02/19/15

Onward, to Defeat!

By: William Palumbo

Will America’s war against ISIS be the first we enter with the intention of losing?

On Tuesday, Breitbart.com carried an extremely salacious piece of news that, judging by the relatively small number of comments, went right over the heads of most readers. Reported Breitbart:

“The Obama administration is revamping its efforts to combat Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) propaganda. ISIS and its supporters produce “as many as 90,000 tweets and other social media responses every day,” reports The New York Times.

An empowered Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, currently a small component of the U.S. State Department, will spearhead the new campaign to fight the ISIS propaganda machine.

Rashad Hussain, a Muslim American with close ties to the White House, will replace Alberto Fernandez, the center’s director, according to The Times.”

The article goes on to cite several curious parts of Mr. Hussain’s biography that place him in close proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood. For the uninitiated, the Brotherhood is an international totalitarian organization which seeks to establish a global Islamic state (i.e., Caliphate) … just like ISIS, whom Hussain is supposed to be battling (in cyberspace, that is).

We’ll soon add some more color to Mr. Hussain’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate groups in the United States, but first a few comments regarding the absurdity of social media “warfare” with savage headchoppers.

How Not to “Fight” a Fake War

It has been a surprise to many in America how well-produced, sophisticated, and professional ISIS’s media campaigns have been. Certainly, the influx of western jihadis have given them sufficient talent and technological know-how to put together their slick slaughter videos and catchy Twitter memes. Lest you forget about their savagery for even a day, the news media and Twitter will shove it right back into your face.

Which, considering our government’s capabilities, raises more than a few questions about the actual strategy to defeat ISIS. The U.S. government and social media platforms are masters at censorship. Post something highly offensive on Facebook or on Twitter and these companies will, more likely than not, remove it. There is photo recognition software that surely can be programmed to detect severed heads and black Shahada flags, and immediately flag them (no pun intended) for review. And there are a thousand ways that government internet monitoring can track activity online and cripple the user. Just ask Edward Snowden. Just ask Sharyl Attkisson.

Finally, remember that Facebook Turkey recently conceded to censor Turkish citizens who criticized Islam (and, more than likely, their fascist leaders, Recep Erdogan).

In conclusion, if Obama and the geniuses who are allegedly fighting ISIS were serious about winning the cyberwar, they’d just implement the tools we all know they have at their (literal) fingertips and shut them down. But they don’t.

Of course, if the same people were serious about winning the actual war (read: killing ISIS, not retweeting them to death), they’d also be doing just that. Instead, they’ve been ordering air strikes that have been described as “pin-pricks” since August, and while they dither ISIS has gained control of massive amounts of additional territory in Syria.

Deliberately Surrendering to the Headchoppers and Child Killers

All of this begs the question, what is the Obama administration doing with ISIS? It should be remembered that this same administration armed and trained Syrian rebels in Qatar. Only then did the world get “ISIS.”

This brings us back to Obama’s new propaganda chief against ISIS, Rashad Hussain. As noted by Breitbart, in December 2013 the Egyptian political magazine Rose El-Yousef profiled Hussain as one of six Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators in the Obama administration. At the time, the Investigative Project on Terrorism wrote of Hussain that he “maintained close ties with people and groups that [Rose El-Yousef] says comprise the Muslim Brotherhood network in America.”

That’s an understatement.

Here’s a healthy dose of facts pertaining to Hussain’s role in the Obama administration and his association with Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the United States:

Hussain was appointed Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Countries by Obama in February 2010.
In 2013, Hussain met with Abdullah Bin Bayyah at the White House. Bayyah is a Vice President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS). IUMS is headed by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is banned from entering the United States.
In 2013, Hussain was a Forum Speaker at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, held in Doha, Qatar. This event is co-hosted by the Brookings Saban Center, and the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2012, Hussain attended the U.S.-Islamic World Conference in Doha, Qatar. With him were future Presidential Chief-of-Staff Denis McDonough, Imam Mohamed Magid (President of the Islamic Society of North America, ISNA), and Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah.
In May 2009, Mr. Hussain was one of the speakers at a Leadership Summit of the Council for Advancement of Muslim Professionals (CAMP). Many of the sponsoring organizations of that event are tied to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood including Islamic Relief, Amana Mutual Funds, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. (From GlobalMBWatch.com)
In 2008, Hussain co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution, Reformulating the Battle of Ideas: Understanding the Role of Islam in Counterterrorism Policy. This paper explicitly calls for the American government not to reject political Islam, but to utilize Islamic scholars and Islamic “policymaking” to reject “terrorism.” It also recommends that “policymakers should reject the use of language that provides a religious legitimization of terrorism such as ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremist.’” (Brookings has taken millions of dollars from the Muslim Brotherhood government of Qatar.)
In 2004, Hussain spoke at a Muslim Students Association’s (MSA) conference in Chicago. There he defended Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian activist who had been indicted by the Department of Justice for racketeering, calling it a “politically motivated persecution.”

