RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Times recently published a long investigative report by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore on how foreign countries buy political influence through Washington think tanks. Judging from Twitter and other leading journalistic indicators, the paper’s original reporting appears to have gone almost entirely unread by human beings anywhere on the planet. In part, that’s because the Times’ editors decided to gift their big investigative scoop with the dry-as-dust title “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,” which sounds like the headline for an article in a D.C. version of The Onion. There is also the fact that the first 10 paragraphs of the Times piece are devoted to that highly controversial global actor, Norway, and its attempts to purchase the favors of The Center for Global Development, which I confess I’d never heard of before, although I live in Washington and attend think-tank events once or twice a week.

Except, buried deep in the Times’ epic snoozer was a world-class scoop related to one of the world’s biggest and most controversial stories—something so startling, and frankly so grotesque, that I have to bring it up again here: Martin Indyk, the man who ran John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, whose failure in turn set off this summer’s bloody Gaza War, cashed a $14.8 million check from Qatar. Yes, you heard that right: In his capacity as vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the prestigious Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk took an enormous sum of money from a foreign government that, in addition to its well-documented role as a funder of Sunni terror outfits throughout the Middle East, is the main patron of Hamas—which happens to be the mortal enemy of both the State of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.

But far from trumpeting its big scoop, the Times seems to have missed it entirely, even allowing Indyk to opine that the best way for foreign governments to shape policy is “scholarly, independent research, based on objective criteria.” Really? It is pretty hard to imagine what the words “independent” and “objective” mean coming from a man who while going from Brookings to public service and back to Brookings again pocketed $14.8 million in Qatari cash. At least the Times might have asked Indyk a few follow-up questions, like: Did he cash the check from Qatar before signing on to lead the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians? Did the check clear while he was in Jerusalem, or Ramallah? Or did the Qatari money land in the Brookings account only after Indyk gave interviews and speeches blaming the Israelis for his failure? We’ll never know now. But whichever way it happened looks pretty awful.

Now, with the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate having captured key oil wells in the Middle East this year, foreign oil has become an even more lethal financial weapon-of-choice for those seeking to destroy democracy and further escalate the War on Terror.

That President Barack Obama failed even to mention oil as a critical factor in the war against IS during his speech to the nation on September 10, is an omission both revealing and dangerous in terms of how his administration wants to depict the stakes involved in this latest confrontation with the jihadis.

America’s failure to achieve energy independence over the last 30 years has resulted in exponential oil price increases that have hurt our nation. Trillions of dollars have left, and billions more continue to leave our economy to purchase oil from countries that seek our destruction, and to support madrassas [Islamic religious schools] that teach new Muslim generations how to hate — and worse.

Now, with the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State [IS] having captured key oil wells in the Middle East this year, foreign oil has become an even more lethal financial weapon-of-choice for those seeking to destroy democracy and further escalate the War on Terror.

Recent reported developments: The Islamic State accelerated its rampage through northern Iraq at the beginning of the summer. Its terrorists quickly captured seven oil fields in the region with the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels of oil per day – assets worth, at international market prices, around $240 million per month.

The IS met virtually no armed resistance as it seized these fields. Indeed, two of them, Najma and Qayara, had already been abandoned as far back as February, when Sonangol, an Angolan company with a 75% stake in the fields, announced that its operations were no longer feasible because of the prevailing climate of insecurity.

ne Pakistani recruiter of child suicide bombers describes these children as “tools provided by God.”

Another Muslim cleric in a madrassa [Islamic boys’ school] describes child suicide bombers as “a gift from Allah that we have an unlimited number willing to be sacrificed to teach Americans a lesson.”

Using children as suicide bombers will stop when… they stop “condoning the killing of innocents.”

The most unconscionable form of child abuse is perhaps the least addressed by human rights organizations: the recruitment and indoctrination of children by jihadi extremists who transform them into suicide bombers and child soldiers.

Hamas’s intentional targeting of Israel by missiles this summer from within densely populated neighborhoods of Gaza filled with Palestinian children is the most callous form of child-abuse yet devised.

During the recent hostilities between Hamas and Israel, media focus remained on the number of civilians — especially children — killed in Gaza. There was almost no mention, however of the cynical intent by Hamas to draw Israeli fire on its own people.

This deliberate infliction of harm and death on one’s own populace was likely designed to win the propaganda war in an attempt to demonize Israel in the court of world opinion.

