Obama legitimizes terrorism 185

Obama is not just pro-Islam, he is pro-terrorist, pro-terrorism – at least when it is carried out by Muslims. For all his boasting about the killing of Osama bin Laden – which in fact he only reluctantly permitted, no doubt for the gain of political kudos – he is not against what bin Laden stood for, or even what bin Laden did.

How can we know?

Here is the evidence, presented with commendable indignation by Andrew C. McCarthy at PJ Media:

The Obama administration will not explain how it came to issue a visa to Hani Nour Eldin, a known member of the Egyptian terrorist organization Ga’amat al-Islamia, the Islamic Group (IG). The explanation is not forthcoming because what it portends is even more sinister than this one infuriating incident.

To call the IG a “terrorist organization” is not just purple prose. The IG is a terrorist organization that has carried out actual mass-murder attacks. There is a formal legal process under which such groups are “designated” as terrorist organizations. The IG has long been formally designated under that process. Once that process has occurred, any American citizen who tries to provide material support to members of a designated terrorist organization — i.e., any American citizen who tried to do what the Obama administration has done for Eldin — would be in jeopardy of being convicted of a serious federal felony worth upwards of 15 years’ imprisonment.

And Hani Nour Eldin is, indisputably, a member of the IG — we are not speculating here. Eldin is quite proud of his membership. He has been unabashed about it. The Obama administration, moreover, does not even attempt either to deny that Eldin is an IG member or to suggest that the issuance of a visa to him — to say nothing of the subsequent meetings he was invited to have with top American national security officials — was the result of some misunderstanding or monumental screw-up. Eldin was very intentionally brought to Washington. Despite the fact that the leader of his organization — the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman — is responsible for massive terrorist attacks against American civilians, Eldin was hosted here as if he were a politician rather than a terrorist. 

So what does the administration tell us about how this could have happened — how it could be that hordes of American citizens, as to whom there is not the slightest suspicion of terrorist sympathies, are forced by the Department of Homeland Security to undergo an appallingly intrusive physical search just to board an airplane, yet a known member of a designated terrorist organization is intentionally invited to board a plane so he can enter our country, be admitted into highly secure government buildings – like the White House — where top national security officials work, and be consulted as if he were a foreign dignitary rather than a jihadist?

The Obama cabinet, in the person of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, tells us that the administration was well aware that Eldin was a terrorist organization member; yet, she maintains that he was carefully vetted by three different government agencies. The administration then made a determination that his admission did not pose a threat to the United States — i.e., that he would not personally endanger anyone he encountered and that the signal conveyed to every other terrorist in the world by Obama’s rolling out the red carpet for a member of the Blind Sheikh’s cabal would not encourage terrorism globally. 

Think for a second about how lunatic that is.

Before the Obama administration came to power, the whole point of such background investigations was to determine if a person was somehow affiliated with an organization notorious for violence or criminality. That was the objective of the exercise. Once you found that there was an affiliation with terrorists, that was the end of the matter — no visa, no invitation into our country, no security clearance, no government employment, no admission to highly secure government locations or access to top government security officials, no benefit from our government, period.

Look at what has happened under Obama. Now, the government takes as a given the very thing the background investigation used to be conducted to find out: namely, that the person at issue is affiliated with known terrorists, terrorist financiers, and/or terrorist organizations. In Obama’s America, that turns out not to be the end of the investigation — it’s only the beginning. Astonishingly, it is only after you confirm that your subject has undeniable terror ties that you start vetting him for dangerousness. Terror ties are no longer a bright-line disqualifier; now they’re just a trigger for conducting more investigation — which actually means, to figure out a way to rationalize accommodating the terrorist.

As with nearly everything Obama, this is such a mind-blowing perversion of longstanding policy that we are paralyzed by the Eldin incident itself. We don’t come around to asking the vital follow-up question: What is going on here? Why is Obama working to change our basic understanding of what a background investigation is? Of what terrorism is? 

Here is what you need to understand. Here is what Mitt Romney needs to be highlighting as a major campaign issue: President Obama is laboring to shift the United States away from the post-9/11 conception of counterterrorism. Our government is steadily adopting the Islamist conception that has gained so much traction on the European Left. The Islamist conception has two elements.

