RUTHFULLY YOURS

After terrorists slaughtered seven people Saturday in London, England, President Trump turned up the heat in ongoing debates over Islam, terrorism, and immigration by criticizing London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan for his permissive, laissez-faire attitude toward terrorism committed by his fellow Muslims.

“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” Trump tweeted after the killings at London Bridge and nearby Borough Market. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”

The Metropolitan Police and British Prime Minister Theresa May have labeled the incidents terrorist attacks and Islamic State has reportedly claimed responsibility for the atrocities. May appeared to agree with Trump, saying “We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change.”

Khan, a member of the left-wing Labour Party, doesn’t particularly care about the threat that Islamic terrorism poses to Western civilization.

It was just last Thursday (June 1) that Khan sounded as detached from reality as former Vice President Al Gore. “Climate change remains one the biggest risks to humanity,” he tweeted. “Now more than ever world leaders must recognise and act on this threat.”

Muslim terror is no big deal, shrugs Khan, who says terrorist attacks are “part and parcel” of city life.

Khan is one of those “urban elites … grotesquely out of touch with the lives of ordinary citizens,” writes Monica Showalter at American Thinker. “They dismiss terror deaths as ‘tragic’ suggesting the victims had some role in their own deaths as in the definition of tragedy.”

It’s easy for elitist hipsters like Khan to “claim global warming is a bigger problem than the immediate and deadly threat of terrorism,” she writes.

Taking action on global warming makes them feel good, costs them nothing and only threatens the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen and miners, not their own. As for terrorism, that’s no problem for them, either – you’ll never find an elitist like Khan strolling on London Bridge on a Saturday night for terrorists to take down. With his bodyguards and the protective bubble he lives in, terrorism is for little people.

Khan’s arrogance and disregard for the safety of others may help to explain why President Trump felt the need to slap him around on Twitter.

Trump mocked Khan, a Sharia-loving darling of the mainstream media, for trying to create a false sense of security among Britons. “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!'”

“This is our city… and we will never be cowed by terrorism,” Khan had previously said in a press release, adding that the killers were “barbaric cowards.”

“Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days,” Khan continued. “There’s no reason to be alarmed. One of the things the police and all of us need to do is ensure that we’re as safe as we possibly can be.”

Media-savvy Trump used social media to treat the horrifying events in London as a teachable moment. He urged the courts to reinstate his stalled temporary travel ban aimed at six terrorism-plagued Muslim countries.

“We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights,” Trump tweeted. “We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”

One of the London terrorist attackers, British police revealed Monday, was Khuram Shazad Butt, 27, a British citizen born in Pakistan who had been investigated by police and MI5. A second attacker was Rachid Redouane, 30, also known as Rachid Elkhdar, and according to police a Moroccan or Libyan. At this writing, police have not revealed the name of the third attacker, but it is now apparent where he got his motivation to kill.

According to Daily Caller reporter Saagar Enjeti, Ahmad Musa Jibril, an Islamic preacher in Michigan, helped radicalize the attacker. Jibril was “well known on YouTube for preaching sermons that appear to lionize Islamic terrorists fighting in Syria.” He is a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent who earned a degree in Islamic law from Saudi Arabia. As Enjeti notes, Jibril appears to have problems adhering to U.S. criminal law as “a convicted fraudster who at one time owed nearly a quarter of a million dollars in restitution to the U.S. government, and served nearly 7 years in prison.”

According to Newsweek, “Jibril preaches a Salafist version of Islam, one of the most conservative strands of the religion and the ideology from which members of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda derive their beliefs.” Based in Detroit, Jibril enjoys “a substantial following” online, with nearly a quarter million “likes” on Facebook, more than 40,000 on Twitter, and 16,000 subscribers on YouTube. He is described as a “subtle, careful, and nuanced preacher” and that comes across in videos like this one.

The London attacker, said the Newsweek report, “is believed to be a homegrown jihadist, from the east London suburb of Barking. The Detroit News cited a friend of the attacker who said “He used to listen to a lot of Musa Jibril. I have heard some of this stuff and it’s very radical. I am surprised this stuff is still on YouTube and is easily accessible. I phoned the anti-terror hotline. I spoke to the gentleman. I told him about our conversation and why I think he was radicalized.” The Detroit News also provided more detail on Jibril’s criminal record.

