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HOMELAND SECURITY

ISIS Again Fixates on California Wildfires, Highlighting Week’s Wind-Driven Devastation By Bridget Johnson

The Islamic State has once again zeroed in on devastating wildfires in California in a section of their weekly al-Naba newsletter usually dedicated to news briefs collected from around ISIS territories.

Several Santa Ana wind-whipped fires have raced through Southern California from San Diego to Ventura counties over the past week. Four thousand firefighters are trying to gain control of the Thomas Fire, the largest blaze that has chewed through 173,000 acres since Dec. 4, destroyed more than 750 structures and is only 15 percent contained; new mandatory evacuations were ordered this morning for portions of eastern coastal Santa Barbara County. The cause of that blaze and others, including the Creek Fire east of Sylmar that is now 90 percent contained after destroying 60 homes, remains under investigation.

Authorities said a 70-year-old woman from Santa Paula died in a car crash while fleeing the Thomas Fire.

The ISIS article noted that “a rapid fire destroyed forests and hundreds of houses in and around Ventura in the state of California” and “the fire broke out in the evening at the foot of the hills near the city” before being “driven swiftly by the wind toward the northwest.”

ISIS noted blazes that were still out of control as well as California’s governor declaring a state of emergency to make available “funds and resources needed to assist more than 1,000 people.” They also included the woman’s death along the evacuation route.

ISIS, which has repeatedly encouraged followers to try arson as a terror tactic, did not take credit for starting any of the blazes.

This past January, ISIS’ Rumiyah magazine — which is published in multiple languages including English — stressed to would-be jihadists that “incendiary attacks have played a significant role in modern and guerrilla warfare, as well as in ‘lone wolf’ terrorism,” claiming a November fire at a furniture factory in Losino-Petrovsky, Russia, and highlighting scores of wildfires around Israel that month as incidents that “demonstrated the lethality of such an effortless operation.”

Suggested target locations for arson attacks, the magazine stated, “include houses and apartment buildings, forest areas adjacent to residential areas, factories that produce cars, furniture, clothing, flammable substances, etc., gas stations, hospitals, bars, dance clubs, night clubs, banks, car showrooms, schools, universities, as well as churches, Rafidi [Shiite] temples, and so forth. The options are vast, leaving no excuse for delay.”

ISIS Zeroes in on ‘Catastrophic’ New Year’s Eve Plot ‘Where Christians Meet’ By Bridget Johnson

The Islamic State notably highlighted an Australian New Year’s Eve terror plot in their weekly newsletter, noting that the would-be attacker would have caused “catastrophic” casualties in “one of the most important centers where Christians meet” to ring in the holiday.

The focus on New Year’s by an official ISIS publication follows several Christmas threats circulated by ISIS supporters.

Ali Khalif Shire Ali, 20, of Werribee was arrested Nov. 27 in southwest Melbourne and charged with preparing to commit a terrorist attack and gathering documents to facilitate a terrorist act.

According to police, the Australian citizen and computer company employee started planning an attack back in March and was arrested when he moved to the stage of face-to-face meetings about acquiring a gun. His intended target was reportedly Melbourne’s Federation Square when it would be packed with New Year’s Eve revelers.

Police said he was using attack instructional guides produced by al-Qaeda. He had been under scrutiny by counter-terrorism officials for at least two years, though did not attend a specific mosque.

“This is a person who would become particularly energized, for a lack of a better word, when overseas events occurred and would express a great deal of interest in committing an attack himself,” Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton said. “…This is a person who’s expressed an intention to try and kill as many people as he could through shooting them in the Federation Square area on New Year’s Eve. Horrendous.”

Just a few days after his arrest, in ISIS’ weekly al-Naba newsletter, the Aussie arrest was included in the terror group’s news briefs — a section where they’ve previously updated ISIS followers on the Las Vegas mass shooting and California wildfires.

The ISIS article noted that “the young man” was planning “to carry out a major attack on a gathering of Christian communities to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Melbourne.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Still Blind After All These Years The real lesson of Trump’s retweet of Britain First videos.Bruce Thornton

President Trump last week retweeted some videos posted by England’s Britain First party, and the usual suspects fell all over themselves condemning the president in an orgy of mass virtue-signaling. The usual question-begging epithets flew thick and fast: “racist,” “fascist,” “hateful,” “bigotry,” Islamophobic,” “extremist,” “far-right,” all the dull clichés trotted out to mask the chronic appeasement of Islamic jihad on the part of bipartisan internationalists.

The uproar over Trump’s actions confirms that the willful blindness of most Western leaders over the reality of Islamic violence continues to weaken our response to the jihadist threat.

The three videos that Trump retweeted showed examples of Muslim confessional intolerance and violence ubiquitous for fourteen centuries: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” Sadly, such incidents have become dog-bites-man stories, and similarly predictable are the responses to them. All were marked by the Western preemptive cringe typical of those who refuse to confront reality.

Consider the American politicians, especially Republican NeverTrumpers, who could not resist taking a potshot at the president and brandishing their moral superiority. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that Trump was “legitimizing religious bigotry” by retweeting the videos. He then added, “We need Muslim allies in the war on terror. I can only imagine how some of our Muslim allies must feel when the president gives legitimacy to it.”

How exactly is showing factual incidents of violence “legitimizing religious bigotry”? So the Muslim who beat up the boy on crutches was not a migrant, but a Dutch citizen. The point remains: Islam views violence against infidels as divinely sanctioned, thus legitimizing any violence. Do we have to repeat for the Nth time the Koranic commands, those uncreated words of Allah, like “slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” “do not take the Jews and Christians as friends,” “fight those who do not believe in Allah,” “fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness,” or “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads”? Are any of the incidents in the videos––and in those circulated by ISIS and other jihadist groups–– incompatible with these commands? Are any of them different from the thousands and thousands of similar lethal actions––over 32,000 just since 9/11–– that we have witnessed for nearly two decades, and that have marked the history of Islam from its beginnings in the 7th century, when Mohammed beheaded the 500 Jewish men of the Banu Qurayza?

Encouraging a Migration Explosion By Robert Curry

Are they doing it on purpose? Of course they are.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/04/encouraging-a-migration-explosion/

America’s progressive elite has disdain for Americans who refuse to embrace their globalist, “borderless world,” and anti-American agenda. Consequently, the progressives have decided to replace the American people with people better suited to help enact their ambitions.

For a glimpse into the future they have planned for you, watch the video below of a stroll through an American mall—not just any mall, but the Mall of America—where you can contemplate that future where it has already arrived.

Or consider what the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times had to say about the University of California/Janet Napolitano scandal. A state audit found UC President Janet Napolitano hiding a $175 million slush fund both from auditors and from the UC Board of Regents. But according to the Times what she did should be overlooked because of the good she has done: “She has been a strong leader for the university during troubled financial and political times, resisting efforts to weaken the university’s independence with a welcome level of toughness and dedicating herself to protecting the university’s undocumented students.” In other words, Napolitano deserves a pass because she protected university students in this country illegally.

Before her selection to head the University of California, Napolitano occupied the office of secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration. In that role, she demonstrated her fitness for her new job at the university by working to enact the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and encouraged “prosecutorial discretion” (meaning they were free to break our immigration laws with impunity) for so-called “dreamers.”

Speaking of California, a jury in San Francisco last week acquitted the illegal alien who murdered Kate Steinle. His acquittal sent a clear message to people living in America illegally—and to American citizens, too. It shows that a particular class of noncitizens have privileges beyond those of mere American citizens. As an illegal, “forced” as the progressives say “to live in the shadows,” Steinle’s killer was an oppressed person. He therefore deserved the mercy of being permitted to live in a “sanctuary city” like San Francisco, even though he had been deported five times before, because he was oppressed by the “white privilege” of Americans like Steinle and her family.

Supreme Court permits full enforcement of Trump travel ban

Handing the White House a huge judicial victory, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of President Trump’s travel ban affecting residents of six majority-Muslim countries.

The justices said the policy can take full effect despite multiple legal challenges against it that haven’t yet made their way through the legal system.

The ban applies to people from Syria, Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Lower courts had said people from those countries with a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the United States could not be prevented from entry.

Grandparents and cousins were among the relatives courts said could not be excluded.

The nine-member high court said in two one-page orders late Monday afternoon that lower court rulings that partly blocked the ban should be put on hold while appeals courts in Richmond, Va., and San Francisco take up the case.

Liberal-leaning Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have left the lower court orders in place.

The justices offered no explanation for their order, but the administration had said that blocking the full ban was causing “irreparable harm” because the policy is based on legitimate national security and foreign policy concerns.

Both courts are scheduled to hear arguments in those cases this week.

Both courts are also dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions “with appropriate dispatch.”

Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley called the ban “lawful and essential to protecting our homeland.”

