Displaying posts categorized under

ANTI-SEMITISM

DHS’s ongoing challenge: Securing soft targets :Chuck Brooks,

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as the vice president for government relations & marketing for Sutherland Government Solutions. He served at the Department of Homeland Security as the first director of legislative affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate.

In response to the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said there is “no credible or specific intelligence regarding a similar plot that has been uncovered” in the U.S.

Regardless, the Brussels attacks have certainly brought a new focus by DHS, the intelligence community and law enforcement to mitigate future threats to soft targets.

Security is based on increased vigilance and layering elements of intelligence, surveillance technologies and trained personnel to guard vulnerabilities. The real challenge has always been deciding how much security to allocate to what, where and when.

Democratic societies by their nature are open and accessible, which poses a difficult challenge to secure all soft targets in public places such as airports, trains, buses, malls, schools, stadiums and hospitals. Or, for that matter, to secure any place where many people like to socially or commercially gather. The emergence of new capabilities could enable DHS to address these vulnerability issues, and there are protocols and systems that can make a difference.

DHS is exploring futuristic checkpoints that integrate the intelligent fusion of sensor components. The set-up could consist of behavioral sensors that try to measure hostile intent with micro facial and auditory sensors. Other physiological sensors could monitor respiratory, cardio, thermal and iris reactions of passengers who may mean harm.

These checkpoints could be combined with high-definition thermal cameras equipped with facial recognition software that feeds into real-time databases of suspected terrorists. The checkpoints could also use millimeter wave or 3-D imaging with stand-off abilities to detect bombs at a distance.

The Iranian Nuclear Deal: The Gift That Keeps on Giving How Obama plans to open up the American banking system to the Mullahs. April 1, 2016 Sarah N. Stern

Last July, when the Administration had been intent on closing a nuclear deal with Iran and selling it to a skeptical American Congress and public, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, emphatically stating that after the deal, Iran will continue to be denied access to the American banking system. “Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S. dollars through New York, hold correspondent account relationships with U.S. financial institutions, or enter into financing arrangements with U.S. banks,” he said.

And while testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in September, Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam Szubin said, “No Iranian banks can access the U.S. financial system; not to open an account, not to purchase a security, and not even to execute a dollarized transaction‎ where a split seconds worth of business is done in a New York clearing bank.”

There are a multitude of reasons why this is an excellent idea. For starters: Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and launders money to be sent all around the world to their terrorist network and terror proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq , Bahrain, Yemen and Gaza.

Allowing Iran to participate in the US banking system will only add more dollars into their coffers to be transferred to their destabilizing and terrorist proxies. In February, the Financial Action Task Force, an inter-governmental body which is established to protect the international financial system from threats to its integrity, issued a public statement that “reaffirms its call on members and urges all jurisdictions to advise their financial institutions to give special attention to business relationships and transactions with Iran, including Iranian companies and financial institutions.”

Obama Equates American and Cuban Revolutions Confusing tyranny with liberty. Humberto Fontova

Right before his first tango in Buenos Aires, President Obama addressed the Cuban people (and the world) in an instantly famous speech from Havana’s Grand Theater. Among the highlights:

“Here’s my message to the Cuban government and the Cuban people: The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution, America’s revolution, Cuba’s revolution, the liberation movements around the world, these ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy.” (U.S. President Obama, Havana Cuba, March 22, 2016.)

Let’s hope this astounding observation resulted from bad staff work. Because, in fact, from the mid-fifties on, both Obama’s recent host (Raul Castro) and his recent mural idol (Che Guevara) were Soviet agents committed to creating a Stalinist Cuba—a vassal to the Communist motherland.

Oh, I know, I know — the media, your professors, the History Channel, Francis Ford Coppola, etc., etc., all claim the Cuban revolutionaries were noble “nationalists” who were pushed kicking and screaming into the arms of Mother Russia by blockheaded Yankee “bullying.”

John Kerry’s New Terror Treason Befriending Communist terrorists with American blood on their hands. Daniel Greenfield

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader.

But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda.

Timochenko is a Communist who was trained at the USSR’s infamous Patrice Lumumba University. The State Department accuses him of ordering the kidnapping of Americans and responsibility for much of the cocaine that is smuggled into the United States. But none of that bothered Kerry who accepted a signed copy of a memoir by the terror group’s former leader which was addressed to “Senor” Kerry.

The signatures in Kerry’s new keepsake include Pablo Catatumbo, a FARC leader with a $2.5 million reward on his head from the State Department, who is wanted for “the production, manufacture, and distribution of hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and the world” and “the murder of hundreds of people who violated or interfered with the FARC’s cocaine policies.”Also signing Kerry’s book was Iván Márquez, who has a $5 million reward on his head for most of the same reasons.

Two of the men sitting opposite John Kerry had been convicted of forcing children to join the terror group as soldiers and sex slaves. FARC runs on thousands of child soldiers and sex slaves. Little girls as young as 7 and 9 were brought into the terror group whose fronts have a “quota” of women to fill. Families that refuse to turn over their daughters to FARC have been massacred as a warning to others.

