FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

State Department Officials Quitting Over “Complete and Utter Disdain for our Expertise” Break out the champagne. Robert Spencer

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

The New York Times reported last Friday that “an exodus is underway” in the State Department. The Times didn’t think this was good news; it gave space to one career diplomat who lamented that there was “complete and utter disdain for our expertise.”

This could be the best news to come out of Washington since the Trump administration took office.

We can only hope that with the departure of these failed State Department officials, their failed policies will be swept out along with them. Chief among these is the almost universally held idea that poverty causes terrorism. The United States has wasted uncounted (literally, because a great deal of it was in untraceable bags full of cash) billions of dollars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, and other countries in the wrongheaded assumption that Muslims turn to jihad because they lack economic opportunities and education. American officials built schools and hospitals, thinking that they were winning over the hearts and minds of the locals.

Fifteen years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later, no significant number of hearts and minds have been won. This is partly because the premise is wrong. The New York Times reported in March that “not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.”

CNS News noted in September 2013 that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”

Yet the analysis that poverty causes terrorism has been applied and reapplied and reapplied again. The swamp is in dire need of draining, and in other ways as well. From 2011 on, it was official Obama administration policy to deny any connection between Islam and terrorism. This came as a result of an October 19, 2011 letter from Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates to John Brennan, who was then the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism, and later served in the Obama administration as head of the CIA. The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA; and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

EDUCATION Comments turned off

College Protesters Demand Peers Pay Them for ‘Emotional Labor’ By Tom Knighton

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

A new low for these appalling brats.

It often seems that campus activists are less about actually creating positive “change” and more about personal vanity. The latest entry comes from the upper-crust Sarah Lawrence College, where The College Fix reports that some activists feel they deserve to be compensated for their activism.

And not by the organizations they’re working with, but by the very peers they tend to annoy with their antics:

Students at Sarah Lawrence College, a posh, private liberal arts college in New York consistently ranked one of the most expensive colleges in the nation, recently called on peers and others to pay female campus activists for their “emotional labor.”

…

It was posted once on March 26 on Facebook in honor of Women’s History Month, then reposted in April as students exchanged heated words on Facebook over a campus controversy.

“In honor of Women’s History Month, and the labor that women and femmes of color do for Sarah Lawrence every month of the year,” the post states, then lists the student Venmo accounts. Venmo is a payment service app. The post, which includes a brightly colored poster declaring “Give your $ to Women & Femmes of Color,” was inspired by the #GiveYourMoneyToWomen hashtag created by prominent feminists.

Now, keep in mind that Sarah Lawrence is one of the most expensive schools in the country. These activist students are either from wealthy families and don’t need the money, or they’re scholarship students who should appreciate the amazing gift they are already getting from others, or they are receiving loans and working and should have a better sense of the value of a dollar.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop this pathetic attempt at extortion: a comment stating “[t]he community is watching you and holding you accountable” sounds an awful lot like a threat to me, and this “labor” they’re demanding to be paid for needs to be negotiated … beforehand.

IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Immigration: How Trump Derangement Syndrome Dumbs Down the Press By Roger L Simon

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

How many IQ points do you lose from Trump Derangement Syndrome or similar conditions of blind political rage?

I was asking myself that while listening to the stupefying question asked of Trump adviser Stephen Miller by CNN’s Jim Acosta at Wednesday’s White House press conference. Miller had been explaining — with a level of clarity and specificity not often seen at these events — the immigration proposal being proffered by Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue and now being backed by the president. The press audience appeared impatient with these details, however, waiting to pounce as it almost always does.

And the pounce came from Acosta, who was irked the proposal listed some level of facility with the English language as one of the new preference points for possible immigration applicants. Wasn’t that de facto discrimination in favor of people from the UK and Australia (read: white skin privilege)?

Earth to Acosta: As of 2015, there were 54 sovereign states and 27 non-sovereign entities where English was an official language. These include India (population: 1,247,540,000), Pakistan (199,085,847), Nigeria (182,202,000), the Philippines (102,885,100), Tanzania (51,820,000) and Kenya (45,010,056) among, obviously, many others. In China (population 1.39 billion), almost all school children begin English in the third grade. In Japan, South Korea and Singapore, it’s also mandatory beginning about the same time. Anyone who’s been to Europe recently knows it’s hard to find anyone under fifty in those countries now who doesn’t speak some degree of English. I could go on, but it’s pointless. English has become, for all intents and purposes, the world lingua franca. The number of possible immigrants from the UK and Australia is less than minuscule by comparison and the implication of racism (hidden in plain sight in Acosta’s question) therefore ludicrous. It’s the opposite.