He and his father Musa Abdallah Jibril were convicted on 42 counts of bank fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. In the course of these proceedings, the government uncovered a family album with photos of Ahmad dressed as a jihadi, and photos of young children with firearms and “playing at holding each other hostage and aiming the weapons at each other’s heads.” Investigators also found that in 1996 Ahmad Musa Jibril sent a fax to CNN claiming responsibility for the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and warning “here will be a series of bombings that will follow no matter how many lives of ours are taken.”

The candlelight vigils didn’t work. After the Manchester Arena suicide bombing in England last month, liberal pundits suggested “mass vigils” and “community solidarity” as a counterterrorism response. The most important imperative, according to the media intelligentsia, was to signal that the West’s commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion” was intact.

Unfortunately, the three Islamic terrorists who used a van and knives to kill another seven civilians and critically injure dozens more in London on Saturday night were unmoved by the “diversity” message. Witnesses described the killers frantically stabbing anyone they could reach, while shouting “This is for Allah”; one witness said that a girl was stabbed up to 15 times.

The “candlelight vigil” counsel has been more muted after this latest attack, though the New York Times has predictably advised the candidates in Britain’s upcoming elections not to succumb to “draconian measures” or to do “just what the terrorists want” by undermining democratic values.

The usual “blame the West” strategy did make an appearance, with some politicians and commentators trying to change the subject from Islamic terrorism to alleged right-wing violence in the U.S. Congressman Adam Smith, from Washington state, reached back to the Oklahoma City bombing to claim that there was a “common thread” of “racism and fear of people who don’t look like you” in the “violence on the other side.” That right-wing violence would only be exacerbated if President Donald Trump’s ideas for fighting terrorism were realized, Smith suggested Sunday on Fox News. Likewise, a spokeswoman from the progressive think tank Demos said that the Trump administration “was tolerating right-wing hate and violence.”

The main response to the London attack, however, has been to reiterate opposition to Trump’s March 2017 executive order briefly suspending new visa issuance from six terror-ridden and terror-sponsoring countries: Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. That modest three-month pause in new visas for travel to the U.S. was to be accompanied by a thorough review of security screening protocols in those six countries.

On Saturday night, following the London attacks, Trump had tweeted: “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” Trump’s exhortation produced expletive-laden fury, as well as more sober dismay. Columnist Fareed Zakaria summarized two of the main arguments against the visa pause on CNN Monday morning. The pause is a “nonsense solution” to Islamic terrorism, Zakaria said, because the “vast majority” of attacks have been committed by “homegrown terrorists and locals.” In other words, “homegrown” Islamic terrorism is not an immigration problem. But a second-generation Muslim terrorist is more of an immigration problem than a first-generation Muslim terrorist. Such a killer demonstrates that the uncontrolled flow of immigrants from terror-breeding countries has overwhelmed the necessary process of assimilation. When security forces in a country like Britain can no longer keep track of Islamic extremists within their borders, that is a consequence of specific immigration policies.

Zakaria claimed that the problem is “ideology,” not immigration. But how will the West’s ability to counter that ideology be improved by bringing in more bearers of it without a better understanding of who is ripe for radicalization? Until we are confident of our ability to screen for radical Islamic ideology in newcomers and their progeny, the rational reaction is to temporarily slow things down.

Zakaria also invoked a study from the libertarian Cato Institute that allegedly shows that there has not been a terror attack on U.S. soil by a visa holder from the six visa-paused countries since 1975. Therefore, the argument goes, the U.S. could not possibly be attacked by someone from those six countries. But just because something has not happened yet does not mean that it cannot happen. The Trump administration chose the six countries on the travel pause list because, as the Obama administration previously declared, they are the most dangerous breeders of radical Islamic ideology on earth. Several of the countries have no functional government at all. There is no reason to think that the U.S. is immune from the North African-generated terror attacks plaguing Europe, especially if the U.S. mimics European immigration levels.

Washington, D.C. is known for its monuments, but it is also known for its “ivory tower” think tanks. These institutions can serve a valuable role in providing dispassionate and empirical analysis in divided times. One of the pre-eminent D.C. think tanks is the Brookings Institution, which has nearly half-a-billion dollars in assets and deep ties to political leaders on the left.

According to Brookings, its mission is to “conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.” Brookings says it values the independence of its scholars and prides itself on “open-minded” inquiry.

Yet, public spending records captured by our organization at OpenTheBooks.com tell a somewhat different story. Rather than focusing on “open-minded” inquiry, Brookings seems swayed by “open-wallet” inquiry. In many cases, Brookings doesn’t resemble a think tank, but a jukebox – add a little coin and Brookings will play your tune, if the price is right.

