Putting Jerusalem First - Dr. Mordechai Kedar

by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

The world has to be brought to understand that Jerusalem is our capital city, historically and forever.

From the minute Donald Trump, while still a candidate, promised to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, I have been asked repeatedly what I think the Arab and Muslim response to that move might be. My usual answer to this kind of question is that "I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet" - in the words of the biblical Amos - and my knowledge of the future is especially limited when talking about the quixotic and crisis-filled area known as the Middle East. Still, when the subject is Jerusalem, one can predict with a fairly high degree of certainty that there will be a good many complaints sounded from the Arab and Muslim world, threats will abound, and there may even be attempts against American complexes and American citizens in countries outside the USA. This could affect ambassadors and engineers, businessmen and media teams, anyone with US citizenship. 

It didn't need the embassy move for this threat to appear. There are enough people out to take revenge on the USA for the change in its attitude towards Islam since the Trump victory, especially the connection he made between terror and radical Islam, a connection whose existence Obama absolutely refused to recognize. Trump also poses a threat to Muslim immigration to the USA, expressing the fears of not a few Americans regarding Muslim immigrants. Jerusalem is not the only member of the equation appearing on the side that includes Trump and the USA, when the Arab and Muslim world are on the other side of that equation.

Actually, the most important factor in the Washington government's deliberations on moving the embassy is how Trump sees the Jerusalem issue: If he views Jerusalem as the Jewish People's eternal capital, a place many Christians are drawn to, a city that the Muslims must accept as Israel's capital whether or not they like it and especially if they do not - then he would have moved the embassy to Jerusalem unhesitatingly, on the day he entered the White House. Reality, however, is more complex: as a seasoned businessman, Trump knows how to identify a successful deal, and how to avoid a high risk deal or one whose chances of failure are considerable.

There are clear signs that the new US president thinks in terms of "America First", meaning that the US intends to give up its position as the world's policeman, leave the myriad conflicts around the world to their legal owners and concentrate on itself, its problems and interests. With that mindset, Trump does not feel obligated to abandon positions taken by those who preceded him in the White House just because some American Jews and Israelis think he has to move the embassy to Jerusalem. True, he did promise to do so during his campaign, but so did his predecessors, and none of them kept that promise. What's the rush? He has four long years to keep that promise, which he may very well decide to keep before the elections for a second term, in order to win the support and votes of American Jews, most of whom did not support his election.

There are other consequences to the decision to move or not move the embassy: How will Israel relate to other presidential promises, such as security guarantees? What can Israel be offered in exchange for not moving the embassy - perhaps the US turning a blind eye to construction in Judea and Samaria? What kind of image will the world have of President Trump if he is seen as bowing to threats and blackmail?  What other demands will the Arabs and Muslims raise once they see that he fears their threats? What will Putin, loyal to his friends, such as Assad, think about a president who does not keep his promises? How will American Muslims and those outside the US react to the embassy relocation? Will it motivate them to perpetrate terror attacks?

These questions exacerbate Trump's concerns that he might lose the ability to play the role of honest broker between Israel and its neighbors, who view Jerusalem as negotiable. To them, moving the embassy means taking a stand that makes the outcome of negotiations a victory for Israel on this matter. It should be noted that the embassy is supposed to be built on land purchased by the Americans years ago, that the residences meant for the embassy staff were built long ago and are rented out. The land is not in the eastern part of the city which the Palestinians demand for their capital, but that has no effect on their opposition to moving the embassy to the western part of the city. Does this make sense? Hardly, but rationality has long been absent from MIddle Eastern reality; if rational thinking had any effect on the situation, the nations of the world would have long since told the Arabs and Muslims that Jerusalem was the Jewish capital over 3000 years ago, way before the rest of the nations had any capital cities of their own.

We are at fault

The truth has to be said: Israel did not do enough to establish the fact that Jerusalem is its capital, to entrench that fact in world consciousness. There are several proofs of this: important government offices, among them the Defense Ministry, work out of Tel Aviv. As a result, just two weeks ago, we heard Trump's intended secretary of defense say at his congressional hearing that Israel's capital is Tel Aviv. After all, his meetings with the defense establishment of Israel take place in Tel Aviv. Israel spent billions on building the Defense Department complex in Tel Aviv, hardly an unimportant ministry.

Most visitors to Israel come by air. The main international airport is called Ben Gurion and on world flight maps, that airport is placed in Tel Aviv. The top of the terminal building should have "Welcome to JSM" on it in different languages, because Jerusalem is serviced by this airport. Instead, its symbol is TLV.This may seem inconsequential, simply technical, but it has significance, especially among decision makers who tend to do a great deal of flying. 

And if we are already on the subject of Ben Gurion airport, may I point out a most embarrassing fact to Israel's decision makers: everyone who arrives at the airport walks along the terminal to passport control, passing through a long circular hall whose walls are covered with gigantic advertisements for beer. In Hebrew the word "bira" means an alcoholic beverage known as beer, but when pronounced emphasizing the second syllable, "bira" means capital city. How shameful!! Is this the way Israel should welcome visitors? Is this the message Israel wants them to get with their first steps in the holy land? Beer? That's what counts? Why not photos of the bira, Jerusalem? Or Israel's beautiful landscapes? Its people, cities, streets? Is there a shortage of things to be proud of? Just beer? That's the highest rung of the ladder? It was the Prophet Isaiah who said: "Woe to that wreath, the pride of Ephraim's drunkards..."

There are other things Israel could do to establish the motif of Jerusalem as its historic capital in the minds of its own citizens and those of the world. For example, one could hold an annual commemoration of the First Temple's dedication on the Sukkot holiday during King Solomon's reign (Kings I, 8), letting the world know that Israel was not established in 1948 but when King David moved the capital of the Jewish monarchy from Hevron to Jerusalem (Samuel I, 5), making the Jewish state and its capital over 3000 years old. 

