A Total Misuse Of Taxpayers’ Money

Yesterday The Middle East Forum reported that in October, the Trump administration handed out $100,000 of federal government money to the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Middle East Forum has found.

The article reports:

To fund CAIR, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first awarded monies to the Washington D.C. government, which then selected CAIR and a number of other extremist organizations as suitable sub-recipients. The federal government would likely have been aware, however, that CAIR was a grantee – according to government documentation, it seems sub-grantees must be approved by DHS before funds are distributed.

The administration’s funding of CAIR was the product of the DHS’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program. As my colleague David Swindle recently wrote in the Daily Wire, Congress’s current proposed expansion of the program’s budget, however “well-meaning,” carries enormous “potential for abuse” and will end up providing “millions of taxpayer dollars” to “pro-jihadist Islamist groups.”

CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Trial in 2008. The Holy Land Foundation was convicted of providing material support to terrorists.

The article notes:

In 2014, the United Arab Emirates designated CAIR as a terrorist organization. And today, its officials continue to promote and excuse violently anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The article concludes:

Surprisingly, under the Trump administration, grants to extremist organizations have actually increased. As we noted last year, “between 2017 and 2018, the amount of taxpayers’ money given to organizations either influenced or controlled by Islamist activists more than tripled from $4 million to $13.5 million. Under the Obama administration, the amount given to Islamist-linked organizations averaged a mere $1.7 million each year.”

In August 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau quickly cancelled a proposed partnership with CAIR after a number of Conservative media outlets started investigating the decision. But why this was not enough to stop the federal government from subsequently funding the very group it had previously conceded was beyond the pale?

Over the last few months, some supporters of the administration have reacted to our research into public subsidy and political support for these theocratic groups by acknowledging the problem but arguing that, in many instances, the federal government’s embrace of Islamists and its failure to work instead with moderate Muslims, is an enduring legacy of extant Obama administration policies.

Given the long-standing programs behind many of these grants, this may well be true. If only there were someone to drain the swamp.

President Trump will need four more years to get to the bottom of the seemingly endless swamp that is Washington, D.C.

Irony

This is irony at its best–it’s sad, but it is irony at its best.

Daniel Pipes is the president of The Middle East Forum. He is an affiliate professor at the University of Haifa. His bi-weekly column appears regularly in the Washington Times and in newspapers around the globe, including the Israel Hayom (Israel), La Razón (Spain), L’Opinione (Italy), and the Australian. His special interests include the role of Islam in public life, Turkey, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and U.S. foreign policy.

Mr. Pipes posted an article today on his blog that is totally ironic.

The article reports:

A local source in the Iraqi province of Nineveh announced on Friday, September 2, that the [ISIS] terrorist group has released an order, based on which no woman is allowed to be wearing niqab or burqa when entering the security and military centres. The decision, according to the source, came after some fully veiled women killed a number of ISIS commanders and members in the past months.

The article notes the irony:

(1) First irony: The ISIS rulers first require the burqa and then, realizing what a perfect cover it provides to attack themselves, ban it from sensitive areas. Should attacks on them continue, perhaps ISIS will have to ban the burqa from all public places, which would be quite a change.

2) Second irony: The most retrograde, extreme, and morbid Islamist regime on earth recognizes burqas as a danger to public security while the modern, moderate, and democratic states in the West remain clueless.

(3) Despite my frustration on this issue, I do believe it’s just a matter of more assaults and more time before Westerners wake up to this problem. But how many more must be gratuitously robbed, raped, and killed before that happens? (September 6, 2016)

It is time for the west to wake up to the danger the burqa represents. Even partially covering your face in your driver’s license picture represents a security risk. It’s time to put the safety of Americans before someone else’s dress code.

One Possible Explanation For Recent Foreign Policy Missteps

President Obama’s foreign policy has been a disaster. President Bush’s foreign policy was slightly better, but was not successful in promoting democracy, freedom, and American interests around the world. President Bush attempted to promote democracy, but any gains were lost when President Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq. Generally speaking, in recent years, when given a choice, America has made the wrong decision.

On Monday, the Middle East Forum posted an article entitled, “Gulliver Tied Down by Lilliputians.” The article details some of the reasons for America’s recent lack of success in dealing with the Middle East.

The article reports:

One in five applicants for jobs at the Central Intelligence Agency have ties to Muslim terrorist organizations, according to the latest round of Snowden leaks. And Israel is a major target of American counterintelligence. Washington is insane.