(a) What we refer to as “terrorism” — ideologically driven mass-casualty attacks designed to extort changes in government policy — is not actually terrorism; it is resistance. That is, violence is a legitimate, or at least quasi-legitimate reaction to government policies that progressives deem inappropriate, if not downright immoral. Why change our understanding of the concept of terrorism? Because terrorism is a universally condemnable atrocity. Resistance, by contrast, is just hardball politics — like community organizing. For the Left, engagement in “resistance” is merely an aggressive form of negotiation; it does not disqualify the aggressor from a seat at the policy table …

(b) It seems like only yesterday that terrorists were seen as the pirates of yore: hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind. No more. For transnational progressives, operatives of organizations like the IG are merely members of a political movement. Welcome to the alchemy of “Islamic democracy,” which is better understood as a laundering operation for Islamic supremacists than as a social transformation for Islamic populations.

In terms of substance, there is nothing democratic about the wave of “democracy” said to be sweeping the Middle East in the “Arab Spring.” Democracy is a culture; holding an election is a mere procedural exercise. The most antidemocratic organizations in the world conduct votes from time to time. If sharia — the Islamic comprehensive legal code — is installed by popular election rather than violence, that does not make it “democratic” in the Western sense of the term. …

Nevertheless, because these procedural exercises now have the effect of placing terrorist operatives in governmental positions, Obama-think urges us to see terrorist organizations as political parties pursuing ordinary policy agendas, not ideologically driven hardliners pursuing a jihad. …

This counterterrorism shift is not merely a misjudgment. It is a profound moral wrong.

Eldin and the IG, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are savages, not politicians. No one would give a hoot what they thought about the direction of their countries but for the fact that they have murdered and maimed their way to a seat at the diplomatic table. And, in fact, they have not moderated their positions: they still deny the right of Israel to exist. They don’t simply disagree with a sovereign adversary’s policies; they maintain that this sovereign is illegitimate and must be destroyed, whether by violence, political processes, or — better — political processes leveraged by violence. To adopt the administration’s position is to guarantee more terrorism. If you illustrate to the terrorist that his methods work, why on earth would he stop using them?

The Middle East’s new Islamic supremacist rulers are not championing democracy; they are championing the imposition of repressive sharia by means of popular vote rather than extortionate killings. Ironically, it was Mubarak, the dictator, who imposed laws that promoted equality for women and prohibited … heinous sharia practices …  Do we actually believe the Islamists are the real “democrats” just because Islamist populations have elected them?

President Obama is not just inviting terrorists to consult with American national security officials. That’s not the half of it. Obama is determined to change our perception of what terrorism is, and to do it in a way that will encourage more savagery.

The terrorism practiced by Egyptian jihadists, you’re to understand, is really just “resistance” against oppression … Get used to it: It is just an aggressive form of politics … one that works because the Obamas of the world indulge it.

DHS head protects a jihadist 80

How secure does Obama’s Secretary for Homeland Security make you feel when you watch this?

National insecurity 182

Secretary Janet Napolitano has no idea that there has been an intelligence leak in her Department of Homeland Security.

In this slow but telling video clip, Representative Louis Gohmert questions her about a man named Mohamed Elibiary who stole and leaked DHS secrets.

Mohamed Elibiary is a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. There are 26 members in all. He was the only one given access to the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) database.

He abused the privilege by downloading and leaking secret information.

Patrick Poole reports:

There’s yet another update to my exclusive PJM report last week that Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council member Mohamed Elibiary allegedly leaked sensitive law enforcement documents prepared by the Texas Department of Public Safety obtained thru the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) to a left-leaning media outlet claiming that the reports represented a pattern of “Islamophobia” to attack TX Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry. According to my source at the publication, they declined to run the story that Elibiary pitched because they didn’t believe that the TX DPS reports were “Islamophobic”. The source also said that reports were marked “For Official Use Only” (FOUO). …

Rep. Louie Gohmert … grilled DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on these allegations in a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week.

And yesterday I reported from multiple sources that Elibiary’s access to the HS SLIC has been revoked.

Now comes an even more disturbing revelation from inside DHS that Mohamed Elibiary is the only member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council – one out of 26 members – who has been given access to the HS SLIC (Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest) database.

I have repeatedly asked DHS spokesman Chris Ortman by phone and email why Elibiary was given special access to the HS SLIC database, and when and how that special access was given, but after more than a week I have received no reply.

