Bombshell: New Info Says Khashoggi Was A Foreign Influence Agent Jamal Khashoggi’s op-eds published in the very influential Washington Post certainly qualify as attempts to change U.S. policy against Saudi Arabia and in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood.By Jim Hanson

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/27/bombshell-khashoggi-foreign-governments-influence-agent/

The Washington Post has caused itself a major scandal since it has come to light they and their martyred “reformer” Jamal Khashoggi were publishing anti-Saudi propaganda for Qatar. They tried to bury this in a pre-Christmas Saturday news dump, but that can’t stop the damage this will do to their reputation.

“Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government,” the Post wrote December 21.

The Post says they were unaware of this, although Khashoggi’s Qatar connections were well known. They will have to answer for what is either incompetence in connecting these dots or simply not caring as Khashoggi’s attacks on President Trump and the Saudis fit right in with their narrative. The Qatar Foundation denies they were paying him to produce the anti-Saudi material.

But during Security Studies Group research for our report on the information operation after his death, we heard from reliable sources familiar with the investigation that documents showing wire transfers from Qatar were found in his apartment in Turkey. They were immediately put out of reach by Turkish security services, so they did not show the collusion between Khashoggi, Qatar, and Turkey prior to his death. We have published a new, unredacted set of findings about the case. It is damning to Qatar, Turkey, and the Washington Post.

Khashoggi may have been operating in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act by doing this on behalf of Qatar. This is the same law that caused both Gen. Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort legal jeopardy by not filing their attempts to influence the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign entity. The op-eds published in the very influential Washington Post certainly qualify as attempts to change U.S. policy against Saudi Arabia and in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Qatar supports in spite of its status as a terrorist organization with most other Gulf countries.

Turkey had control of the narrative after the killing as the only primary source for the media, with Qatar backing up their tales. Both had eager partners in western media outlets. Security Studies Group tracked this phenomenon in our paper, “Khashoggi case- Analysis of an Information Operation”: “Although Turkish-language media supported and helped to drive the narratives, as did Arabic-language media controlled by Turkish ally Qatar, the main outlets that Turkish intelligence used to execute their operation were major Western English- language journalist outlets.”

Hijab in the House By Bruce Bawer

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/hijab-in-the-house/

One of the notable results of the November 6 midterm elections was that the U.S. House of Representatives went from two Muslim members — Indiana’s André Carson and Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who on the same day was elected his state’s attorney general — to three Muslims, Carson plus two new female members from Michigan and Minnesota. With few if any exceptions, the mainstream media rooted for these ladies throughout the campaign season and lustily cheered their victories, not because of their skills or experience or political views but because they represented “diversity.”

The same media also did their best to cover up unpleasant details about them. For example, Rashida Tlaib, the soon-to-be-installed member from Michigan, has a record of outspoken anti-Semitic comments (at her victory party, she wrapped herself in a Palestinian flag). As David Steinberg demonstrated in a bravura series of investigative articles for PJ Media, Ilhan Omar, the hijab-wearing future Gentlewoman from Minnesota (on her account, Democrats plan to lift a 181-year-old ban on head coverings in Congress), not only hates Jews but committed perjury and married her brother, likely as part of an immigration and student-loan scam. Nonetheless she is already being hailed as a “star” and has been elected to a leadership role in the House progressive caucus.

Granted, these are just two House members out of 435. And Ellison, who won election in Minnesota despite his chummy relations with Louis Farrakhan and highly plausible accusations of domestic abuse, is, so far, the country’s only Muslim state AG. But it’s a start — a foot in the door. At what point are we permitted to begin worrying out loud?

How about when we catch up with Canada, where the minister of Immigration is a Somali-born Muslim named Ahmed Hussen, who was last seen pushing the sinister UN migration pact and refusing to answer queries about it from Rebel Media, Canada’s online alternative news organization? (Canada’s mainstream media were too polite to ask Hussen uncomfortable questions about the UN deal.)