Dissembling and Procrastination from Obama and his Puppets

In October, former CIA Chief and Secretary of Defense (both positions held under Obama) Leon Panetta expressed what should have been treated as an incredible opinion. The war against ISIS, Panetta stated, would be a “30-year war.”

Let’s state the obvious: if you’re planning a 30-year war, are you planning victory, or a prolonged, dragged out, and humiliating defeat? The Nazis were defeated in much less than 30 years’ time, and ISIS right now is no German Wehrmacht. Not even close… not yet, anyway.

That stupefying statement by an Obama-appointed public figure, as unbelievable as it was, was actually trumped this week by State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf. Harf, speaking after the world had recently witnessed the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot and the mass beheadings of Coptic Christians in Libya, claimed that the United States could “not kill ourselves out of his war. We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs.” ISIS certainly seems to believe they can kill themselves out of this war, whether the murdered are men, women, or children.

But not according to the U.S. Department of State. Instead, to defeat ISIS, Libyans need jobs (or something, right Ms. Harf?). This is just too ironic, considering that the Obama administration is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and there are a record number of Americans long-term out of work.

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jihad

Americans aren’t all that familiar with Islam, jihad, honor killings, or the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the most recent U.S. Census, less than one million people in the United States speak Arabic at home.

So, maybe it makes sense to listen to the government of Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, when it states publicly that ISIS is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The shock value here is minimized when one remembers that Al Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and the Taliban are all Muslim Brotherhood spinoffs.

Then again, other spinoffs of the Brotherhood include CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, and the MSA. Rashad Hussain, the chief architect of a bogus cyberwar strategy against ISIS, is a well-known associate of these groups going back more than a decade. It’s a matter of public record.

Not even in 30 years will this “strategy” defeat ISIS. It’s not designed to. It’s designed to defeat us.

As an infamous 1991 memo of the Muslim Brotherhood stated, “The Ikhwan (i.e., Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Obama consistently defends Islam, yet has no problem lecturing Americans about the Crusades (which ended long before Columbus sailed to the Americas). If we the people don’t get serious about stopping this modern day jihad soon, the sabotage from within will soon be complete.

01/24/15

Steve Emerson opens up about controversy

01/21/15

Hypocritical New York Times Takes on Steven Emerson

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

When the New York Times sees a gaffe made on Fox News, it blasts the network in article after article, in this case at least three times, but when its own reporters make basic fact-checking mistakes, the paper’s readers receive casual notice at the bottom of an article.

In some editions of the Times, Stephen Castle and Robert Mackey misidentified the parent company of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s title at News Corporation, and “paraphrased incorrectly in some editions” Rupert Murdoch’s Twitter comments. That’s three errors in one article.

These errors were in an article criticizing Steven Emerson, a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi and Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, who mistakenly said that “[A]nd in Britain, it’s not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”

Emerson retracted his statement, saying that he “clearly made a terrible error for which I am deeply sorry,” and Fox News issued an on-air apology regarding the incident. Emerson even made a donation to Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Will The New York Times make similar donations on behalf of its numerous errors in the Castle and Mackey article?

Writers for the Times didn’t hold back: “Maybe if these ‘journalists’ left their bubble and actually talked to more Muslims, they wouldn’t spew nonsense—such as that Pakistan is an Arab country or that Birmingham, England, is entirely Muslim and a no-go area for Christians,” wrote Nicholas Kristof for the Times. “That paranoid claim by a Fox News ‘expert,’ later retracted, led wags to suggest that the city had renamed itself Birming, since Muslims avoid ham.”

The New York Times repeatedly labeled Emerson a “self-described expert on Islamist terrorism.” Investigative reporter Gary Weiss, in an outstanding blog post on this controversy, noted, “When you call someone a ‘self-described expert’ it’s a bit like calling someone a ‘self-described doctor.’…He or she is a phony.”

Weiss suggested that Kristof was perhaps carrying a grudge against Emerson for an article years earlier in which “Emerson raked [Kristof] over the coals for a column that criticized the U.S. and Israel for isolating the Hamas terror group.

But as Weiss pointed out, the late New York Times managing editor A.M. Rosenthal called Emerson “one of the nation’s best national security correspondents” whose “investigative work on radical Islamic fundamentalism is absolutely critical to this nation’s national security. There is no one else who has exhibited the same expertise, courage and determination to tackle this vital issue.” And Weiss cited other examples of praise for Emerson on the pages of the Times: “In this article in the Times in 1988,” wrote Weiss, “veteran Times reporters Martin Tolchin and Richard Halloran described Emerson as ‘an expert on intelligence.’”

But the Times are a-changing.

Times executive editor Dean Baquet has announced that the paper won’t publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons “primarily” because doing so might offend its Muslim readers.

While Emerson clearly was wrong on the specifics of what he said, he was referring to the undeniably expanding Islamization occurring in parts of Europe. This news story from CBN in 2010 captured this very real phenomenon, which does exist, and continues to grow.

Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid cited some of the outstanding work that Emerson has done through the years, which is the reason that the left has come after him so hard: “For his part, Emerson has been consistently correct about the development of the Islamic extremist networks that now threaten America and the world,” writes Kincaid. “His latest film, ‘Jihad in America: The Grand Deception,’ describes how Muslim Brotherhood fronts, such as CAIR, have pursued a strategy described in secret documents as the ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ of destroying Western civilization from within.” He also referred to Emerson’s 1994 documentary, “Jihad in America,” which “included previously unknown videos of the clandestine activities of radical Islamic terrorist groups in the United States.”

Besides, the Times, as AIM has cited for 45 years, often gets the big things wrong as well. For example, we debunked their December, 2013 story on Benghazi that they intended as the definitive statement. We’re still waiting for their retraction or correction on that one.

Despite his mistake, Emerson is one of the nation’s leading experts on Islamic terrorism. The New York Times, on the other hand, has shown itself time after time to be hypocritical and agenda-driven.

01/10/15

Paris—The Latest Example of Islamic Jihadist Terrorism

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While much of the media are doing contortions trying to explain why the latest terrorist attacks are either home grown, lone wolf, or committed by alienated youth, this misses the point. And yes, we realize that most victims of Islamic jihadists are other Muslims. Just look at the massacre in Pakistan last month of 141 individuals, including children and teachers. Or the one this week by Boko Haram in Nigeria that may have led to the death of at least 2,000.

The Islamic terrorists who attacked the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris this week, brutally murdering 12 people, were killed by authorities today. The situation is still fluid, but reports indicate that at least 15 hostages are now free, and one more terrorist may be on the loose following two hostage situations that ensued during the hunt for the terrorists. One might think that Paris—and France—might be able to breathe a sigh of relief. In reality, however, the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the two ensuing hostage situations were merely a continuation of the latest line of Islam-inspired terror attacks worldwide, be it on the Canadian Parliament; in Sydney, Australia; in Pakistan; on two policemen in New York City; or in Moore, Oklahoma.

The problem is not who these attackers are, or whether they are a card-carrying member of al Qaeda, Boko Haram, or the Islamic State—but that they are conducting such atrocious acts. Just in the U.S. and Canada alone in the last couple of months we’ve had a number of attacks occurring in the name of Allah. To the victims, and most of the rest of us, the rest doesn’t matter.

The Washington Post is reporting that Boko Haram may have executed thousands. “A video recently emerged, Genocide Watch reported, that shows gunmen shooting civilians as they lay face down in a dormitory,” reports Terrence McCoy. “A local leader explains they are ‘infidels,’ even though he admits they’re Muslim: ‘We have made sure the floor of this hall is turned red with blood, and this is how it is going to be in all future attacks and arrests of infidels. From now on, killing, slaughtering, destruction and bombings will be our religious duty anywhere we invade.’”

McCoy notes that Boko Haram’s attacks seem more “wanton” than those perpetrated by other terror groups.