So, assuming he didn’t have a lobotomy on the way to the press conference, what made the CNN reporter so (to be blunt) catastrophically uninformed that he would ask such a thing?

Answer: a cocktail of blind rage, the overwhelming self-centered need for you and your side always to be right with (for bitters) a healthy splash of malignant moral narcissism. In 2017, that’s called “The Trump,” served neat or on-the-rocks and stronger even than Dorothy Parker’s martini. Two glasses and the only word left in your vocabulary is “Russia,” three and it’s “impeachment” (slurred heavily). Rational discussion has gone out the window. It isn’t even a possibility.

I could say it’s unfair to Acosta to single him out, but it’s really not. He has been especially bad, ensconced in a front-row seat at these events as if he were a wannabe starlet preening for a photo opportunity. (“Are you watching, Mr. DeMille?”) He was also constitutionally incapable of letting Miller speak for fear, as is so often the case, he would have to deal with what Miller was actually saying.

But the real loser in all this is not Acosta or even CNN. It’s the American people who learn less than zero from the press conferences, in fact are brutally misled by our media in a wanton and selfish matter. It’s all about them and not one jot about informing their audience. In fact, there is an almost palpable rejection of the latter because then they (that unwashed audience) might see something, anything, good in what Trump or one of his minions might be proposing. That is not allowed to happen under any circumstances. Dialogue nyet!

The immigration question on the table Wednesday is an excellent case in point. Miller was treating the press (and the television audience) as adults, carefully explaining the administration’s rationale for the proposal. It is their contention that some restriction on immigration is greatly for the benefit of the many unemployed American citizens already here — particularly minorities. Blacks and Latinos have the most to gain from this. CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Seth Rich case is back on the front burner – and it now involves the Trump White House! By Peter Barry Chowka

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

After lying dormant for several months, the unsolved cold-case brutal murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was front and center once again, yesterday[1]. Rich was shot in the back as he was walking to his apartment in Washington, D.C. in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016.

It fell to taxpayer-funded NPR to drop the story and introduce the latest spin on it, which it did on its Tuesday Morning Edition program accompanied by a lengthy article, “Behind Fox News’ Baseless Seth Rich Story: The Untold Tale.”

Bringing the tale back to life with a startling new anti-Trump angle this time was a defamation and discrimination lawsuit filed in federal court in New York City later Tuesday morning by attorneys representing Rod Wheeler, the former Washington, D.C. homicide detective, which NPR had an advance and “exclusive” look at. Wheeler was suing his current employer, the Fox News Channel; 21st Century Fox; Malia Zimmerman, a Fox News reporter; and a Republican operative named Ed Butowsky for a variety of alleged offenses.

A Fox News contributor since 2005 who was paid for his occasional on-air reporting and commentary on crime cases, Wheeler quickly achieved his 15 minutes of fame – that was over within one week – last May when he emerged as the person hired by Seth Rich’s family to investigate Rich’s unsolved murder. In several on-camera interviews, initially with the local Fox channel in Washington, D.C. and the next day with his employer the Fox News Channel (which took the story national), Wheeler claimed that he had uncovered evidence that lent credence to the previously unpopular theory, pushed by independent conservative media, that Rich had been taken out because he might have been the source of DNC emails leaked to WikiLeaks in July 2016 that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign and resulted in the resignation of DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz.

For example, on May 15, Fox 5 D.C. reported the following conversation with Wheeler:

FOX 5 DC: “You have sources at the FBI saying that there is information…”

WHEELER: “For sure…”

FOX 5 DC: “…that could link Seth Rich to WikiLeaks?”

WHEELER: “Absolutely. Yeah. That’s confirmed.”

The following day, Wheeler appeared by remote from D.C. on several Fox News channel programs broadcast from New York, including Hannity. Wheeler told Sean Hannity:

When you look at that with the totality of everything else that I found in this case, it’s very consistent for a person with my experience to begin to think, well, perhaps there were some email communications between Seth and WikiLeaks. Every time I talk with the police department, though, Sean, every time I talk with the police department about the WikiLeaks or the emails, it’s automatically shut down. That discussion is automatically shut down.