Another very important step is to change the Arabic name for Jerusalem on Israel's road signs. They now say "Al Quds," a relatively recent appellation. The classic name for Jerusalem, appearing countless times in the Muslim Hadith (Oral Law), is "Beit al Maqdes," and anyone who looks at the name realizes that it is taken from the words Beit Hamikdash, the Holy Temple. Israel has every right to use that name as it is the one that appears in the earliest Islamic sources. And Israel could simply transliterate the word "Jerusalem" into Arabic letters. After all, that is the city's name.

Another thing that could be done is to put large signs at the entrance of every church saying: "Welcome to Jerusalem the historic and eternal capital of Israel." These signs must appear in as many languages as possible: Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. This is a fight for public awareness and these signs will help establish Jerusalem's standing to us, our neighbors and our visitors.

Unfortunately, there are people and organizations in Israel and the rest of the world - sadly including Jews and Israelis - who aspire to divide Jerusalem and give its eastern, sanctified area, to non-Jews whose holy city is Mecca.  We have to put these people and organizations outside the Pale, where they belong, in the eastern section of the rubbish bin of the Israeli public sphere and that of the entire world.

It is important to remember that there were Israeli politicians who gave in to pressure and put Jerusalem on the negotiating table at which they sat with our hostile neighbors, something for which we are still sorry today. It is too much to expect from the world's nations and their leaders to see Jerusalem as the capital of Israel if we do not do everything in our power to establish its centrality as our capital. Once we do everything to prove to everyone that Jerusalem is eternally ours, there will be no reason for any country or leader to refrain from putting their embassy in the Eternal City.

Written for Arutz Sheva, translated from Hebrew by Rochel Sylvetsky

Dr. Mordechai Kedarr is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. Thoroughly familiar with Arab media in real time, he is frequently interviewed on the various news programs in Israel.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20090

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They Teach Our Children, Advise Our Government, And Support Jihad - Abigail R. Esman

by Abigail R. Esman

In many institutions, subjectivity clouds social research, while students' minds are too-frequently shaped by anti-democratic, anti-Western, and – worse – truth-challenged ideologues.

Since the rise of ISIS as an Islamic extremist group, and certainly since its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the official creation of the caliphate, researchers and intelligence groups worldwide have noted its popularity with Muslim women, even in the West. Unlike other terrorist groups, ISIS has pointedly recruited women. And many women have, on their own, found the promise of life in the Islamic State particularly appealing.

Along the way, researchers and intelligence agencies have argued that the Muslim women who join ISIS, especially those who travel to Syria from the West, take active roles in ISIS's jihad. While they are largely barred from fighting on the battlefield, women have enrolled in the al-Khansaa brigade, the women's moral police force which enforces strict codes of dress and public behavior. Al-Khansaa officers regularly arrest and beat women who violate sharia-based modesty laws or who appear in public without a male companion. Other women raise their sons to be jihadists, or bring their children with them from the West in the hopes that they, too, will grow up to support the Islamic State and its jihad.

Now a young Dutch researcher, Aysha Navest, has come out with a different theory based on interviews she held with over 22 women now living in the caliphate. Navest, who is affiliated with the University of Amsterdam (UvA), says she knows several of those women. They reveal a very different portrait of the so-called "ISIS brides:" girls who are not recruited for jihad, but who willingly and eagerly make the perilous trip to Syria, where they live peaceful, happy lives as homemakers, mothers, and wives. Her findings appeared last April in the journal Anthropology Today, a peer-reviewed publication of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

There is just one problem: Aysha Navest allegedly also recruits women for the Islamic State.

This is the conclusion of journalists at the Dutch national daily NRC Handelsblad, who matched Navest's birthdate, hometown, children's first names and other identifying details with those of "Ought-Aisha," a woman posting messages on the Dutch-Muslim website Marokko.nl. And according to "Ought-Aisha" (or "Sister Aisha"), life in the Islamic State is simply grand. In various posts, she has praised suicide bombers, honored Osama bin Laden, and insisted that jihadists will find rewards in Paradise. Additionally, the NRC reports, in Facebook posts she has referred to Shiites and apostates as "people who rape our women, torture our men, and kill our children."

Unsurprisingly, the NRC's findings put renewed focus on Navest's reports and the nature of her research, which was performed under the tutelage of two well-known UvA professors – anthropologist Martijn de Koning and Modern Islamic Culture professor Annelies Moors. Both De Koning and Moors now admit that Navest's subjects were interviewed anonymously, largely via WhatsApp, and that she did not share the women's names even with them – a departure from standard research practices that call for transparency. Even so, according to Elsevier, they stand behind her research.

Others, however, voice considerable skepticism. The Dutch intelligence agency AIVD dismissed Navest's report from the outset, noting that her conclusions stood in stark conflict not only with their own, but with other studies by UvA scholars. The UvA has now called for an independent investigation into Navest's background and the reliability of her work.

Even fellow academics have been scathingly critical. In his column for Elsevier, Leiden University Professor of Jurisprudence Afshin Ellian observed that as a result of Navest's online postings, "in normal situations, she would end up in prison for incitement to violence and hate with terrorist intentions." Instead, the conclusions of her "research" showing that women do not join directly in jihad but simply enjoy idyllic lives as wives and mothers in the Caliphate, represent "the manner in which she pursues her own jihad: by pulling a smokescreen before the eyes of the unbelievers."

But the situation also exposes a larger problem within academia internationally. In many institutions, subjectivity clouds social research, while students' minds are too-frequently shaped by anti-democratic, anti-Western, and – worse – truth-challenged ideologues. For example, at UvA, De Koning has long been accused of sympathizing with Islamic extremists. Among other things, he co-authored a book describing Salafism as a "utopian idealism."