And these aren’t just dollars provided by private donors — these are your tax dollars funding partisan advocacy projects and papers.

Since 2008, Brookings amassed nearly $20 million in contracts and grants from 50 agencies – including the Obama Administration’s Office of the President. Despite assets of $496 million (IRS990, FY2014), our OpenTheBooks.com audit shows it was not enough. Brookings instituted an aggressive strategy to pursue federal business over the past nine-years.

The Federal Money Ball at The Brooking Institute funded by the U.S. Taxpayer

OpenTheBooks.com

Big Moneyball at The Brooking Institute funded by the U.S. Taxpayer

Under current federal law, none of this is illegal, but the question is whether it’s ethical to secretly coerce taxpayers into supporting partisan causes. Moreover, an organization loses all credibility to hold government accountable when the government becomes a donor. (To see the full list of the 227 federal awards to America’s foremost liberal think-tank, click here.)

An institution originally founded as an independent public policy think-tank, government watchdog, and public charity, Brookings learned how to dial into taxpayer money. A few examples:

Brookings reaped millions of dollars in fees from federal agencies including billing up to $50,000 for two-day training seminars. Additionally, five Brookings positions charged the agencies between $1,375 and $3,440 per day for “custom training” solutions;
Brookings collected $23,000 from Barack Obama’s “Office of the President” for employee training (2015);
Federal agencies – such as Veterans Affairs, Treasury and Energy – paid up to $6,135 to place key employees into Brookings “fellowships.” The Brookings sales pitch to donors touted their “legislative inner circle” and claimed their taxpayer-paid fellows were placed on the staffs of then-Senators Obama and Hillary Clinton and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid;
Brookings charged federal agencies $2,575 per head for a seminar called “Inside the White House.”

Review just one Brookings federal contract here – running through 2018.

In a recent broadcast of the John Batchelor Show, Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) of the House Select Intelligence Committee, confirmed that all three subpoenas his committee sent to senior Obama administration officials seek details about the unmaskings of American citizens. He also said that it was “very unusual” for an ambassador like Samantha Power to unmask names of American citizens “under any circumstances.” The chairman made clear that he and his colleagues would not be requesting the information if they didn’t have “probable cause that there was an abuse of power” and that his investigation into possible illegalities was just beginning.

“Oh, this is only the beginning,” Nunes said. “There are many more officials that we have concerns about abusing the intelligence programs.”

Nunes joined Batchelor and Mary Kissel of The Wall Street Journal editorial board last Thursday to discuss the subpoenas sent to former CIA director John Brennan, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former UN ambassador Samantha Power.

Via John Batchelor at The Daily Beast:

“The subpoenas,” Nunes explained, “actually went to the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, requesting specifically, of those three individuals that were named, the unmaskings they have done, that they did, from the time period of 2016, the entire year, leading up to Jan. 20 of this year.”

Quickly Nunes focused on the politics of the unmaskings.

“I can’t get into why we chose those individuals, but clearly this is just further escalation in the concern we have of the unmaskings of Americans by the senior leaders of the Obama administration. Americans that didn’t know about it, and, of course, potentially Trump transition officials.”

Nunes clarified his concerns.

“Every American is masked. The intelligence agencies are bound by law to mask all American citizens that get picked up in foreign collection. What has to happen, if you want to find out who the American is—there’s a process and procedure in place for that. It’s actually very uncommon in most cases, and seldom happens. But the concern I have had, that I expressed publicly, quite publicly, actually, a couple months ago, was that it became excessive. That Obama administration officials were unmasking people in the Trump transition, and it made me quite uncomfortable.”

The chairman explained that the subpoenas were necessary because the committee has been waiting since March 15 for answers. “The intelligence agencies have been slow-rolling us, which is what led to these three subpoenas being issued,” he said.

Nunes also told Batchelor that his colleagues have a “particular interest” in Brennan, Rice, and Power, “but I can say that those are not the only ones we have an interest in.”

