The Taylor Force Act – Putting “Palestine” in perspective: Martin Sherman

The Palestinian population is not some hapless victim of the terror groups, but the very crucible from which they emerged

Congress is finally considering legislation to stop the Palestinian Authority from incentivizing violence…This has to stop, and the Taylor Force Act…attempts to do that. As it currently stands, the act would cut U.S. foreign assistance to the West Bank and Gaza in its entirety if the “payments for acts of terrorism against United States and Israeli citizens …do not stop…. There should definitely be no ‘pay to slay’, but…[b]eing smart counts for more than being right. And the smart approach is one that also recognizes that innocent Palestinians…should not be forced to pay for the mistakes of a government they cannot control. – David Makovsky et al“The Smart Way to End ‘Pay to Slay’”, Foreign Policy, August 2, 2017.

Lesley Stahl, on CBS’s 60 Minutes on the effects of US led sanctions against Iraq (May 12, 1996): We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Madelaine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations , subsequently President Clinton’s Secretary of State: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.

Recently, three members of the well-known think-tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, posted an article on the new legislative initiative, named the Taylor Force Act after the West Point graduate and veteran, who was killed in a terrorist attack in Israel last year.

Appropriate and imperative

The proposed bill, which was recently passed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with overwhelming bipartisan support, is designed to stop American financial aid to the Palestinian Authority [PA] until it ceases its generous payments to individuals who commit acts of terrorism and to the families of deceased terrorists.

Perversely, under the prevailing conditions, the more gruesome the act of terror and the longer the sentence imposed on the perpetrator, the greater the remuneration!

Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal points out, under existing circumstances, “U.S. aid becomes a transfer payment for terrorists”.

This is clearly an unconscionable situation and hence legislation to contend with it, and correct it, was not only appropriate, but imperative.

The need for a punitive response to the egregious “pay for slay” custom of the PA was conceded by the previously mentioned Washington Institute article, entitled “The Smart Way to End ‘Pay to Slay’”.

Penned by David Makovsky, distinguished fellow and director of the project on the Middle East Peace Process, veteran diplomat Dennis Ross, distinguished fellow and counsellor on the U.S.-Israel Strategic Relationship, and Lia Weiner, a research assistant, it clearly proclaims “There should definitely be no ‘pay to slay’… This has to stop.”

“…the ‘mistakes’ of a government they cannot control”.

However, it cautions against an across-the-board cessation of US funds to the PA, calling for a more nuanced (read “watered-down”) application of the punitive cuts:“Threats of sweeping cuts to Palestinian aid may hurt the cause more than they help.”They warn that “To entirely defund U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza is…to halt economic and social progress there”, proposing instead an approach that “recognizes that innocent Palestinians…should not be forced to pay for the mistakes of a government they cannot control”.

But making the innocent members of the population pay for the nefarious deeds of governments they “cannot control” has been the hall mark of American policy across the globe for years—even when those governments have been far more tyrannical than the PA.

Make America Great Again (MAGA) Performance Review by Linda Goudsmit

It is time for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) performance review. How have Candidate Trump’s campaign promises fared in President Trump’s White House?

When ex-president Obama promised President Trump the customary peaceful transition of power President Trump believed him – it was a devastating mistake and catastrophic for MAGA. Our new President is a savvy businessman and America needs his business expertise – but government business is even dirtier and more corrupt than the New York real estate business.

In real estate it is far easier to identify your enemies – in government the swamp creatures are camouflaged by their ever-changing colors, deceitful smiles, and ability to adapt. Swamp creatures are entirely self-serving – there are no teams or loyalties in the swamp – just survival.

For eight years ex-president liar-in-chief Obama staffed the United States government with Globalists, Islamists, and Leftist activists. His hope and change agenda was designed to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. Obama followed Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to create the social chaos required for seismic social change. Obama weaponized his pro-Muslim agenda and used it in his information war to destabilize America and create social chaos. He staffed the government with Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR members. Obama weakened the military and national security apparatus with training manuals rewritten to satisfy his MB/CAIR advisers that deliberately deleted any mention of Islam as the ideological inspiration for jihad terror. He used Common Core to re-educated our youth with a revisionist curriculum that rejects Judeo-Christian traditions and exalts Islam as a religion of peace. Obama was the media’s globalist darling and they covered up his crimes against America to advance the globalist agenda of their owners.