Likewise, at Kent State University, the FBI is reportedly investigating history professor Julio Pino for ties to the Islamic State. A Muslim convert, Pino has made provocative comments on campus and in university-based newspapers, including shouting "Death to Israel" during a lecture by a former Israeli diplomat. In a letter to a campus publication, he declared "jihad until victory!" On Facebook, Pino once described Osama bin Laden as "the greatest." He also posted a photograph of himself in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, adding the caption "I come to bury D.C., not to praise it," Fox News reports.

Kent State officials say they "distanced" themselves from Professor Pino, whose tenured position poses legal challenges to dismissing him from the faculty.

In contrast, at nearby Oberlin, Assistant Professor Joy Karega's Facebook posts calling ISIS an arm of American and Israeli intelligence agencies and blaming Israel for the attacks of 9/11 were enough to get her fired from her job teaching Rhetoric and Composition. As the industry newspaper Inside Higher Ed reported, despite initially defending her right to academic freedom, Oberlin officials ultimately determined that, "Beyond concerns about anti-Semitism, which fit into larger complaints about escalating anti-Jewish rhetoric on campus, Karega's case has raised questions about whether academic freedom covers statements that have no basis in fact."

Then there is John Esposito, Georgetown University's professor of Religion and International Affairs and Islamic Studies. An extensive Investigative Project on Terrorism investigation into Esposito's activities found that he has used his position to "defend radical Islam and promote its ideology- including defending terrorist organizations and those who support them, advocating for Islamist regimes, praising radical Islamists and their apologists, and downplaying the threat of Islamist violence." He refuses to condemn Hamas and, according to the report, "remains a close friend and defender of Palestinian Islamic Jihad board member Sami Al-Arian."

Al-Arian ran the PIJ's "active arm" in America while working as a University of South Florida professor.

Like Navesh, Esposito seems to want to aim his work beyond the ivory towers. He has spoken on Islam to the State Department, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security and other government offices. Similarly, Navesh hoped that her "research" would help shape policy in the Netherlands, encouraging courts to issue lighter sentences on women who returned home from the Islamic State. After all, they hadn't engaged in terrorism. They'd only lived in domestic bliss abroad. Where's the crime in that?

None, of course, if it were true. But it is not.

There is nothing new, of course, in respected journals publishing flawed research by people who aim to shape public policy or opinion – the infamous and now-debunked Andrew Wakefield study that claimed to link autism to vaccines is a prime example. But such examples only underscore the challenges, and the need to investigate better the accuracy of scholarly reports as well as the integrity of those who write them. Islamic jihad, after all, is not just about destroying our lives, but about destroying our culture. In the face of the "smokescreens" of that jihad, intellectual vigilance will be our strongest shield.


Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/5765/they-teach-our-children-advise-our-government

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Illegal Aliens Really Do Vote – a Lot - William Campenni

by William Campenni

While few cases are prosecuted, it’s not because few crimes are committed.

A warm, sunny Saturday a decade ago, there was a Hispanic festival in our small town, a bedroom community for illegal aliens seeking day labor jobs in the nearby wealthy suburbs. It was a sanctuary city at the time. No problem with the festival itself. The music was lively and the food tasty. And don't the Irish have St. Patrick's Day, and the Italians Columbus Day?

While wandering around the festivities, I noticed a table with three nice ladies in front of a "Register To Vote" sign. Curious about its presence at a festival where the bulk of the crowd was either illegal alien day laborers or legal non-citizens, I went over to inquire. Before I spoke, one of those nice ladies asked me if I was registered to vote. Wanting to see where this would go, I said no, and asked how to sign up. A voter registration form was thrust in my hands. The very first item on these forms, in Virginia and the rest of America, was "I am a citizen of the United States of America," with YES and NO blocks to check.

"Don't I need to show you some proof of citizenship?" I asked. She replied "no." I asked her how she could verify that I wasn’t lying. Sensing she might be on a slippery slope, she called over a supervisor from the Registrar's Office and told the woman of my concern. The official told me they never checked citizenship status because I would be penalized if I lied. Really? So I asked her how she would verify my truthfulness, or those of the dozens of new voters being registered that day. Defensively, she replied that they checked all registrations for accuracy at the Registrar's Office when they were turned in.

I called the Registrar Monday, and asked if they do indeed verify citizenship status. I was told that they didn't unless someone made a specific complaint against an individual applicant.

Forward to our next local election, where the illegal alien presence and an unlawful day labor site were THE issues, I noticed that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in their purple tee shirts, and their local spinoffs were canvassing the town. I followed them for awhile as they went to homes and neighborhoods where the illegal aliens concentrated, and watched them exit each home or apartment with a new handful of voter registrations. 

Ten years later, nobody at the Registrar's Office is checking citizenship.

The brutal truth is that illegal aliens vote, and in large numbers. Voter fraud is not exclusive to illegal aliens. There are also legal aliens (green card, H1B visas, tourist visa holders, etc.) who vote illegally. And it's not just Latin Americans. The non-citizen demographic includes South Asian tech workers, Irish overstays, West and Horn of Africa immigrants, and Asian students. Then there are dual-state voters (college kids, snowbirds, transients), reincarnated voters, and un-purged voters long moved from their precincts.

While few cases are prosecuted, it’s not because few crimes are committed. Political pressure from Democrats and the cowardly establishment, open-borders Republicans, precludes rigorous enforcement. The United States Attorney in Virginia refused to prosecute such cases in several Northern Virginia counties. The Democratic Party Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections refused to release any information on illegal alien registrations. Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Lindsey Graham deny the existence of voter fraud, but they offer no proof for their position. Then they ridicule President Trump when he asks to investigate the problem. 

