international students studying in Vancouver, Canada. They asked me, “do you think religion and politics are separate?” I said “no, they cannot be separate.” They were surprised as my response because clearly I did not reflect the common understanding of religion in western society.
This dichotomy between what ought (or ought not) to be the role of “religion” society and how Islam perceives itself hinders the West’s understanding of Islam. Islam means “submission” in Arabic — submission to the will of God and his law. The secular West perceives that Islam should be like Lutheranism — fine for consumption on Sunday mornings, but don’t bring it to work on Monday, let alone into our schools. In a society that outlawed the Ten Commandments in 1962 (banning them from public schools), the role of “religion” in American society has pursued very much the French path of secularization, which equates to practical atheism. Religion became a decoration or social trinket that one wears for personal or family reasons — but hardly anything to fight over. Those who take it seriously are thought emotionally touched and under educated; we are looked down upon by our secular betters.
But what does the West do when Islam does not live by the rules the agnostic West has imposed upon “religions?”
The West thinks that good Moslems are like good Lutherans — harmless really. But that anyone who believes that all of society must be in submission to Gods law is “not a true Moslem.”
But nothing could be farther from the truth. If one accepts as true the existence of God and one accepts as authoritative the written word of God as the Koran — then upon what basis, other than secular atheism (or Christianity) does one propose that Islam would not speak to all areas of human existence? Such nonsense is believed only by those who can’t wrap their head around the idea that they (the secularists) are not the only people on the planet that have an all encompassing world view that suggests how the living world should be ordered.
Islam is internally consistent in the sense that if it’s tenets are true, then they must apply to all areas of life — not just the realm of the soul and the thoughts. Atheistic secularism demands the same submission.
This secular Western project has been hell-bent (pardon the expression) on exorcising “religious” (which in Europe means Christian) ideas from every aspect of human behavior save the unspoken prayers and hidden thoughts between man and God. Outward displays of religiosity — attending church — are excused as simply one’s preference for charitable activities or a social group — hardly a serious group of people who would challenge the secular political order.
Yet that is just what the Christians did in Europe from the Ascension of Christ right up through, at least, the Protestant Reformation and the establishment of a Christian Republic on the shores of New England in the 1600s. This was its height and near the beginning of the end. The Enlightenment challenged the old order and won; Christianity has been in retreat ever since notwithstanding claims of personal conversion — which highlight the problem without addressing it. By embracing “internal conversion” Christianity has surrendered the world to Atheism. Atheism — the hedonist type practiced today — is hardly a match for true Islam which demand submission.
Is Hillary Clinton ready to send her feminist daughter to the front lines with a rifle to fight Islam? No. Rather, she pretends real Islam is like Lutheranism and would welcome it into the United States as her intellectual sister (Angela Merkel) has done in Germany. Thank God for the great pagan Donald Trump who, non-religious though he may be — understands that for peace to prevail someone must surrender and — by God or by Mammon — it should not be the United States.
It has become not only un-Christian — but un-American — to actually stand up for anything historically American. “American values” to Obama and is fellow travelers consists in anything and everything that historically has little to do with America, namely atheism, Islam, and mass immigration of peoples wholly unlike those who settled and built this country. For them American values means shunning and shaming those who are not sufficiently accepting of “other,” and that “other” being that which is fundamentally not American — especially not European and not Christian.
They are traitors to the land that gave them birth, as are the European Christians (or their offspring) who advanced the trope that as a good Lutheran, they should be satisfied with a Christianity that existed only on Sunday mornings. Once that was settled, they then surrendered Sunday mornings — they renounced Christian evangelism and embraced that which was formerly called “sin.” The sin now, in the church, is to call something sin. Condemnation is condemned; all is accepted except for those who won’t accept all.
I have yearned for a place under the intellectual sun where I can be in intellectual Lutheran — believing fervently in what I believe but hoping for a society in which all can practice and believe as they would. I no longer believe that is possible. To accept atheistic secular sovereign — to believe that there is such as thing as intellectually and political neutrality where we can all just get along — is self delusion and vanity. I am already illegal in my own country man times over: European, male, straight, Christian. My greatest sin is that I am proud of all those identities — identities which defy the Orwellian demand for total submission to all external speech and actions in conformity to the Great Secular State.
The atheistic/secular intellectual regime in which politics and law is conducted in the United States and Europe has made Christianity effective illegal, except from the self-adorning social trinkets we adopt, and discard when “offensive” to non-Christians.
Children in public schools are raised in a pagan religion. And they are brainwashed that somehow that secular atheism is “neutral” and above the fray of partisan faction. Such is the intellectual dominance of the dominant trope.
No. It its not neutral. It is as all encompassing as Islam — which means the submission of all. The West has handicapped itself intellectually in that it refuses to understand this thing called Islam as anything but another form of Lutheranism — of no real practical good to running a civilization. True Moslems won’t submit to that secular idea. It is not the “fanatics” and “extremists” of Islam that are perverting their “religion” rather they are simply acting out the implications of their beliefs system every bit as much as the United States acts out it’s own fundamentalist values of women’s rights, universal voting, and a right to secular education. Europeans (including the US) wage global war to impose that secular religion which, in their own eyes, is not a religion but merely the “truth.”
And there you have it. We are blind to our fundamentalist religiosity.
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