Make America Great Again advances Americanism. MAGA is the new program that President Trump brought to Washington to oppose globalism. So, after seven months what does the MAGA performance review reveal? A shocking reorganization from MAGA to GAMA – Globalists are Management Again.

In a stunning reversal of staffing all the President’s men are OUT and all the ex-president’s men are IN. This is a catastrophic management upheaval. It is simply impossible for President Trump to fulfill his campaign promises to MAGA with an oppositional staff that rejects Americanism, a Washington swamp that embraces globalism, a biased mainstream media that protects the globalists, a pro-Muslim educational system that idealizes globalism, and a national security apparatus that denies Islamic ideology is the inspiration for jihadi terrorism.

How did this happen? How does a dream become a nightmare? How does unlikely Candidate Trump become President Trump and then lose his way?

Thought precedes behavior. Businessman Trump built an empire by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

Candidate Trump became President Trump by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision MAGA, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

President Trump brought his MAGA vision to Washington but the globalist traps were already set. There was no peaceful transition of power as promised. Instead, the swamp offensive began. The first attack was on General Michael Flynn, a true America-first patriot who understood the clear and present danger of radical Islam. General Flynn had the information to expose Obama’s insidious master plan to destabilize and destroy America from within. The globalist swamp needed to destroy General Flynn’s credibility to survive and so they did. But the creatures were not satisfied and the swamp attacks continued.

President Trump’s America-first MAGA team that was designed to oppose and dismantle the existing globalist swamp in Washington was attacked relentlessly and has itself been devoured by the swamp creatures instead. Team members Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka – all disappeared. Obama loyalists H.R.. McMaster, Dina Habib-Powell, Allison Hooker, Fernando Cutz, Andrea Hall, Rear Admiral David Kriete, Jessica Cox, Stephanie Morrison, Heather King, and Robert Wilson – all reappeared. Why?

Linguistic McCarthyism Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers. By Victor Davis Hanson

‘The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob, in furor over the assassination of Julius Caesar, encounters on the street a poet named Cinna. The innocent poet was not the conspiratorial assassin Cinna, but unfortunately shared a name with the killer.

The terrified poet points out to the mob this case of mistaken identity: “I am Cinna the poet.”

The mob answers: “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses! . . . It is no matter, his name’s Cinna!”

Shakespeare certainly would recognize that, like the playwright’s Roman mob, we have launched a war against words in our frenzy to find targets for our politically correct madness.

Recently, there were progressive calls at the University of Southern California to rename the school’s mascot, the white Andalusian horse “Traveler.” Members of the Left thought that the mute animal’s name too closely resembled the name “Traveller,” the favorite horse of Confederate general and sudden demon of 2017 Robert E. Lee.

But the mob was not finished there. An Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee was recently yanked by the sports channel ESPN from broadcasting a University of Virginia football game. Apparently, Lee’s name was too close to that of Robert E. Lee.

Nearly a century and a half after his death, General Lee has gone from tragic figure to Public Enemy No. 1 of the Left.

Lee the sportscaster, like Cinna the poet, was found guilty on the basis of ignorant association with his name. If the politically correct herd could not get its hands on the long-dead Robert E. Lee, it would apparently settle for anyone in the present who shared nearly the same name.

Why would a supposedly civilized country descend into such linguistic fascism?

Part of the problem is the presumption by elites that a supposedly illiterate public must be protected from itself. But does anyone really believe that average people will confuse an Asian-American sportscaster who has the common Chinese surname “Lee” and the all-American first name “Robert” with a Confederate general — or that the sportscaster could thus be somehow tangentially connected with the recent violence in Charlottesville?

ESPN, however, does not bet on the intelligence of the average American. It prefers to virtue-signal that it is above all suspicion of sympathy for the Confederacy. In its search for cosmic justice, it cares little about the injustice it metes out to real live people.

ESPN has long politicized sports and continues to lose viewers over its adolescent political correctness. Not long ago, the network fired tennis commentator Doug Adler. He had characterized the aggressive play of tennis star Venus Williams as employing the “guerrilla effect.” (“And you’ll see Venus move in and put the guerrilla effect on, charging,” Adler had said.) Adler’s reference was drawn from the once-popular term “guerrilla tennis” that denoted a tough, brawling, take-no-prisoners style from the 1990s.

New ADL Hire Helped Obama Admin Forge Ties With Hamas-Linked Group A strange way to combat anti-Semitism. Ari Lieberman

On August 28, The Anti-Defamation League announced that it had hired Obama holdover, George Selim, as its “Senior Vice President of Programs.” According to the ADL’s press release, Selim will be the ADL’s point man on programs connected to law enforcement, education and community security. This newly created position will ostensibly help the ADL better track, monitor and thwart all forms of xenophobia and prejudice. Selim will report directly to the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.