Congressman: Is U.S. ‘Serious’ About Going After Iranian Airline Shuttling Weapons, Terrorists? By Karl Herchenroeder

WASHINGTON – A gap in sanctions policy against Mahan Air, which Iran has used to traffic weapons and terrorists, has put Americans and the world in danger as the airline is freely operating in major European airports, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told Treasury Department officials Thursday.

Mahan Air has been designated as a terrorist organization, given its support to the Assad regime in Syria. The airline, which is regarded as the Quds Force’s aviation arm, enjoys significant traffic through airports in Milan and Munich, allowing Iran to connect foreign flights to the United States.

“Why are we allowing European air carriers to start their flight at Mahan-infested airports and come to the United States?” Sherman asked during a Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade hearing. “Why are we not going after the airports, or are we serious about Mahan Air?”

While questioning Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea and Director for the Office of Foreign Assets Control John E. Smith, Sherman asked why American companies are still doing business with airports that accommodate Mahan and why American airlines are still purchasing fuel from the same companies that deal to Mahan.

Billingslea responded that in a departure from the Obama administration, the Trump administration has been “incredibly” aggressive in trying to alter European relations with Iran. Smith noted that the Treasury Department has implemented some designations against European airlines in the past few months, most notably Ukraine International Airlines, which has discontinued some of the troublesome flights routes.

To Billingslea’s point that this administration has altered the previous approach, Sherman said that the Treasury Department is “setting a very low bar.”

“At least we cleared the bar, right?” Billingslea asked. “But I think you make a good point, and it would be very prudent for any company that transacts with Mahan Air to be exceptionally cautious going forward.”

“I don’t think they should be cautious,” Sherman said. “I think you should nail them.” CONTINUE AT SITE

What Will It Take to Get Serious About Missile Defense? By Angelo Codevilla

North Korea’s possession of mobile-launched missiles that can deliver nukes anywhere in the United States shows that, nowadays, anybody can make lots of pinpoint-accurate missiles of any range. Since America’s ICBMs, submarines, and bombers are fewer, concentrated in fewer places than ever, even North Korea can carry out the kind of disarming attack that Americans feared the Soviet Union might have mounted in the 1980s. Kim Jong-un is showing the world that the missile defense programs into which the U.S. government has poured some $80 billion in recent years are no barrier to destroying most U.S. strategic forces and holding the American people hostage.

The officials who crafted these programs, ideologically focused as they have been on not hindering Russia’s or China’s capacity to devastate America, built token defenses to suffice against unsophisticated, unserious opponents. But North Koreans, semi-starved and serious, grasped better than highly credentialed Americans how this focus makes U.S. defenses inherently vulnerable. Yet, because U.S. policy continues to be one of not having missile defense—the public’s support for it notwithstanding—the government’s response to its programs’ failure is to pour more money into them.

The Technology is Not Lacking
Since the 1960s, the government and elite opinion have obfuscated that policy by pretending that technology is lacking. Hence, support for missile defense has meant spending endlessly on expensive tokens and endless “research.” Yet, as ballistic missiles have evolved since the 1950s, America has never lacked the technical means of defending seriously against them. As Professor Joseph Constance’s magisterial work showed, Republicans and Democrats have avoided responsibility for critical choices on these matters by framing them in pseudo-technical terms, none too subtly telling the public that they are beyond ordinary people’s understanding. Nonsense.

What follows summarizes how current programs are irremediably inadequate to defend against any serious missile attack from anywhere, and what a missile defense worthy of the name requires.

The current “National Missile Defense” (NMD) system consists of a single radar/fire control system plus a maximum of 44 interceptors based mostly in Alaska that purports, or rather pretends, to defend U.S territory. This arrangement so increases the distance that the interceptors must travel and so shortens the time in which the interceptors must do it that the interceptors have to be huge. Moreover, because the system’s designers chose to require that the interceptors collide with the incoming warhead directly—without the aid of any warhead—the guidance system must be exquisite and fragile. Such requirements make these interceptors hugely expensive and doubtful of success. Current “employment doctrine” calls for devoting two interceptors to each incoming warhead. In short, this system is un-expandable.

US Would Be Wise To Prepare For EMP Attacks On Its Cities by Ilan Berman

Imagine that a hostile nation – say, North Korea – fires a nuclear-tipped missile at the United States. The missile detonates in the upper atmosphere above a major American city such as Los Angeles, releasing a cascade of charged electrons that damages and destroys all technology and electrical systems within line-of-sight of the explosion. Vital infrastructure on the country’s Western seaboard is incapacitated. Large swathes of California and parts of Nevada lose power. Stores, social services and emergency functions that rely on electricity begin to break down, as disorder spreads and the death toll climbs.