The absolute disregard by Hamas of its own citizenry underscores the brutal nature of this terrorist sub-state. It also raises the question of how, given the opportunity, Hamas would treat Israeli non-combatants. Actually, that can already be seen in the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish boys in Israel — followed a few days later by intense rocket fire — which precipitated the recent Gaza War. Hamas’s apparent tendency to exploit the lives of innocents should not surprise: Islamic radicals seem to have a long history of abusing children to advance their goals.

Just recently, for instance, there was the mass kidnapping by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram of young girls from their school in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno — an event covered, at least for a while, by the media. Before that, there was there was the attempted murder of the 15 year old Malala Yousafzsai, the outspoken Pakistani girl shot and wounded in the head by the Taliban because she wanted an education.

Where is the reporting, however, on the approximately 500 honor-killing murders of young girls and women in Pakistan each year?[1]

The “most transparent administration in history” is once again revealing the rank hypocrisy of President Obama’s assessment. In a motion filed Monday night, lawyers from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to delay the transfer of documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, until after her rulings requiring that transfer can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. If their bid is successful, it could push the appeals process past the Obama administration’s time in office. In short, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is trying to run out the clock.

Last July, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the DOJ to turn over a “Vaughn index” of all Fast and Furious-requested documents sought by Judicial Watch, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in June 2012. The records sought by Judicial Watch were those withheld from the Oversight Committee when President Obama cited executive privilege in a transparent effort to protect his Attorney General. U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates lifted the 16-month delay, despite contentions by the DOJ that turning over the records would interfere with litigation between the agency and the Oversight Committee, which had subpoenaed the same documents.

Bates’ ruling was clear:

In the [February 15, 2013] order granting the stay, this court explicitly noted that the DOJ ‘does not seek, and the court will not award, an indefinite stay pending ultimate resolution of the House Committee litigation,’ and that ‘the benefits of delaying this case might well [become] too attenuated to justify any further delay …Because many of the issues to be resolved in this case do not overlap with the House committee, and because resolving those issues will not risk upsetting the delicate balance of powers in subpoena disputes between the political branches, the Court will require DOJ to produce a Vaughn index here.

Bates also noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” the executive privilege claims made by Obama preventing these documents from being seen by Congress and the American public.

A month later, with the dispute now being adjudicated by Berman, the DOJ was also ordered to turn over a “privilege log,” a.k.a. a list of the documents being withheld. Both orders were supposed to be fulfilled by Oct. 1, 2014.

On Monday the DOJ made it clear they will make yet another attempt to defy both orders. “The Department respectfully submits that it would be preferable for the parties, this Court, and the D.C. Circuit — if an appeal were taken — to have any injunctive order await the conclusion of the district court litigation to allow for orderly and complete appellate proceedings,” DOJ lawyers wrote.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/islamic-state-find-us-soldiers-homes-show-up-and-slaughter-them
Law enforcement bulletin warned of ISIS urging jihad attacks on US soil : Jana Winter

A law enforcement bulletin obtained by FoxNews.com warned that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for “lone wolves” to attack U.S. soldiers in America in recent months, citing one tweet that called for jihadists to find service members’ addresses online and then “show up and slaughter them.”

There will be “a continued call – by Western fighters in Syria and terrorist organizations – for lone offender attacks against U.S. military facilities and personnel,” warned a July law enforcement intelligence bulletin from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, a state-run agency that gathers, assesses and shares threat information and works with the Department of Homeland Security. “These threats will most likely increase should the U.S. or its allies attack the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) in Syria or Iraq.”

In one example cited in the bulletin, a British jihadist encouraged radicals still living in the West to use Facebook and LinkedIn to find and target soldiers.

“You could literally search for soldiers, find their town, photos of them, look for address in Yellowbook or something,” the tweet read. “Then show up and slaughter them.”

On Thursday, Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told FoxNews.com that “there is no credible intelligence at this time to suggest that there is an active plot by (ISIS) to carry out an attack in the United States.”

“Public postings by people claiming to be (ISIS) supporters on social media threatening to carry out attacks against the United States and our allies have been made, and we are aware of them,” Boogaard said in a statement. “The product referenced is based on such open source social media reports from earlier this summer and is not considered to reference specific, credible evidence of a plot against the homeland.”

The bulletin came out long before Tuesday’s indictment of an upstate New York man on a raft of terror-related charges, including attempting to kill “officers and employees of the United States. Mufid Elfgeeh, 30, of Rochester, was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on three counts of attempting to provide material support and resources to Islamic State. Elfgeeh was arrested in late May in a Walmart parking lot after a sting in which an FBI informant offered to sell him guns and silencers, which Elfgeeh allegedly wanted to use to kill returning American troops as well as Shiite Muslims living in the region.

