RUTHFULLY YOURS

The following was taken from an interview from Frank Gaffney’s “Secure Freedom Radio”. Clare Lopez, a retired CIA operations officer and the current Vice President for Research and Analysis at the Center for Security Policy, discusses a little-know threat known as the Gulen Movement. Lopez goes on to describe the threat from this particular movement to academic institutions inside the United States.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Welcome back, we’re joined by my colleague at the Center for Security Policy, our Vice President for Research and Analysis, a career intelligence professional, indeed for about twenty years in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine services, a woman of extraordinary skill and knowledge, in particular about threats to this country, now, most especially emanating from the global jihad movement. Her name is Clare Lopez, she is the coauthor with Christopher Holton of a new monograph from the Center for Security Policy press entitled, Gulen and the Gulenist Movement: Turkey’s Islamic Supremacist Cult and Its’ Contributions to the Civilzation Jihad. Clare, welcome back, it’s good to have you with us as always.

CLARE LOPEZ: Thank you very much Frank, very much glad to be with you.

FRANK GAFFNEY: I wanted to catch up with you rather urgently, Clare, because this monograph has become even more timely as a result of a development that’s reported in the Wall Street Journal today, in which it appears the government of Turkey has retained legal counsel in this country to bring, basically a complaint, against some of the operations of this Gulenist movement. So let’s talk first about that movement, what it is, who Fethullah Gulen is, how they got here and what they’re doing and then we’ll talk about the particulars of this case in Texas.

CLARE LOPEZ: Sure, well, Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish Sunni cleric, he left Turkey in 1999, came to the United States to live here when he was fleeing the then secular government in Turkey, with which he was at odds over his behavior and activities in Turkey, which involved a network of schools and promoting opposition to Kemal Ataturk that was secularizing and modernizing Turkey. So he’s been here in the states, living in the Poconos in a guarded compound ever since 1999. But he continues to head up not just a global empire of school systems, including here in the U.S., but a financial empire and many Turkish cultural groups too.

FRANK GAFFNEY: This cult is really organized as you say around Fethullah Gulen, but his principal purpose though is to promote principally, the same things that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has been doing, in fact they’ve been thick as thieves for a long time in advancing this Islamist agenda in Turkey for a long time. They’re evidentially at odds at the moment, what is that about, Clare?

CLARE LOPEZ: Well, yes, they have fallen out, but just as you say, they were on the same page for a long, long time, along with President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, which is in power now in Turkey, the AKP for short, and they’ve shared the agenda for the destruction for Ataturk’s modernization program in Turkey and a turn in Turkey back to neo-Ottoman days, and an Islamist agenda.

FRANK GAFFNEY: The caliphate, yeah. So what are they at odds about now, Clare?

CLARE LOPEZ: Well, they’re at odds because they both can’t be in power. They both can’t be on top. They’re bitter rivals for power inside of Turkey right now, as a matter of fact, the style of President Erdogan has become increasingly dictatorial, he just recently deposed his Prime Minsiter Ahmed Davutolgu and the senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood, interestingly, Yousef al-Qardawi recently in a public conference called Erdogan ‘sultan,’ he actually called him Sultan. So it’s about power, that’s all it is, who gets to be in charge.

FRANK GAFFNEY: So it’s kind of war between Mafia dons, it’s not substantive difference, it’s just over who will be in charge.

CLARE LOPEZ: That’s a way to put it.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Let me, Clare, ask you then about the present issue reported in the Wall Street Journal about these Harmony schools, as they’re called, in Texas. What are they and are they the only examples of what Gulen has got going here at taxpayer expense?

Federal officials are warning that mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus will start biting and infecting US residents in the next month. Key trouble spots are southern Florida, Louisiana, Texas and southern California, but the risk could extend farther north.

The virus inflicts horrific brain damage on unborn children as well as neurological disorders in adults. The Obama administration’s bungled response heightens the danger.

Americans are being told to “drain, dress and deet” – drain water lingering in their yards, wear long pants and sleeves and use bug repellent. In short, avoid mosquito bites. Imagine the health of your unborn child depending on that.

That makes as much sense as “duck and cover” did in the 1950s in the event of a nuclear attack.

Today a pregnant woman’s safety hinges on how well her local government controls mosquitoes. The differences are alarming: Fort Myers, Fla., has a $24 million budget and 27 planes for mosquito control. Cash-strapped San Antonio has only two spraying trucks.

Most health departments lack equipment to detect Zika and combat mosquito invasions. Peter Hotez, dean of tropical medicine at Houston’s Baylor Medical College, fears the epidemic’s extent won’t be known “until babies start showing up in delivery suites with microcephaly.”

