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HOMELAND SECURITY

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U.S. appeals court voids ‘shockingly low’ 17-year sentence in NY terrorism case Jonathan Stempel

By on December 27th, 2019

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-crime-terrorism/u-s-appeals-court-voids-shockingly-low-17-year-sentence-in-ny-terrorism-case-idUSKBN1YV1AL

A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday ordered the resentencing of a Staten Island, New York man for attempting to provide material support to Islamic State and kill an FBI agent, saying his 17-year prison term was “shockingly low.”

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Fareed Mumuni’s trial judge abused her discretion in imposing a term that was 80% below the 85 years recommended by federal guidelines, and even below the 18-year term for co-defendant Munther Omar Saleh, who was not accused of attempted murder.

In a 2-1 decision, the court said U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie improperly second-guessed whether Mumuni, 25, intended to kill FBI Special Agent Kevin Coughlin in June 2015 by stabbing him repeatedly with an 8-inch kitchen knife in Mumuni’s home.

It also said Brodie gave too much weight to mitigating factors such as Mumuni’s age, his lack of a prior criminal record and support from family and friends.

Such errors “caused the district court to render a sentence that is shockingly low and unsupportable as a matter of law,” Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes wrote for the majority.

Mumuni’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue in Brooklyn, whose office appealed the sentence, declined to comment.

Coughlin survived the attack.

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Trump Administration Picks Mexican Partnership over Terrorist Designation to Fight Cartels Though Country’s Top Cop Was on Sinaloa Payroll

By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/trump-picks-mexican-partnership

President Donald Trump picked a horrible time to postpone designating Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), a misguided decision made at the request of the divisive leader of a country with record-high crime and a failing economy. Days after declaring the cartels would finally be classified as FTOs by the U.S. Trump did an about-face to appease Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador, assuring that instead Mexico and the U.S. would “step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!”

It was laughable when Trump posted the absurd explanation for shelving the FTO designation on social media a few days go. How could the U.S. effectively join forces with a famously corrupt Latin American government to combat the sophisticated and violent criminal enterprises that have practically taken over the country? A federal case unsealed this week helps answer the question and sheds tremendous skepticism on Trump’s delusional U.S.-Mexico “joint efforts” plan. Mexico’s former top law enforcement official, a presidential cabinet member who oversaw the country’s federal police, took millions of dollars in bribes to protect one of the country’s most notorious drug cartels, according to federal prosecutors. The disgraced Mexican Secretary of Public Security, 51-year-old Genaro Garcia Luna, has been charged with three counts of cocaine trafficking conspiracy and one count of making false statements.

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Congressmen Want US Islamist Organizations Investigated for Terror Financing The State Department could start by looking into ICNA and its supporters in Tennessee. Cathy Hinners

By on December 13th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/congressmen-want-us-islamist-organizations-frontpagemagcom/

Kudos to a trio of Congressmen, including Tennessee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, for requesting that the State Department investigate the “innocuous sounding organization Helping Hands for Relief and Development (HHRD) and their ‘sister organization,’ the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)” for “promoting extremist ideology and terror finance”:

While they sell themselves as innocuous Muslim civil society organizations, they are, in fact, arms of one of the most radical networks in the world.

Fleischmann has good reasons to pursue this inquiry since individuals intimately tied to both ICNA and HHRD are active in Tennessee.

House Resolution 160, which preceded the Congressmen’s letter, claims HHRD and ICNA are domestic affiliates of Jamaat-e-Islami.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a jihadi South Asian Sunni revivalist movement dedicated to Islamic revolution, extremist Sunni Muslim ideology, and the establishment of a global caliphate.

The House Resolution also states that ICNA is “openly affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami,” and shares leadership with them, while HHRD collaborates with a Pakistani terrorist network.

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Kosher Market Gunman Was Farrakhan Fan Daniel Greenfield

By on December 13th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/kosher-market-gunman-was-farrakhan-fan-daniel-greenfield/

After Barack Obama was caught posing with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the racist Nation of Islam hate group, after Keith Ellison, after Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour (currently with the Bernie Sanders campaign) were caught cheering Farrakhan, each time the media made the argument that Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism was inconsequential because even though he praised Hitler, it didn’t lead to violence.

Now it turns out that the Jersey City Kosher market gunman was a fan of Farrakhan and obsessively played recordings of his ravings.

 Mr. Anderson repeatedly played audio recordings of a man the neighbor believed to be Louis Farrakhan, and sounded like he himself was growing agitated. He shouted bible verses and then chanted out his interpretations of what they meant.