In fact, numerous studies document the fraud that these politicians and their media votaries consciously ignore or derisively rebut. A well researched report on illegal alien voting in my home state of Virginia revealed more than a thousand illegal alien registrants in just eight counties. It did not include the two most populous, of which one, Fairfax County, is a de facto sanctuary county, and the very county described in the opening paragraphs of this article. Extrapolate those eight Virginia county totals to the whole state, and then to the entire United States, including states like California where no illegal alien controls exist, and you can see that President Trump's claims are not so frivolous. 

The effects of turning a blind eye to this felonious voter fraud? Virginia was once a solid red state. Once the illegal alien invasion hit the state in full flood after 2004, (thanks in part to Republican amnesty advocate George Bush's indifference to the tsunami) it became a blue state. The margin of Hillary Clinton's victory over Donald Trump in Virginia was almost entirely her margin in Fairfax County, where illegals have sanctuary and are protected by a solidly Democrat government. In five recent statewide elections, the Republican margin of defeat - Cuccinelli for Governor (vs. McAuliffe), Gillespie for Senate (vs. Warner), Allen for Senate (vs. Webb), and two Attorneys General - was almost certainly the result of illegal voting. Al Franken sits in the Senate almost certainly because of Minnesota vote fraud. Paul Ryan in his gerrymandered Wisconsin protectorate may not know that, but we citizens in Virginia and elsewhere do know it.

Virginia has recently implemented some controls on voter fraud, such as a photo ID requirement. But that law has been weakened by liberal court challenges and a Democrat governor. What’s more, the ID law controls fraud only on election day. The real fraud is in the registration process. Once on the voter rolls, illegals are essentially home free, because even a photo ID is easy to come by. 

Analysts John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, and TV reporter Eric Shawn, have done yeoman’s work in several published studies on voter fraud. A new study confirms similar voting fraud in Philadelphia, the electoral whale in Pennsylvania’s elections. As far back as 2012, a CBS 4/Miami Herald study, not exactly a right wing bastion, revealed that Florida’s voter rolls included as many as 180,000 non-citizen legal resident voters, while illegal alien voters weren’t even noted because they could not be explicitly identified. The left-leaning Pew Research Center in 2012 contended that state voter rolls contain millions of inaccuracies ripe for exploitation.

There are numerous surveys in other states with similar results, should Ryan, Graham, Fox News, CNN and those of their ilk bother to study them instead of rail against Trump.

Speaking of which, the Democratic (and Republican) politicians and pundits who now ridicule Trump as lacking evidence, are ignoring evidence which already exists. Trump has called their bluff, and there will now be the investigation they have sought. People in the real world already know the results. You can be sure that Democratic Secretaries of State and Democrat-controlled election boards are scurrying to seclude their files from prying eyes, and the federal and state bureaucracies who must supply the corroborating support data (jury duty exclusions, green card identities, tax records, visa overstays, border entry records, illegal alien arrests, drivers licenses, etc.) are finding ways to hide or retain the information.

For many inside the chattering class Beltway bubble, illegal alien vote fraud is a debating exercise with the endgame political advantage. But for each and every citizen, it is a theft of that person's sacred vote. As with illegal alien crime, the compassion always goes to the perpetrator, not the victim. But my vote and your vote was secured and defended by thousands of servicemen over the years, many of whom gave their lives. It is sad and disgraceful to know that the value of a hard-won vote is being destroyed by people who shouldn't even be in this country. Bring on that investigation!


William Campenni is a retired engineer, business owner, and Air Force fighter pilot.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/illegal_aliens_really_do_vote_a_lot.html

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Immigration Priorities: Translators, and Victims of Genocide - Shoshana Bryen

by Shoshana Bryen

If "vetting" is not possible and American security requirements are real, is there a way to bring together our historic sympathy for refugees and historic welcome of immigrants with our reasonable concerns?

• Prioritize two groups from the Middle East: those who have worked for the U.S. military as translators (and their families); and Middle East Christians who, according to then-Secretary of State Kerry, were being subjected to genocide in Syria and Iraq.
• In 2008, Congress authorized 20,000 special visas for Iraqis who served the U.S. for a year or more; and in 2009, authorized 7,500 visas over seven years for Afghan translators. The idea was to get allies who had risked their lives for American troops out as quickly as possible, but thousands have waited for years.
• Iraq and Afghanistan are countries in which being tagged as helpful to the U.S. military can be, and has been, a death sentence. And worse, in July 2016, an extension of the visa program failed to make it out of the Senate.
• Of the 10,801 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016 from Syria, only 56 (0.5 percent) were Christian.
• Making a concerted effort to bring those two desperately threatened groups to the United States would meet our commitment to the translators, give concrete expression to our revulsion at genocide, protect the interests of the American people, and ensure that America remains hospitable to immigrants and refugees.

If you want security clearances in the United States, the government "vets" you quite thoroughly. They begin by asking you questions and then ask for a list of people to interview -- family, friends, employers, etc. They take your list and ask those people for more people who will talk about you, then take that list and ask those people for more people who will talk about you -- and so on until the lists have the right number and combination of names that overlap. If you have a vindictive ex-wife, watch out. They do a credit check, a criminal background check, a motor vehicle records check, and a medical records check. Psychiatrist? That too.

When discussing visas for people coming to the U.S. from countries with terrorism issues, it is useful to know what it means to "vet" and why there is no possibility of vetting (or "extreme vetting," whatever that means) refugees and potential immigrants who have no links to their former lives. Vetting -- whether for security clearances or visas -- is all about your life to this point.

President Trump's executive order halting immigration from seven countries for 30 days -- for a start -- is a reasonable response to the increasing understanding that people from certain countries can pose more of a security risk than people from other countries, even when all the countries are Muslim-majority. The seven are Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia; the U.S. government, under previous presidents, had cited all for terror links. Countries such as Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Oman and Tunisia and other Muslim-majority countries are not affected.