DHS Secretary: No ‘Specific, Credible Threat’ to U.S. Except ‘Terrorist-Inspired Acts’ By Bridget Johnson (huh???!!!!)see note

Naive or stupid? And this dolt is in charge of homeland security ?rsk

The Homeland Security secretary said that while there is no “specific, credible piece of intel about a plot of the Belgian type here in the United States, we continue to be very concerned about terrorist-inspired acts that could be carried out here in the homeland.”

DHS leader Jeh Johnson told MSNBC today that the administration is “continually concerned about foreign terrorist travel, and we continue to focus on those things.”

“We know from their public calls and from social media and the Internet that ISIL has made efforts and called for attacks here in the homeland,” he said. “And that’s — that’s one of the things we’re focused on right now. Terrorist-inspired attacks are part of the new era that we’re in right now.”

President Obama convened a meeting of “key members of his counterterrorism and homeland security team,” according to the White House, on Monday.

“The President was briefed that there is currently no specific, credible intelligence of any plot to conduct similar attacks here in the United States,” the press secretary’s office said in a readout of the meeting. “The President’s team also updated him on recent expanded information-sharing with international partners and ways that the United States is working to disrupt and counter external plots emanating from ISIL-controlled territory.”

“Additionally, the President received briefings on ongoing efforts to address ISIL’s use of the Internet to recruit followers, incite them to violence, and mobilize them to engage in attacks in the United States and abroad.”

The White House said Obama “directed his team to continue to intensify efforts to degrade and destroy ISIL and to ensure that the United States is doing everything possible to disrupt any ISIL external plotting efforts, including by continuing our strong leadership in the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.”

Obama told the nation that there was no specific, credible threat against the homeland before and after the Dec. 2 San Bernardino terrorist attack — in statements reassuring Thanksgiving and Christmas travelers.

Johnson said today that “San Bernardino, Chattanooga, the attempt in Garland City, Texas, last year, reflect this new era that we’re in.”

“The FBI has made a number of arrests of those who have been inspired by ISIL’s calls, by al-Qaida’s calls, and that’s what we’re focused on right now in addition to the traditional concerns about aviation,” he said.

The DHS secretary urged Americans to “continue to go to public events, public gatherings, enjoy holidays, freedom to travel, freedom to associate, celebrate our immigrant heritage, but be vigilant and be aware and know that a lot of homeland security and law enforcement officials are working overtime to address the existing threats.”

Obama State Dept. Refuses to Confirm Pakistani Terrorists Targeted Christians on Easter By Debra Heine

State Department spokesman John Kirby refused to confirm “a hundred percent” on Monday what the rest of the world had already figured out: The suicide bombers in Lahore, Pakistan, on Sunday had specifically targeted Christians celebrating Easter. After an initial State Department statement neglected to mention the fact that Christians were targeted, Kirby did acknowledge yesterday that “that certainly appears to have been the case.”

The devastating blast killed more than 70 Pakistanis, 29 of them children, leaving more than 300 wounded.

Separately, at a White House press briefing yesterday, Press Secretary Josh Earnest did acknowledge that Christians were the intended targets of the bombing, but he stressed that most of the victims were Muslims.

Kirby told reporters that he did not have “the fidelity of information to confirm overtly” what the terrorists responsible for the bombing have already admitted.

Ahsanullah Ahsan, a spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, the breakaway Taliban faction claiming responsibility for the attacks, told the Associated Press on Sunday that the suicide bomber “deliberately targeted the Christian community celebrating Easter.” He also said the attack was meant to protest Pakistan’s military operation in the tribal regions.

Referring to the State Department’s statement condemning the attack, which conspicuously contained no reference to the targeting of Christians, AP reporter Matt Lee asked, “There’s been some commentary about why you guys didn’t mention either the Easter connection or the Christian connection in your condemnatory statements over the weekend and again today. Do you believe the claim of responsibility that Christians were targeted and are targets?”

“We have no indications that their claims of responsibility are false, though I can’t sit here and confirm it a hundred percent,” Kirby said. “Therefore I have no indications that their, the motivation that they claim was the reason is also false, but this is all going to be investigated by Pakistanis.”

Trump Is Obama Squared Two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem America. Bret Stephens

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-is-obama-squared-1459207095

Donald Trump is Barack Obama squared. Not as a matter of rhetorical style, where the president is glib and grammatical, while the developer is rambling and coarse. Not as a matter of economic instincts, where Mr. Obama is a social democrat while Mr. Trump is a mercantilist.

And not as a matter of temperament. Mr. Obama is aloof and calculated. Mr. Trump loves to get in your face.
ENLARGE
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

But leave smaller differences aside. The president and The Donald are two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but fundamentally broken. Both men revel in their disdain for the political system and the rules governing it. Both men see themselves not as politicians but as movement leaders. Both are prone to telling fairy tales about their lives and careers.

And both believe they are better than everyone else.