This new development raises questions about why an outside adviser who is not employed by any state or local law enforcement agency would be given access to a database intended for sharing intelligence between agencies. It should be noted that highly sensitive material, including FBI source reporting and terror watch lists, are posted on the HS SLIC system and would have been available to Elibiary.

Homeland security and law enforcement officials I spoke with this week about expressed serious concerns that an outspoken partisan political appointee with no law enforcement experience and highly questionable background would be given access to their intelligence reporting. Why and when was Elibiary given this access by DHS?

With Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security continuing to stonewall questions about this matter, it may be that only Congress exercising its oversight authority will be able to get answers to these questions.

While Janet Napolitano is in charge of national security, we’d all better be armed and extra vigilant.

Parental guidance needed for security officers? 74

Imagine:

The police want to receive no reports about crime.

The hospitals want to hear nothing about sickness and injury.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to learn nothing about controversial opinion, see and hear nothing about extreme violence and its gruesome results, or ponder criminal activity.

Ha-ha! None of these similarly ridiculous statements could be true, could it?

Well, one is. The TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for screening passengers boarding planes, “detecting, deterring, and defeating terrorist or other criminal hostile acts targeting U.S. air carriers, airports, passengers, crew, and when necessary, other transportation modes within the US’s general transportation systems” and conducting “comprehensive inspections, assessments and investigations” of passengers “to determine their security posture” wants to hear no “controversial opinion” on, say, argument for and against suicide bombing and jihad. So it has banned “certain websites from the federal agency’s computers, including halting access by staffers to any Internet pages that contain ‘controversial opinion’, according to an internal email obtained by CBS News.”

The email was sent to all TSA employees from the Office of Information Technology on Friday afternoon. It states that as of July 1, TSA employees will no longer be allowed to access five categories of websites that have been deemed “inappropriate for government access.”

These are:

• Chat/Messaging

Controversial opinion

Criminal activity

Extreme violence (including cartoon violence) and gruesome content

• Gaming

The email does not specify how the TSA will determine if a website expresses a “controversial opinion.”

There is also no explanation as to why controversial opinions are being blocked, although the email stated that some of the restricted websites violate the Employee Responsibilities and Conduct policy.

The blowing up of aircraft in flight is criminal, extremely violent, and gruesome. Are TSA employees to keep their minds off these facts? If so, is it because they will be harmed by knowing them?

And on whose parental instructions? Janet Napolitano’s – the stunningly smart Secretary of Homeland Security?

We may never know.

Obama’s abasement of America 7

China is one of the worst, possibly the worst regime on earth. Under Mao tens of millions were starved to death, more millions committed suicide, and hundreds of millions were deliberately murdered – many more than the 70 million calculated, because for decades most newborn baby girls were killed. China still allows no free speech, no free press, no freedom of assembly. Torture is routine in its prisons and gulags. Its citizens are imprisoned without trial. In any case trials are travesties of justice. The government’s entire business is to protect itself against the people. In sum, China is an evil Communist dictatorship. The dictators are wholly without moral compunction.

In very bad faith these monsters accuse America of “violations of human rights”.  Obviously this is chutzpah writ very large indeed. The Chinese cite crime levels in the US as if common crime were the result of government policy. They cite measures of defense, such as those taken under the Patriot Act, as if they were morally illegitimate.  (See the accusations below in our post, Seeing ourselves as others see us.) The contrast between the governmental system of the United States, designed to protect the people from tyranny, and the Communist system designed to tyrannize over the people, could not be greater.

It is true that the present administration of the United States has a dictatorial inclination, so much so that we often allude to Obama as “the dictator”. We don’t doubt that he is a collectivist by temperament and training. We would not be astonished to learn that he thinks the Chinese system of government is better than the one set up by the framers of the United States Constitution. While he is in power he can do a lot of damage – has done much already – but he will not destroy American freedom. The people will not let him.

He himself does not value individual liberty. He has absorbed a distorted version of American history from his Marxist parents, mentors, teachers, and associates.

And so he has his legates confess what he sees as America’s political sins to – the Communist dictators of China!  In what amounts to a form of apology, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner tarred his own country with guilt and shame – and then boasted that had done so.

It was not even enough that Obama’s envoy should  express repentance for the accusations China made; in addition he threw in one that the Chinese had not mentioned. He condemned a perfectly constitutional and morally defensible law recently made in Arizona to protect itself from massive illegal immigration. (Posner has probably not even read the law. Neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor  Homeland Security head, Janet Napolitano, has read it, by their own admission!)