Killing U.S. troops on American soil is an increasing focus of jihadists, according to the bulletin, titled “Continued Threat to Military Personnel from Al Qaeda Inspired Homegrown Violent Extremists.” It was sent out on July 8, 2014, “in response to recent social media messaging from Western fighters in Syria calling for attacks against “soldiers in the West.” Instead of luring radicalized Americans to the Middle East, Islamic State will likely encourage them to stay home and kill U.S. soldiers here, the bulletin warned.

Fresh terror busts in Australia expose a common Achilles’ heel of the West: Indiscriminate refugee policies turn free countries into breeding grounds for jihad. It’s the same game in America. Soldiers of Islam have weaponized our blind generosity against us.

In Sydney this week, authorities detained a half-dozen Muslim plotters and arrested a top collaborator in an alleged conspiracy to kidnap and behead a random Australian citizen. The accused mastermind? Mohammad Ali Baryalei, an Afghan refugee turned Aussie Islamic State recruiter. He and his aristocratic family were welcomed Down Under decades ago. Baryalei returned the favor by taking to the streets of Sydney to recruit and radicalize dozens of fellow Muslim immigrants or their children.

Baryalei’s minions include Australian jihadist Khaled Sharrouf, the homicidal son of Lebanese immigrants. Sharrouf is now based in Syria, where he infamously tweeted a photo of his elementary-school-age son brandishing a severed human head.

The Sydney Beheading Bust comes on the heels of a separate outbreak of violence by Afghan refugees aligned with the terror group Hezbollah. In late August, Aussie police broke up a bloody riot involving members of the “420 gang” — Muslim teenage boys and young men who post sword-wielding, AK-47-toting selfies on social media. The self-described “Shia soldiers” quote Hezbollah militant imam Hassan Nasrallah online, while wreaking havoc in Sydney slums offline.

International “human rights” wags have attacked Australian officials for trying to crack down on unfettered immigration from terror-sponsoring states. Now, many of those ungrateful imports are crying “Islamophobia” as law-enforcement authorities try to stop the head-choppers from spilling blood on their soil.

Australia, we feel your pain. America’s unselective and desultory asylum and refugee policies have also enabled jihadists of all stripes and blades to recruit, convert, plot, pillage, rape, and kill.

In our heartland, Minneapolis has become “Little Mogadishu” — a haven for Somali refugees targeted by Islamic supremacists. It’s a deadly two-way street. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted in The Grand Jihad: “We not only import Somali aliens, including their ‘traditional leaders.’ We also send back aspiring Islamist militants, including suicide bombers. Since 2006, the FBI has detected that many Somalis are returning to fight on behalf of al-Shabaab, and more are launched from Minneapolis than from any other U.S. haven.”

Some insults and indignations stick. Some injustices don’t fade.

Back when I was around 15 years old I was offered a summertime job. This was in Montreal. I would have to present myself for a brief interview, but since a high authority in town had recommended me, the fix was in, it was in the bag. The interview was a formality.

The man behind the big desk began asking questions…strange questions.

“Your father is Polish. Yes?”

“No, my father is Jewish.”

“I understand,” said the man. “But he is a Polish Jew.”

I did not know what that was, and I said so. Polish? Spanish? What’s the difference?

“Polish Jews,” the man persisted, “are known to be Talmudic, no? Bookish, studious.”

True, my father knew the depths of Torah and Talmud – but bookish? He worked 14 hours a day in the leather trade.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean they tend to be lazy.”

Western nations keep the talks going, to justify costly de-carbonization programs at home.

At a perilous juncture in world affairs and with the international system visibly breaking down — the first forcible annexation of European territory since Hitler’s war; a bunch of fanatics and psychopaths, perpetrators of a double genocide, seizing control of a vast swath of the Levant, and American leadership exhausted — the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is convening a summit of world leaders to discuss, of all things, global warming. True, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton calls it the most consequential and urgent set of challenges facing the world, but the leaders of Canada, Germany, China, and India appear not to agree and are giving next week’s meeting in New York a pass.

The idea for the summit is Mr. Ban’s, who has made global warming the overriding mission of the United Nations since becoming secretary general in 2007. No previous secretary general has evinced so little interest in the great matters of peace and war and has so little to show for his efforts. Were it not for the prestige of his job, Mr. Ban would cut a hapless figure, over the years making a string of histrionic warnings and absurdly optimistic forecasts of the imminence of a global warming treaty.

