RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/islamist-terror-threat

Eighteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, many Americans believe that the threat of Islamist terror is played out—but that’s only because our counterterrorism efforts have been so successful. Attempted terror attacks no longer make front-page headlines, but the list of foiled plots to kill American citizens is long and chilling. This past summer saw arrests of potential terrorists who would have killed dozens or hundreds of people if successful. On September 3, for example, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, also known as Suleiman Al-Amriki, with providing material support to ISIS. Asainov is accused of having been an ISIS sniper and weapons instructor. A naturalized U.S. citizen (he was born in Kazakhstan) who lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years, Asainov traveled in late 2013 to Istanbul, a common entry point to Syria. There, he joined ISIS and rose through the ranks to become an “emir” in charge of weapons training. He tried to recruit other Americans to fight for ISIS in Syria. Asainov messaged a government informant, exclaiming in reference to ISIS, “We are the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed!” He still yearned to die on the battlefield for jihad, Asainov told the informant.

Last month, Awais Chudhary was charged with plotting to stab New Yorkers in Queens. A 19-year-old American citizen born in Pakistan and raised in a middle-class neighborhood, Chudhary planned to attack pedestrians on a bridge over the Grand Central Parkway to the Flushing Bay Promenade or at the World’s Fair Marina, both of which he had visited repeatedly to scout where he could kill the most people. He planned to record his attack to inspire others. He intended to use a knife, he told an agent, unless the agent could show him how to bomb a “mini-bridge over a busy road with many cars.” He was arrested en route to retrieve items he had ordered online for the assault—a tactical knife, a mask, gloves, and a cellphone with a chest and head strap to enable him to record his slaughter hands-free. 

Also last month, prosecutors charged two women from Queens with planning to build bombs similar to those used in earlier terrorist attacks. Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, both U.S. citizens and Queens residents, pleaded guilty to distributing information about how to make and use explosive devices and weapons of mass destruction. Between 2013 and 2015, the complaint states, they planned to build a bomb themselves, teaching each other chemistry and the electrical skills needed to create and detonate a deadly device. They also explored how to make plastic explosives and assemble a car bomb, bought and stored in their homes materials required for an explosive device—including  propane gas tanks, soldering tools, car-bomb instructions, machetes, and several knives—and discussed similar devices used in past terrorist incidents, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. They researched potential targets, focusing on law enforcement and military installations. Velentzas favored attacks on government targets. In terrorist attacks, she said, “You go for the head.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274912/18-years-after-911-threat-terror-attacks-continues-michael-cutler

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred nearly 18 years ago yet the impact still reverberates around the world.

It is disconcerting that Americans who are now coming of age to vote were born after the attacks of 9/11 and what they know or don’t know about those attacks depends on what they have been taught by teachers who are not being “Politically Correct” but actually provide lessons that conform to Orwellian Newspeak as does the mainstream media.

On August 30, 2019 The Hill reported, Trial for men accused of plotting 9/11 attacks set for early 2021.  That report begins with this excerpt:

The trial for men charged as plotters of the 9/11 attacks was set Friday for Jan. 11, 2021, The New York Times reported.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men are set to be charged for their alleged role planning the 2001 terror attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. Mohammed has been accused of being the mastermind behind the strike.

While the media typically attributes the death of approximately 3,000 innocent victims to the attacks, in reality the actual death count is much higher and victims of those attacks continue to suffer and die because of their exposure to the toxins that were released as a result of the attacks.

As we approach the 18th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 terrorism-related stories are still making news, underscoring the irrefutable fact that the threat of terrorism continues to hang over our heads, not unlike the Sword of Damocles.  However, the lunatic Left seeks to leave America defenseless.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-taliban-shouldnt-get-within-5000-miles-of-camp-david/

The best thing to be said for the planned Camp David meeting with the Taliban is that it didn’t happen.

President Trump has a weakness for the grand gesture. Hosting the leadership of a vicious, terrorist insurgency that aided and abetted September 11 and is trying to kill Americans as we speak certainly would have been . . . memorable.

The invitation was part of the effort to bring to a conclusion negotiations that were close to a deal, although not one favorable to the interests of the United States.

The deal envisioned the U.S. reducing its current troop presence of roughly 15,000 down to zero about 16 months from now, at which point any commitments the Taliban had made would be worthless. We understand the frustration with a war that has lasted 18 years, but it would be foolish to end the “endless war,” or our part of it, with the Taliban once again in position to threaten Kabul and harbor international terrorists who mean us harm. We’ve had recent experience with a president following through on campaign pledge to end a war no matter what — and, of course, Barack Obama had to order troops back to Iraq when ISIS took over a swathe of the country.

If and when the Afghan civil war ends, it will involve a settlement with the Taliban and the Afghan government. This was not even close to that. The Taliban agreed to begin talking only to the Afghan government, and the deal didn’t even entail a ceasefire. There were reportedly conditions in an annex that the Taliban would be very unlikely to meet, giving us the leeway to put the brakes on our withdrawal. But if we don’t want to get out — and we shouldn’t — why ink a deal that creates even more doubt about our staying power and legitimizes the Taliban?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274872/muslim-migrant-american-airlines-mechanic-charged-robert-spencer

On Thursday, according to the Miami Herald, a Muslim airplane mechanic named Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani was arrested “on a sabotage charge accusing him of disabling a navigation system on a flight with 150 people aboard before it was scheduled to take off from Miami International Airport earlier this summer.” But calm down, you ignorant and unrepentant Islamophobe: as always, this has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. How do we know that? Why, because Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani tells us so.

A criminal complaint affidavit filed in Miami federal court states that Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani told federal air marshals that “his intention was not to cause harm to the aircraft or its passengers.”

