Facing Child Support, Man Joins the Jihad

By AMY FORLITI Associated Press

Abdifatah Ahmed struggled for years to make ends meet.

After losing his $15-an-hour job fueling airliners in Minneapolis, the Somali-American father of nine survived on low-wage jobs and public assistance. He complained about working hard, but never having enough money. His circumstances worsened when he was ordered to pay more than $700 a month to support three of his children — including one less than a year old.

Months later, he surfaced in Syria, where he went to fight for the Islamic State.

“I think since he lost his job, he was maybe never normal after that,” sister Muna Ahmed told the AP last fall.

“It’s unbelievable,” his friend, Farhan Hussein, said recently. “Where did this disease come from?”

Hussein said his friend seemed confused about life, and sometimes felt stressed out by the women with whom he had children: Minnesota court papers show at times he was paying child support to two ex-wives for five of his kids, as well as support for a sixth whose mother is not identified. He wasn’t the type to go to mosque or pray every day — instead, he went clubbing and even drank alcohol, Hussein said.

When he felt troubled, Ahmed might turn to his religion for a week or so at a time. But once the blues passed, he would be back to his old self — flirting with women, dressing sharply, listening to rap music, shooting hoops and lifting weights at a local gym, Hussein said.

He dipped sporadically into political discussions, speaking about the Palestinians, the civil war in Libya and conditions in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia where many Somalis live. But the continued atrocities against Syrian civilians committed by the Assad regime apparently made a deeper impression.

On Dec. 3, 2013, a post on his Facebook account showed pictures of mutilated kids: “Look what is happening in syria. Where is the UN when u need them. This is worse than libya you get it?”

A month later, it appears, Ahmed was in Syria himself.

“A muslim has to stand up for was right. … I give up this worldly life for allah and to save the ummah (community of believers) if that makes terrorist am happy with it,” he wrote in a Jan. 3, 2014 post.

Another post that same day contains a photo of him holding a rifle in one hand, and a book that may be the Quran in the other.

Alarmed, Hussein messaged Ahmed, urging him to come home. After ignoring his friend for months, Ahmed replied that “we’ve got to fight” for the caliphate.

Ahmed’s last Facebook posts, including one that says “having fun in jihad,” are dated last July 25.

The next month, a member of Ahmed’s family received a picture that appeared to show him dead, with a gunshot wound to the head. The State Department is working to verify reports of Ahmed’s death, but Hussein identified the person in the photo as his friend, who would have been 34 according to court records.

Family and friends interviewed by the AP said they don’t know what motivated Ahmed to go to Syria. Hussein said he may have been trying to escape financial troubles and the stress of being pulled in different directions by the women in his life.

“That’s the only thing I could think of that would (mess) his life up, and make him lose his hope,” Hussein said.

He added: “He was looking for paradise.”

Fair Child Support: The Audacity of Hope

Not a few of us have come to personally wonder, even mourn the loss of our true national identity. The personal identity of Americans is even more challenged. We have come to a place of oppression and circumstances over which we have no control, but we are going to have it all rubbed in our faces by oppressive law and unfettered government application. Mistakes aren’t permitted unless you have influence and a hefty bank account. Justice is bought and sold like a revel at Bourbon Street. It’s cheapened the nation and weakened the fabric of society instead of strengthening it. We are a nation that encourages vile and predatory behaviors which reject the core of what builds and strengthens the strong nations of the past for the rhetoric of despots that seek to wield unlimited power.

But …social conservatives…want a return to a bygone era, in which sexuality outside of marriage was subject to both punishment and shame, obtaining a divorce was far more difficult, and marriage offered not merely personal fulfillment but also well-defined social roles for men and for women. In their view, any government policy that appears to reward or even express neutrality toward what they consider to be immoral behavior whether providing birth control to young people, abortion services to women, welfare support for unwed mothers, or legal recognition of same-sex unions-inherently devalues the marital bond. Such policies take us one step closer, the argument goes, to a brave new world in which gender differences have been erased, sex is purely recreational, marriage is disposable, motherhood is an inconvenience, and civilization itself rests on shifting sands.

In this missive posted in his book Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama pretends to be reasonable by acknowledging the feelings of the opposition. He spends a chapter acknowledging the beauty of the Constitution, while dismissing it for something better, likely because of his status as a attorney that specializes in constitutional law. Instead, he talks around it as if to say, the Constitution is nice to study and a great document to thump on when you want to make a point, but it is a quaint tool of the past. Too bad the nation didn’t read his books before they voted him into office, not that it really matters anyway. John McCain, with ties to banking fraud, wasn’t a better choice, just a different one. Presidents have become cheerleaders of what sounds good while allowing Congress to pass predatory legislation without so much as a wimper. They have become complicit with the criminals that pretend to protect the nation.

Many politicians say that they see life as an issue of sexual behavior instead of the ability to maintain relationships, which government is loathe to do. It reinforces the negative instead of the good. It lies and distorts for the powerful and well-to-do. It favors mothers over fathers based on the timeworn models that it seeks to reject through the politics of empowerment. It has transferred this evil to divorced or rejected non-custodial parents. They are simply work horses that will sustain the children of the state as the elite look after their own interests.