On paper, Selim, an Arab-American of Egyptian and Lebanese descent, appears qualified for the role. He served in the Bush and Obama administrations in various capacities, principally in the areas of community outreach and countering violent extremism (CVE). But beneath the surface lies a more sinister side to Selim, one that renders him entirely unfit for his new position.

In a June 7, 2012 interview with the Daily Caller, Selim admitted engaging with representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and further acknowledged that there were “hundreds” of such meetings taking place with various governmental departments and agencies. Selim refused to elaborate on the content of those meetings and offered no insight on which CAIR officials he met with.

In 2007, the United States Department of Justice named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development criminal probe. Members of the HLF were charged with laundering money to Hamas, a genocidal organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department. The HLF and five of its officers were convicted of all charges.

CAIR objected to the DOJ designation but a U.S. District Court judge ruled that there was “ample evidence to establish the association.” That ruling was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. DOJ’s designation led the FBI to sever all “non-investigative cooperation with the group.”

Moreover, CAIR officials are on record spewing vicious anti-Israel and anti-Semitic vitriol. Its founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, is a poster child for conspiracy theories and medieval-style anti-Semitism. He is a Hamas supporter, has refused to condemn acts of terrorism committed against Israeli civilians, rejects Israel’s right to exist, espoused anti-Semitic canards of Jewish influence and control over U.S. foreign policy, and as has entertained wild David Duke-like conspiracy theories suggesting that Israel had a hand in the September 11 attacks. Even Greenblatt’s ADL has recognized CAIR’s odious nature publishing a dossier of the group on its website.

Trump’s Presidential Grace and Class in Texas Yet Fake News critics pounce on his every step — as if each one is an impeachable offense.Matthew Vadum

President Trump’s visit to flooded parts of southern Texas went off without a hitch yet he has been besieged with scathing attacks by rabid left-wingers and their media allies desperate to find fault with him and treat his every action as a crazed assault on the time-honored political norms of the country.

Despite what you may have seen on CNN or heard on NPR, from this writer’s perch, Trump did more or less everything right. The trip, which didn’t take Trump into devastated Houston proper, was ordinary and comforting. In a word it was presidential. The president wasn’t there to rescue babies or house pets from flood zones – he was there to reassure the victims of Hurricane Harvey and let the nation know that the dire situation there was being handled properly, which, apparently, it is. Federal aid is flowing to the region, he said.

The visit to stricken areas was what one political junky called Trump’s first “natural disaster test.” He passed.

Before boarding Air Force One, the president hailed the “incredible” spirit of the people of Texas. “Things are being handled really well, the spirit is incredible,” he said at the White House. “It’s a historic amount of water, never been anything like it. The people are handling it amazingly well.”

Trump spoke an undeniable truth when he added that “tragic times such as these bring out the best in America’s character.”

In recent days Trump’s Twitter feed has been filled with the usual, otherwise unremarkable expressions of hope and optimism that Americans have come to expect from their president in times of crisis.

“First responders have been doing heroic work. Their courage & devotion has saved countless lives – they represent the very best of America,” read one tweet.

“Texas & Louisiana: We are w[ith] you today, we are w[ith] you tomorrow, & we will be w[ith] you EVERY SINGLE DAY AFTER, to restore, recover, & REBUILD!” read another.

“After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!” read another tweet.

Another read, “I will be going to Texas as soon as that trip can be made without causing disruption. The focus must be life and safety.”

“Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen. Good news is that we have great talent on the ground,” read a tweet.

This is what a president in modern times is expected to do. He is supposed to comfort the afflicted, promise things will get better, and reassure a worried populace.

But no matter what Trump did or didn’t do in coastal Texas, the media would have found an excuse to whine about him. Shouting obnoxiously and exploding with haughty indignation has worked for these people ever since the president declared his candidacy at Trump Tower. Trump’s presidency is an abomination to these people and his every action an impeachable offense.

So naturally, on cue the media set to bitching and moaning about Trump supposedly not acting presidential and being out of his depth.

These journalists are willing to tolerate a Republican president if they have to, but they won’t put up with one who is bold, assertive, and who dares to defend himself and relentlessly promotes his agenda. But when Obama did the same, even at times and in circumstances when it made reasonable people wince, he was given a pass.

