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August 2016

Who is Khizr Kahn, the father of a fallen US solder? By Clarice Feldman

Khizr Kahn is the father of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq who spoke poignantly of the loss of his son and then used that platform to attack Donald Trump. On Sunday he tweeted further disparaging remarks about Melania.

Google shows this for his law practice:

His NYC address is here (but the phone number is in DC)

Khan, Khizr M. CFC

Law Offices of KM Khan

415 Madison Avenue

15th Floor

New York, NY 10017

Phones: 202.279.0806

Fax: 646-673-8401

Contact Us

I was surprised that a NY law office would list a D.C. telephone number, so I called it to check and was told by the man who answered it was not Khazir Khan’s law office, but the man who answered would not tell me who it was.

So I did more digging and learned that is also the phone number of a group called American Muslims Vote, which says its mission is to:

To create an enlightened community by providing and developing Patriotic American Muslim leadership and

Encouraging American Muslims to participate in the democratic process at local, state and national level and vote on the election day.

I did some further research into who registered this domain name and when? Khizr Khan registered it on July 23, 2016.

He’s looking increasingly like a plant to me — a Muslim Cindy Sheehan playing on people’s sympathies to foster a Democratic Party political agenda. And of course, in that goal he has the full throated support of the American media:

Polish Experts: ‘Europe is at The End of its Existence. Western Europe is Practically Dead’ Oliver Lane

Speaking to Polish television, a former member of Poland’s counter-terror police and an academic expert on information warfare and terrorism have articulated their concern about the intellectual and spiritual collapse of European civilisation, remarking it is “at the end of its existence”.

Former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBS) officer Jacek Wrona and military history academic Dr. Rafa³ Brzeski were guests on the Polish TVP Info programme discussing the Munich shooting in which nine were killed, and were forced to conclude it was a symptom of the end of European Civilisation. Information warfare expert Dr. Brzeski rejected the suggestion in German media that the Munich killer — an 18 year old Muslim — was mad, pointing out the killing had “an element of planning”, reports wPolityce.

As for the treatment of the attack in the mainstream media, the academic said it was a case of the “ministry of propaganda at work… it is self-censorship. There is nothing worse than self-censorship in journalism”. Rejecting the reluctance of mainstream media to recognise the killings as a terrorism, he said: “this is definitely an act of terror… the execution of an act of terrorism. He was setting out to scare people, and that is an act of terror”.

Pre-empting the emergency press conference held by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she said her government stood by its policies and decisions which helped create the migrant crisis, and recognising the frustration of the German people with this approach, the academic remarked: “The Germans have had enough of this, which does not mean the government has had enough. These are two different approaches”.

Hillary Clinton’s School Choice She used to support charters. Now she’s for the union agenda.

No one would call the 2016 election a battle of ideas, but it will have policy consequences. So it’s worth noting the sharp left turn by Hillary Clinton and Democrats against education reform and the charter schools she and her husband championed in the 1990s.

Mrs. Clinton recently promised a National Education Association (NEA) assembly higher pay, student-loan write-offs, less testing and universal pre-K. She had only this to say about charter schools, which are free from union rules: “When schools get it right, whether they are traditional public schools or public charter schools, let’s figure out what’s working” and “share it with schools across America.”
The crowd booed, so Mrs. Clinton pivoted to deriding “for-profit charter schools,” a fraction of the market whose grave sin is contracting with a management company. Cheering resumed. When she later addressed the other big teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), she began with an attack on for-profit charters.

We remember when Mrs. Clinton wasn’t so easily intimidated by unions. Bill Clinton’s grant program took the movement from a few schools to thousands. In Mrs. Clinton’s 1996 memoir, “It Takes a Village,” she wrote that she favored “promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages.” And here’s Mrs. Clinton in 1998: “The President believes, as I do, that charter schools are a way of bringing teachers and parents and communities together.”