Nunes expanded on the possibility of an “abuse of power” in the data. “The big problem here is that the people that run these programs are protecting the United States, protecting U.S. citizens from terrorist attacks, from other adversaries that we have around the globe, and we have to protect American citizens from being picked up in these types of foreign intelligence collections. However, what clearly has happened here—at a minimum—I don’t know if it’s illegal, but it’s clearly an abuse of power, that senior Obama administration officials would unmask someone.” CONTINUE AT SITE

There is currently, on the streets, smashing storefronts and setting things on fire, a group called “Antifa,” for “anti-fascist.” Antifa are not a new phenomenon; they surfaced during the Occupy movement, and during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Antifa movements began in early-20th-century Europe, when fascism was a concrete and urgent concern, and they remain active on the Continent. Lately, Antifa have emerged as the militant fringe of #TheResistance against Donald Trump — who, they maintain, is a fascist, ushering into power a fascist regime. In Washington, D.C., Antifa spent the morning of Inauguration Day lighting trash cans on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, setting ablaze a limousine, and tossing chunks of pavement through the windows of several businesses. On February 1, Antifa set fires and stormed buildings at the University of California–Berkeley to prevent an appearance by Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. (They succeeded.) In April, they threatened violence if Ann Coulter spoke on the campus; when the university and local law enforcement refused to find a secure location for her to speak, she withdrew, saying the situation was too dangerous.

These and similar episodes call to mind Woody Allen’s character’s observation in the 1979 film Manhattan: “A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point of it.”

All politics is, at some level, a vocabulary contest, and it happens that American politics is currently engaged in a fierce fight over, and about, words. The central word at issue is “fascist,” but there are others: “racist,” “sexist,” and the like. A great many people are currently involved in a turf war, aiming to stake out conceptual territory for these charged words: What is fascism? What isn’t it?

An illustration: In April, Heather Mac Donald was physically blocked from an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, Calif., where she was scheduled to speak. Mac Donald is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, a prominent right-of-center think tank. She is a noted expert on law enforcement, especially the complex relationship between law enforcement and minority communities. She was among the first to theorize that anti-police protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and elsewhere have facilitated an increase in urban crime; the so-called Ferguson Effect is now a matter of consensus among experts on both the left and the right. National Review readers will be well acquainted with Mac Donald; she publishes in these pages regularly.

A group of students from Pomona College, part of the consortium of Claremont schools, penned a letter to Pomona president David Oxtoby, affirming the protest at their sister institution. Mac Donald, they wrote, should not be permitted to speak; she is “a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.” Mac Donald was not offering any material for substantive intellectual discussion; she was, they claimed, challenging “the right of Black people to exist.”

Some call it reframing; others put a coat of paint on it and call it a new car. Basically, it is the process by which a deception is perpetrated simply by saying thus is so and pointing to the shiny surface as proof.

This is once again happening with the egregious David Horowitz. Several years ago, I had the unexpected misfortune of having to experience the true nature of David Horowitz due to his spearheading a disinformation campaign against me and my 2013 book American Betrayal. This campaign of lies would end up including nearly two dozen pieces by a cabal of writers, the first of which I rebutted, perhaps ironically, at Breitbart News. (Other rebuttals, too, for that matter, ran at Breitbart when other websites refused me space.) For new readers, American Betrayal, in part, is about how Moscow-directed and -loyal communists and their accomplices were secretly able to infiltrate and influence the US and other great powers into cataclysmic acts that entrenched, enriched and expanded the Soviet empire abroad; at home, they rotted out the Republic long before “the Sixties” ever began — all, according to “court history” ever since, under the banner of “victory” in World War II and the Cold War. It seems fair to say this is not a subject that a normal anti-Communist, especially ex-Communist, would lose his mind over.

In the several years since (and during) this shockingly sustained attack-campaign, I also began to learn how Horowitz has shaded his own biography to obscure the proximity of his early life to the KGB in America — an alarming choice for one self-billed and trusted as a guide to domestic Communist affairs.

There. Disclaimer done. Where was I?

The latest Horowitz-reframing appears in a paint-job-superficial Washington Post piece headlined: “How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise.”

The Post’s premise — the centrality of Horowitz in that “shadow” universe supposedly fueling the rise of Donald Trump — could not be more wrong, or more absurd. For one thing, Trump’s lift-off was in 2015, sans charities or shadow-universe thereof. Where was Horowitz? “This column is not an endorsement of Donald Trump or any candidate,” Horowitz wrote on December 22, 2015. (Full disclosure: My own endorsement of Trump ran at Breitbart News on December 26, 2015; then again, I am not a tax-exempt charity.) Soon thereafter, as Trump swept toward the nomination, Horowitz would start piggybacking onto Breitbart News with a series of look-at-me-Trump op-eds. At the time, it struck me as a naked effort to catch up with the Trump Train before it pulled into Washington without him.