Six decades after Milton Friedman proposed school vouchers, the Nobel Prize-winning economist is winning the argument on the policy results if not always on the politics.

Today 26 states and the District of Columbia have some private school choice program, and the trend is for more: Half of the programs have been established in the past five years. That hasn’t stopped opponents from arguing there’s no proof vouchers help students learn. But a new study from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas shows otherwise.

The study’s most important news is that voucher students show “statistically significant” improvement in math and reading test scores. The researchers found that vouchers on average increase the reading scores of students who get them by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by about 0.15 standard deviations. In laymen’s terms, this means that on average voucher students enjoy the equivalent of several months of additional learning compared to non-voucher students.

The researchers looked at 19 studies covering 11 voucher programs from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Delhi, India. The authors chose the 19 because they met the criteria for the “gold standard” of program evaluation, with both a “treatment group” (the voucher kids) and a “control group” (the non-voucher kids). “When you do the math, students achieve more when they have access to private school choice,” says Patrick J. Wolf, who conducted the study with M. Danish Shakeel and Kaitlin P. Anderson. CONTINUE AT SITE

New Yorkers under a certain age may not recall when racing home from the subway at night was normal, but maybe they’ll get the opportunity. They can thank the progressive city council, which this week repudiated the “broken windows” policing that has contributed so much to making Gotham safe.

On Wednesday the councillors decriminalized so-called quality-of-life offenses such as littering, drinking or urinating in public and loitering in parks after dark. The package of new laws downgrades such misdemeanor citations to civil summonses so scofflaws will no longer have to appear in court or pay hefty fines.

Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito claims the laws will reduce arrests and incarcerations of minorities. Quality-of-life offenses make up about half of criminal summonses. However, only one in five individuals who are summoned to criminal court are actually found guilty, and fewer than 10% of those arrested for misdemeanors are sentenced to jail.
Relaxing law enforcement will almost certainly promote disorder instead, as James Q. Wilson and George Kelling surmised in their classic 1982 article “Broken Windows.” Their theory, which has been borne out in real life, is that tolerating widespread disorderly behavior encourages greater lawlessness, and minor infractions often lead to major crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE

New Yorkers strolling through Chinatown in downtown Manhattan last Sunday might have noticed an unusual flurry of activity: Jewish men and women, a rabbi in a clerical gown, and a color guard gathering in graveyard tucked away behind a wrought-iron fence. Members of the New York synagogue Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America, were visiting their historic cemetery at Chatham Square.

In an annual ritual ahead of Memorial Day, they were there for a ceremony that few other synagogues in America could perform: honoring the members of their congregation who had fought in the Revolutionary War.

For Shearith Israel, where I am the rabbi, what is most striking is not that its history stretches back to the Colonial period, but rather that so many of its congregants sided with George Washington against England. New York was known as a Tory stronghold: When English forces expelled Washington’s troops from the city, King George III’s soldiers were greeted with a “Declaration of Dependence” signed by hundreds of New Yorkers, declaring their allegiance to Great Britain.

The Jews of New York, by contrast, were largely of the patriot persuasion, in part because Shearith Israel’s spiritual leader, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was known for his vocal support for the Colonists’ cause. Like many members of the Continental Congress, even Seixas had hoped for reconciliation with England. As late as May 1776, Seixas gathered his flock in the synagogue, located then on what is now South William Street, to pray that the English would “turn away their fierce Wrath from against North America.”

Hiring more TSA agents may shorten the lines of passengers waiting to go through airport security, but this will do little to ensure they safely arrive at their destination. And shortcutting Syrian refugees vetting procedures from 12 or 18 months to a few days, increases the risk of bringing jihadists and their sympathizers into the country.

While it is necessary to screen passengers and their luggage for explosives and weapons. And while there is an added deterrence factor in doing so publically, such screenings are not enough to better secure airports and airplanes waiting to take off.

Rushing through proper vetting of TSA agents to cut down on long lines of passengers, or drastically reducing the screening of Syrian refugees, many are undocumented and unknown numbers using false passports, could pose a serious threat to the United States. But even if done properly, such screening tells nothing about their tendencies.

Moreover, political correctness enforced by the U.S. and European governments and potential legal harassment from Islamic organizations have conditioned many to turn a blind eye to potential security risks.

How many among the growing numbers of supporters of radical Muslim groups are posing as refugees? How many are working at airports? How many are looking for ways to exploit security gaps? How can they be identified before they carry out an attack?

Workers allowed to airports restricted areas and on planes are supposed to go through security checks each and every time. However, as of last month, according to TSA Administrator Robert Neffenger, only Atlanta, Miami, and Orlando airports required “employees to go through a security check before entering “secured” areas of the airport.”