Three years ago, the Washington Post sketched the elephantiasis in the U.S. intelligence establishment without, of course, access to the detailed numbers leaked by Edward Snowden last week. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you can’t hire people you can trust. If you spend $52 billion in the “black budget,” you create so many conflicting bureaucratic interest groups as to cancel out any possible signal with a wave of noise.

I have very mixed emotions about Edward Snowden and what he has done, but this is information that should be made public. Obviously common sense has departed from the CIA hiring process.

The article at Middle East Forum contrasts the fact that America intelligence services cannot find Arab translators and are forced to hire people whose backgrounds they cannot  verify with the fact that Israel routinely teaches Arab languages in high school and thus has more translators than they can use. Admittedly, Israel is in the midst of the danger, but we can still learn a lesson from them.

The article concludes:

The U.S. has relied extensively on friendly Arab intelligence services, above all the Egyptians, to fill the gap — except that the Obama administration did its best to bring down the Egyptian military in 2011 and install the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis have plenty to tell, but little that Washington wants to hear: Israel never fell victim to the mass delusion about the so-called Arab Spring, and has warned throughout (along with Saudi Arabia) that Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be crushed. Israel therefore is treated as an intelligence target rather than as a collaborator, while the Arab intelligence services who most might help us — Egyptian and Saudi — must regard us with skepticism in the best of cases and hostility in the worst.

America is flying blind into a hurricane. Americans who write about the Middle East now depend on what other countries choose to leak to us. Washington isn’t in the loop any longer.

Whether we are willing to admit it or not, America is involved in a war for her survival and for the survival of western civilization. Our enemies will fight this war whether we choose to fight it or not. It’s time to wake up and defend our freedom.

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Some Objective Commentary On America’s Foreign Policy In The Middle East

One of the best sources of objective information on the Middle East is the Middle East Forum. The Middle East Forum posted an article last week entitled, “America‘s Problems in the Middle East are Just Beginning.” The article is not particularly encouraging, but it is frank and objective.

The opening paragraphs of the article state:

It’s 2015, and there is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas), financed by Iran, wins an election on a platform demanding the expulsion of the Jews from Israel. Iran meanwhile smuggles shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to terrorist cells in Palestine that can take down civilian airlines at Ben-Gurion airport. With backing from the Egyptian military, Fatah throws out the elected Hamas government and kills larger number of Hamas supporters. What will Washington do? Given the track record of both the Obama administration and the Republican mainstream, one would expect America to denounce the use of violence against a democratically-elected government.

Such is the absurdity of both parties’ stance towards Egypt: the Egyptian military is doing America’s dirty work, suppressing a virulently anti-modern, anti-Semitic and anti-Western Islamist movement whose leader, Mohammed Morsi, famously referred to Israelis as “apes and pigs.” It did so with the enthusiastic support of tens of millions of Egyptians who rallied in the streets in support of the military. And the American mainstream reacted with an ideological knee jerk. America’s presence in the Middle East has imploded.

It is obvious to even the most casual observer that America’s Middle East policy is a disaster. It has been so dictated by our dependence on oil and by our lack of understanding of the civilizations and organizations we are dealing with that we have absolutely no moral authority or solid ground to stand on. Our government has been infiltrated and influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1990’s (see government exhibit 3-85.pdf–as it was called during the first part of the Holy Land Foundation Trial). The first half of the exhibit is in Arabic, you have to scroll about halfway through it to find the English translation. The document explains how to present Islam as a civilization alternative with the goal of bringing America into a world-wide caliphate.

The article at the Middle East Forum concludes:

America cannot bear to think about its own Civil War because the wounds are too painful; in order to reunite the country after 1865, we concocted a myth of tragic fratricide. Wilsonian idealism was born of the South’s attempt to suppress its guilt for the war, I have argued in the past. That is an academic consideration now. America’s credibility in the Middle East, thanks to the delusions of both parties, is broken, and it cannot be repaired within the time frame required to forestall the next stage of violence. Egypt’s military and its Saudi backers are aghast at American stupidity. Israel is frustrated by America’s inability to understand that Egypt’s military is committed to upholding the peace treaty with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood wants war. Both Israel and the Gulf States observe the utter fecklessness of Washington’s efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The events of the past week have demonstrated that America’s allies in the Middle East from Israel to the Persian Gulf can trust no-one in Washington–neither Barack Obama nor John McCain. Those of us in America who try to analyze events in the region will be the last to hear the news, and the value of our work will diminish over time.

