https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/did-fbi-have-spy-in-trump-presidential-campaign/The Steele-dossier author told Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson about a ‘human source.’ Something tells me Glenn Simpson did not make a mistake. Something tells me the co-founder of Fusion GPS was dead-on accurate when he testified that Christopher Steele told him the FBI had a “human source” — i.e., a spy — inside the Trump […]
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US Foreign Policy. He can be reached at
Many extremist Muslims believe that their religious desire is coming true in in the US. Religiously speaking, for extremist Muslims, ruling America is Allah’s (God’s) word. To them, a sacred promise is coming to fruition.
What does being the second-largest religion in a country mean? Voters impact local and national politics, swing domestic elections, elect more representatives from the same religious affiliation, are influential enough to determine who the next president of the United States may be, and change the laws of the land.
This sense of immunity and dismissal led to the downfall of many countries throughout time.
“Soon,” said the letter, “America Will Be Ours”.
“Ours?”
The writer, it became clear, was an extremist Muslim in the U.S. who claimed to be a reputable religious preacher. With each new word, concern grew.
He pointed out, throughout the letter, the “sinful” ways of the West: dancing, drinking, dating…
He expressed disgust that most women did not wear the hijab or participate in prayer five times a day. Then he got straight to the point: “Ours,” he explained, represented Muslims like him.
The sentiment is hardly a new one. A person hears similar proclamations from many Muslim extremists throughout the years. The real shock was not letter but the reaction of many Americans after seeing it.
Such a thing, they said, could never happen. The writer’s words were “just bluster,” nothing to be taken seriously. Most surprisingly, they stated — honestly — that Muslims who speak of such intentions do not really mean what they say, so these threats should not be cause for concern.
The history of the two nations where I grew up — Iran and Syria — taught all of us there a big lesson about living in this kind of ignorance: the reality of how quickly a nation can be consumed by the philosophies of a religious state. An authoritarian and malicious regime, as exists now in Iran — the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and brutal even to its own people — is something we cannot forget.
Our allies are finally becoming force multipliers — joining with America to use its talent and technology finally to defeat the jihadist threat. We should assist and encourage the UAE and Saudi Arabia, not abandon them.
More than 7,000 miles from Washington and far from America’s headlines, a war in Yemen is rewriting America’s strategy against Iran and terrorism.
The three-sided civil war pits two radical Islamist forces — Al-Qaeda’s largest surviving army and Iran’s biggest proxy force — against each other and six of America’s Arab allies. U.S. Special forces carry out covert raids and CIA drones rain down missiles on terror leaders.
The outcome of the Yemen war matters: U.S. forces are fighting there and a new strategy against terrorism is now being tested in the Middle East’s poorest nation.
Since Britain’s Royal Marines marched out of their Aden Protectorate in November 1967, Yemenis have killed each other over nearly every international ideology: colonialism, communism, and radical Islamism. Add in the tribal rivalries and the religious divides between competing versions of Sunni and Shia Islam — and the stage is set for perpetual war. Indeed, Yemen, in every decade since the 1960s, saw bombings, bloodshed and barbarism.
Iran has also seemingly been trying to form a “Shi’ite Crescent” across the Middle East, through Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean.
According to nearly half a million computer files released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency late last year, captured from Osama bin Laden’s compound, Iran had also offered “support to al-Qaeda in exchange for targeting the Gulf.”
In addition, Iran has been sponsoring Shia uprisings in Bahrain. The US ambassador to Bahrain during the Obama administration evidently turned a deaf ear to pleas from Bahraini officials for help; he presumably feared upsetting the president’s Iran deal, just as Obama had, by failing to act after his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons was crossed in Syria.
The question of whether torture is immoral does not have quite the yes or no answer that California Senator and posturing Democratic presidential wannabe Kamala Harris implied it had during the questioning of CIA nominee Gina Haspel. Classic torture is the intentional infliction of excruciating pain and permanent injury. Merely pouring water down the nostrils of a terrorist does not meet that classic definition.
And yes, who is doing it matters. Brutalizing an American prisoner of war to get information to be used to kill more Americans is immoral. Making a Khalim Sheik Muhammed think you might actually drown him, which you have absolutely no intention of doing, to save American lives by disclosing future plans and plots is not an immoral purpose.
Extracting needed information by such methods from the likes of a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who decapitated Daniel Pearl before turning passenger jets into manned cruise missiles, is not an immoral choice What about the choices the murderous and soulless Mohammed, who Kamala Harris turned into a victim, forced his genuine victims to make? As far as we know, Sen. Harris, no terrorists were ever forced to choose death by incineration or jumping out of a 100-story building.
One wonders what Harris would recommend if a terrorist planted a nuke set to go off in an hour in Washington, D.C. Would we tell him (or her): “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney. Now, please, tell us where you planted the nuke.” In that situation few Americans would be unwilling to attach the battery cables to the prisoner’s privates. Sometimes the end does justify the means.
If you have to choose one aspect of the liberal worldview to hate the most, it should be that impulse to blame bad, negative reactions to sound policy on the sound policy, rather than the bad actor.
To put it in fewer words, we can’t change what we do out of fear of reprisal. Well, we shouldn’t anyway.
It’s funny that this concept is not entirely lost on our friends on the left or our betters in the press. After a terror attack, much lip service is given to the continuation of daily life—to not change who we are or what we do in order to placate evil. But it only seems to apply, for them, to mundane things like attending concerts or trips to the ballpark.
If it’s sound foreign policy or acting in our own national interest that angers a terrorist or terror-supporting regime, however, then suddenly, “blame the victim” becomes all the rage. That’s where Chris Cuomo’s question on Friday morning comes in. CONTINUE AT SITE
There may have been an FBI spy interacting with the Trump campaign in 2016, Kimberly Strassel reported in the Wall Street Journal Thursday evening, adding fuel to long-held suspicions that an FBI/DOJ mole had attempted to ensnare Trump campaign advisers in some sort of Russian collusion trap.
This revelation comes after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein again backed down after a protracted fight with Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, allowing members to view classified documents about “a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.”
The FBI and DOJ had apparently been hiding the critical information from congressional investigators for months in order to protect the top-secret intelligence source.
In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.
Nunes doggedly pursued the matter, last week issuing a letter and a subpoena demanding more details, but Rosenstein’s response was to accuse the House of “extortion” and claim that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” was a constitutional “duty.”
“Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall,” Strassel notes. “And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in ‘loss of human lives.’”
The FBI and CIA’s “top-secret intelligence source,” according to the Washington Post’s anonymous law-enforcement leakers, is a U.S. citizen who was involved in the Russia counterintelligence investigation.
Explains Strassel: “When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.” CONTINUE AT SITE
Progressives dominate all but a few corners of American academia, but apparently they want it all. Witness the political and media assault on George Mason University, an island of intellectual diversity in Northern Virginia that has committed the sin of accepting money from conservative donors.
A public university with some 36,000 students, George Mason has made a mark in economic debates through its Mercatus Center. This has caught the attention of an outfit called UnKoch My Campus, which claims that donors like Charles and David Koch inappropriately influence university decisions. The demand is for “transparency” but the real goal is to silence conservative views.
George Mason recently released hundreds of pages of public records in response to requests by Transparent GMU, the local UnKoch affiliate. They include contracts and correspondence related to a $30 million donation in 2016, the largest in school history. Ten million dollars came from the Koch Foundation, and $20 million from an anonymous donor represented by attorney Leonard Leo. Mr. Leo is also a vice president of the Federalist Society, the non-secret network of conservative lawyers.
Cue the outrage. Among the horrors supposedly uncovered by UnKoch is that one condition of these gifts was that George Mason rename its law school after Antonin Scalia. UnKoch wants everyone to know that the Great Scalia was “one of the most ideological and polarizing Supreme Court Justice [sic] in history.” OMG, as the kids say. The New York Times ran a nearly full-page story on the documents.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2018 global grievance tour touched down in Australia this week. The Democratic nominee for President in 2016 has been selling tickets to provocative events in which she explores the alleged shortcomings of her compatriots. Meanwhile back home, her team is once again tapping some of the very wealthiest of her compatriots to support the family enterprise.
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks to foreign audiences are not limited to gripes about the most recent U.S. presidential campaign. She’s also willing to offer unkind words about current U.S. policies.
According to the Australian Associated Press:
The United States’ abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal will make negotiations with North Korea more difficult and leaves America’s credibility “shot”, Hillary Clinton says.
The former US secretary of state and failed 2016 presidential candidate also said there must be concrete concessions from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un amid the current efforts at diplomacy.
Ms Clinton used a talk in Melbourne to again criticise US President Donald Trump’s Iran decision, after tweeting that it was a big mistake.
“Pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal will make it harder to negotiate successfully with North Korea or anyone else,” she said on Thursday night.
“I think pulling out of that agreement makes America less safe and less trusted and Iran more dangerous.
Well-heeled Australians eager to hear what’s wrong with America, its elections and its political leadership were unlikely to be disappointed by this leg of the tour. According to Australia’s Daily Telegraph:
“Free from the constraints of running, Secretary Clinton will share the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules,” the speaking tour’s website claims.
On May 15, 1939, philosopher John Dewey issued a statement to the press announcing the formation of the Committee for Cultural Freedom. Attached were the committee’s declaration of principles and the names of 96 signatories. The following day, at a meeting inside Columbia University’s Low Library, the committee adopted its official manifesto. “Never before in modern times,” the document began, “has the integrity of the writer, the artists, the scientist, and the scholar been threatened so seriously.”
The committee’s members included anthropologists, philosophers, journalists, dramatists, attorneys, educators, and historians. Politically, they ran the gamut from democratic socialists to New Deal liberals to nineteenth-century liberals who embraced the market without serious qualification. What unified them was their commitment “to propagate courageously the ideal of untrammeled intellectual activity.” The “fundamental criteria for evaluating all social philosophies today,” their manifesto read, are “whether it permits the thinker and the artist to function independently of political, religious, or racial dogmas.” The basis for this alliance between such disparate persons, they continued, was “the least common denominator of a civilized culture—the defense of creative and intellectual freedom.”
It was the existence of Popular Front groups who toed the Stalinist line in science, literature, social thought, and the arts that moved the committee’s chief organizer, Sidney Hook, to action. “It seemed to me that it was necessary to challenge this massive phenomenon that was corrupting the springs of liberal opinion and indeed making a mockery of common sense,” Hook wrote in his autobiography, Out of Step (1987). “I decided to launch a new movement, based on general principles whose validity would be independent of geographical or national boundaries and racial or class membership.”