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the December 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed more than 2,400 Americans.

President Obama is visiting Hiroshima this week, the site of the August 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb that helped end World War II in the Pacific Theater. But strangely, he has so far announced no plans to visit Pearl Harbor on the anniversary of the attack. The president, who spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, should do so — given that many Americans have forgotten why the Japanese attacked the United States and why they falsely assumed that they could defeat the world’s largest economic power.

Imperial Japan was not, as often claimed, forced into a corner by a U.S. oil embargo, which came only after years of horrific Japanese atrocities in China and Southeast Asia. Instead, an opportunistic and aggressive fascist Japan gambled that the geostrategy of late 1941 had made America uniquely vulnerable to a surprise attack.

By December 1, 1941, Nazi Germany, Japan’s Axis partner, had reached the suburbs of Moscow. Japan believed that the German army would soon knock the Soviet Union out of the war.

Japan had also hedged its bets by signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviets. Japanese leaders assumed that even if communist Russia survived, Japan could avoid a costly land war on its rear flank. The U.S., not Japan, would likely have a two-front war.

By 1941, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had all been defeated and occupied by the Third Reich. Only the British remained of the original European anti-Axis allies, and London had been under constant aerial assault by the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Japan figured that Germany and Italy might soon win the war and wished to pile on before it ended.

Japan had calculated that all of Europe’s resource-rich Pacific and Asian colonies were now orphaned and up for grabs. By starting a Pacific war and knocking out the U.S., Japan could get its hands on the resources necessary to fuel its war machine.

British-held Singapore and the American bases in the Philippines were isolated and poorly defended. And they would be completely cut off once the U.S. Seventh Fleet and air arm were neutralized at Pearl Harbor.

Starting a war in the Pacific meant the Japanese would have easy access to huge supplies of oil, rubber, rice, and strategic metals for their newfound mercantile empire, the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The U.S. also had lost military deterrence. The Japanese had watched carefully as America did little to help its two closest allies: France and Great Britain. The former was easily overrun by the Nazis, the latter bombed unmercifully.

An outbreak of deadly infectious tuberculosis among refugees President Obama sent to Indiana is a frightening reminder that the administration’s dangerous immigration policies are putting American lives at risk.

In a frenzied rush to bring as many non-English-speaking Third World aliens to the country as possible before his presidency ends in a few months, Obama is allowing Syrian war migrants and refugees to be brought into the country without first undergoing proper medical examinations, a violation of the nation’s most basic public health protocols.

“Tuberculosis is one of the most lethal infectious diseases in history,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and surgeons. “It is easily transmitted, say on a public bus [and] increasingly, it is becoming highly resistant to all our antibiotics,” she said.

It is clear that Obama doesn’t care about the health and well-being of the American people. That was obvious when he began pushing to create the so-called death panels that Obamacare mandates. But now as a result of the president’s recklessness, fatal diseases are surfacing or making a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.

Under Obama, immigration policy aims to import new Democratic voters — the less skilled, less educated, less enamored with the norms and values of Western civilization, the better. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by Obama to expand and remake the American electorate.

Prior to the Obama era, tuberculosis was a rare diagnosis and many thought the disease had more or less been eradicated in the United States. Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed openness today to editing military job titles to make “man” more gender-neutral, even as he struggled with a way to make “unmanned” less masculine.

The Marine Corps Times reported last week that the service is reviewing its job titles — rifleman, infantryman, etc. — in the wake of all combat roles being opened to women and a January directive from Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for the Corps and the Navy to ensure those job descriptions are gender-neutral.

Every job title that includes “man” is up for review and potentially on the editing block.

Meeting with reporters today at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., Carter was asked whether he saw “a benefit or a need to do that throughout the military.”

Carter said it was “a very good question.”

“And, you know, of course one wants to signify a reality, which is a very favorable reality for us in defense, of the modern era, which is that we’re making full use of the wonderful talents of half of the population of the country,” he said.

“And it would be a huge mistake not to do so. And that’s why I wanted to see all military operational specialties opened to qualified females. That doesn’t mean that they’ll get in and it doesn’t mean that they’ll choose to do it. But it does mean that I have the opportunity to pick from the entire population of the country. And since it’s an all-volunteer force, I would be — wouldn’t be fulfilling the needs of having the best force if I weren’t fishing in the widest possible pond.”

Carter stressed “that’s the logic behind the position of women in our Department of Defense in today’s world.”

“And signifying that in all appropriate ways is I think exactly that — very appropriate and needed,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE