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HOMELAND SECURITY

Muslim Activist Detained After Refusing Staten Island Ferry Bag Check, Predictability Ensues By Patrick Poole

Self-styled “community organizer” and “civil rights activist” Hesham El-Meligy was detained earlier today by the NYPD after refusing a bag search while attempting to board the Staten Island Ferry.

Predictably, El-Meligy is claiming racial profiling and “Islamophobia,” and insisting his rights were denied. But fellow Staten Islanders are pushing back on his claims.

A religious and political activist on Staten Island claims he was placed in handcuffs, frisked and issued two summonses by NYPD officers based on the way he looks.

Hesham El-Meligy, a Muslim who was born in Egypt, was temporarily detained and searched by police at about 8 a.m. Wednesday at the Staten Island Ferry terminal in St. George, after he refused a random bag check.

After a search of his backpack, he was issued summonses for trespassing and disorderly conduct and allowed on to the ferry, police said Thursday.

El-Meligy, founder of the Islamic Civic Association on Staten Island and chairman of the Staten Island Libertarian Party, said he believes the bag check wasn’t so random.

He took to Facebook hours after the incident, saying he felt singled out because his Egyptian heritage.

“I have no doubt that many (people) are in fact stopped randomly, but the manner this was done in my particular case made it feel different,” said El-Meligy.

But at least one eyewitness to El-Meligy’s detention disputes his account:

Could You Prevent Big Brother Watching? By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Stephen Bryen

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described the protagonist, Winston Smith’s efforts to find a way to prevent Big Brother from watching his expressions:

“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.”

In 1949, when Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published, one could have evaded Big Brother’s watchful camera under the cover of darkness. Today, however, “Night Vision” technologies can penetrate darkness.

Today, according to Wikileaks latest stolen documents release, the United States Intelligence Agency (CIA) together with the British domestic Intelligence agency- MI5, joined in developing televisions (especially Samsung’s Smart TV), smartphones, cars, and other computerized devices into spying machines.

So, what do you do to stop any Big Brother from invading your privacy, spying on all your activities everywhere? Watching you and listing to your conversations? Even to your snoring?

Stephen Bryen offers the following:

What do you do if all your devices are open to hacking? –Android and iPhone phones and watches, Bluetooth, WiFi, “Smart” TVs, laptops, tablets, GPS, car stereo, computers, Alexa and Google Home, home alarm systems –in other words, everything?

Meeting Security Challenges Through Vigilance, Readiness and Resilience by Chuck Brooks

In 2017 we are facing a new and more sophisticated array of physical security and cybersecurity challenges that pose significant risk to people, places and commercial networks. The nefarious global threat actors are terrorists, criminals, hackers, organized crime, malicious individuals, and, in some cases, adversarial nation states. Everyone and anything is vulnerable, and addressing the threats requires incorporating a calculated security strategy.

According to Transparency Market Research, the global homeland security market is expected to grow a market size of $364.44 billion by 2020. A large part of the spending increase over the past year is directly related to cybersecurity in both the public and private sectors.

A security strategy to meet growing challenges needs to be both comprehensive and adaptive. Defined by the most basic elements in managed risk, security is composed of:

Layered vigilance (intelligence, surveillance);
Readiness (operational capabilities, visual command center, interdiction technologies);
Resilience (coordinated response, mitigation and recovery).

The specifics of a security approach may vary according to circumstances, but the mesh that connects the elements is situational awareness combined with systematic abilities for critical communications in cases of emergency.

Because society is undergoing such a rapid technological change, the traditional paradigms for addressing threats are evolving with the security challenges. Two particular security challenges characterize the current and future connective landscape in both the public and private sectors: protecting critical infrastructure, and protecting the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities.

The Security Challenge of Protecting Critical Infrastructure

In the U.S., most of the critical infrastructure, including defense, oil and gas, electric power grids, health care, utilities, communications, transportation, education, banking and finance, is owned by the private sector (about 85 percent) and regulated by the public sector. Protecting the critical infrastructure poses a difficult challenge because democratic societies by their nature are open and accessible. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, a Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland, between 1970 and 2015, 2,723 terrorist attacks took place in the U.S.; of these attacks, 2,055 (75 percent) targeted critical infrastructure.

Intelligence Community Leaking Saboteurs set on bringing down a president. Matthew Vadum

Saboteurs in the U.S. intelligence community posing as patriots have been working hard to drive President Donald Trump from the White House.

Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and former War College professor John R. Schindler bragged on Twitter last week about the spy-led plot his friends are conducting against the president.

“Now we go nuclear,” he tweeted. “IC [intelligence community] war [is] going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior IC friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.’”

“US intelligence is not the problem here,” Schindler added. “The President’s collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details, but the essence is simple.”

In a column Feb. 12, Schindler cited wild, unproven, conspiratorial theories about Trump’s ties to Russia to justify his comrades’ seditious push to remove Trump from power.

[T]he still-forming Trump administration is already doing serious harm to America’s longstanding global intelligence partnerships. In particular, fears that the White House is too friendly to Moscow are causing close allies to curtail some of their espionage relationships with Washington—a development with grave implications for international security, particularly in the all-important realm of counterterrorism.

People like Schindler think they know what’s best for America in terms of national security and foreign policy. Allowing an outsider like Donald Trump to do the job Americans elected him to do is unthinkable to them. So Trump must go.

People of Schindler’s ilk are using government resources in an effort to overthrow the nation’s duly elected government. While smiling on TV and assuring the public his administration was fully cooperating with the Trump transition team, President Obama gave members of the intelligence community permission to wage war against then-incoming President Trump.

Before leaving office President Obama cleared the way for his confederates in the intel world to ramp up their use of dirty tricks to kick the legs out from under the incoming Trump administration by changing intelligence-sharing rules. The goal is to prevent Trump from rolling back Obama’s poisonous legacy.

The most famous victim so far of what could be called Obama’s shadow government is National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, an anti-Islamofascist hardliner who was forced out of his post Feb. 13 by what appears to be a deep state cabal centered around the sleazy former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes. As Flynn’s replacement, Trump has appointed “warrior-scholar” U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Rhodes and other former Obama administration officials were part of an intrigue that led to the downfall of Flynn, investigative journalist Adam Kredo reported at the Washington Free Beacon.

Flynn’s resignation was “the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.”

Kredo isn’t the only one crying foul.

A Muslim Brotherhood Security Breach in Congress There’s a national security risk swamp to drain. Daniel Greenfield

Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified information.

The signatories to the letter were Andre Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to undermine national security.

Two of them have been linked to an emerging security breach.

The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz; to whom the letter had been addressed.

Imran Awan and his two brothers, Jamal and Abid, are at the center of an investigation that deals with, among other things, allegations of illegal access. They have been barred from the House of Representatives network.

A member of Congress expressed concern that, “they may have stolen data from us.”

All three of the Pakistani brothers had been employed by Democrats. The offices that employed them included HPSCI minority members Speier, Carson and Joaquín Castro. Congressman Castro, who also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, utilized the services of Jamal Moiz Awan. Speier and Carson’s offices utilized Imran Awan.

Abid A. Awan was employed by Lois Frankel and Ted Lieu: members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Also on the committee is Castro. As is Robin Kelly whose office employed Jamal Awan. Lieu also sits on the subcommittees on National Security and Information Technology of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Tammy Duckworth’s office had also employed Abid. Before Duckworth successfully played on the sympathy of voters to become Senator Tammy Duckworth, she had been on the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces of the Armed Services Committee.

Gwen Graham, who had also been on the Armed Services Committee and on the Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee, had employed Jamal Awan. Jamal was also employed by Cedric Richmond’s office. Richmond sits on the Committee on Homeland Security and on its Terrorism and Cybersecurity subcommittee. He is a ranking member of the latter subcommittee. Also employing Jamal was Mark Takano of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Imran had worked for the office of John Sarbanes who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees, among other things, the nuclear industry. Other members of the Committee employing the brothers included Yvette Clarke, who also sits on the Bipartisan Encryption Working Group, Diana DeGette, Dave Loebsack and Tony Cardenas.

But finally there’s Andre Carson.

Carson is the second Muslim in Congress and the first Muslim on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and, more critically, is the ranking member on its Emerging Threats Subcommittee. He is also a member of the Department of Defense Intelligence and Overhead Architecture Subcommittee.

Islamic Terror and the U.S. Temporary Stay on Immigration by Uzay Bulut

It is short-sighted and reckless to blame President Trump for trying to protect his country and keep his country safe — as any good leader is supposed to do. It would be much wiser to direct our anger where it belongs — at Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists.

To many people, it must be easier to go after the U.S. president than after ISIS terrorists. That way, critics of the president can also pose as “heroes” while ignoring the real threats to all of humanity.

Critics of Muslim extremists get numerous death threats from some people in the West because they courageously oppose the grave human rights violations — forced marriages, honor killings, child rape, murdering homosexuals and female genital mutilation (FGM), among others.

Why do we even call criticism of such horrific practices “courageous”? It should have been the most normal and ordinary act to criticize beheadings, mutilations and other crimes committed by radical Muslims. But it is not.

On the contrary, the temporary ban aims to protect genuine refugees such as Bennetta Bet-Badal, who was murdered in San Bernardino. It would be much wiser to direct our anger where it belongs — at Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists.

In San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, 14 people were murdered and 22 others seriously wounded in a terrorist attack. The perpetrators were Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple. Farook was an American-born U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, who worked as a health department employee. Malik was a Pakistani-born lawful permanent resident of the United States.

Among the victims of the terror attack was Bennetta Bet-Badal, an Assyrian Christian woman born in Iran in 1969. She fled to the U.S. at age 18 to escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed the Iranian revolution.

“This attack,” stated the Near East Center for Strategic Engagement (NEC-SE), “showcases how Assyrians fled tyranny, oppression, and persecution for freedom and liberty, only to live in a country that is also beginning to be subject to an ever-increasing threat by the same forms of oppressors.”

“NEC-SE would like to take this opportunity to once again urge action to directly arming the Assyrians and Yezidis and other minorities in their indigenous homeland, so that they can defend themselves against terrorism and oppression. This tragedy is evidence that the only way to effectively counter terrorism is not solely here in the US, but abroad and at its root.”

Members of the Islamic State (ISIS) have declared several times that they target “kafirs” (infidels) in the West.

In 2014, Syrian-born Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the official spokesperson and a senior leader of the Islamic State, declared that supporters of the Islamic State from all over the world should attack citizens of Western states, including the US, France and UK:

“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way, however it may be.

“Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.”

It is this barbarity that the new U.S. administration is trying to stop.

Study: 72 Convicted Terrorists Who Live in U.S. Came from Countries Covered by Vetting Order By Rick Moran

This should come as a rude shock to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges who justified overturning Trump’s “extreme vetting” executive order covering seven mostly Muslim countries by claiming there is “no evidence” those countries have produced a terrorist.

The Center for Immigration Studies compiled a list of 72 U.S. residents from those seven countries who were convicted of terror-related charges.

In June 2016 the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, then chaired by new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, released a report on individuals convicted in terror cases since 9/11. Using open sources (because the Obama administration refused to provide government records), the report found that 380 out of 580 people convicted in terror cases since 9/11 were foreign-born. The report is no longer available on the Senate website, but a summary published by Fox News is available here.

The Center has obtained a copy of the information compiled by the subcommittee. The information compiled includes names of offenders, dates of conviction, terror group affiliation, federal criminal charges, sentence imposed, state of residence, and immigration history.

The Center has extracted information on 72 individuals named in the Senate report whose country of origin is one of the seven terror-associated countries included in the vetting executive order: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The Senate researchers were not able to obtain complete information on each convicted terrorist, so it is possible that more of the convicted terrorists are from these countries.