These attacks are coming at such an accelerated pace today that any sort of long term solutions, such as being more responsible and not insulting Islam or the prophet Muhammad, seem futile. Do we really think anyone at the school in Pakistan or in Baga, Nigeria had slandered the prophet?

“The Religion of Peace” website has documented the Islam-motivated terrorist attacks of 2014.

The Washington Post reported on January 7th that the “Paris attack lacked hallmarks of Islamist assaults in the West,” highlighting the possibility that this was an unofficial attack “without any direct ties to groups such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.”

The next day, The New York Times reported that one of two attackers “suspected of killing 12 people at a satirical newspaper in Paris traveled to Yemen in 2011 and received terrorist training from Al Qaeda’s affiliate there before returning to France.”

However the media decide to parse the latest Paris attacks, these Islamic jihadis clearly have been drinking from the same toxic stream of violent ideology.

As happened with the Moore, Oklahoma beheading by Alton Nolen, the media and liberal pundits were quick to separate the Charlie Hebdo killers from Islamic ideology—going to great lengths to find a parallel with any other case they could fathom.

One guest on MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner” compared Jerry Falwell’s lawsuit against Hustler Magazine to the violent murder of 12 innocent people at Charlie Hebdo, without any rebuttal coming from Wagner. Jonah Goldberg of National Review condemned this as “The Dumbest 57 Seconds Ever on TV.”

I would also point to MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s characterization of Nolen’s beheading of a co-worker in Oklahoma as supposedly having as little to do with his alleged “workplace violence” as what he ate for breakfast. The FBI, apparently, swallowed the idea that Nolen’s attack was workplace violence, as well.

And recently, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Howard Dean went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to condemn the attacks, but asserted, “I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life. That’s not what the Koran says. Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.”

“When I watch Americans use words like cowardly, barbaric, murder, outrageous, shocking, etc., to describe a violent extremist organization’s actions, we are playing right into the enemy’s hands,” said Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, U.S. commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, in December regarding ISIS, according to The New York Times. “They want us to become emotional. They revel in being called murderers when the words are coming from an apostate.”

The Daily Caller cited an example of The New York Times removing a section from a previously posted article that told how one of the terrorists at the Charlie Hebdo offices spared the life of a woman who was there during the attack:

“Instead, she told French news media, the man said, ‘I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman, we don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself,’ she recalled.”

Later on the Times altered the article, removing “but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself.” This is the type of political correctness that is commonplace in the media. It is not a matter of cowardice, fearful of being attacked like Charle Hebdo was, but rather an ideological, editorial decision to attempt to minimize the link to Islam.

As I asked in my recent column on the underreported and misreported stories of 2014, “What does it take to spark media outrage?… What is it going to take to end this ongoing slaughter by jihadists, acting in the name of Islam?”

In 2011, when Charlie Hebdo was firebombed for “an edition poking fun at Islam,” according to the UK Telegraph, Time Magazine’s Bruce Crumley blamed the publication for the violence perpetrated against it, writing,

“Not only are such Islamophobic antics [as publishing cartoons] futile and childish… but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?”

By such a measure the media should censor itself from publishing or disseminating the inflammatory Charlie Hebdo materials in any outlet at all. And if The Washington Post is any indication, that’s exactly what happened: it used a photograph that cleverly hides the Charlie Hebdo cover from view while featuring a copy of the publication amidst other magazines.

Ironically, a call to combat terrorism came, not from the media, but from Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al Sisi even before the attack in Paris. He made a speech that hopefully will prove to be a turning point, but don’t count on it. In his New Year’s Day address, he urged the Imams to lead a “religious revolution” against extremism. But he has a huge battle on his own turf, as he gained power after millions of Egyptians called for the removal of Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who had been elected president of Egypt after the removal of Hosni Mubarak. This is but a small step forward.

As President Al Sisi said, “I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.”

Why must such bold words come from Egypt’s president, and not our own, and other Western leaders, or from the mainstream media? Steve Emerson, of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, argued that “Indeed, the responses from our own president, French President Hollande and British Prime Minster David Cameron all spouted the same empty pabulum in asserting that the Paris attack had nothing to do with Islam or any religion for that matter. But the hollow comments coming from our own leaders are steeped in the stench of appeasement and cowardice.”