A "Muslim ban" would be racist, wrong, and a violation of deeply held American principles; but the claim by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that visa restrictions are tantamount to slavery and denying women the right to vote is slanderous, exaggerated, inaccurate and anti-American. Restrictions -- and post-fact checks -- on people who enter the United States from countries with clear links to terrorism, and to which we cannot turn for record-checks and interviews, are simply something the United States does.

In 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was occupied by radical Islamists bent on war with the United States. The Carter Administration ordered all Iranians with student visas to report physically to U.S. immigration officials or face possible deportation. Ten months later (Carter's order had to go through the courts), the New York Times, citing an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman, reported that nearly 60,000 students had registered as required, about 430 had been deported, and 5,000 had left voluntarily. In the interim, Carter ordered federal officials to:

"invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly."

Iran remains at war with the United States and al Qaeda and ISIS are no less at war simply because they lack a central government.

In 2015, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Consular Affairs told a House hearing that the U.S. government had revoked more than 9,500 visas over terrorism concerns since 2001 (the number is now more than 13,000). The attacks of 9/11 were followed by more attacks and plots against symbols of American military, law, justice, and governance as well as trains, bars, and shopping centers that are symbols of everyday life. Mass-casualty attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando were only the latest catalysts for Americans' underlying concern that have been growing for years about terrorism and the government's ability to protect us.

If "vetting" is not possible and American security requirements are real, is there a way to bring together our historic sympathy for refugees and historic welcome of immigrants with our reasonable concerns?

Yes.

Prioritize two groups from the Middle East: those who have worked for the U.S. military as translators (and their families); and Middle East Christians who, according to then-Secretary of State Kerry, were being subjected to genocide in Syria and Iraq.

In 2008, Congress authorized 20,000 special visas for Iraqis who served the U.S. for a year or more; and in 2009, authorized 7,500 visas over seven years for Afghan translators. The idea was to get allies who had risked their lives for American troops out as quickly as possible, but thousands have waited for years. Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Spencer Case wrote early in 2016:

"State Department numbers show that an Iraqi applying for a special visa could expect to wait for 292 business days before hearing back -- and hearing back may just be another delay or a denial. In Afghanistan, the average wait time is 417 business days."

Iraq and Afghanistan are countries in which being tagged as helpful to the United States military can be, and has been, a death sentence. And worse, in July 2016, an extension of the visa program failed to make it out of the Senate.

Secretary Kerry described his understanding that Christian women were sold as sex slaves, and both women and men were massacred in areas of Syria and Iraq controlled by ISIS. But of the 10,801 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016 from Syria, only 56 (0.5 percent) were Christian.

When a few persecuted Iraqi Christians crossed the border into the U.S., they were thrown in prison for several months and then sent back to the countries persecuting them, possibly to be enslaved, raped, or murdered. Pictured above: Members of California's Iraqi Christian community and their supporters protest the months-long detention of Iraqi Christian asylum-seekers at the Otay Mesa detention center. (Image source Al Jazeera video screenshot)

Making a concerted effort to bring those two desperately threatened groups to the United States would meet our commitment to the translators, give concrete expression to our revulsion at genocide, protect the interests of the American people, and ensure that America remains hospitable to immigrants and refugees.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9848/immigration-translators-genocide

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UN Ambassador Haley: 'There is a new US at the UN' - Rick Moran

by Rick Moran

"This is a time of strength. This is a time of action. This is a time of getting things done.”

Freshly minted U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley gave her first speech at the U.N. yesterday, and it was an eye opener – at least for most of the world, who is used to the United States meekly accepting the anti-American, anti-Israel actions taken by the world body.

The Hill:

“There is a new U.S.-U.N.,” she said during her first speech at U.N. headquarters. "We talked to the staff yesterday and you are gonna see a change in the way we do business.”
“Our goal, with the [Trump] administration, is to show value at the U.N.,” added Haley, the former GOP governor of South Carolina. "The way we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure that our allies have our back as well.
“For those who don’t have our back, we’re taking names. We will make points to respond to that accordingly.”
Haley added the Trump White House would help improve the U.N. and reevaluate its goals as an institution.
“This administration is prepared and ready to have me go in, look at the U.N. and everything that’s working, we’re going to try and make it better,” she said. "Everything that’s not working, we’re going to try and fix.”
“And anything that seems to be obsolete, and not necessary, we’re going to do away with. This is a time of strength. This is a time of action. This is a time of getting things done.”

Those words must have terrified the U.N. diplomats, who live a comfortable existence at the expense of the American taxpayer.

The former governor blasted the U.N. Security Council’s December vote condemning Israel’s settlement building in disputed territories during her confirmation hearing last week.
“Nowhere has the U.N.’s failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel,” Haley said during her Jan. 18 opening remarks.
“Any honest assessment also finds an institution that is often at odds with American national interests and American taxpayers … are we getting what we pay for?”
Haley was questioning America’s funding to the U.N., which constitutes about 22 percent of the global organization’s budget.
Trump, who has also denounced the U.N. Security Council’s vote on Israeli settlement building, called the institution “obsolete” earlier this month.

There is so much wrong with the U.N. that Haley doesn't need to look very far to initiate reforms. At the top of the list must be the U.N. secretariat – the huge, bureaucratic mess that serves the U.N. secretary general. The secretariat is a colossal waste of money, and efforts to reform it in the past have met with fierce resistance.

In addition, departments like the Commission on Human Rights are a joke. Putting nations that violate human rights with impunity on a commission that regularly criticizes the U.S. and Israel for "violations" needs to be eliminated. 