“I think I’m a better speech writer than my speech writers,” Mr. Obama told an aide in 2008. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my director.” Compare that to Mr. Trump earlier this month, when asked on MSNBC who he turns to for foreign policy advice. “My primary consultant is myself.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Another Terrorist Strike, Another Obama Lecture The president knows that the U.S. could defeat Islamic State outright, but he lacks the political will to lead the fight. Jason Riley

http://www.wsj.com/articles/another-terrorist-strike-another-obama-lecture-1459291616

President Obama’s weekly radio address on Saturday was his latest attempt to reassure the country that the U.S. is making significant progress in the fight against Islamic terrorism, notwithstanding the Brussels airport attack last week and the Paris massacre in November. Alas, it didn’t take long for reality to contradict the soothing rhetoric. The very next day, a Taliban splinter group inspired by Islamic State bombed a crowded park in Lahore, Pakistan, killing more than 70 people, mostly women and children.

“Members of the Christian community who were celebrating Easter today were our prime target,” a Taliban spokesman told NBC News. And the women and children weren’t collateral damage, mind you, they were the targets, according to Lahore’s police chief. Americans argue over whether hardened jihadists should be waterboarded, while the terrorists prey on the softest of targets.

Pakistan is a country of 190 million people, and 97% identify as Muslim. Christians make up less than 2% of the population but are under constant attack from Islamic terrorists. More than a dozen people died in two church bombings in Lahore last April, and some 80 people were killed in a 2013 church bombing in the city of Peshawar. Yet Mr. Obama spent the second half of his radio address lecturing Americans on the importance of religious tolerance. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Art of National Suicide America can still avoid sharing Europe’s fate. But only if we take action. By Victor Davis Hanson

Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.

After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations.

As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology.

The immigration policies of France and Belgium are unfortunately also de facto those of Greece. And a petulant and poor Greece, licking its wounds over its European Union brawl with northern-European banks, either cannot or will not control entrance into its territory — Europe’s window on the Middle East. No European country can take the security measures necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.

As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and balances on statism through their representatives in Congress. Yet the ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic, politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans. We already see how the capricious erosion of federal immigration law has brought chaos to the borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a scary thing for a federal power arbitrarily to render its own inviolable laws null and void — and then watch the concrete consequences of such lawlessness fall on others, who have been deprived of recourse to constitutional protections of their own existential interests.

Europe’s immigration policy is a disaster — and for reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are incidental, not essential, to one’s persona, no courage to assume that an immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique leftism.

Naturally, then, Europeans are unable to understand why a young Libyan came to Europe in the first place, and why apparently under no circumstances does he wish to return home. Specifically, Europeans — for a variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any concrete and positive fashion. The result is that Europe cannot impose on a would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run like Sharia courts. It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently rejected. I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that terrorists might just as well be Christians.

Even worse is the European notion of medieval penance: Because one in the concrete present apparently wants little to do with a Moroccan second-generation ghetto dweller, he fabricates abstract leftist bromides to square the circle of hypocrisy and assuage his guilt — sort of like Hillary Clinton or Mark Zuckerberg calling for perennial open borders to justify their Wall Street–funded luxury and tony apartheid existence.

In Europe, immigrants are political tools of the Left. The rapid influx of vast numbers of unassimilated, uneducated, poor, and often illegal newcomers may violate every rule of successful immigration policy. Yet the onrush does serve the purposes of the statist, who demagogues for an instantaneous equality of result. Bloc voters, constituents of bigger government, needy recipients of state largesse, and perennial whiners about inequality are all fodder for European multicultural leftists, who always seek arguments for more of themselves.

Obama: ‘Our Most Important Partners Are American Muslims’ Susan Jones

“ISIL poses a threat to the entire civilized world,” President Obama said in his Saturday radio address, as he explained what he’s doing to counter the threat posed by radical Islamic extremism — a phrase he refuses to use.

In addition to waging war and diplomacy, Obama said Americans, for their own good, must welcome Muslims into their midst:

“As we move forward in this fight, we have to wield another weapon alongside our airstrikes, our military, our counterterrorism work, and our diplomacy. And that’s the power of our example. Our openness to refugees fleeing ISIL’s violence. Our determination to win the battle against ISIL’s hateful and violent propaganda — a distorted view of Islam that aims to radicalize young Muslims to their cause.

“In that effort, our most important partners are American Muslims. That’s why we have to reject any attempt to stigmatize Muslim-Americans, and their enormous contributions to our country and our way of life.

“Such attempts are contrary to our character, to our values, and to our history as a nation built around the idea of religious freedom. It’s also counterproductive. It plays right into the hands of terrorists who want to turn us against one another; who need a reason to recruit more people to their hateful cause.

“I am a father. And just like any other parent, the awful images from Brussels draw my thoughts to my own children’s safety. That’s also why you should be confident that defeating ISIL remains our top military, intelligence, and national security priority.”

Obama said the terrorists will fail, because “we will defeat them” with our values, our way of life, and our vision of the future.

Secretary of State John Kerry, interviewed on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” was asked if he is worried about another terror attack in Europe.

“Well, I think everybody is concerned, because for several years now, foreign fighters have been returning from Syria or from other locations and implanting themselves in the communities,” Kerry responded.