Such a scenario isn’t the plot of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, although it well could be. It is, rather, the projected outcome of a man-made electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event of the type that a growing number of America’s adversaries are capable of creating.

Of course, the phenomenon of EMP is not new. It was first discovered well over half-a-century ago as an unintended byproduct of U.S. nuclear testing in the 1940s. Nevertheless, over the decades, a lasting solution to this challenge has proven elusive, for at least two reasons.

The potentially catastrophic consequences of an EMP event have made the issue a difficult one to broach, as a matter of public policy. Debates over the probability of such an occurrence, meanwhile, has led more than a few observers to minimize the associated risk – and to ridicule those who argue for preparedness.

Yet such complacency is ill-advised. The threat of electromagnetic pulse is both real and potentially devastating. More than a dozen years ago, in 2004, the congressionally-mandated Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, colloquially known as the EMP Commission, concluded that the damage caused by an EMP to the United States “could be sufficient to be catastrophic to the nation.” Moreover, given America’s lack of protection against the phenomenon, the commission noted, “our current

ISIS Teases Vegas in Upcoming Sequel to Original Film Threatening America By Bridget Johnson

The Islamic State is promoting a forthcoming sequel to its most infamous movie that threatened America at the beginning of the caliphate, with the new trailer showing fire raining down on several U.S. cities before America is engulfed in a fireball.

ISIS’ official al-Hayat Media Foundation didn’t give a release date for “Flames of War II: Until the Final Hour,” but distributed the trailer extensively across many open media platforms including YouTube and Google Drive.

The teaser begins with a rapid-fire montage of fiery battle scenes that appear to be from Iraq or Syria.

The focus then shifts to the United States, with columns of fire raining down on Los Angeles, Florida, New York, Texas and Nevada, labeled on a U.S. map.

ISIS appeared to be referring to the San Bernardino Christmas party attack in 2015, the 2015 attempted attack at a “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, the 2016 Orlando nightclub attack, this Halloween’s Manhattan bike path attack, and the Las Vegas mass shooting at the beginning of October. The terror group continues to claim gunman Stephen Paddock as their own Abu Abdul Bar al-Amriki, yet have not released evidence to back up the claim; authorities have maintained they have discovered no terrorist links as a motive remains elusive). CONTINUE AT SITE

Robert Mueller, Agent of Willful Ignorance It was Mueller who made sure that the U.S. government would ignore and deny the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. Robert Spencer

It has come to light that as director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, who is currently the special counsel looking for any dirt he can find on Donald Trump, presided over the 2012 removal of all counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism. Since then, our law enforcement and intelligence officials have been blundering along in self-imposed darkness about the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. This, it turns out, was Mueller’s doing.

In February 2012, the Obama Administration purged more than one thousand documents and presentations from counter-terror training material for the FBI and other agencies. This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had deemed it inaccurate or offensive to Muslims.

This purge was several years in the making, and I was – inadvertently – the one who touched it off. In August 2010, when I gave a talk on Islam and jihad to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force — one of many such talks I gave to government agencies and military groups in those years. While some had counseled me to keep these talks quiet so as to avoid attracting the ire of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the possibility of that pressure seemed to me to make it all the more important to announce my appearances publicly, so as to show that the U.S. government was not going to take dictation from a group linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those who had urged silence were proven correct, however, for the Obama administration was indeed disposed to take dictation from CAIR. CAIR sent a series of letters to Mueller and others demanding that I be dropped as a counter-terror trainer; the organization even started a “coalition” echoing this demand, and Jesse Jackson and other Leftist luminaries joined it.

At the FBI, Mueller made no public comment on CAIR’s demand, and so it initially appeared that CAIR’s effort had failed. But I was never again invited to provide counter-terror training for any government agency, after having done so fairly regularly for the previous five years. CAIR’s campaign to keep me from taking part in counter-terror training was, of course, not personal. They targeted me simply because I told the truth, just as they would target anyone else who dared do so.

Although Mueller was publicly silent, now we know that he was not unresponsive. And the Islamic supremacists and their Leftist allies didn’t give up. In the summer and fall of 2011, the online tech journal Wired published several “exposés” by far-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman, who took the FBI to task for training material that spoke forthrightly and truthfully about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.