The U.N. is a black hole for American tax dollars with billions misspent or wasted. It will be a tall order for Haley to make a dent in reforming an institution so resistant to change and corrupt to its core.

Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/01/un_ambassador_haley_there_is_a_new_us_at_the_un.html

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Germany Downplayed Threat of Jihadists Posing as Migrants - Soeren Kern

by Soeren Kern

The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid.

• More than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 are being investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, according to the Federal Criminal Police.
• The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid. German authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants, many lacking documentation, to enter Germany without a security check. German authorities admitted they lost track of some 130,000 migrants who entered the country in 2015.
• German authorities knew in early 2015 that Walid Salihi, an 18-year-old Syrian who applied for asylum in Germany in 2014, was recruiting for the Islamic State at his asylum shelter in Recklinghausen, but they did nothing.
• Anis Amri, the Tunisian jihadist who attacked the Christmas market in Berlin, used at least 14 different identities, which he used to obtain social welfare benefits under different names in different municipalities.
• "We have probably forgotten to take into account what political opponents such as the Islamic State are capable of doing and how they think." — Rudolf van Hüllen, political scientist.

German political leaders and national security officials knew that Islamic State jihadists were entering Europe disguised as migrants but repeatedly downplayed the threat, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments, according to an exposé by German public television.

German officials knew as early as March 2015 — some six months before Chancellor Angela Merkel opened German borders to more than a million migrants from the Muslim world — that jihadists were posing as refugees, according to the Munich Report (Report München), an investigative journalism program broadcast by ARD public television on January 17.

More than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 are now being investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, according to the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA).

The revelations come amid criticism of U.S. President Donald J. Trump's plans to suspend immigration from select countries until mechanisms are in place to properly vet migrants entering the United States. The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid.

Based on leaked documents and interviews with informants, the Munich Report revealed that German authorities knew in early 2015 that Walid Salihi, an 18-year-old Syrian who applied for asylum in Germany in 2014, was recruiting for the Islamic State at his asylum shelter in Recklinghausen, but they did nothing. Some six months later, a search of Salihi's accommodation produced a shotgun. Salihi was not deported.

It later emerged that between 2011 and 2015, Salihi had used seven aliases to apply for asylum not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Italy, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland. He had also been charged in several countries with a laundry list of crimes, including physical assault, robbery and weapons offenses.

In February 2014, for example, Salihi was arrested for sexually assaulting women at a discotheque in Cologne. That same month, he physically assaulted a homeless man, attacked a random passerby and attempted to strangle a fellow resident at his asylum shelter. Police later traced his cellphone to downtown Cologne on December 31, 2015, when hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by mobs of Muslim migrants.

On January 7, 2016, Salihi stormed a police station in the 18th district of Paris while shouting "Allahu Akbar." He was carrying a butcher knife, an Islamic State flag and was wearing what appeared to be an explosive belt. Police opened fire and shot him dead.

A former roommate described Salihi: "He was very aggressive, especially when it came to religion. To him, all unbelievers were worthless and had to die."

Salihi was not an isolated case. According to the Munich Report, in early 2015 American intelligence agencies warned German authorities that Islamic State jihadists posing as migrants were making their way through southern Europe with the aim of reaching Germany.

The warnings, however, were ignored, and in the summer of 2015, German authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants, many lacking documentation, to enter Germany without a security check.

At the time, leading German security experts insisted that the Islamic State would not send jihadists to Europe. In October 2015, for example, Holger Münch, President of the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), said: "We do not have a single case yet in which it has been confirmed that members of a terrorist group from Syria or Iraq have come here to Germany specifically to commit attacks."

Münch also said: "If you look at the risks you face by coming to Germany via the Mediterranean Sea, I think there are simpler ways to get here if you plan to do so, and you do not need a stream of refugees."

Gerhard Schindler, President of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) said: "It is unlikely that terrorists will use the dangerous boat route across the Mediterranean to get to Europe."

German political scientist Peter Neumann, who is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King's College in London, said:

"There is not a single shred of evidence, proven evidence, that an Islamic State sympathizer has been smuggled to Europe. There is even less evidence that this has been an active strategy of the Islamic State. It is important that politicians do not express their own opinions and strengthen the public's fears."

Neumann also said:

"In recent weeks there have been a series of Islamic State videos in which it was quite clearly stated that supporters of the Islamic State should remain in the Islamic State and that they should not try to emigrate, and that this active infiltration strategy, about which is sometimes reported, is non-existent."

Less than a month later, on November 13, 2015, Islamic State jihadists, the majority of whom entered Europe by posing as migrants, carried out the coordinated Paris attacks in which 137 people died and nearly 400 were injured.

On July 19, 2016, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker seriously injured five people on a train in Germany, while shouting "Allahu Akbar." He is shown at left in an Islamic State video saying, "In the name of Allah, I am a soldier of the Caliphate and am launching a martyrdom operation in Germany... I will slaughter you in your own homes and in the streets." Right: The attacker's body is removed from the place where police shot him, after he charged at them with the axe.

In 2016, the true scale of the German problem of jihadists posing as migrants began to come into focus:

• February 4. German police arrested four members of a cell allegedly planning jihadist attacks in Berlin. The ringleader — a 35-year-old Algerian who was staying at a refugee shelter in Attendorn with his wife and two children — posed as an asylum seeker from Syria. He had reportedly received military training from the Islamic State.
  
• February 5. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency, revealed that more than 100 Islamic State fighters may be living in Germany as refugees, some of whom are known to have entered the country with fake or stolen passports.
  
• February 8. German police arrested an alleged Islamic State commander, living at a refugee shelter in Sankt Johann. The 32-year-old jihadist, posing as a Syrian asylum seeker, entered Germany in the fall of 2015.
  