Or how about when we evolve as far as Germany, whose Minister of Immigration Aydan Özoğuz is the sister of two Hezbollah enthusiasts named Yavuz and Gürhan Özoğuz, who reportedly have “close ties to the Iranian government” and to various Holocaust deniers and who run a “virulently anti-Israeli, anti-American and anti-democratic” website called “Muslim-Markt.” In a 2013 interview, Aydan, the Immigration minister, said: “They are my brothers. I don’t deny my family. I think apart from my brothers on political issues.” Two years later she expressed the same sentiments in an NPR interview, saying that she and her brothers “have completely different views” but that she considers it “important to keep the channel of communication open in her family.” How sweet! One is reminded of Hillary’s sidekick, Huma Abedin, who got a pass from the media even though her father ran a top Muslim Brotherhood organization and her mother edited a Sharia law journal (for which Huma herself worked from 1995 to 2008) and sat on an Islamic council chaired by the vile hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

In 2015, voters in the traditionally Polish-American city of Hamtramck, Michigan, elected the nation’s first Muslim-majority city council — leading a local Muslim leader to shout at an Election Night victory party: “Today we show the Polish, and everybody else!” As Robert Spencer wrote at the time: “Multicultural euphoria, meet Islamic supremacist reality.” No major U.S. city has a Muslim mayor yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Rotterdam has one: Morocco-born Ahmed Aboutaleb, who’s been in office since 2009 and who identifies as a devout yet Westernized Muslim. A dual citizen of the Netherlands and Morocco, Aboutaleb has said many of the right things about terrorism and integration, and has even been praised by Geert Wilders; but last December he got into trouble when he told an interviewer that “every Muslim is a bit of a salafist” and described his own mayoral work as “jihad in its most perfect form” — remarks which led Wilders to demand his resignation. A couple of months ago, Aboutaleb agreed to a plan that would cut off the flow of asylum seekers from North Africa into Rotterdam, which is already one of the most heavily Muslim — and crime-ridden — cities in Europe. But who knows what he’s really thinking? What can it possibly mean to be a devout yet Westernized Muslim? Whom is this guy hoodwinking? His fellow Muslims or us?

Sadiq Khan, who has been mayor of London for two years, also calls himself a “moderate, socially liberal Muslim.” Yet one of his first acts as mayor was to ban ads on public transport depicting scantily clad females. He claimed to be doing so on feminist grounds, although many observers saw it as a step toward Sharia. Under Khan, who has notoriously stated that living with terrorism is “part of living in a big city,” London authorities have focused less on Muslim crime and preventing terrorism and more on harassing “Islamophobes.”

Then there’s the Somalia-born Lord Mayor of Sheffield Magid Magid, who, since being named to that post earlier this year, has been celebrated by hip types all over the UK because he’s young, black, Muslim, and informal to the point of irreverence. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Magid referred to the current monarch as Queen Victoria, then, when corrected, said: “Yeah. Liz.” Making no secret of his disdain for the monarchy, his contempt for Donald Trump, and his indifference to the legacy of Winston Churchill, Magid appears to know absolutely nothing about the history of his city and has not bothered to read the guidelines to official protocol that he was given when he took office; but he’s big on immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, all of whom, he says, “enrich our society,” and one of his chief goals is to establish an official Sheffield poet laureateship so he can give the job to a certain rapper. Anyone who criticizes him for any of this is, in his view, a racist. Magid comes off as such a buffoon that it’s hard to take him very seriously as a part of the Muslim menace, but perhaps it’s unwise, at this stage, to underestimate his ability to make a meaningful contribution to the Islamic assault on British freedom. CONTINUE AT SITE

FBI: Record number of illegal immigrants tried to buy guns this year by Paul Bedard

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/fbi-record-number-of-illegal-immigrants-tried-to-buy-guns

The FBI this year has turned away a record number of illegal immigrants trying to buy guns, according to a new report of background checks.

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System said that it rejected 7,836,600 planned purchases from “illegal/unlawful alien” in 2018. And that was at the end of November. Christmas purchases of guns are typically high and were not included.

That number has been increasing in recent years. In 2017, it was 7.3 million. The year before, it was 7 million rejections. In 2015, it hit 6.6 million.