I don’t know if democracy is possible in the Arab world. Turkey did a reasonable job of it for a while, but the Islamists are in the process of taking over Turkey, and democracy and Sharia Law are not compatible. Western civilization promotes freedom, property rights, and individual achievement. Those values are not part of Sharia Law. Until we acknowledge that there is such a thing as a superior civilization, we will continue attempting to negotiate with people who simply want us dead or under their control.

Please follow the link above to the Middle East Forum and read the entire article. It is not encouraging, but it is honest.

 

 

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Our Current Foreign Policy Toward Egypt Has A Problem

Yes, I know that there was a coup in Egypt. If a coup is defined as a group of unelected people seizing power from an elected group of people, there was a coup in Egypt. However, when the elected group (the Muslim Brotherhood) begins to change the government to end democracy, someone has to act to preserve democracy. That is what happened. in Egypt. The problems that led to the problem begin almost immediately after Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. To understand exactly what happened, it is important to look at the history of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. It was founded to re-establish the imperial Islamic state. It was established as a reaction to the fact that the government of Turkey was established as a secular government after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is to establish a world-wide caliphate through political and violent means. If you google the exhibits in the Holy Land Foundation Trial and read them, you will discover the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America.

Under Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood was in jail in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Anwar Sadat after he signed a peace treaty with Israel, and the military put Hosni Mubarak in power. Mubarak put the Brotherhood in jail.  When President Obama spoke in Cairo in 2009, he put the Muslim Brotherhood in the front row–signaling to the Brotherhood that he would support them. Despite vague statements from the Obama Administration to the contrary, that support has not changed.

On Friday, a website called The Middle East Forum posted a story about how the average Egyptian feels about what is going on in his country and the role America is playing in Egypt.

The article in the Middle East Forum reports:

First, most offensive to Egyptians—and helpful to the Brotherhood’s cause—is McCain‘s insistence on calling the June 30 Revolution a “military coup.” In reality, the revolution consisted of perhaps thirty million Egyptians taking to the streets to oust the Brotherhood. McCain is either deliberately misconstruing the event, or believes the story as manufactured by Al Jazeera and promulgated by Ambassador Anne Patterson. In this narrative, at least an equal amount of Egyptians supported Morsi, and the military overthrew him against popular will. Al Jazeera has actually broadcast images of the millions of anti-Morsi protesters and identified them as pro-Morsi protesters, disinformation which was quickly adopted by Western media.

Several Al Jazeera correspondents have resigned due to Al Jazeera acting as the Brotherhood’s international mouthpiece.

Fortunately, some American officials have formally rejected this false narrative. A new congressional resolution states:

Whereas in recent weeks, an estimated 30,000,000 Egyptians in a majority of Egypt’s 27 provinces gathered to protest the widespread failures of former President Mohamed Morsi and the Government of Egypt and its violations of the most basic rights of all Egyptian citizens, including Egyptian women, minorities, and those publicly dissenting from its views and policies; Whereas the participants in the June 30, 2013, popular protests far outnumbered those involved in the protests and demonstrations of January and February 2011 …

Even the Obama administration has been sensible enough not to call the June 30 revolution a “military coup.” Nevertheless, McCain rejected John Kerry’s statement that “the [Egyptian] military did not take over.”

What happened in Egypt was a movement by the people of Egypt to attempt to form a democracy in the face of an elected government trying to undo the concept of democracy. In supporting the idea of even letting the Muslim Brotherhood take part in the Egyptian government, we would be supporting persecution of Christians and other minority religions, the institution of Sharia Law, which takes away the equality of women, and the formation of an Islamic state similar to Iran. I really don’t think that is in the best interest of the Egyptians, the Americans, or peace in the Middle East.

We need to remember that terrorists in the Middle East (and other places) have learned to use the weapon of propaganda very well. The Middle East Forum is one of the few reliable sources for unbiased information on what is going on in the Middle East.

 

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Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives Testimony

Please click on the link below to hear testimony on coverage of events in Egypt as the Muslim Brotherhood consolidates its power.

Raymond Ibrahim (Middle East specialist and Associate fellow, Middle East Forum) testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives. Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott presented \”Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt\’s Coptic Christians.\”

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