• February 29. German authorities admitted they lost track of some 130,000 migrants who entered the country in 2015. The revelation raised concerns that unaccounted migrants could include jihadists who entered the country posing as refugees.
  
• June 2. German police arrested three suspected Islamic State members from Syria on suspicion of preparing an attack in Düsseldorf.
  
• June 3. The head of the German police union, Rainer Wendt, said that budget cuts in the public sector made it impossible to vet all of the migrants coming into Germany. He was responding to demands that all migrants undergo immediate security checks.
  
• July 19. A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker brandishing an axe and shouting "Allahu Akbar" seriously injured five people on a train in Würzburg. The assailant was shot dead by police after he charged at them with the axe. The teenager had been placed with a foster family just two weeks before the attack as a reward for being "well integrated."
  
• July 24. Mohammed Daleel, a 27-year-old migrant from Syria whose asylum application was rejected, injured 15 people when he blew himself up at a concert in Ansbach. The suicide bombing was the first in Germany attributed to the Islamic State.
  
• July 25. The Federal Criminal Police revealed that more than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 were being investigated for links to the Islamic State.
  
• September 13. German police arrested three Syrian jihadists in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Prosecutors said the three came to Germany in November 2015 posing as migrants and with the intention of "carrying out a previously determined order from Islamic State or to await further instructions."
  
• September 17. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann accused the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) of failing to root out potentially tens of thousands of fake passports. Many migrants who entered Europe as Syrians are, in fact, from another country of origin. Almost 40% of all Moroccans who entered Greece falsely represented themselves as Syrians, according to one study.
  
• October 10. The BAMF knowingly allowed more than 2,000 asylum seekers with fake passports to enter Germany.
  
• October 27. Public prosecutors charged Shaas Al-M, a 19-year-old Syrian jihadist who arrived in Germany posing as a refugee, with plotting to bomb popular tourist sites in Berlin, including the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, for the Islamic State.
  
• December 19. At least 12 people were killed and dozens injured after a truck rammed into a Christmas market in Berlin. The main suspect in the attack was Anis Amri, a 23-year-old migrant from Tunisia who arrived in Germany in July 2015 and applied for asylum in April 2016. Although Amri's application for asylum was rejected in June 2016, he was not deported because he did not have a valid passport.
  

On January 5, 2017, it emerged that Amri used at least 14 different identities, which he used to obtain social welfare benefits under different names in different municipalities.
German political scientist Rudolf van Hüllen concluded:

"We have probably forgotten to take into account what political opponents such as the Islamic State are capable of doing and how they think. We have not tried to understand their mentality, and therefore we have overlooked the fact that for the Islamic State it was an obvious option to use the safe refugee routes. This is a quite logical matter."

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9837/germany-migrants-jihadists

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Crimes against Humanity: "Normal" Treatment of Middle Eastern Women - Khadija Khan

by Khadija Khan

All around you, you see women killed, molested, imprisoned, maimed and incarcerated while their men sugar-coat the abuse as "modesty", "honour", "divine law" or even "justice".

• Mullahs seem to prefer protecting inhuman laws to protecting humans.
• Most full coverings for women are black, which absorbs heat, and are made not of cotton but of non-porous cloth - in the scorching heat.
• In a province of Indonesia, Aceh, a woman, accused of being intimate with her boyfriend is caned, in front of a jeering crowd. Later, a photograph of the screaming woman is published as a token of pride for the men who had just exacted this "justice" -- on her; no consequence for the boyfriend. It was a lesson to remind women to submit to their place in society.
• Turkey last year presented a bill for tackling its widespread child-marriage issue: the Turkish government introduced a bill that pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. The victim is not consulted.
• All forms of exploiting women are presented as divine law, sharia, in which women have no say, which they are unable to use in their own defence, and which they are forced to accept as their fate.
• These are countries where men are not only permitted, but invited, to consider woman a pet -- to be killed, burned with acid, benzene or a weapon of choice supposedly to preserve a family's "honour".
• These laws, put in place by the governments and the clergy, provide a safe escape for criminals, such as those who kill their women and claim it is in the name of "honour".
• The deeper horror is that all these abuses -- child marriage, confinement, FGM, rape, torture, and legal discrimination -- have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, "multiculturalists" who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people's customs no matter how brutal they might be.
• Sadly, they are unable to see that they are actually part of the huge jihadi radicalization machine working under the very nose of even governments in the West.
• As the British in India effectively got rid the people of the cultural practice of suttee, in which Hindu widows were required to throw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, if people would really like to do "good", they will please help to stop similar crushing practices.

A bitter truth, often glossed over in the name of "tradition," is the religious teachings and the responsibilities of a Muslim woman. Most glossed over is the violence that men are still allowed to inflict on their women in the name of their religion and culture on such a massive part of the planet.

This brutality not only takes place in ISIS-held territory but across most Muslim societies. All around you, you see women killed, molested, imprisoned, maimed and incarcerated while their men sugar-coat the abuse as "modesty", "honour", "divine law" or even "justice".

In addition to warning would-be ISIS recruits of the horrors that await them if they jump onto the bandwagon of terrorist organizations, let us take a look into "normal" Muslim societies.

Women in Saudi Arabia, in the name of laws and "traditions", are kept effectively non-existent. They are forced, outside the house to wear full-body covering, abayas. Most full coverings for women are black, which absorbs heat, and are made of non-porous, cloth -- not cotton -- in the scorching heat.

Women are also not allowed to drive, they cannot leave the house without a male guardian, they are liable to be flogged, stoned to death or beheaded if found guilty of even the smallest infractions, and often, as in being raped, even if they are factually innocent.

Campaigns have been launched to abolish the guardian system, in which women must be escorted outside their homes by a male relative or "guardian".