The neighbor said the most common theme was that Mr. Anderson’s religion was the only true faith while others — specifically Catholicism and Judaism — were false.

He soon heard Ms. Graham join in the chanting and said she sounded “coerced.”

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VICTOR SHARPE: THE WILL TO FIGHT FOR AMERICA

By on December 11th, 2019

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/191210

As Hitler’s aggression grew ever more threatening prior to World War 2, Winston Churchill once said the following in Britain’s wavering Parliament:

“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood-shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

Whenever you hear the gruesome shriek in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar”preceding yet another Muslim atrocity, be it in Europe, the UK, here in America or worldwide, it is worth remembering those words of Churchill and what it will mean to live as slaves.

Allahu Akbar does not mean “God is Great” as the liberal talking heads, multiculturalists, diversity merchants and the politicallycorrect ‘progressive’ praetorian guard never fail to tell us. No, it means Allah is Greater. In other words, Islam claims that it is infinitely superior to our Judeo-Christian faith and heritage and to all other non-Muslim beliefs in the world.

So when we hear the predictable and breathtakingly ignorant ‘progressive’ elites lecture us that the latest slaughter of Americans by Muslims here in America is just the result of a “mental health issue” or an incident of “workplace violence,” remember they are warning us that we must never put two and two together lest we come to the obvious conclusion that the evil act is simple Islamic terrorism. Evil will always win if good doesn’t fight back.

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Antifa Home Invasions: ‘Can It Happen Here?’ The hazard of progressive propaganda. Mary Grabar

By on December 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/antifa-home-invasions-can-it-happen-here-mary-grabar/

Recently, in Germany, a gang of Antifa punks broke into the home of a 34-year-old female real estate agent and beat her up for the simple reason that she was a real estate agent, i.e., selling property. In her case it was luxury property. Antifa does not approve of private property, especially expensive private property. So they beat her up.

Here in the good ole’ USA, Mike Adams wrote a column titled “Three Essential Firearms for Civil Unrest,” the ‘civil unrest’ likely being a “mob of Antifa ‘anti-fascists’” coming into your neighborhood and crossing your property line, Molotov cocktails in hand.

This may seem farfetched, but I’ve seen things progress at an alarming rate since 2011, when I observed and wrote about the Occupy Wall Street movement from which our present-day Antifa movement has evolved.

I was living in the Atlanta area so I went to the “occupation” of Woodruff Park downtown. In my article I noted the “hippie art festival” atmosphere among the tents, but also wondered, as my title indicated, whether the “occupations” were “anarchy waiting for crisis.” Occupiers protested the sale of a building used as a homeless shelter to Emory University for a medical facility. Back then I saw George Soros-supported “Cop Watch” punks in orange t-shirts putting their video cameras in the faces of police simply trying to stop protestors from blocking a hospital emergency entrance or an ambulance going down a downtown street. Today we have masked protestors with weapons calling for the death of police and attacking reporters and attendees of public events, like campus speeches and political rallies.

Back then, in response to the lag in police response to a 300-strong, rush hour march up Peachtree Street, and then the mayor’s revocation of his order to end the “occupation” of the park, I asked, “Is it endangering public safety to allow an anarchic group of young people, the homeless (often with mental and substance abuse issues), and ne’er do wells to take to the streets on their own?”  Noting the chants against private property and sales of socialist newspapers, I detected “unfocused, but revolutionary” aims of protestors. The young man selling the Socialist Worker told me that he had learned about its publisher, the International Socialist Organization, from his professors at nearby Georgia State University.

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Anti-Semitism Grows in Brooklyn as Its Roots Remain Misunderstood By Zachary Evans

By on December 10th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/anti-semitism-brooklyn-grows-roots-remain-misunderstood/

City leaders and national commentators have blamed white nationalism for an uptick in hate crimes targeting the borough’s Jews. The truth is much different.

I n 2019, the Jewish communities in the Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn experienced a wave of anti-Semitic violence. Much of it was captured on cellphones or security cameras, and local news covered several individual incidents. “It’s happening at a rate that we are not used [to],” one Orthodox community leader in Williamsburg told National Review.

The crimes have ranged from the harassment of individual Jews on the street to more-coordinated assaults. In September, a group of teens smashed the windows of a synagogue in Williamsburg as congregants prayed on the night of Rosh Hashanah. The attacks eventually prompted an outcry among Jewish media outlets, including Commentary, Tablet, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, especially after statistics from the NYPD confirmed that anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city had risen markedly since 2017.