The United States has admitted terrorists from all of the seven dangerous countries:

Somalia: 20
Yemen: 19
Iraq: 19
Syria: 7
Iran: 4
Libya: 2
Sudan: 1
Total: 72

According to the report, at least 17 individuals entered as refugees from these terror-prone countries. Three came in on student visas and one arrived on a diplomatic visa.

At least 25 of these immigrants eventually became citizens. Ten were lawful permanent residents, and four were illegal aliens.

Al-Shabaab Magazine: ‘We’ll Keep Marching Till We Reach the State of Maine’ By Bridget Johnson

A news issue of Al-Shabaab’s magazine calls on jihadists to emulate the British converts who murdered a soldier on a Woolwich street in 2013, along with a poem warning that jihadists would be “marching” to Maine.

The issue of Gaidi Mtaani also features a lengthy story about late al-Qaeda recruiter and cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, whose lectures are cited by American terrorists to this day, playing paintball in San Diego in the 1990s.

The Somali terror group, allied with al-Qaeda, has previously urged Western jihadists to draw inspiration from the attack on 25-year-old Fusilier Lee Rigby, who was first struck by a car and then stabbed and hacked by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. London-born Adebolajo, 28, who was raised Christian before converting to Islam, filmed a statement before police arrived at the murder scene, vowing “you people will never be safe.” Both are serving life in prison.

Al-Shabaab’s magazine dubs Adebolajo 2013’s “Muslim of the Year,” declaring “good men are hard to find.”

“In an age stained with defeatism and cowardice, a room full of Mujahid Adebolajo is exactly what today’s world needs,” the article, bylined Abu Maryam, states. “…If a pictures speaks a thousand words, then blood in British streets speak a million words. Knowing that the British Government only understands the language of violence, instead of writing his letter on paper, Adebolajo decided to write his letter on the streets of Southeast London using the blood of a British soldier.”

Adebolajo was “practically teaching the British public and the world in general, the elementary principle of universalism” through the murder, the terror group argued, with eye-for-an-eye reasoning.

“World media and left wing conservatives can deceptively portray Mujahid as a psychopathic slayer if they please, but after watching the video and hearing his words, deep down inside everyone knew he was making perfect sense. Amidst the hustle and bustle of London streets, specifically targeting a British soldier once stationed in Afghanistan clearly expresses the political motives behind the killings and disproves the fallacy that the attack was a haphazard intent to randomly slay Britons,” the article continues.

“It’s quite ignorant and presumptuous of non-Muslims and Muslims alike to think that the driving force of Mujahid’s actions were fueled by an inherent disdain for British culture or values,” the terror group argues, noting that if Adebolajo just wanted to kill fellow Britons there were more people at the scene he could have attacked.

“Their message couldn’t be any simpler, ‘We swear by Allaah the All-Mighty we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.’ These same axioms expressed by Mujahid in England, were reiterated by Nidal Hasan, Mohamed Mirah, and the same concepts that will continue to be personified through bloodshed in Western streets, unless taken seriously.” Hasan killed 13 at Fort Hood in 2009, while Mohammed Merah killed French soldiers and Jewish children during a 2012 shooting spree in Toulouse and Montauban.

Merah was born in Toulouse while Hasan was born in Virginia, keeping with the article’s theme of urging attacks at home by jihadists native to Western countries.

A poem bylined by the same author of the article says to “tell the West we’re a roaring flame/That can’t be doused that can’t be tamed/And until you cease your bombs and planes/We’ll keep marching till we reach the State of Maine.” CONTINUE AT SITE

DHS had been warned about radicalized Muslim who allegedly murdered Denver officer by Carlos Garcia

The awful murder of 56-year-old Denver transit officer Scott Von Lanken is made all the more worse after reports surfaced that the Department of Homeland Security had been warned about the alleged killer by members of his mosque. The attack took place Tuesday when Joshua Cummings approached the uniformed transit officer as he was helping two women, according to police. Cummings reportedly told him, “Do as I tell you,” and then fired a gun into his neck, fatally injuring him.