Well, that’s a relief. The poor lamb was just “upset” over the ongoing impasse between his mechanics’ union and American Airlines. This unresolved conflict has, he said, “affected him financially.”

Acting out on his frustration and rage, Alani, according to the Herald, tampered with “the so-called air data module,” which “caused an error alert as the pilots powered up the plane’s engines on the runway.” This led to the flight being “aborted and taken out of service for routine maintenance at America’s hangar at MIA, which is when the tampering with the ADM system was discovered during an inspection. An AA mechanic found a loosely connected tube in front of the nose gear underneath the cockpit that had been deliberately obstructed with some sort of hard foam material…. According to the complaint filed Thursday, Alani glued the foam inside the tube leading from outside the plane to its air data module, a system that reports aircraft speed, pitch and other critical flight data. As a result, if the plane had taken off that day from MIA, the pilots would have had to operate the aircraft manually because the ADM system would not have received any computer data.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/afghanistan-airport-security-turn-toward-pre-9-11-mindset/

The national temperament has changed. But has the security environment?

N o one who is under 18 was alive on September 11, 2001, the annual remembrance of which we will mark on Wednesday. The 9/11 jihadist atrocities are, at most, a dim memory to the generation of Americans who are now coming of age, who will be our leaders in the bat of an eye.

The page has been turned. As President Trump is wont to say, we’ll see what happens.

What is now happening is a turn to a pre-9/11 security footing. Notice, I said a turn, not a return. It remains to be seen whether, in reality, we have gotten to the point where our threat environment is what it was thought to be before the onslaught; yet, the country has determined to conduct itself as if that were the case.

It’s a bold experiment. I doubt that it will work, though I’d love to be wrong.

Signs of the change were all around us this week, at home and half a world away. In Virginia, a federal judge invalidated the Terrorist Screening Database, a watch list secretly compiled by the government, which subjects those listed to heightened security vetting before they are permitted to board commercial aircraft. In Kabul, the Trump administration’s envoy struck an agreement in principle to reduce the number of American troops in Afghanistan, with an eye toward a withdrawal that would purportedly “end” what the president describes as our “endless” war — U.S. forces having invaded the country in those tense days, 18 years ago.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/06/research-director-of-cair-previously-praised-ngo-with-jihadist-ties/

The research director for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Abbas Barzegar, has a history of publicly supporting a Turkish nonprofit organization that “has provided financial, logistical and political support for jihadists,” according to The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

What makes Barzegar’s praise of Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) particularly noteworthy is that he is the head author of CAIR’s 2019 report on Islamophobia, titled “Hijacked by Hate: American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network.” In other words, he has been accusing U.S. nonprofits of Islamophobia while publicly endorsing a group that, according to the former chief of counter-terrorism in Turkey, has furnished material support to jihadists.

It is unclear whether Barzegar was either ignorant of IHH’s role or knew but did not care. When approached by IJT for comment, Barzegar did not respond.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2015, Barzegar claimed that IHH was on the “front lines” in Syria, assisting tens of thousands of Syrian refugees heading towards Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. He even presented IHH as ideal candidates for becoming “ideological gatekeepers” within the war-torn region, arguing they were capable of performing more than simply “routine aid work.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-judge-rules-terror-watchlist-violates-constitution/

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a government terror watchlist that prevents flagged individuals from flying violated the Constitution.

The No Fly List of “known or suspected terrorists,” which includes over 1 million individuals, violates the constitutional rights of those placed on it, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ruled.

Twenty-three Muslim U.S. citizens, backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), had sued, claiming they faced “a range of adverse consequences without a constitutionally adequate remedy” as a result of being placed on the list.

The plaintiffs “have constitutionally protected liberty interests that are implicated by their inclusion” on the watchlist, Trenga wrote, adding that the Department of Homeland Security process through which an individual could challenge their inclusion on the list “is not constitutionally adequate to protect those liberty interests.”

“There is no evidence, or contention, that any of these plaintiffs satisfy the definition of a known terrorist,” Trenga said, adding that the behavior qualifying someone as a “suspected terrorist” is too broad.

“CAIR has a half-dozen other watchlist cases pending in federal courts across the country, and this opinion will pave the wave for our continued victories,” CAIR national litigation director Lena Masri said in a statement. “Today’s opinion is a victory for the more than one hundred American Muslims we represent and for the thousands of American Muslims who are currently stigmatized by the watchlist.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/isis_beheading_plotters_conviction_overturned_by_obamaappointed_judge.html

Daoud Wright is a former Islamic State (ISIS) operative in Boston who was the ringleader of a plot to behead me. In December 2017, he was found guilty on five counts in this terrorist plot against me, which involved Wright maintaining close contact with and even financing a major American ISIS leader, Zulfi Hoxha. Yet late Wednesday afternoon, one of those convictions was overturned. Federal Appeals Court Justice David J. Barron said Wright “could have been simply been ‘role-playing’ with respect to following ISIS’s direction.”

Back when Wright was convicted, the jury didn’t think Wright was just “role-playing.” They brought the verdict in swiftly: according to WBUR, they “reached five verdicts in six hours.” Acting U.S. Attorney William Weinreb said: “Mr. Wright is a terrorist, an ISIS supporter and recruiter who intended to wage war against the United States by beheading people and killing Americans.”

Barron, in contrast, clearly has embraced the claim of the defense during the trial, that Wright was just a fat fantasist sitting in his mother’s basement playing video games and dreaming of glory. But in an extraordinary article that appeared in the left-wing Atlantic in January 2018 entitled “A New American Leader Rises in ISIS,” Seamus Hughes, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, and Bennett Clifford revealed that a “shared interest in video games may have been one of the first things that brought Hoxha together with David Wright.” The video games were not an idle pastime: