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NYPD to Settle Muslim Surveillance Lawsuits Under agreement, the agency must strengthen oversight of its surveillance practices, including adding a civilian attorney as a monitor By Pervaiz Shallwani

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

The New York Police Department must strengthen oversight of its surveillance practices as part of a settlement of two civil-rights lawsuits accusing the force of unfairly monitoring Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Under the settlement, filed in federal court Thursday, the police department agreed to changes that include reinstating an independent attorney to monitor surveillance by the NYPD’s intelligence unit—a role that was eliminated after 9/11.

The NYPD also agreed to several other changes in the surveillance rules, known as the Handschu guidelines, a set of policies initially put in place more than 30 years ago to make sure First Amendment rights aren’t violated during criminal probes.

The new guidelines include setting time limits for active investigations and putting in writing an existing NYPD policy that it is illegal to profile anyone solely on the basis of race or religion. The agreement also requires the NYPD to remove a controversial report on radicalization that has been on its website since 2007.
The long-running controversy illustrates the tension between law-enforcement agencies that say they must take steps to remain vigilant in an age of global terrorism, and civil-rights and other groups that say civil liberties shouldn’t be violated in the name of security.

Both the police department and plaintiffs lauded the settlement for protecting the religious and political rights of people in the city without hampering the ability of authorities to conduct terrorism investigations.

“We hope the NYPD’s reforms help make clear that effective policing can and must be achieved without unconstitutional religious profiling of Muslims or any other communities,” said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

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Terrorism-Related Arrests Made in California and Texas Two refugees from Iraq charged with lying about terror affiliations By Devlin Barrett and Miriam Jordan

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

Two refugees from Iraq were arrested Thursday on separate charges that they lied to U.S. authorities about their alleged affiliations and activities with terror suspects.

Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, 23, of Sacramento, Calif., was charged with making a false statement involving terrorism. He is due in court Friday, officials said.

“While he represented a potential safety threat, there is no indication that he planned any acts of terrorism in this country,’’ said Benjamin Wagner, the U.S. Attorney in Sacramento.

According to court filings, Mr. Al-Jayab is a Palestinian born in Iraq who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee in 2012. Between October 2012 and November 2013, while living in Arizona and Wisconsin, he allegedly told others in online discussions that he planned to travel to Syria to fight for terror groups.

Then, in November 2013, he allegedly traveled to Syria and, according to his social media posts, said he was fighting in that country alongside terror organizations, including Ansar al-Islam. Authorities say he returned to the U.S. in early 2014 and has been living in Sacramento.

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An IRS Retreat on Charity The agency pulls its proposal to sweep up small-donor records.

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

It’s not every day we can celebrate a less intrusive Internal Revenue Service. But charities and the people who support them will be happy to learn that the IRS has withdrawn its proposal to collect more donor information, including Social Security numbers.

In September the IRS and Treasury Department proposed to give charities the “option” of filing detailed reports on everyone who contributes more than $250 to a charity. The IRS was calling it “voluntary,” which in government means the agency hasn’t gotten around to requiring it yet. We reported on the legitimate fear that new reporting would be required of every nonprofit—including the conservative organizations that the IRS helped muzzle in the 2012 presidential election.

Amazingly enough, in this case the IRS appears to have listened to concerns from the taxpayers who pay their salaries. On Thursday the IRS said it is withdrawing its proposal after receiving “a substantial number of public comments.” Many of the comments “questioned the need for donee reporting, and many comments expressed significant concerns about donee organizations collecting and maintaining taxpayer identification numbers for purposes of the specific-use information return,” said the IRS. The legitimate anger of average citizens was amplified by stalwart IRS watchdogs like Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) on Capitol Hill.

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Crayons Down, Kids. It’s Hillary Story Time Two new picture books depict Mrs. Clinton with a hagiographic glow that even kindergartners might find hard to swallow. By Meghan Cox Gurdon

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

Nuclear threats aside, North Korean political propaganda seems pretty silly to wised-up, postmodern American sophisticates. Who do these guys think they’re fooling, with their cheesy posters of happy children flocking around the knees of a benevolent Great, or Dear, or Current Leader? And surely only the brainwashed or the very young could ever swallow the regime’s steady supply of tales extolling the miraculous achievements of the Kim dynasts.

Yet perhaps we Americans are not entirely immune to this sort of thing, especially in an election year. Two new picture books put such a gloss on the life and career of the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president that book editors in Pyongyang could take a few tips from them. In the doctrine of these tales for children 4 to 8, not only has the mark of greatness been upon Hillary Clinton since her birth, but she has also been the liberator of her people—that is, of women.

Michelle Markel’s “ Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead” (HarperCollins) begins with an alarming account of the darkness that enfolded this land as recently as the 1950s, when, horrible to relate, “it was a man’s world. Only boys could grow up to have powerful jobs. Only boys had no ceilings on their dreams. Girls weren’t supposed to act smart, tough, or ambitious.”

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The ‘Evangelical Revolution’ is an engine of support for Israel ByDr. Jürgen Bühler

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

Most Jews and Israelis see Evangelical support for Israel as an American phenomenon • Dr. Jürgen Bühler, CEO of International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, explains that it is now a worldwide affair • From Africa to South America to Asia, Israel can now count on Evangelical communities all over the globe for sympathy and support.

As we enter 2016, there is good news for Israel. True, the country is facing a wave of terror at home, growing criticism from Europe, and attempts to expand the boycott and de-legitimization of Israel on American campuses. But at the same time there also is growing support for Zionism in non-aligned countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In countries like China, El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria and many other nations a real revolution is taking place, which not many Israelis are aware of it: an “Evangelical Revolution.”

The world has, according to estimates, more than half a billion evangelical Christians. In the past, this current has been linked mainly to the United States, but in the last two decades, the number of Evangelicals in the Southern Hemisphere has jumped dramatically.

For example, the Pew Institute’s research estimates that a fifth of evangelical Christians worldwide live in Asia – approximately 150 million people. This is a fact that the Israeli public ignores. For Israelis, evangelism is an American story, but the reality is completely different. One by one, residents of Asia, including millions in such hostile Islamic countries as Malaysia and Indonesia, adopt the evangelical Christian faith. Not only Asians are embracing evangelical Christianity: 14 percent of the residents of Africa – over 180 million people – and nearly 100 million people in Latin America are evangelical Christians. This revolution is sweeping the entire southern hemisphere.

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Our Gutted and Gutless FBI: Fiction vs. Reality by Edward Cline at 5:05 PM

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

I’ve written a number of novels in which I give the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the benefit of the doubt. I cast the agency in the role of an ally for justice and as a defender of individual rights and the sanctity of property. FBI agents befriend my heroes, or my heroes befriend them.

Were I pen another novel today and involve the FBI in the plot, the agency would be cast in a villainous role, because it has become a tool and instrument of authoritarian political correctness and enforcement. It would have no more moral or Constitutional legitimacy than does the IRS, the EPA, the DEA, the FDA, or the HHS.

Nominally, as a federal enforcement agency that reports to the Department of Justice, the FBI exists to:

… protect and defend the United States, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners

Currently, the FBI’s top priorities are:

Protect the United States from terrorist attacks
Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage
Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes
Combat public corruption at all levels
Protect civil rights
Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises
Combat major white-collar crime
Combat significant violent crime
Support federal, state, local and international partners
Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI’s mission

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Obama’s Malice Aforethought II by Edward Cline

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

By the time Obama gets through with “transforming” America, there won’t be anything exceptional about it.

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” — Barack Obama, October 30, 2008 “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” — Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

Quoting from a Canada Free Press column on Obama’s plans to spy on bloggers, I opened my October 2010 Rule of Reason column, “Obama’s Malice Aforethought” with:

The President Barack Obama’s feelings are hurt.

For most of his time in the White House, Obama has been critical of information about him and his administration posted on the Internet. He’s frequently denigrated bloggers and Internet conservative news & commentary web sites for their efforts to cover stories the so-called mainstream news media refuse to cover, according to critics of his plans to control the “Information Highway.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Liberal’ Jewish Gathering Drops Dissident (Pro-Israel) Voice By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on January 8th, 2016

“We were in a Jewish setting and you can only criticize Israel,” Tenenbom said of the Limmud Conference, “for me, that was the worst.” By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

“Yes, all voices are welcome, so long as they are critical of Israel,” is how Tuvia Tenenbom, journalist, dramatist and best-selling author, described the Limmud Conference in Birmingham, England on Dec. 27 – 31, 2015.

Tenenbom, author of “Catch the Jew,” sat through several days, but not all, of the recent conference. Tenenbom was supposed to be there for the entire conference, he was a speaker, but after being disinvited from the fourth session in which he was supposed to appear, and after enduring scathingly hostile verbal attacks from audience members and former Limmud officials, Tenenbom had enough.

That’s what Tenenbom says.

What Keith Kahn-Harris says is quite different and he’s the organizer and leader of the session from which Tenenbom was dropped, and he’s the one who told Tenenbom he was disinvited.

According to Kahn-Harris, it was his decision alone to drop Tenenbom from the final panel and it was “not an ideological decision from someone ideologically opposed to Tuvia Tenenbom.” Instead, Kahn-Harris said he dropped Tenenbom from the session because he had invited four participants but only really wanted three – and he “left it to the [time of the] conference” to decide whom to cut.

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MY SAY: NORTH KOREA

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

It is now so easy for the Republicans to blame Clinton and Obama for North Korea’s nuke rattling, and while they certainly deserve plenty of blame, George Bush(2) and his Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice should also share the blame. This is a column written by Rice, who was as deluded as Madeleine Halfbright in facing down the nasty Papa King.

Diplomacy Is Working on North Korea By Condoleezza Rice June 2008
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121443815539505367
North Korea will soon make a declaration of its nuclear programs, facilities and materials. This is an important, if initial, step and we will demand that it be verifiable as complete and accurate.

Amidst all the focus on our diplomatic tactics, it is important to keep two broader points in mind. One, we are learning more about Pyongyang’s nuclear efforts through the six-party framework than we otherwise would be. And two, this policy is our best option to achieve the strategic goal of verifiably eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons and programs.

North Korea now faces a clear choice about its future. If it chooses confrontation ; violating international law, pursuing nuclear weapons, and threatening the region ; it will face serious consequences not only from the United States, but also from Japan, South Korea, China and Russia, as it did in 2006 after testing a nuclear device.

If, however, North Korea chooses cooperation ; by fulfilling its pledge from the September 2005 Joint Statement to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs”; a path is open for it to achieve the better and more secure relationship it says it wants with the international community. That includes the U.S. We have no permanent enemies.

Any effort to denuclearize the Korean peninsula must contend with the fact that North Korea is the most secretive and opaque regime on the planet. Our intelligence is far from complete. Despite these inherent limitations, consider what we have achieved and learned thus far through the six-party framework, and how much more could still be possible.

North Korea is now disabling its plutonium production facility at Yongbyon ; not freezing it, as before, but disabling it for the purpose of abandonment. U.S. inspectors are monitoring this process on the ground.

In its declaration, North Korea will state how much plutonium it possesses. We will not accept that statement on faith. We will insist on verification. North Korea has already turned over nearly 19,000 pages of production records from its Yongbyon reactor and associated facilities. With additional information we expect to receive; access to other documents, relevant sites, key personnel and the reactor itself – these records will help to verify the accuracy and completeness of Pyongyang’s declaration. North Korea’s plutonium program has been by far its largest nuclear effort over many decades, and we believe our policy could verifiably get the regime out of the plutonium-making business.

Getting a handle on North Korea’s uranium-enrichment program is harder, because we simply do not know its full scale or what it yielded. And yet, because of our current policy, we now know more about North Korea’s uranium-enrichment efforts than before, and we are learning more still ; much of it troubling. North Korea acknowledges our concerns about its uranium-enrichment program, and we will insist on getting to the bottom of this issue.

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Our World: The return of the rule of law Caroline Glick

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Two thirds of Israeli Arabs say that their Knesset representatives are not advancing their interests.
Last October, as the Palestinians began their latest round of terrorist war against Israel, lawmakers from the Joint Arab List participated in mass anti-Israel rallies in major Arab towns. One such rally in Nazareth in mid-October attracted some 2,500 participants. After it ended, some demonstrators started throwing rocks at Jews.

The next day, MK Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint Arab List stood on a street in Nazareth and gave a live interview to Channel 2 news.

Just as the camera began filming, Nazareth Mayor Ali Salam drove down the street. Seeing Odeh, Salam stopped his car and began bellowing, “Get out of here! Enough of your interviews. Go ruin things somewhere else!” Odeh tried lamely to get the camera to stop filming. But Salam continued shouting.