The six-minute video of Wheeler’s May 16 Hannity interview is online here, and since May 16, Fox News has also had it online here.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Defending the Founders and the (American) Enlightenment By Robert Curry

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

In his article “Modernity and the Secularization of Reason,” Tim Jones claims that fascism and communism are “rooted in the reason midwifed out of philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Bacon, Hume, and Marx.” He then makes this astonishing assertion: “[This] makes American democratic republicanism a first cousin of those tyrannical ideologies [fascism and communism] since it, too, grew out of the same philosophical soil.”

The claim Jones makes – that American democratic republicanism is a first cousin to fascism and communism – is simply not true.

Trying to sort out everything in the article would be a huge challenge. Let’s keep it simple by beginning with Rousseau. The line from Rousseau to Kant is direct. Kant had only one picture in his austere household: a picture of Rousseau on the wall above where he wrote. From Kant to Hegel and on to Marx is also a direct line, and the line from Hegel and Marx to fascism and communism is, obviously, direct as well. But this line misses the American Founding entirely, and misses it by a country mile.

This line from Rousseau begins with his “general will” and his rejection of individual rights. In Rousseau’s political vision, everyone surrenders all rights and submits to the general will, which then maintains absolute equality. What is required, Rousseau wrote, is “the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community.” Submission to the general will entailed the surrender of all property rights.

Rousseau’s vision was finally realized in the 20th century in Nazi Germany and in the USSR. Nazi ideology – national socialism – and Soviet ideology – international socialism – aligned with Rousseau quite precisely. Here is Richard Overy in his book on Hitler and Stalin, The Dictators: “The two dictatorships … preached the absolute value of the collective and the absolute obligation to abandon concern for self in the name of the whole.” Hitler and Stalin showed us what it means for everyone and everything to be subject to the general will.

Note the word “alienation,” which Rousseau uses. In the language of Rousseau’s time, to alienate is to transfer the title to a property or other right to another person. The American Founders used the negation of that term to advance a different vision of rights. They claimed that we have “unalienable rights,” rights that cannot be alienated, which cannot be surrendered. According to the Founders, our unalienable right to our lives and our unalienable right to our liberty cannot rightfully be transferred or taken from us, because those rights are inherent to us as human beings, part of what it means to be a rational being and a moral agent.

The American idea did not grow out of the same philosophical soil as fascism and communism.

Let’s briefly turn to another claim made in the article, a claim about the Enlightenment era: “The Enlightenment secularized reason with no moral strings attached making it morally neutral.” This claim is perhaps a fair assessment of the French Enlightenment, but not of the very different American Enlightenment.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: 23,000 Terrorists and Counting by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

Theresa May herself is also not entirely to be trusted in this area. Despite her calls for no tolerance for extremism, she has recently been widely criticized for blocking publication of a major report into foreign funding of extremist Muslim groups.

For years now, radical preachers, terrorist recruiters, and fundamentalists who openly hate this country, its democratic values, and its tolerance for all faiths, have walked British streets, campaigned on university campuses, and converted and radicalised young men and women.

What seems not to be understood about “the religion of peace” is that “peace” comes only after the entire world has been converted to Islam so that a “Dar al-Harb”, the “Abode of War,” will no longer even exist.

Since the beginning of March, 17,393 people have been listed as terror suspects. — French Senate report: “Prevention of Radicalism and Regional Authorities”, April 2017.

On May 26, four days after the major terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, British intelligence officials stated that they had identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the UK, all of them considered potential terrorist attackers. According to The Times,

About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a “residual risk”.

The two terrorists who have struck in Britain this year — Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, and Khalid Masood, the Westminster killer — were in the pool of “former subjects of interest” and no longer subject to any surveillance.

A police officer stands guard near the Manchester Arena on May 23, 2017, following a suicide bombing by an Islamic terrorist who murdered 22 concert-goers. (Photo by Dave Thompson/Getty Images)

The report adds that the two men who beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby in London, in 2013, had been known to the security services, just as Abedi and Masood were, but had been dropped to low priority.

David Anderson, QC, the former reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, noted concerns in his 2015 report about the “speed with which things can change” around suspects and “the difficulties in knowing how best to prioritise limited surveillance resources”. Senior police have also spoken of the difficulty in identifying the triggers that might “reactivate” extremist behaviour.

Others had expressed similar concerns about how the jihadi ideology, based in radical religious belief, is so intensely ingrained that it never leaves individuals and may easily reactivate a desire to commit atrocities.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain: A Summer of Anti-Semitism by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

“2016 was the worst year on record for antisemitic crime [in Britain],” — National Antisemitic Crime Audit, published on July 17, 2017.

“Britain has the political will to fight antisemitism and strong laws with which to do it, but those responsible for tackling the rapidly growing racist targeting of British Jews are failing to enforce the law.” — Gideon Falter, Chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

The first “Palestine Expo” — a two-day festival in London, self-described as the “biggest social, cultural and entertainment event on Palestine to ever take place in Europe” — was held over the weekend of July 8, 2017 at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster. The gathering, attended by an estimated 15,000 people, included political panels, workshops and food courts — ostensibly to highlight and honor “Palestine history and heritage.”

Given the identity of its organizers, however, its true impetus — to demonize the Jewish state — was clear from the outset. Sponsored by the Leicester-based Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA), a group that openly supports the Islamist terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, the event aroused the anger of pro-Israel activists and the British government alike.

About a month before the Expo was scheduled to take place, Communities and Local Government Secretary Sajid Javid sent a letter to the FOA — which promotes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and figures such as Holocaust denier Paul Eisen — expressing his concerns and threatening to call off the event.

FOA founder Ismail Patel replied that Javid had “failed to provide any satisfactory reason as to why they have chosen to cancel an event which seeks to celebrate Palestinian culture and heritage.” He also resorted to a classic anti-Semitic trope, accusing the government of being influenced by the Jewish lobby.

As Javid set the date of June 23 for his final decision on whether the Expo would be canceled, Patel began a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for legal representation to challenge the government in the event of a cancellation. Neither materialized, however, when the controversy was upstaged by the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, which erupted on June 14, the day of the exchange of letters between Javid and Patel.

A week later, Javid gave the green light for the event.

Among the speakers at the Expo was South African Islamic scholar Sheikh Ebrahim Bham, know for having quoted Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels comparing Jews to fleas. Patel defended his decision to host Bham at the event by saying:

“Shaykh Bham clearly uses it to demonstrate how terrible the treatment of the Jews under Nazi persecution was.

“He then goes on to state that similar treatment is now being experienced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation – that of being sub-human.”

Other speakers included openly anti-Israel academics, some Jewish, all with a history of anti-Semitic writings, remarks and social media postings, as well as the highly controversial former UK National Union of Students president Malia Bouattia.Jason Silver, a Jewish resident of London who attended the event “to record what I knew would be a hate fest of antisemitism and more blood libels and incitement to hatred,” sent a letter to the Daily Mail detailing his experience. He also posted the letter on Facebook, along with video footage he recorded during the three hours he was there, before being forced by organizers to leave.

Silver wrote that talks by “key speakers were truly vile, both to Jews and against the UK for the Balfour Declaration,” a reference to the 100-year-old document supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine — for which the Palestinian Authority has threatened to sue Britain.

Silver said that he encountered no problems with participants — most of whom were wearing Muslim garb — until he donned his Jewish skull cap. Within 10 minutes, he wrote, he was told he was not welcome, and must exit the premises. When he asked why he was being ordered to leave — after having been there for a full three hours with no mishap — he was not given a reason.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

NIDRA POLLER: TEMPLE WALL PSYCHODRAMA

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

Act 1 July 14th: three Arab Israelis pick up weapons previously stored by an accomplice in the al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount and gun down two Israeli Druze policemen. Being courageous jihadis, they shoot the policemen in the back. Israeli authorities step in where the Waqf, guardians of the mosques, had failed to exercise due diligence. They bar entry to the Temple Mount, gather evidence, install metal detectors to prevent further killing-this type of crime often comes in waves-and then reopen the Temple Mount. This normal exercise of Israeli sovereignty provokes violence in Jerusalem and recriminations from Western media onlookers that echo the war cry: Israel is not respecting the status quo. Prime Minister Netanyahu remarks that stashing weapons in the mosque is a violation of the status quo, but chronology loses its bearing whenever Islam is concerned. Steps taken to restore that status quoi are presented by Western media and commentators as provocative measures that led naturally to rioting, murderous attacks, and diplomatic aggression.

Thousands of Muslims prostrate themselves outside the gates, defiantly refusing to pass through the metal detectors. In between prayer sessions they unleash their fury on law enforcement, throwing firebombs, firecrackers, allahu akhbars, and threats of extermination. The genocidal war cry khaybar khaybar ya yahud, jaish muhammad sawfa ya’ud! ricochets in the steep narrow lanes of Jerusalem’s old city. We know that tune. It was on the hit parade in the summer of 2014 when our local jihadis stomped through the streets of Paris bellowing khaybar khaybar (“Remember Khaybar [dirty] Jews, Mohamed’s army is coming [to exterminate you] again.”) [cf Poller, The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks la République]

Act 2: our French media, undoubtedly guided and fed by Agence France Presse, report fulminatingly on the distress caused to Muslim worshippers by the installation of metal detectors at entries to l’esplanade des mosquées [mosque compound]. Commentators, never at a loss for words, lock into default position: The problem is the colonies. The problem is far and further right wing Netanyahu, gobbling up Palestinian land, making peace impossible. The problem is, he won’t make a 2-state solution.

N.B. factual mistakes, careless mistakes, incomplete information and sloppy reporting of every sort are the hallmark of news makers. However, honest mistakes are random. Deliberately failing to mention that the two Israeli policemen were shot with weapons smuggled into the al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount is not sloppy reporting. It’s a lie.

The metal detectors become an arbitrary gesture of humiliation and, far worse, they’re one step away from the total destruction of the al Aqsa mosque. Yes, our ladies and gentlemen of respectable media automatically identify with the most bloodthirsty of the ranting raging rioters. They integrate the rage and the rationale. It’s so natural they don’t miss a step. Metal detectors, they’re tearing down the mosque, the Israelis have turned this into a religious war, au secours, help! What about the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Israel and the disputed territories that are not chanting khaybar khaybar kill the Jews? Enlightened Muslims publish op-eds denouncing the counterproductive uprising fueled by Islamic extremists. Our opinion makers don’t seem to be aware of their existence. Seventeen years since the al Dura blood libel triggered an unending wave of atrocities, the sky is still falling, the mosque is in danger, and kill the Jews seems like a reasonable response to a few metal detectors.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

THE FERTILE SOIL OF JIHAD TERRORISM’S PRISON CONNECTION PATRICK DUNLEAVY (OCTOBER 2011)

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

A lonely, alienated and angry person is convicted of a crime and imprisoned. Although he is prone to violence, and feels he has been wronged by “the system” he is fearful of prison predators and generally a loner. He is befriended by another prisoner, a skillful radical Moslem who introduces him to the Koran and shows great empathy and offers protection and social interaction. He converts to Islam and meets a charismatic Moslem chaplain, who has been chosen for the job by an Imam with close ties to organizations known to enable and fund terrorism. First, he becomes a messenger whose visitors who are sympathetic to his hatred of authority become conduits of information from and to outside terror operations with calls and orders emanating from the chaplain’s quarters. Ultimately he is converted to the cause of terror and jihad. Thus, a prison terror cell is hatched.

This may sound like a proposal for a movie but it is very real and happens throughout American jails. All Americans interested in national security and terrorism must read Patrick T.Dunleavy’s mesmerizing book “The Fertile Soil of Jihad-Terrorism’s Prison Connection.”

Patrick Dunleavy, former deputy inspector general of the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the New York State Department of Correctional Services which investigates and infiltrates criminal enterprises and conspiracies was a key figure in “Operation Hades” which probed the radical Islamic recruitment for jihad inside and outside prison walls.

In January 1993, only a month before the first World Trade Center bombing, a young Palestinian Arab named Abdel Nasser Zaben was imprisoned for robbery and kidnapping. Medical and psychological records indicate that his language, reading, comprehension and mathematics skills were below average. His devotion to Islam, however, was disciplined and orthodox and he was keen to convert and recruit. Furthermore, his ability to spot a potential recruit and manipulate his fears and frailties is impressive.

Dunleavy traces Zaben’s peregrinations through boroughs and mosques in New York as well as his prison “career” where he recruited a significant and diverse number of common criminals to the cause of Islamic terrorism in several penitentiaries starting with Riker’s Island.

Rashid Baz.

At Riker’s Island, Zaben reconnected with a friend Rashid Baz, a Lebanese livery cab driver celebrated by Hamas sympathizers as the “Holy Warrior and Son of Islam” for opening fire on a van full of Hasidic Jewish boys on the Brooklyn Bridge in March 1994, killing one and wounding several others. Baz was tried and convicted of the second-degree murder of Ari Halberstam, a 16-year-old Jewish yeshiva student from the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, along with fourteen other counts of attempted murder.

From Riker’s Island Zaben moved through the New York Downstate Correctional Facility, a maximum security Auburn Correctional Facility, Cayuga Correctional Facility in the Finger Lakes district of New York, Fishkill Correctional Facility, and finally, after a parole rejection, Shawangunk Correctional Facility from which he was released and deported in 2005.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Finding Jihad in Jail The Growing Number of Radicals Recruited in Western Prisons by Benjamin Welton

Posted By on August 3rd, 2017

On June 3, 2017, a man boarding a bus in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland was recognized by one of the passengers as the perpetrator of an armed robbery that had taken place earlier in the day. The passenger immediately called the police, and officers intercepted the bus at a subsequent stop, blocking one of its doors, to prevent the suspect — 35-year-old Blaine Robert Erb — from fleeing.

Erb responded by drawing two semi-automatic pistols from his backpack and firing both in all directions. He was killed during the shootout, which was captured on surveillance cameras.

What was not covered by the press about the incident — reported as yet another example of the wanton violence that has come to characterize Baltimore – was a description of Erb’s attire and other aspects of his appearance. This is a significant “oversight”: what the video footage reveals is that Erb was wearing a Muslim thobe and large skull cap, and that he sported a long, bushy red beard. This could indicate that he is among those coined by certain experts in the U.K. as “ginger jihadis” to denote “redheaded men and women … replacing the ritual bullying of the playground with the ritual strictures of radical Islam, perhaps… as a result of the bullying and persecution they endure early in life.”

Although it is not clear whether Erb was bullied as a child or ever converted to Islam, his extensive rap sheet is on record. Wanted for failing to appear in court on multiple DUI charges, Erb served jail sentences for various crimes, including assault, theft, robbery and possession of illegal weapons. According to a 2014 report in the Daily Caller, in 2006, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee that prisons were becoming a “fertile ground” for jihadis, who were indoctrinating and recruiting fellow inmates in the ideology of radical Islam. Erb could easily have been recruited behind bars. In April 2016, the New York Times reported that the number of convicted terrorists currently housed in American prisons is 443 — a number that dwarfs the number of inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

This prison practice, in high gear across the West, sparked Britain to create three special “jihadi jails-within-jails,” to keep the most dangerous extremists from having contact with, and then influencing, the general criminal population. A recent report in the U.K.’s Metro states that Michael Adebolajo — one of the men who murdered British Army soldier Lee Rigby — and the extremist Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary are thought to be among the prisoners transferred to a separate facility.

The American twist to Erb’s story is its connection to another domestic terrorism problem plaguing the U.S. — the growing number of jihadis targeting police officers. The case of ISIS supporter Edward Archer — who confessed to gunning down a Philadelphia police officer “in the name of Islam” — is but one example.

In Queens, New York, 32-year-old Zale Thompson attacked New York City police officers with a hatchet. Thompson, who friends claimed also espoused “black power” politics, had viewed a total of 277 websites promoting jihad, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and beheadings prior to launching his attack. He also had previously been arrested several times in California and charged with domestic violence.

Also in New York, Ismaayil Brinsley posted extremely pro-jihad Koran quotes and other such material on his Facebook and Twitter accounts before murdering two NYPD officers in December 2014. Brinsley, like Thompson, had connections to black supremacist organizations, including the Black Guerrilla Family. Brinsley most probably had made such connections while serving time in Georgia and Ohio prisons. Brinsley had already been arrested 19 times.

The Chechen Tsarnaev brothers set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, and then murdered MIT police officer Sean Collier during their attempted escape. The elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, began his criminal career as a low-level drug dealer who played a role in a triple-murder in Waltham in 2011.

In France, police have also been the victims of jihadi shootings and car bombs. Last April, a gunman with known ties to jihadi networks killed a police officer on the Champs Elysées. “Karim C” had an extensive history of moving in and out of jail.

According to Aaron Klein, author of Schmoozing With Terrorists, ISIS began to take advantage of racial tensions in America in 2015 by attempting to recruit disgruntled black Muslims in Ferguson and Baltimore. This was months after the Daily Mail reported that ISIS supporters vowed on Twitter to send militants to fight police in Ferguson if protesters committed to Islam.

The irony is that the more the West pledges to combat global terrorism and keep it contained militarily or through criminal justice systems, the more jihadists manage to spread their message — on social media, in mosques and in prisons — by infiltrating the hearts and minds of individuals and groups susceptible to it. Erb appears to have been such a person. His story should be highlighted, not buried.