“But all in all, I have little sympathy for those who would enlist the government in the task of enforcing sexual morality. Like most Americans, I consider decisions about sex, marriage, divorce, and childbearing to be highly personal-at the very core of our system of individual liberty. Where such personal decisions raise the prospect of significant harm to others-as is true with child abuse, incest, bigamy, domestic violence, or failure to pay child support-society has a right and duty to step in. (Those who believe in the personhood of the fetus would put abortion in this category.) Beyond that, I have no interest in seeing the president, Congress, or a government bureaucracy regulating what goes on in America’s bedrooms.

Moreover, I don’t believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them-or by punishing those who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety. I want to encourage young people to show more reverence toward sex and intimacy, and I applaud parents, congregations, and community programs that transmit that message. But I’m not willing to consign a teenage girl to a lifetime of struggle because of lack of access to birth control. I want couples to understand the value of commitment and the sacrifices marriage entails. But I’m not willing to use the force of law to keep couples together regardless of their personal circumstances.” – (Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama, page 335)

No Mr. Obama, instead we bully them after the fact with law that only the most wealthy can manage. In the article “Deviance and Society in Child Support Law,” I detail how behavior has been stigmatized and grouped into types of addicted behavior. Politics ignores the truth about its’ role in the process as it seeks the “common good,” pretending to be above all matters of humanity. It treats single mothers and their children as wards of the state and celebrates its’ role in the matter. It treats fathers as workhorses, slaves which must forever pay for the mistakes of the relationship without due process and the standards that built the nation. Remember that these standards only apply to criminal law. The possibility of innocence only applies to criminals, but not to the non-custodial parent of children that the  government owns.

Family law has carefully been maintained as civil law, the law of lying ex-spouses and courthouse escapades, even though the non-custodial behavior has been criminalized in a world without the assurance of justice on any level. Judges can’t stand the irreverent carping of the ‘human trash’ they serve. Government has sanctioned the same predatory behavior in families and relationships that it holds as precious in its worldview of control. Manipulation has become the reality of all relationships, while soft words such a diversity and peace are espoused. They sell the virtues of sacrifice without possessing that virtue. Diversity and peace are the watchwords of society, as that society is gripped by social engineers that claim “common good.” We don’t need society. Government is the holder of punishment and shame.

You know the solution. Be a good slave, stay employed at all costs in the name of fear and don’t make waves- or face the consequences. Economics don’t matter, nor does unemployment. Good men and women know what they have to do. Playing into the system isn’t necessarily the best answer. Otherwise, there isn’t even the audacity of hope, the kind of hope that President Obama claims to live by.

Fair Child Support: The Audacity of Hope by E.J. Manning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://bradleyamendment.wordpress.com.

Child Support & Eugenics: Be Positive, Be Healthy

by E.J. Manning

The U.S. government has really been pushing their feel-good eugenics health message, which is very light on sharing useful facts. “Teens who feel good about themselves are more likely to grow into young adults who feel better about their health” and “positive well being is also associated with fewer risky health behaviors such as smoking and physical inactivity.” Finally, “It’s really important for parents and schools to promote positive characteristics such as self-esteem and optimism, and to provide social support during this time [in life].” This is not unlike President Obama’s election message of national hope, clothed in a mythology of change and national responsibility.

The growing tendency in government science is to provide genetic explanations for disease as the means for the nation’s contemporary concept of biological health. This includes not only the concept of absence of disease processes, but also the idea of an individual’s risk of disease or death. This allows mainstream politics to continue to peddle a world of processed food and corporate profits to support their world view as they ply their efforts at population control and behavioral conditioning. The concept of genetic disease always involves a social unit: the family, a couple contemplating having children, or an ethnic or geographically defined group. Health authorities want to broadcast a popular message on positive attitude and positive health without substance. They want the hearts and admiration of youth. While attitude does play into the health of each American, nobody is more hypocritical about health and how they treat American citizens than the Federal Government. Government adopted eugenics says that certain individuals are genetically and culturally too risky for society to tolerate.

What does this have to do with child support? Simple. What you cultivate within the adult population is the dominant culture of the nation. What the Federal government has been cultivating for the last forty years in family law is nothing less than oppression and segmentation of families, while championing the cause of whoredom and love detachment for single parents and children. Members of the judicial system and even attorneys that play into the legal system have adopted the same eugenics-based pap grounded in fear, oppression and lack.

As a result, a be positive, be healthy attitude has little real importance to the Federal Government, since happiness starts in the family rather than in the halls of government. Parents putting other parents down and fighting like selfish children over petty things doesn’t build up children, but tears them down. It sets a bad example and prohibits youth from making effective family choices in their lives as they mature. It creates a permanent condition of strife in the hearts of the young that persists until the grave. Painting a false smile of pretense doesn’t help. All the vicious family infighting does is to bolster the power and authority that a new age of government needs to make permanent the means to rule over every aspect of life without truly considering the consequences. Government needs unhappy families that they can enslave and ensnare. It wants the human family to operate in much the same way as government does, except in the group-think of personal responsibility to governmental authority.

Child Support & Eugenics: Be Positive, Be Healthy by E.J. Manning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://bradleyamendment.wordpress.com.