The mainstream religious lobby immediately went on the defensive. Saudi Arabia's highest Islamic figure, the grand mufti, denounced the call to abolish guardianship as a crime against Islam.

Mullahs seem to prefer protecting inhuman laws to protecting humans.

In Iran, women are forced to cover themselves and need a guardian to step outside the home, if they want to be "protected". Bicycling is prohibited.

Women are also forced to live with an abusive husband, as dictated by abusive marital laws and social taboos.

Moral brigades by the name of Gasht e Ershad ("guidance patrol") coerce females to behave "decently". Now Sharia patrols and curbs against women also exist in England and France – an indication where these extremists want to drive the West.

In parts of France, women cannot go out onto the street "unaccompanied" or even enter a café. "Here," men tell them, "we do things like in our home countries!"

In a province of Indonesia, Aceh, a woman, accused of being intimate with her boyfriend, is caned in front of a jeering crowd. Later, a photograph of the screaming woman is published as a token of pride for the men who had just exacted this "justice" -- on her; no consequence for the boyfriend. It was a lesson to remind women to submit to their place in society.

A sharia-policeman canes a woman who was accused of being intimate with her boyfriend, in Aceh, Indonesia. (Image source: Getty Images)

Under the newly proposed Sharia laws, women are also forced to be accompanied by a male guardian to "protect" them. Banda Aceh also banned women from entertainment venues after 11pm unless they are accompanied by a male family member. Aceh district has also banned unmarried men and women from riding together on motorbikes.

Turkey last year presented a bill for tackling its widespread child-marriage issue: the Turkish government introduced a bill that pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. The victim is not consulted. After the rage of the masses, the bill was withdrawn – at least for the time being.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said at a news conference in Istanbul:

"We are taking this bill in the parliament back to the commission in order to allow for the broad consensus the president requested, and to give time for the opposition parties to develop their proposals."

The government seems determined to bring it back after making some minor changes.

Many Muslim countries follow similar restraints, effectively keeping women under house-arrest. All forms of exploiting women are presented as divine law, sharia, in which women have no say, which they are unable to use in their own defence, and which they are forced to accept as their fate.

The practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), not required by Islam, is a pre-Islamic tribal norm across the African belt of the Muslim region, as well as in parts of India, Indonesia and Middle East.

In Pakistan, the hudood ordinance, promulgated in 1979 to curb outside-of marriage-sex, has actually turned out as a monstrosity for female rape victims.

The ordinance demands, under sharia law, that a rape victim be grilled in a court of law as if she is the perpetrator. She is asked to produce four male witnesses to prove her case or else she is booked as having committing adultery and having already confessed to the crime.

These are countries where men are not only permitted, but invited, to consider woman a pet to be killed, burned with acid, benzene or a weapon of choice supposedly to preserve a family's "honour".

These laws, put in place by the governments and the clergy, provide a safe escape for criminals, such as those who kill their women and claim it is in the name of "honour".

A killer can be pardoned in court by the victim's next of kin, who, thanks to much clan intermarriage, is usually a family member of the assailant as well. The judge, with the stroke of a pen, therefore lets these criminals walk free.

Although recently Pakistan passed a bill barring the family members from pardoning assailants in the name of sharia (Qissas) or reconciliation, the flickering hope of its implementation is still in question as no court has so far set this new law as a precedent in the hundreds of pending cases across the country. That neglect means that despite the new law, in practice, rulings are "business as usual".

Such taboos are also safeguarded by the clergy, who rule the society through the loudspeakers of the mosques.

Afghanistan remains perhaps the most brutal country in terms of women's rights violations.

Farkhanda Malikzada, for instance, a 27-year-old seminary student accused by a fortune teller a custodian of a shrine, of burning a Quran, was simply thrown to hound-like mob of men who beat and burned her to death -- in front of a number of police officers and cameras in broad daylight. Most of the identifiable assailants were never punished, while the fortune teller who unleashed this horror had his death sentence commuted.

Investigators also revealed that Farkhanda might have questioned sexual orgies by the shrine's custodians, who were later found inside the holy place with condoms and Viagra.

"Yet," reports Alissa J. Rubin, who wrote the New York Times report, "Afghan women most need the legal system to defend them: They are largely powerless without the support of male family members, and it is usually family members who abuse them."

Being covered in black, non-porous cloth in the desert heat; being stoned to death or beheaded; being confined to a house as a brood-mare and servant, effectively enslaved, unable to leave or earn an independent living, are the reality that millions of women are made to suffer every day – supposedly for their "protection".

To add insult to injury, in most societies, these discriminations are imposed by the mullahs as religious obligations.

In the 21st century, an unchaperoned woman outside the house is regarded as subhuman, fair game to be raped, assaulted, humiliated, burned alive or decapitated -- based on patriarchal norms.

The deeper horror is that all these abuses -- child marriage, confinement, FGM, rape, torture, and legal discrimination -- have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, "multiculturalists" who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people's customs no matter how brutal they might be. What they are really doing, however, is providing crucial support for savage injustices either by sweeping them under the carpet or by defending barbarism as "cultural norms".

Three- or four-year-old girls go to kindergarten wearing a headscarf -- no longer just in the Middle East or Africa but in England, Germany and virtually throughout Europe.

These kinds of abuses are permitted and even encouraged by an indoctrination that runs deep through the generations, and that are tragically perpetuated by well-meaning "multiculturalists" in Europe who actually think they are doing "good" by preserving these barbaric conditions.

Sadly, they are unable to see that they are actually part of the huge jihadi radicalization machine working under the very nose of even governments in the West.

As the British in India effectively got rid the people of the cultural practice of suttee, in which Hindu widows were required to throw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, if people would really like to do "good", they will please help to stop similar crushing practices.

Khadija Khan is a Pakistan-based journalist and commentator.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9761/middle-eastern-women

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