Those might have been understandable at the outset of his term, before hopes for a treaty were repeatedly dashed. Mr. Ban was in Bali at the end of his first year hailing the annual climate talks as the chance to usher in a “a new age of green economics.” After the collapse of attempts to agree on a new treaty two years later, he told delegates at Copenhagen, “You sealed a deal,” which they hadn’t, and promised to have a legally binding treaty in 2010, which there wasn’t.

Having lost the race to have a new treaty in place before the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period, Mr. Ban declared at the start of the 2012 Durban conference, “It would be difficult to overstate the gravity of this moment.” So he gave it his best shot: “Without exaggeration, we can say: the future of our planet is at stake.” In fact, Durban was the high water mark of hopes for a son-of-Kyoto. Agreement in Durban on a road map to an outcome “with legal force” was later eviscerated by developing nations at subsequent conferences.

The fact that ISIS focuses on beheadings rather than elaborate plots makes them that much harder to foil.

On Thursday, Australian authorities claimed they thwarted a plot by supporters of the Islamic State to grab random people off the street and then behead the captured citizens on videotape. Australia’s attorney general said that the massive raid, the largest counterterrorism operation in the nation’s history, involving more than 800 police officers and raids of at least twelve properties, was necessary because, “If the . . . police had not acted today, there is a likelihood that this would have happened.”

Australian prime minister Tony Abbott confirmed that the raids were prompted by intercepted phone calls, from an Australian of Afghan descent believed to be Mohammad Ali Baryalei. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he is suspected to be the “most senior Australian member of the terrorist group Islamic State, having traveled to Syria in April last year.” A proselytizer for the “Street Dawah Movement,” Barylei “was outspoken and wouldn’t shy from speaking the truth regardless,” a former fellow Dawah member told Fairfax Media. “He wasn’t pleased with living in Australian society and wanted to live in an Islamic society away from open alcoholism, homosexuality, fornication, drugs, and capitalism.”

Baryalei is credited with recruiting at least two fellow Australians to the cause. One, Khaled Sharrouf, infamously tweeted pictures of himself executing prisoners in Iraq and images of his seven-year-old son holding a severed head in Syria. Another fellow Australian, Mohamed Elomar, has also released images of himself holding the decapitated heads of his “enemies.”

So here’s the troubling question: Why did Baryalei bother making the phone calls?

We’ve been hearing for months that the Islamic State is brilliant at social media. The terror group can reach out to supporters, sympathizers, and assassins all around the world with a single tweet, Facebook post, or YouTube video.

If the terror group wants Muslims in Sydney, Australia — or in New York City, or in Topeka, Kansas — to grab innocent people off the street and saw their heads off, all it needs to do is say so. The word will get to the intended ears quickly enough.

Republicans have multiple plans to offer basically the same health-care at lower cost.

Supporters of the Obama administration like to create the impression that there is no viable alternative to the Affordable Care Act — i.e., Obamacare. But that is demonstrably not true. Republican senators Richard Burr, Tom Coburn, and Orrin Hatch introduced a plan earlier this year that would cover just as many people with insurance as Obamacare at a fraction of the cost.

Now we have confirmation, in the form of a new cost estimate, that a similarly constructed but slightly different proposal would also cost less, while covering nearly the same number of people.

The plan, developed and promoted by the 2017 Project — a group dedicated to developing a conservative reform agenda — shares several key features with Burr-Coburn-Hatch:

It repeals the ACA.

It leaves in place the employer-sponsored system of coverage through which the vast majority of working Americans and their families get insurance today.

It would provide new “continuous coverage” protection for people who stay enrolled in health insurance. They could move from employer coverage to the individual market, and vice versa, without their health status factoring into the premiums they owe. Their preexisting medical conditions would also have to be covered by insurance plans, and they couldn’t be denied coverage by an insurer based on their health status.

It provides new federal funding for high-risk pools, aimed at ensuring affordable options for persons with expensive conditions and minimizing the premium effects of more high-cost patients entering the individual insurance market.

It provides new, age-adjusted tax credits for persons who do not get their health insurance through an employer. Workers in firms with 50 or fewer employees could opt for the credit in lieu of tax-exempt employer-paid premiums.

It places an upper limit on the tax preference for employer-paid premiums, pegged initially to a premium level exceeded by 25 percent of employer plans.

It allows participants in the Medicaid program to get the tax credits and thus enroll in the same private insurance plans available to others in the individual insurance market.