Obama has done dreadful harm to his country: crippling its economy, putting it into unfathomable debt, appeasing the Islamic bloc while it is at war with Islam, and simultaneously  antagonizing its traditional allies. But of all that he has done, abasing the nation he leads before the blood-soaked  despots of Communist China is surely the most despicable.

Keeping the homeland safe 157

This information comes from Dr Terry  Kelhawk at PoliticalMavens. A Palestinian passed through Paris on his way from the Middle East – we are not told where to – and this is what happened:

The Arab Muslim screeners [in Paris] found out he was Palestinian, and while the other passengers were being heavily scrutinized, he got the “hail fellow well met” treatment. Smiles and sympathy replaced not only his walking through the metal detector, but exempted his backpack from the indignity of x-ray as well. Good thing he was not in the mood to blow up a plane that day.

That needs to considered along with this report by CNS News (worth reading in full):

Four months after the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit and nine years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, only 14 of the 57 U.S. consulates identified as being at “high risk” for potentially providing visas to terrorists have been furnished with units of the Department of Homeland Security’s Visa Security Program (VSP).

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, is planning to freeze the program’s budget for fiscal 2011.

The VSP, established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, puts Department of Homeland Security officials in the field at U.S. consulates to vet the backgrounds of people applying for U.S. visas. …

While administration officials have said publicly that five additional VSP units should be in place at high risk consulates by the end of 2011, President Barack Obama’s fiscal Year 2011 budget for DHS–submitted almost two months after the Christmas Day bombing attempt—does not increase funding for the program from its fiscal 2010 level.

According to a March 8 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, a lack of funding could hamper expansion of the Visa Security Program to the many high-risk consulates that still do not have a unit. …

President Obama’s proposed freeze on VSP funding and the administration’s slow pace in putting new VSP units in high risk consulates is unacceptable to some congressional Republicans, who have introduced legislation to address these issues.

The Secure Visas Act (HR 4758), introduced in March by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), would allocate $60 million to the program for fiscal 2010 and another $60 million for fiscal 2011 for placing VSP units in the 15 “highest risk” consulates beyond the 14 that already have units in place. That bill would approximately double the funding the Obama administration has allocated for the program in fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011.

“The visa security process is our first line of defense against terrorists and others who wish to do us harm,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the lead sponsor of the Secure Visas Act, told CNSNews.com. “But under President Obama, new Visa Security Units ground to a halt.” …

At the current rate of VSP placement — about five consulates every two years — it would take until 2021 for 75 percent of high-risk consulates to have the program in place. …

“If the Obama administration will not exercise its authority to develop new VSUs (Visa Security Units) at the highest risk posts identified by its own Department of Homeland Security, Congress must step in,” said Smith. …

Smith and Secure Visas Act co-sponsor Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) noted that it took 12 months for the DHS to start the process for putting a VSP unit in Yemen, the country where Christmas Day bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was radicalized.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano waited 12 months before even sending a request to the State Department to open a unit in Yemen,” the senators wrote. …

TSA: Terrorist Support Administration 6

This news strains belief. But we tell ourselves it shouldn’t really, because, for  all the glaring stupidity of the decisions, they’re perfectly consistent with the policies and sympathies of the Obama administration.

It comes from Creeping Sharia:

TSA tells terrorists where body scanners are, and exempts them.

Terrorists spread the information and discuss …

… ways to evade and beat airport scanners on jihadi forums:

We have that system in place in Algiers…does anyone know if it’s capable of detecting [the flammable gas] butane?”

On another Jihadist site, a visitor questions security involving 3D scanners at British airports asking: “Can I refuse [to pass through] for religious reasons?”

Before long comes this answer: “… advise those who wish to avoid the Heathrow scanners to take the train to Paris… and then board a plane from there.”

The TSA website features a map and lists of locations to help terrorists determine which airports to avoid when planning to smuggle explosives aboard commercial airplanes. There’s also a video on CNN showing just how easy it is to beat TSA’s screenings.

Since terrorism isn’t limited to air travel, the TSA also lists other domestic U.S. locations where the scanning technology is used, primarily court houses and prisons

[There will be] 1,000 machines in the nation’s highest-risk airports by next year. However, body scanner screening is “optional for all passengers,” and this is due to the stealth jihad of Muslim Brotherhood groups in the United States (funded from outside the United States) – and was enacted to exempt the specific religious demographic that prompted the need for such advanced security.