Illegal immigrants rank at the top of those on the FBI’s “prohibited category.”

Byron York: When Democrats embraced the ‘Southern Border Fencing Strategy’ by Byron York

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-when-democrats-embraced-the-southern-border-fencing-strategy

In 2006 Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which mandated the construction of multilayer pedestrian fencing along about 600 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. It passed with big, bipartisan majorities: 283 votes in the House and 80 in the Senate. Some top Democrats who are still in the Senate today supported the fence: Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Debbie Stabenow, and Sherrod Brown.

Just the next year, Congress made clear it didn’t really mean what it said. The new law was amended to make fence building optional.

In 2013, Congress got back into the fence game. The Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill included something called the “Southern Border Fencing Strategy.” It called for 700 miles of at least single-layer pedestrian fencing along the border. It wasn’t a standalone measure; the fence was to be part of a broader package of border security measures alongside provisions that would create a process by which the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants would ultimately gain a path to citizenship.

With citizenship in the deal — even citizenship that would take a decade to achieve in some cases — Democrats were fully on board for a border barrier. The Gang of Eight bill passed in the Senate with 68 votes, including unanimous Democratic support. Name any Democrat who is in the Senate today who was there for that 2013 vote — Schumer, Durbin, Murray, Baldwin, Bennet, Blumenthal, Brown, Cantwell, Cardin, Casey, Coons, Feinstein, Gillibrand, Hirono, Kaine, Klobuchar, Leahy, Manchin, Menendez, Merkley, Murphy, Reed, Sanders, Shaheen, Stabenow, Tester, Warner, Warren, Whitehouse, Wyden — name any, and they voted for the bill that included the Southern Border Fencing Strategy.

Palestinians: Silencing and Intimidating Critics by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13477/palestinians-silencing-intimidating-critics

Palestinian columnist Sami Fuda denounced the Hamas crackdown on its critics in Gaza: “Apparently, freedom of expression is unacceptable to the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip… The policy of intimidating and imprisoning writers will not deter them and is completely ineffective and unacceptable.”

While these few Palestinians have expressed concern over Hamas’s effort to silence its critics, international human rights organizations, including some that operate in the Gaza Strip, continue to turn a blind eye to this assault on public freedoms. They are either afraid of Hamas, or they do not give a damn about human rights violations unless they can find a way of pointing an accusatory finger at Israel.

Hamas is prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a rally marking the 31st anniversary of its founding, but says it cannot afford to provide financial aid to impoverished Palestinians. Meanwhile, any Palestinians who dare to ask Hamas the wrong questions will find themselves behind bars.

What does the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas do when it is not firing rockets at Israel or sending Palestinians to clash with Israeli soldiers along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel? It sends its security officers to arrest, interrogate, intimidate and harass anyone who dares to criticize Hamas.

It is not as if anyone was expecting Hamas to act differently. The terms democracy and freedom of expression have never been in Hamas’s dictionary. For Hamas, it is either you are with us or you are against us. There is no third option for Palestinians living under Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip, even for those who were previously associated with Hamas, but later changed their minds and dared to express a different opinion or, worse, criticize the Islamist movement.

In the past week alone, Hamas has arrested two Palestinian academics on suspicion that they voiced criticism of the group: professor of biology Salah Jadallah and writer Khader Mihjez.

Turkey and EU: Can this Marriage be Saved? by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13404/turkey-eu-marriage

In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya.

Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

“I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” — Johannes Kahn, EU Enlargement Commissioner; interview in Die Welt.

When Turkey first applied for full membership in the European Union in 1987, the world was an entirely different place — even the rich club had a different name: the European Economic Community. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had undergone minor surgery; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term; Macau and Hong Kong were, respectively, Portuguese and British territory; the Berlin Wall was up and running; the demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square were a couple of years away; the Iran-Contra affair was in the headlines; the First Intifada had just begun; and what are today Czech Republic and Slovakia were Czechoslovakia.

In March 2003, just a few months after he was elected Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey was “very much ready to be part of the European Union family.” In October 2005, formal accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU began.