Yet the trend has been covered only occasionally in the national media, and such coverage often misses the mark. Take MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough’s suggestion during the November 15 edition of his TV show, Morning Joe, that the attacks were related to the rising tide of white nationalism. “We’ve seen anti-Semitic crimes skyrocket,” Scarborough said. “If we could just see what’s happening in Brooklyn every week. . . . The anti-Semitism is fueled by the promotion of white nationalism, and the refusal to call it out.”

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has made a similar argument. “I want to be very, very clear: The violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the right,” de Blasio said at a June press conference. National politicians have echoed the theme. In a November 11 article in Jewish Currents, Senator Bernie Sanders asserted that anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York, just as in the rest of the United States, are “the result of a dangerous political ideology that targets Jews and anyone who does not fit a narrow vision of a whites-only America.”

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Muslim jihad against US Jews has been constant since 9/11 Andrew Bostom

By on December 10th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/muslim-jihad-against-us-jews-has-been-constant-since-9-11/

Since 2001 there have been incessant attacks and attempted attacks specifically targeting U.S. Jews and Jewish institutions and accompanied by the open profession of Islamic jihadist, anti-Semitic motivation.

Mohammed Alshamrani, the Pensacola Naval Air Station shooter, appears to have been “motivated,” in part, by an obsession with jihad against Israel. Just prior to the Dec. 7 attack, a threat was posted to Alshamrani’s alleged Twitter account: “You will not be safe until we live it as reality in pleastain [sic].” This was a reiteration of a threat against the United States made by Osama bin Laden  in a January 2010 audio message over American support for Israel’s right to self-defense.

Although Alshamrani’s lethal attack did not directly target Jews or Israel, jihadi terrorism directed unequivocally at U.S. Jews, and their institutions, has been a continuous phenomenon since Sept. 11, 2001. Moreover, the scope of this ongoing threat has not been enumerated, while the canonical Islamic religious incitement animating it—and the resulting disproportionate 2.4-foldrate of extreme anti-Semitism within the U.S. Muslim community, i.e., 34 percent of Muslims vs. 14 percent of non-Muslims—are almost entirely ignored.

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Terror Attack At Naval Air Station Highlights Immigration Catastrophe Limitations in the vetting process endanger national security. Michael Cutler

By on December 10th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/terror-attack-naval-air-station-highlights-michael-cutler/

The nearly all-consuming fixation on the lack of border security along the U.S./Mexican border ignore the many other elements of what should be a cohesive and coordinated immigration system.

Contrary to the claims made by the open borders, immigration anarchists, the purpose of the border wall is not to prevent the entry of aliens and/or cargo into the United States, but to make certain that all who enter the United States are properly vetted and records of their entry are created.

However, not enough attention is paid to the vetting process itself upon which the integrity of the immigration system depends.

The issue of border security must include the process by which visas are issued and by which aliens are screened at ports of entry.

The great majority of foreign terrorists who have attacked our nation have actually entered the United States through ports of entry either with visas that were obtained by concealing the backgrounds and true identities of the aliens in question, or by making bogus claims to political asylum, getting released and then disappearing.

The issue of the vetting of aliens has made it to the front page of newspapers and the “A block” of television news program because of the deadly shooting at the Pensacola Air Naval Station by a 21 year old member of the Saudi military, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a second lieutenant in the Saudi Air Force as reported in the New York Times on December 6, 2019, Trainee on Military Base Mounts Deadly Attack.

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U.S. Officials: Saudi Gunman Left Trail of Anti-American Social Media Posts before Pensacola Attack By Tobias Hoonhout

By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-officials-saudi-gunman-left-trail-of-anti-american-social-media-posts-before-pensacola-attack/

U.S. officials have confirmed they are looking into anti-American comments posted on the Twitter account of Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, the Saudi national who killed three in a shooting at the Pensacola naval base last week.

Federal law enforcement officials are investigating whether the gunman authored the words or just posted them, an official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Another official said that prior to the shooting, the gunman hosted a dinner party where he and three others watched videos of mass shootings.

SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist media, reported that the gunman did not claim allegiance to any group, but echoed famed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

Rita Katz

The style of the #Pensacolashooting doesn’t necessarily resemble one group over another. However, given that ISIS has very little to lose at this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if it claimed the attack, regardless of the attacker’s potential allegiances.

BREAKING: Tweet by #Pensacola attacker Alshamrani suggests terrorist motive. Does not claim allegiance to any group, but echos Bin Laden: “The security is a shared destiny…You will not be safe until we live it as reality in [Palestine], and American troops get out of our land.”

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