From a May 2009 posting – well before the Christmas plane bombing attempt and faux fatwas to protect Islamic terrorists were issued; from a host of Muslim Brotherhood-linked stealth jihadists including MPAC, the Islamic Shura Council, and the Fiqh Council of North America:

After a series of meetings with interfaith leaders and advocacy organizations, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) this week agreed to make traveler compliance with the highly controversial “full body scanners” optional. [Remember, the TSA is headed by the lady Mark Steyn aptly calls Janet Incompetano.]

The … announcement came after a number of groups expressed concern over privacy and modesty issues, for themselves and their children, related to the advanced image technology machines. [Never mind the safety issues for the rest of us!] The TSA reassured the community representatives (Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, Chairman Fiqh Council of North America, Shakeel Syed, Executive Director Islamic Shura Council and Aziza Hassan, Director Government Relations of MPAC) in a meeting requested by the Islamic Shura Council to discuss the Islamic perspective on body scanners. …

It all seems too easy. Islamic terrorists have every advantage. They don’t even have to work for information. They are exempt from the security measures in place to thwart and catch them.

A pointless yakfest 70

Why did the Dictator hold his “nuclear summit” with heads of state flocking to Washington to pay homage to his great leadership? Since it was about nothing of importance, and nothing of importance came of it, it was probably only to have heads of state flocking to pay homage to his great leadership. Just something His Modesty desired.

With his usual clear sight, Mark Steyn writes:

In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand …but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.

Granted that almost all of Obama’s exciting innovative “change we can believe in” turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there’s still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear “nonproliferation” in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.

Yet it’s a nuclear power.

That’s what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. If you read in the paper that New Zealand had decided to go nuclear, would you lose a moment’s sleep over it? Personally, I’d be rather heartened. It would be a sign that a pampered and somnolent developed world had woken up and concluded that betting your future on the kindness of strangers is a helluva gamble. What Obama and his empty showboaters failed even to acknowledge in their “security” summit is the reality of the Post-Big Five nuclear age: We’re on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel ‘n’ dime basket-cases go nuclear.

How long do you think that arrangement will last? Iran has already offered to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. Sudan? Ring a vague bell? Remember that “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser you went to, where someone read out a press release from George Clooney, and you all had a simply marvelous time? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed – with machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive. In the Congo, five and a half million have been slaughtered – and, again, in impressively primitive ways.

But a nuclear Sudan would be a model of self-restraint?

By the way, that’s another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It’s not that Britain has nukes, and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It’s that the machete crowd are willing to kill on an industrial scale, and the high-tech guys can’t figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative.

The Obama Happy Fairyland Security Summit was posited on the principle that there’s no difference between a Swiss nuke and a Syrian nuke. If you believe that, you’ll be thrilled by the big breakthrough agreement of the summit: Canada, Chile, Mexico and Ukraine have agreed to reduce their stocks of enriched uranium. Peace in our time! I have here a piece of paper from the prime minister of Canada!

This is the nuclear version of Janet Incompetano’s initial reaction to the Pantybomber – when she banned passengers from having paperback books on their laps for the last 45 minutes of the flight. In an age of freelance nukes, we shouldn’t be banning items but profiling threats. For 30 years, Iran has acted with extraterritorial impunity and without even the minimal courtesies of international relations – seizing embassies, taking out mob contracts on British novelists, seeding terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, blowing up community centers in Latin America. Washington’s pathetic fallback of “containment” is intended to prevent Tehran using a nuke, in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere else within range. There is no strategy for “containing” Iran’s leverage of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for “containing” the mullahs’ generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology. …

As we learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don’t care who they kill can inflict quite a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. That’s the “asymmetric warfare” that matters. So virtuously proclaiming oneself opposed to nuclear modernization ensures a planet divided into civilized states with unusable weapons and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever’s to hand.

So another grand week’s work for a president pressing full steam ahead into the post-American global order. The good news is that at least you don’t have to worry about a nuclear blitzkrieg from Winnipeg. Sleep easy.