Today, 31 years after the first date, the alliance seems to be broken, with no signs in the foreseeable future of a marriage between two perfectly unsuitable adults. Knowing that, both sides in the past decade have played an unpleasant diplomatic game of pretension: not be the one that throws away the ring. This boring opera buffa is no longer sustainable.

Turkey’s democratic deficit has grown just too bitterly huge to make it compatible with Europe’s democratic culture. According to the advocacy group Freedom House:

“In addition to its dire consequences for detained Turkish citizens, shuttered media outlets, and seized businesses, the chaotic purge has become intertwined with an offensive against the Kurdish minority, which in turn has fueled Turkey’s diplomatic and military interventions in neighboring Syria and Iraq.”

Pakistan Earned U.S. Designation as “Country of Particular Concern” by Kaswar Klasra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13432/pakistan-country-particular-concern

“Occupations deemed as ‘dirty’ and ‘shameful’ are reserved for Christians, and many believers are victims of bonded labor. Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws target religious minorities but affect Christians the most…”. — Open Doors.

“Christians continue to be killed for accusations of blasphemy, as well as for their low status in society. In June 2017, a Christian sewage worker died in a hospital because three Muslim doctors refused to touch him, thereby making themselves unclean, during their Ramadan fast.” — Open Doors .

“Abusive enforcement of the country’s strict blasphemy laws resulted in the suppression of rights for non-Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, and Ahmadis.” — United States Commission on International Freedom.

Pakistan was among the nations recently designated by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as “Countries of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 for having engaged in or tolerated ‘systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations of religious freedom.'”

Islamabad promptly issued an angry response, which reads, in part:

“Pakistan rejects the US State Department’s unilateral and politically motivated pronouncement… Besides the clear biases reflected from these designations, there are serious questions on the credentials and impartiality of the self-proclaimed jury involved in this unwarranted exercise.

“Around 4 percent of our total population comprises citizens belonging to Christian, Hindu, Budhists [sic] and Sikh faiths. Ensuring equal treatment of minorities and their enjoyment of human rights without any discrimination is the cardinal principle of the Constitution of Pakistan…”

“As a party to seven out of the nine core human rights treaties, Pakistan has been submitting compliance reports on its obligations with regard to fundamental freedoms. The government of Pakistan has devised well-establishment legal and administrative mechanisms to safeguard the rights of its citizens. Pakistan does not need counsel by any individual country on how to protect the rights of its minorities.”

Playing Defense in Lebanon A new book explores the changing tactics, and essential continuities, in Israel’s decades-long but mostly undeclared war against Hizballah. Matti Friedman

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2018/12/playing-defense-in-lebanon/

One day in the mid-1950s, at a time of rising guerrilla incursions from Gaza, the Israeli chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, arrived to inspect a base on the border. The local commander proudly showed the one-eyed army chief the fortifications he’d built with his men, including trenches and reinforced emplacements. Imagine the commander’s rude surprise when, instead of praising him, Dayan asked furiously: “What did you dig in for? If anything serious happens, we want to attack, not defend!”

Dayan not only ordered the junior commander to fill in the trenches and take apart the emplacements but, according to his biographer Shabtai Tevet, went on to “forbid the digging of defensive networks anywhere along Israel’s borders.” The new Israeli army was supposed to be mobile and unpredictable, not to hobble itself in earthworks and concrete.

Just over 40 years later, in early 1998, I arrived as an infantryman at an Israeli outpost in south Lebanon. At this outpost, a forward position in the army’s long war against Hizballah fighters, there were trenches, concrete emplacements, and bunkers where we sheltered from shelling. Similar positions were to be found on nearby hilltops, all accessed by lumbering armored convoys that came up the roads from Israel. Beyond some minor activity like preparing ambushes or patrolling roads, and the odd special operation generating great excitement but little value, the army seemed to have no mobility, no real plan, and no hope of winning. We had fortifications and technology. The enemy had the initiative.