Take the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson, for example. “Even in visiting hurricane-ravaged Texas, Trump keeps the focus on himself,” shrieked her biased, subjective headline.

“With his wife at his side, he sounded as if he were addressing a political rally instead of a state struggling to start to recover – but it was a tone that matched the screaming crowd,” she wrote.

Trump is a showman. That’s what he does and that’s what helped him vanquish umpteen challengers for the GOP nod and Democrat Hillary Clinton, something just about nobody thought he could pull off.

Johnson’s sentence could have been used to describe at least every second or third day when Barack Obama was Narcissist-in-Chief, whether he was speaking to a large, worshipful audience in a venue with a conspicuous echo effect, complaining that Cambridge, Mass., police “acted stupidly,” rhapsodizing about dead street thug Trayvon Martin as the son he never had, proselytizing before the whole world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” or informing Dallas, Texas, cops’ widows that a Black Lives Matter sniper gave their husbands exactly what they had coming.

Has France Been Bought by a State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism? by Drieu Godefridi

It is through these tax breaks that the Qataris are buying the “jewels” of France. The U.S. is not selling its defense companies to Qatar.

Thanks to its huge gas and oil reserves, Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world and huge reserves of cash to invest everywhere, whereas France, thanks to 40 years of socialism, is in dire need of cash.

The state of Qatar has been officially labelled as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, and an active supporter of Islamic terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State — not by Western governments, but by Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islamic faith, and the other Islamic regimes of the region.

Knowing the facts of Qatar — 11000km2, one-third the size of Belgium, population 2.5 million — the question may seem far-fetched: How could France, the great France, possibly be bought by a tiny state such as Qatar?

For the single reason that, thanks to its huge gas and oil reserves, Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world and huge reserves of cash to invest everywhere, whereas France, thanks to 40 years of socialism, is in dire need of cash and has a tradition of corruptible officials, to say nothing of a propensity for “collaboration”.

On August 4, the English press — not the French press — revealed that French prosecutors are actively investigating two events: the awarding the 2022 World Cup of football (soccer) to Qatar, and the purchase by “Qatari Diar”, a state-owned investment company, of a stake in the French utility firm Veolia.

At the center of the investigation is former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. To be sure, Sarkozy has not been formally indicted (and he may never be), but the evidence is overwhelming.

First, the World Cup. That the State of Qatar, known for decades for its active support of Islamic terror organizations, and with a temperature among the highest in the world — in addition to zero tradition in the world of football — was awarded the 2022 World Cup is, of course, a source of wonder ever since the award was announced by FIFA, the international governing body of football.

French investigators are now looking into a meeting that took place between then-President Sarkozy, Michel Platini — the French former president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), who sat on the FIFA committee that chose Qatar — and Qatari officials on November 23, 2010 (10 days before the vote). It is alleged that Platini was dead-set against Qatar and that Sarkozy urged him to change his mind: “They’re good people.”

The “deal” is said to have been sealed when Qatar agreed to buy the biggest French soccer team, the Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG). It is alleged that huge bribes were paid by Qatar to high-ranking French officials, to secure these two deals: the World Cup and the Veolia investment. Although no evidence has yet been presented, the case would not have been opened by French prosecutors without it. In addition, no one has ever denied the meeting of November 23, 2010.

In April 2010, the “Qatari Diar” fund bought a 5% stake in Veolia. Investigators are tracking 182 million euros suspected of having been used to bribe French officials. Investigators are also looking into a possible link between these two operations: Qatar investing in Veolia as a favor to France, possibly in exchange for France’s support for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup.

France’s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy (left) greets Qatar’s then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani (right) on March 19, 2011 in Paris, France. (Photo by Franck Prevel/Getty Images)

It is doubtful if the French investigators will ever get to the bottom of these two cases. The judiciary in France has a long tradition of submitting to the government. Since 1789, the French judiciary has not even been an independent power — as are the Legislative and the Executive — but a mere authority with a more limited scope.

Victims of Turkey’s Islamization: Women by Burak Bekdil

“Women should know their place…. Gender equality is against human nature.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to the ministry’s findings, physical violence is the most common form of abuse: 70% of women reported they have been physically assaulted.

One of the suspects made a deal with K.C.’s family: he paid a sum of about $5,700 to the family and agreed to marry K.C. The family arranged a bogus wedding ceremony, took pictures and presented them to the court to save the man. Under pressure from her family, the rapist had suddenly become her fiancé.

On Feb. 6, 1935, Turkish women were allowed to vote in national elections for the first time, and eighteen female candidates were elected to parliament – a decade or more before women even in Western countries such as France, Italy and Belgium. Eight decades later, Turkish women look like unwilling passengers on H.G. Wells’ Time Machine traveling back to their great-grandmothers’ Ottoman lives.

Turkey’s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once proudly said that “Women should know their place,” and that “Gender equality is against human nature”. His deputy prime minister said that women not to laugh in public. It was not shocking to anyone when Turkey’s Ministry of Family and Social Policies found in 2016 that no fewer than 86% of Turkish women have suffered physical or psychological violence at the hands of their partners or family. According to the ministry’s findings, physical violence is the most common form of abuse: 70% of women reported they have been physically assaulted.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once proudly said that “Women should know their place,” and that “Gender equality is against human nature”. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

More recently, Kadin Cinayetlerini Durduracagiz Platformu, a women’s rights organization, reported that 28 women were murdered by men in July 2017 alone. The same month, eight other — luckier — women were physically assaulted for “wearing shorts or ‘indecent’ outfits or smoking in public.” The report concluded by saying, “The state remains silent.”

Turkey increasingly features all possible social and political reflections of Islamism: authoritarianism, majoritarianism and officially-tolerated intolerance to everything Islamists may deem “un-Islamic.” Women are often the target group, and might not avoid intimidation even if they dress in line with the Islamic code. Hayrettin Karaman, an Islamic scholar and the darling of Turkey’s pro-Erdogan Islamists, recently argued that smoking cigarettes sends signals about women’s morals. He wrote in his Aug. 3 column:

“When I see a woman who wears a headscarf but also smokes in public, I get the impression that she’s saying: ‘Don’t mind the fact that I am covering my head. Don’t give up on me, I have a lot more to share with you.'”

Naturally, many Turkish men took the cleric’s words as a message of sexual availability. This kind of thinking is common in conservative Muslim societies. It did not used to be that way in secular Turkey. It is simply an outcome of Turkey’s top-down government-induced social Islamization. That has two disturbing aspects: willing social participation of people who comply, and inequality before law.

FBI Denies Request for Files on Hillary Clinton, Citing ‘Lack of Public Interest’ By Debra Heine

An attorney in New York City thinks former President Obama may still be running the FBI after the bureau cited a “lack of public interest” in rejecting an open records request related to its investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Ty Clevenger filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request way back in March of 2016 asking for a variety of documents from the FBI and the Justice Department as part of an ongoing effort to get Clinton and her personal attorneys disbarred for mishandling official emails during her tenure as secretary of state.

The FBI shot down Clevenger’s request for information from the FBI’s files using the flimsiest of excuses.

Via the Washington Times:

“You have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject,” FBI records management section chief David M. Hardy told Mr. Clevenger in a letter Monday.

“It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation regarding the public’s interest in the operations and activities of the government before records can be processed pursuant to the FOIA,” Mr. Hardy wrote.

Mrs. Clinton, is the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, former chief diplomat, former U.S. senator, and former first lady of both the U.S. and Arkansas.

Her use of a secret email account to conduct government business while leading the State Department was front-page news for much of 2015 and 2016, and was so striking that the then-FBI director broke with procedure and made both a public statement and appearances before Congress to talk about the bureau’s probe.

In the end, the FBI didn’t recommend charges against Mrs. Clinton, concluding that while she risked national security, she was too technologically inept to know the dangers she was running, so no case could be made against her.

Clevenger told the Times that he thought it was obvious why Mrs. Clinton’s case was of public interest, but he went ahead and sent the bureau documentation of congressional requests for an investigation into whether Clinton perjured herself anyway.

“I’m just stunned. This is exactly what I would have expected had Mrs. Clinton won the election, but she didn’t. It looks like the Obama administration is still running the FBI,” Mr. Clevenger told the Times. “How can a story receive national news coverage and not be a matter of public interest? If this is the new standard, then there’s no such thing as a public interest exception,” he said.

“It’s an absolute joke,” said former Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Fox News Wednesday morning. “The reality is, they do the exact same thing to Congress.”

Chaffetz, who joined Fox News as a political analyst after resigning from Congress in June, said:

The deep state will do everything it can to protect its own. There is no reason why those documents should be held from the public — but they also aren’t giving them to Congress. I issued a subpoena on this information! “There were congressional inquiries and they still didn’t give those documents. CONTINUE AT SITE

Arrested Democratic IT Staffer Imran Awan Still Has Active House Email Account By Debra Heine

Imran Awan, the former Democrat IT staffer who was arrested last month at Dulles International Airport as he tried to flee the country amid an FBI and Capitol Police investigation, still has an active, secret email account on the House computer system, The Daily Caller reported Tuesday.

Awan and several members of his family — including his wife Hina Alvi — are being investigated by the FBI and Capitol Police for conspiracy, bank fraud, and cybersecurity violations. The clan was reportedly barred from using the computer networks at the House of Representatives back in February.

According to the Caller, Awan’s email address is still active “and linked to the name of a House staffer who specializes in intelligence and homeland security matters for Indiana Democratic Rep. André Carson.”

Court documents and emails obtained by TheDCNF show Awan used the address 123@mail.house.gov in addition to his standard imran.awan@mail.house.gov account.

He and two of his Pakistani-born brothers, as well as his wife, are at the center of an FBI investigation over their IT work with dozens of Democratic congressional offices. Authorities shut down Awan’s standard email account Feb. 2, and he was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport trying to board a flight to his native Pakistan on July 25.

Authorities apparently did not realize Awan has a second account that is not linked to his identity. While his main email address began rejecting mail after it was shut down, the 123 address was still accepting mail Tuesday.

The Daily Caller’s intrepid reporter Luke Rosiak discovered that the account belongs to Nathan Bennett, a Carson aide whose work in Congress includes “national security and foreign affairs” and work on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The member Bennett works for, Carson, is a member of both the House Intelligence and House Homeland Security Committees, and previously employed Awan. CONTINUE AT SITE

What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why Monopolized by the Left, academic research on crime gets almost everything wrong. John Paul Wright Matt DeLisi

The history of academic criminology is one of grand pronouncements that don’t often prove out in the real world. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, criminologists demanded that public policy attack the “root causes” of crime, such as poverty and racism. Without solving these problems, they argued, we could not expect to fight crime effectively. On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social programs—yet crime went up, not down. In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work, either.

These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations. Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were almost universally negative. In the real-world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broken Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.

In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated? Answers to the first question are readily available—and suggest the answer to the second.

Academic criminologists are mainly sociologists, trained in statistics and armed with theories. Though most don’t study crime or violence directly, they have produced useful studies about offenders and the criminal-justice system. Through their work, we know, for example, that criminal behavior is strongly intergenerational, that relatively few people account for the majority of all crimes, and that some offenders desist from crime over time but many others simply change the types of crimes they commit. We also have learned that most offenders are generalists—that is, they commit a diverse assortment of crimes—and that steps can be taken to reduce criminal events by making them more difficult to carry out. Most criminals, it turns out, are lazy.

In other ways, though, criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations, and neighborhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings about the reality of crime. Most academics have never met with women who have been raped or children who have been molested, or seen the carnage wrought by a bullet that passed through a human skull, or spent a lot of time with police on the street. The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of the world sometimes fosters a romanticized view of criminals as victims, making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment.

Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

A quick perusal of Presidential Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Justice, bestowed by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), shows that the winners were primarily rewarded for their left-wing advocacy. They included a judge in Massachusetts who advocated abolishing the state’s death penalty, an FBI agent who successfully sued the organization for ethnic discrimination, and a former director of juvenile corrections in Massachusetts who closed the state’s juvenile reformatories and wrote a book alleging that the system hunted down black men for sport. The society also honored Zaki Baruti, a radical black activist in St. Louis known for his hatred of police and support for leftist causes.

Recently, the ASC’s policy committee sent a mass e-mail to members, asking for help in countering a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Heather Mac Donald, a longtime City Journal contributing editor and a writer known for eviscerating liberal claims about the police and the justice system. Mac Donald argued that because of increased scrutiny and charges of racism, police had rolled back their efforts to deter crime, at least in minority communities, resulting in rising violence in many cities across the country. She called this the “Ferguson Effect,” after the town in Missouri where the (justified) police shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man, in 2014 ignited riots and gave rise to a new anti-law-enforcement push from advocates, the press, and Democratic politicians. The existence and extent of the Ferguson Effect is an empirical question that can be debated. But it is telling that the ASC had never shown any interest in rebutting the hundreds of editorials that repeated factually baseless claims about police shootings or the racism supposedly embedded in the criminal-justice system. Only Mac Donald’s work was singled out—as was Wilson’s, years earlier.