This is somewhat interesting on different levels. One would think, as a universe-creator and all that, Horowitz’s own Frontpagemag.com was the center of that supposed Trumpian firmament; at least, if Horowitz really was, as the Post claims, the “intellectual godfather to the far right.”

For some time in 2016, however, Horowitz was just another Breitbart by-line (average age 25?), apparently seeking some new credentials, if not “cred,” of his own. In May 2016, which was really just in the nick of time to make any kind of a pre-nomination fuss, Horowitz finally scored by dropping the perfect stinkbomb of a headline at Breitbart News: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”

Antique echoes of Daily Worker jargon aside (who but old-time Bolshis say “renegade” anything?): In the ensuing media clamor over Horowitz’s “Renegade Jew” headline (he *confessed* to writing it himself), Breitbart had to fend off charges of anti-Semitism, which would dog the site throughout the presidential campaign — but now with the help of Horowitz, who is Jewish. Mission accomplished! Having mixed it up with Breitbart boys under siege, Horowitz was now, basically, one of them. Plus, in so gratuitously slamming neocon Kristol, ex-Communist and, now, surely, ex-neocon Horowitz was also able to run up the Jolly Roger of the alt-right. “Renegade Jew,” indeed. Good political positioning is more like it. Meanwhile, the issue that lit him up so much — Obama’s Iran deal — is still on Trump’s table, not that Horowitz cares so much now.

So, why wouldn’t Horowitz just take care of all of this personal reframing exclusively at his own website?

A quick look at the latest Alexa website rankings explains all.

Today, Frontpage.mag is No. 12,639 in the US — which, of course, means there are 12,638 more popular websites than David Horowitz’s website out there today; it ranks 41,338 globally.

Breitbart News, on the other hand, is No. 61 in the US today, and No. 292 in the world.

To be fair, yours truly’s site ranking is barely measurable at No. 140,911 in the US — but perhaps dianawest.net would do a bit better if it raked in some fraction of the $5.4 million David Horowitz’s Freedom Center received as charitable largesse in 2015 alone, as the Post reports. Horowitz, not by the way, skimmed $583,000 of the top in salary that same year. Running a “shadow universe” is so terribly taxing, especially when your fancy web$ite isn’t so widely read.

https://spectator.org/buy-american-may-not-be-american/

President Trump asserts with patriotic fervor that his administration stands for America First, a commendable but somewhat ambiguous concept. What gives it meaning is the idea that Americans “buy American.” Presumably when facing consumer choices Americans should look for a label that keeps them at home.

The problem with the concept is that it defies an American commitment to the free market – an argument at least as patriotic as America First. Comparative advantage has been a hallmark of trade, notwithstanding many abuses and currency manipulation. Trade is never entirely fair since each of the trading partners seeks an advantage. Yet the market has a mechanism for addressing excesses, such as “dumping.”

If there is confusion in the market, it is over production provenance. The Ford, manufactured (or should I say assembled) in the United States has parts from at least 14 nations. Globalization, for better or worse, has changed the nature of trade and the method of manufacturing. We may choose to call a Ford an American car but it is no more American than a Volkswagen assembled in Mississippi. Even when one says I want to buy American because it is good for the country I love, you cannot be sure the product in question doesn’t have parts from abroad.

“Buy American” invariably requires an undesirable economic choice. Americans may be willing to pay a premium for a product manufactured here, but that is a choice rarely considered as Walmart’s gross sales suggests. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, accounts for eleven percent of the unfavorable trade balance with a reliance on electronic products manufactured elsewhere. Unless a tariff is imposed on these products, it is unlikely U.S. counterparts can compete on economic terms. That is a reality the Trump position seemingly overlooks.

Ultimately what is good for the nation is not easy to determine. Job loss is a real problem when U.S. companies are unable to compete. Free market economics often overlook the plight of a steel worker – to cite one example – whose company cannot compete against foreign rivals. This individual may be less interested in efficiency than job protection. On the other hand, an unfavorable balance of trade may have a salutary effect on the economy. The allocation of resources based on products from abroad allows the U.S. economy to concentrate on sectors likely to be most productive. Were it not for this internal market allocation, most Americans would be farmers today.

Clearly the free market is imperfect. Many are left behind in the process of rewards and penalties or what Schumpeter described as creative destruction. As I see it, mature economies must put an emphasis on retraining. The idea that an employee will hold the same position throughout his working life is anachronistic. In fact, while trade has resulted in some job loss, the real culprit in this matter is technological advancement. Yet most Americans are not Luddites and any referendum on the matter would favor advancement.