But now Mrs. Clinton needs the support of the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation known as teacher unions, which loathe charter schools that operate without unions. The AFT endorsed Mrs. Clinton 16 months before Election Day, and the NEA followed.

Shortly after, in a strange coincidence, Mrs. Clinton began repeating union misinformation: “Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids,” she said on a South Carolina campaign stop in November. But Mrs. Clinton used to know that nearly all charter schools select students by lottery and are by law not allowed to discriminate. The schools tend to crop up in urban areas where traditional options are worst. A recent study from Stanford University showed that charters better serve low-income children, minority students and kids who are learning English.

The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections Why did Hillary’s State Department urge U.S. investors to fund Russian research for military uses? By Peter Schweizer

Hillary Clinton touts her tenure as secretary of state as a time of hardheaded realism and “commercial diplomacy” that advanced American national and commercial interests. But her handling of a major technology transfer initiative at the heart of Washington’s effort to “reset” relations with Russia raises serious questions about her record. Far from enhancing American national interests, Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in this area may have substantially undermined U.S. national security.

Consider Skolkovo, an “innovation city” of 30,000 people on the outskirts of Moscow, billed as Russia’s version of Silicon Valley—and a core piece of Mrs. Clinton’s quarterbacking of the Russian reset.

Following his 2009 visit to Moscow, President Obama announced the creation of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission. Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state directed the American side, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov represented the Russians. The stated goal at the time: “identifying areas of cooperation and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability, international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties between the Russian and American people.”

The Kremlin committed $5 billion over three years to fund Skolkovo. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department worked aggressively to attract U.S. investment partners and helped the Russian State Investment Fund, Rusnano, identify American tech companies worthy of Russian investment. Rusnano, which a scientific adviser to President Vladimir Putin called “Putin’s child,” was created in 2007 and relies entirely on Russian state funding.

What could possibly go wrong?

Soon, dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel and Cisco, made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco committing a cool $1 billion. In May 2010, the State Department facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital—and weeks later the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies. CONTINUE AT SITE

European Prisons Fueling Spread of Islamic Radicalism Convicted terrorists sit atop the social pecking order in many facilities, using jail time to plot new attacks or groom petty criminals for jihad By Noemie Bisserbe

PARIS—After his capture in Belgium, the Paris terror suspect Salah Abdeslam was transferred to a prison cell in France where the paint on the walls was still fresh.

Prison staff had spent three weeks renovating the space, bolting down furniture and installing video cameras to make sure the 26-year-old’s solitary confinement went smoothly, said Marcel Duredon, a guard at Fleury-Mérogis, the high-security facility on the outskirts of Paris.

Still, the measures did little to calm the ruckus that erupted in the cell blocks as dusk fell and word spread about the prison’s newest inmate, the last surviving suspect in the Nov. 13 attacks.

“Some welcomed him as the messiah,” Mr. Duredon said.

The rise of Islamic State has caught Europe’s prison systems flat-footed. Convicted terrorists, some of whom serve prison terms as brief as two years, sit atop the social pecking order in facilities like Fleury-Mérogis.

Many use jail time to forge ties with petty criminals from the predominantly Muslim suburbs that ring European cities, authorities say, grooming them for jihad missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria—or attacks at home.

Now the return over the past year of an unprecedented number of jihadists from Islamic State territory is placing European prisons in an even bigger bind. To keep militants off the streets, authorities are throwing many of them in jail, but that is injecting battle-hardened radicals into overcrowded prisons. Researchers estimate that 50% to 60% of the roughly 67,000 inmates in the French prison system are Muslims, who represent just 7.5% of the general population.

Prison officials are also faced with a difficult choice between absorbing hardened militants into the general prison population, where they might radicalize others, or to concentrate them in special wards where they may be better able to hatch plots.

“We’re sitting on a time bomb,” says Adeline Hazan, who heads a state agency tasked with auditing French prisons. CONTINUE AT SITE