RUTHFULLY YOURS

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:

https://www.investigativeproject.org/8045/breaking-news-cair-touts-partnership-with-census

Federal law enforcement knows enough about the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to order its agents not to engage with the group outside of criminal investigations. But despite that, the U.S. Census Bureau believes the conservative, Sunni-dominated Islamist organization is a trustworthy organization to partner with in next year’s national population count.

“CAIR is proud to partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to ensure American Muslims are fairly and accurately counted in the 2020 Census,” Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a CAIR news release. “Full participation in the census ensures that American Muslims will be better represented in Congress and that their communities receive an equal share in state and federal programs.”

It isn’t clear what CAIR or the Census Bureau will do as part of the partnership. The statement indicated CAIR will promote participation in the Census and advise people how to avoid scams. The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

“CAIR wants to ensure that that not only are American Muslim communities being fairly counted – but that their neighborhoods are getting a fair share in federal and state funding,” the CAIR release said.

Internal documents seized by the FBI show that CAIR and its founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were deeply involved in a Hamas-support network in America created by the Muslim Brotherhood. A committee report described the group’s mission as “defending the Islamic cause in Palestine and support for the emerging movement, the Hamas Movement.”

amgreatness.com/2019/08/27/woke-military-former-army-captain-describes-how-sjw-policies-harm-military-readiness/

A former Army officer says former President Barack Obama’s social engineering policies did great harm to the U.S. military and the nation is still “paying a price” for it.

Former U.S. Army Captain James Hasson—a decorated Afghanistan veteran and now a contributor to the Washington Examiner—appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday evening to talk about his new book, Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. 

“The Army that I joined during Barack Obama’s first term was nothing like the Army that I left at the end of his second, Hasson said. “Social justice warriors imposed a progressive agenda on the military with no regard for the harm they caused to military readiness or national security. We’re still paying the price and the American people deserve to know.”

“Traditionally conservatives believe that the left goes after the military by inadequately funding it—just not giving it enough money,” Carlson noted. “You describe in this book something that is far more sinister and effective where they basically try to rot it from the inside.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com
In a privacy experiment, we bought one banana with the new Apple Card — and another with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa from Chase. Here’s who tracked, mined and shared our data.

You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank. Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few.

Oh, the places a banana will go in the sprawling card-data economy. Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet — and it’s time that we add privacy, alongside rewards and rates, to how we evaluate them.

Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler tracked the same purchase at Target with two kinds of credit cards: the Chase Amazon Prime Rewards Visa and the Apple Card. (James Pace-Cornsilk/The Washington Post)

Apple, branching out from gadgets, just began offering a needed alternative. The new Apple Card’s best attribute is privacy (though the fashion faux pas of its white titanium has gotten more attention). Apple restrains bank partner Goldman Sachs from selling or sharing your data with marketers. But the Apple Card, which runs on the Mastercard network, doesn’t introduce much new technology to protect you from a lot of other hands grabbing at the till.

With my banana test — two bananas, one purchased with the popular Chase Amazon Prime Rewards Visa and the other with Apple’s Mastercard — I hoped to uncover the secret life of my credit card data. But in this murky industry, I was only partly successful. Unlike my other recent technology experiments, such as watching what my iPhone does while I sleep, I couldn’t hack into my cards to follow the data.