Doing it her way 138

Janet Napolitano, whom Obama chose for no good reason to be Homeland Security Secretary, has decided that the best way to keep Americans safe is to work closely with the enemy who is trying to kill them and destroy their country. She will  provide organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood with security information at regular meetings, and perhaps award them some tax-payer’s money, trusting that this will induce them to – what? Melt under the warmth of her respect, agree to cancel the jihad, and forswear forever the use of terrorism?

From Pajamas Media:

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and her senior staff privately met in Washington, D.C., to begin a controversial information sharing program with Muslim organizations — including three directly linked with the extremist entity the Muslim Brotherhood. …

Secretary Napolitano spent an hour and a half briefing the organizations, informing them of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counter-radicalization program and exploring ways to mutually share information. Muslims, Arabs, and Sikhs attended the briefings held on January 27 and 28. The organizations are scheduled to meet regularly with DHS senior aides and with Napolitano.

Publicly, most Muslim and Arab organizations have said they oppose rising militancy and radicalization within their communities. But privately, they seem to harbor distrust of law enforcement agencies and believe profiling, not radicalization, is the primary problem in the United States.

The organizations meeting with Napolitano included the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2007 federal terror funding case. Also present were the leaders of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Muslim American Society. All are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is considered the ideological foundation for Islamic terror groups.

Many of the radical groups, including those who have extremist ties, publicly embrace counter-radicalization programs. One of the reasons, congressional sources said, is that there is a possibility the Obama administration may award large government grants to the Muslim groups if they join the new program. Nevertheless, while many Muslim groups have preached moderation and anti-radicalization in public, privately they seemed reluctant to rally to the administration’s side. In some cases there certainly were people expressing in private conversation a sort of outrage that this [counter-radicalization] is even a topic of discussion.

Reactions from anti-terrorist authorities also were negative. Some felt it demonstrated the administration was naïve. U.S. House Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), a member of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that … the administration was clueless: “It is clear government agencies and officials do not get it.”

Steve Emerson, an anti-terrorism expert and the founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, told PJM: “I’m not sure she [Napolitano] understands what the Muslim Brotherhood is. It’s the parent of al-Qaeda and all terrorist groups, confirmed by all the intelligence chiefs.”

A former intelligence officer for the U.S. government [said]: “The fact that the government reaches out to these groups, more than any other factor, shows you how broken our intelligence apparatus is.”

A climate change in politics 81

The Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, has decided not to let her state become impoverished in order to save the earth from getting a mite warmer. Or cooler. Or  whatever it is the environmentalists are currently panicking about.

The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?

Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment.” At the time he said the regional agreement “sets the stage for a regional cap-and-trade program which will provide a powerful framework for developing a national cap-and-trade program.”

Since then, the nation has slid into a recession, and the only thing man-made about climate change has been the manipulated and manufactured claims that we are doomed if we don’t act to fight it.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.

Arizona joined the climate initiative under its previous governor, Janet Napolitano, now secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

All 50 states agreed to the cap-and-trade pact, but left implementation up to each state. Only California is ready to start its program in 2012.

Brewer also ordered Arizona’s Environmental Quality Department to take another look at stricter vehicle emission rules, based on California’s standards, set to take effect in 2012, fearing they would significantly raise new car costs. Slowly but surely, economic reality is trumping climate fantasy.

Rumblings of discontent are also being heard in California. Assemblyman Dan Logue is sponsoring an initiative for the November ballot that would halt implementation of the state’s global-warming law, Assembly Bill 32, until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5% from the current 12.4%.

“The state’s greenhouse reduction program is not a freebie,” Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, said last month. “Large costs foisted on an unemployment-riddled state economy and increased electricity rates … are not affordable at this time, if ever.”

A 2009 study by economists at California State University, Sacramento, and commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable found implementation costs … “could easily exceed $100 billion” and that by 2020 the program would raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household per year.

Even the most optimistic assessments of global pacts such as Copenhagen and Kyoto would have moderated at great cost the earth’s temperature by an amount too small to measure. The impact of a regional pact by a handful of states would be futile, especially when they are downwind from the world’s biggest polluter, the “developing” nation of China, which is exempt from such global pacts. … The pact also envisions strict emission limits on American cars at a time China has passed the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market. …  But the political climate is about to change.

– So says Investor’s Business Daily, who published this report. We think and hope it’s right. Economic necessity is a fairly reliable antidote to irrational belief.

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