By Col. Rob Maness, USAF ret
STARRS Board of Advisors
As I posted on X just weeks ago: Mississippi voters, and all Americans, need to get engaged. Habitual low election turnout results in most incumbents staying in place. They feel invulnerable and take actions they know their constituents won’t approve of.
We have the power to stop the Islamization of our state. That warning has now been proven more urgent than I first feared.
Fellow Americans and Mississippians, I am a retired Air Force Colonel, a 32-year combat veteran, a 9/11 Pentagon survivor, one of you who commanded Americans fighting in the Global War on Terror against Sharia adhering Jihadists until the day I retired, and a lifelong defender of the Constitution I swore to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I have seen what happens when free peoples grow complacent and Sharia overcomes a society’s institutions. Today, I am expanding on that initial call with the hard facts now before us.
On August 5, 2026, Assma A. Ali, a full-hijab-wearing Yemeni-American immigration attorney from Ridgeland, was sworn in as Municipal Court Judge for the Town of Benoit.
The documents are public: the oath of office signed by Mayor Linda Carter and the town board agenda listing her as “Judge Assma Ali, Esq.” This is no longer rumor. It is fact.
We would not even know the full scope of this story without the courageous, relentless reporting of Amy Mek and the RAIR Foundation.
Amy broke the story when the celebrations first erupted across Yemeni and Islamic media. She continued documenting every development on X and through RAIR, exposing the radical networks cheering the appointment, pressing for official records when denials flew, and forcing the truth into the open when local officials and media tried to dismiss it.
Her work, and the follow-up by State Senator Michael McLendon releasing the actual oath and agenda, made the facts undeniable.
Ali practices immigration law, specializing in legalizing those who enter or remain in our country illegally.
Radical networks are ecstatic. Debbie Almontaser, the same activist forced out of a New York school principalship for defending “Intifada NYC” T-shirts, called it a moment “our community needed to see” and “our daughters needed to see.”
Former Congressman Jamaal Bowman, the Democratic Socialist who pleaded guilty to pulling a false fire alarm in the Capitol to delay a vote, offered congratulations.
She has publicly cheered radical DSA figures and defended individuals with records of praising Saddam Hussein, expressing admiration for the Muslim Brotherhood, and engaging in antisemitic content.
This is not about one woman’s faith or a First Amendment issue. It is about the networks surrounding her and what their celebration reveals.
When jihadis and the ummah treat a judicial appointment in deep-red Mississippi as a major victory and a signal that our state is open for settlement, we would be fools to ignore the pattern.
This is how institutional penetration begins, one small town at a time, one black robe at a time, while most citizens stay home on election day.
Habitual low voter turnout is the root of the problem. Incumbents and local officials feel invulnerable. They take actions they know their constituents would reject if those same constituents ever showed up at the polls or held them accountable between elections.
Benoit is a tiny Delta town. An appointment there does not require statewide scrutiny, until the celebrations start and the precedent is set.
Then comes the normalization: more appointments, more cultural infrastructure, more pressure to accommodate ideologies that are fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and Mississippi law.
Sharia is not merely a personal religious practice. It is a comprehensive legal and political system that subordinates individual rights, women’s equality under the law, free speech, and the supremacy of our Constitution to a foreign code.
Those who prioritize it cannot, in good faith, take or keep an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
Public office is not a diversity checkbox. It is a sacred trust.
Mississippi has already seen the early signs, Arab American Heritage Month proclamations extracted from Republican leaders, photos with high officials, the quiet expansion of parallel cultural institutions.
We must not become the next state that slowly surrenders its institutions while congratulating itself on tolerance. Texas is already wrestling with recognition of foreign holidays and financial systems tied to the same ideology.
We still have time to draw a hard line.
What must we do?
Demand that every elected official and candidate for public office, from the Governor and Attorney General to county and municipal leaders, publicly address this appointment and the radical networks celebrating it.
State Senator Michael McLendon has already called for Benoit to take every lawful step to remove her, and I add my voice to his. Other Republican leaders must stop hiding behind silence.
Support legislation modeled on efforts in other states to specifically bar Sharia law even if they have laws barring generic foreign legal systems on the books, require transparency on foreign funding and influence, and ensure every public official’s first and only allegiance is to the Constitution.
Most importantly, vote. Run for office. Recruit other citizens and organize. Attend board meetings in large numbers. Hold officials accountable between elections.
Follow the ongoing reporting by Amy Mek and RAIR, they are doing the work our local media will not. Low voter turnout is a choice that hands power to those who do not share our values. We have the numbers. We have the heritage of faith, family, and freedom that built this state. We lack only the will to use them in the face of the inevitable smears and attacks that will come regardless.
I did not spend three decades in uniform, nor survive the attack on the Pentagon and lead Americans fighting in the Global War on Terrorism against Islamic Sharia adherents, so that the next generation of Americans and Mississippians would inherit courts and communities slowly reshaped by the ideology that rejects the very foundations of our republic.
The Constitution is not a suggestion. American law is not optional.
Mississippi must remain Mississippi. America must remain America.
Get engaged. Stay vigilant. Defend what is ours.
Friends, there is an emotional aspect to warfare, especially among the warriors. This pic is of a much younger Rob Maness, freshly returned from his first combat sortie against the Islamists that attacked our country. It was especially satisfying since he was in the Pentagon on… https://t.co/pKuE0FguLm pic.twitter.com/eocD5diBxO
— Rob Maness (@RobManess) September 11, 2026
“Friends, there is an emotional aspect to warfare, especially among the warriors.
This pic is of a much younger Rob Maness, freshly returned from his first combat sortie against the Islamists that attacked our country.
It was especially satisfying since he was in the Pentagon on 9/11/2001 and witnessed the atrocities committed on innocents in person.
Knowing little school children were on the American Airlines jet is the most stark reminder of Islam’s destructive nature in his mind, especially today, when we are fighting ban Sharia Law in our free country.”
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