The story of the long, strange war against Hizballah in south Lebanon, and of the deep changes it wrought in the thinking of Israel’s army and society, has gone largely unnoticed amid the better-known episodes in the country’s history. This is striking, given the impact this nearly four-decade conflict has had on Israel; the number of Israelis who’ve been touched by it; the way that Hizballah tactics have inspired other players, like Hamas; the way that Hizballah itself has gone on to become a regional player, particularly in the Syrian conflict; and the war’s persistence to this day along Israel’s frontier with Lebanon, where Israeli engineers are busy right now demolishing Hizballah attack tunnels near the border town of Metullah.

Bomb Explosion in Athens Fuels Fear of New Generation of Terror Recent attacks have sparked fears of the emergence of a new generation of terrorist groups rooted in far-left organizations By Nektaria Stamouli

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bomb-explosion-in-athens-fuels-fear-of-new-generation-of-terror-11545907002

Two people were injured after a bomb exploded outside a church in central Athens on Thursday, fueling concerns of a resurgence of urban-guerrilla violence in Greece.

The growing number of recent attacks has sparked fears of the emergence of a new generation of terrorist groups rooted in far-left organizations that target the conservative establishment.

Thursday’s blast occurred just after 7 a.m. local time outside an Orthodox Church in the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki, before it was due to open for service. A police officer and the church caretaker were wounded and rushed to hospital, the officials said. There was no warning call to authorities or claim of responsibility.

“The church caretaker spotted a box outside the entrance of the church, moved it and called the police,” a police official said. “It exploded a few minutes later when the police arrived; the blast was not powerful.” The two were slightly injured and were receiving treatment at local hospitals, officials said.

Earlier this month a powerful bomb exploded outside a big Greek media group, in what officials called an attack on free speech and democracy. In mid-November, a bomb was placed outside the house of senior Greek judge in central Athens. No one was wounded as there were warning calls for the attacks.

Last year, former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos was wounded and hospitalized for several weeks after he opened a letter bomb while riding in his car. In March 2017 Greek politicians and European Union officials were targeted in the same manner. CONTINUE AT SITE

China’s Bumbling Police State The only thing protecting human rights from the bureaucracy? Inefficiency.By Maya Wang

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-bumbling-police-state-11545869066

Barely a day goes by without a story about China’s ambition to use new technologies for nefarious means, and Human Rights Watch has amassed evidence that President Xi Jinping is building a “digital totalitarian state.” But Beijing’s aspirations to control people’s everyday lives are not so easily realized. Supporters of human rights have plenty of opportunities to limit the damage.

The recent headlines are chilling: “In China, your car could be talking to the government.” “China’s brightest children are being recruited to develop AI ‘killer bots.’ ” The country’s “social credit” system restricts the freedoms of citizens the state considers to have behaved badly. The government is pushing for national DNA and voice-recognition databases and for big-data “predictive policing” programs aimed at picking out political threats—all without any effective protections for privacy. The brutal crackdown on Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China involves both high- and low-tech surveillance.

Yet the Chinese government’s mass-surveillance capabilities are more fearsome in theory than in practice. “While big data has become a sizzling hot concept, there is so much more speculation than actual application,” laments one researcher working for the Chinese police, who adds that police leaders are frustrated they may be “sitting on” a “data gold mine” that they are unable to exploit properly. Authorities’ mass-surveillance ambitions are bedeviled by unreliable and incomplete basic data, as well as incompatible datasets and systems developed by different companies, among other problems.

Plus, citizens across China find ingenious ways to evade surveillance. Blacklisted by the social-credit system? Use documents other than ID cards to get around the restrictions. Concerned your calls are being monitored? Activists have learned creative ways to make police lose track of them.

Beijing has devoted enormous efforts to perfecting mass surveillance during the “Strike Hard” crackdown in Xinjiang, which began in late 2016. One element—the “Becoming Family” program, in which officials are dispatched to live with Muslim families, monitor and indoctrinate them—requires mobilizing 1.1 million government officials to keep tabs on a population of 13 million Muslims.

These programs depend on meticulous data input, which may prove unsustainable. Local officials report logging grueling hours—early morning until midnight, with hardly any vacation—to maintain a constant stream of “dynamic” data necessary for mass surveillance and other repressive measures. CONTINUE AT SITE