Police captured him blocks away and recovered a firearm.

Cummings is an Army veteran and a convert to Islam, but representatives of his mosque grew apprehensive of how radicalized he was becoming. They had sent a letter to DHS warning about Cummings in December.

Suspect Joshua Cummings, 37, attended a mosque event and raised red flags after expressing perceived extremist views and a willingness to “fight,” according to the email that representatives of the mosque sent to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in December. It’s unclear when the mosque event occurred.

“He seems pretty advanced in his path of radicalization,” the email warned DHS. “He also feels that it [is] okay to fight now (not jihad/struggle, but actually fight), here to establish the rule of Islam.”

The letter concluded with details about how they were trying to pacify his radicalism with counseling from Imams, but it wasn’t working. “He is not listening to reason.”

Homeland Security confirmed in a statement that they had received the letter, adding, “It was immediately referred to the appropriate law enforcement agencies for review.”

Scott Von Lanken was a devoted husband who worked 65 hours a week “to provide for his family, including an adult daughter with disabilities,” reported Kyle Clark of 9 News in Denver.

Von Lanken had also been a Christian pastor at an Assembly of God church in Loveland, Colorado, and later at a church in Ohio.

Cummings faces first degree murder charges according to ABC News, and will appear in court Friday.

Jihadist Groups in the US: What Next? by Benjamin Weingarten

Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) continues freely to operate in America. In the wee hours of election night 2016, in fact, its Los Angeles office leader called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The Trump administration has stated its commitment to fighting Islamic supremacism, including the Muslim Brotherhood itself.

To what lengths would America’s leaders go to protect a group that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) deemed a terrorist organization?

A bombshell new report from the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reveals the alarming answer.

It involves a man who in his almost 50 years of public life has done more for America’s enemies — first of the Communist variety and later of the jihadist brand — than perhaps any other: Iran lobbyist-in-chief John Kerry.

In the most recent case, he did so in secret, apparently well aware of the political consequences of exposing the potentially catastrophic policy he was pursuing to the light of day.

As IPT’s report details, Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) were classified as terrorist groups by the UAE in 2014, as two of the 83 entities identified as such for their ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Furious at such a charge, CAIR pushed Secretary of State Kerry to lobby on its behalf. Kerry’s State Department reportedly complied, meeting with UAE officials regularly to plead CAIR’s case.

State signaled such a stance publicly almost from day one. As IPT notes:

At a daily State Department press briefing two days after UAE released its list, a spokesman said that State does not “consider CAIR or MAS to be terrorist groups” but that it was seeking more information from UAE about their decision. He added that “as part of our routine engagement with a broad spectrum of faith based organizations, a range of U.S. government officials have met with officials of CAIR and MAS. We at the State Department regularly meet with a wide range of faith based groups to hear their views even if some of their views expressed at times are controversial.”

“Controversial” is an interesting way of describing the views of a group that makes common cause with jihadists and jihadist sympathizers. There is an irony, as IPT recounts:

Just days before the UAE’s 2014 designation of CAIR as a terrorist group in the organization’s San Francisco chapter bestowed its “Promoting Justice” award to Sami Al-Arian and his family. Al-Arian secretly ran an American support network for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group in the late 1980s and early 1990s. PIJ was responsible for terrorist attacks which killed dozens of Israelis and several Americans.

CAIR’s jihadi ties are numerous and longstanding, involving not only the links of its founders and present leaders to Hamas, and as critics say, apologists for Islamic terrorism, but also for impeding counterterrorism efforts. Lawyers in a class-action lawsuit representing the family of slain former FBI counterterrorism official John P. O’Neill — who perished in the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center — named CAIR part of a criminal conspiracy to promote “radical Islamic terrorism,” and declared that CAIR has

“actively sought to hamper governmental anti-terrorism efforts by direct propaganda activities aimed at police, first-responders, and intelligence agencies through so-called sensitivity training. Their goal is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police departments and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities.”