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Turkish Jails: Packed with Kurds, Only Seven Members of ISIS by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

According to a recent public statement by the HDP, 1478 Kurdish politicians — including 78 democratically-elected mayors — have been arrested since July 2016.

The co-heads of the HDP party, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksektas, are also in jail. Prosecutors seek up to 142 years in jail for Demirtas and up to 83 years in jail for Yuksekdag. One of the charges directed to Demirtas is “managing a terrorist organization.”

According to a recent report by Turkey’s Platform for Independent Journalism (P24), 151 individuals are in prison for being journalists or for being employed in the news media. Dozens of TV stations, news agencies, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations have been closed down by the Turkish government.

In Turkey, it seems, ISIS members are freer than journalists and peaceful, democratically-elected Kurdish politicians.

According to the Turkish ministry of justice, only seven members of the Islamic State (ISIS) have been convicted of crimes and jailed in Turkey in the last year and a half.

The data was made public when Bekir Bozdag, the Turkish justice minister, was asked in Turkey’s parliament the number of ISIS convicts in Turkish jails.

One of the many ISIS members in Turkey that has been released by Turkish courts is Abdulsamet C., arrested on September 2 of last year on charges of being a member of a terrorist organization.

Abdulsamet C. confessed that he had travelled to Syria to join ISIS in 2014. He added that an Azeri man with the code-name “Ammar”, who spread ISIS propaganda in an Istanbul mosque, provided him with contact information that enabled him to go to the Turkish city of Gaziantep, through which he entered Syria, where he joined ISIS.

Abdulsamet C. said that he went to the Syrian town of Jarabulus with a group of people, received religious education in the town of Manbij for a month, and then traveled around to Iraq and Syria before returning to Turkey in July 2015.

Seeking to benefit from the “Active Repentance Law,” he was released by a Turkish court on probation. Yet he continued to be in contact with ISIS even after returning to the Umraniye neighborhood in Istanbul, where his family resides.

An indictment drafted for Abdulsamet C. by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office includes evidence showing his connections with ISIS, such as banners, photographs, videos and songs. During a raid on Abdulsamet C.’s house, police also found a book entitled, “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad,” which is banned in Turkey.

Despite all the evidence at hand, Abdulsamet C. was released by an Istanbul court on probation on the grounds that he has a permanent residence in Istanbul. The newspaper Hurriyet contacted the lawyer of the ISIS member, who said he was surprised at the release of his client.

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On Boycotting Radical Islamic Nations by Nonie Darwish

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

The interviewer seemed shocked to hear that I do not have any Arab or Muslim friends who are protesting President Trump’s ban, and that many immigrants of Islamic origin support the ban and are fed up and embarrassed by what jihadists are doing.

The lesson America needs to know is that the West is not doing Muslims a favor by constantly treating them as children who should be shielded from reality. They hungry for the truth: that their educational system and mosque preaching are full of incitement, are abhorrent, hate-filled and the foundation upon which violent jihad is built.

Muslims need to know that the world does indeed have a justifiable and legitimate concern about Islam and actions done in the name of Islam by Muslims.

Muslims need to look at themselves in the mirror and see the world from the point of view of their victims. Instead, the West is sacrificing its culture, values, laws, pride and even self-respect.

It might compassion that leads the West to take in millions of Muslim refugees but it is reckless compassion. Do Westerners question the motivation of Islamic theocracies as to why ultra-rich Arab nations are sending us their refugees but taking in none?

Some “tough love” is urgently needed if Muslims are to be motivated to change and reform.

Early this morning an Arabic radio station in the Middle East called asking my opinion about President Trump’s ban on refugees and citizens of seven Muslim nations. The radio host, who sounded angry over the ban, was a Christian Arab. She was surprised to hear that I supported the ban and think that it should have taken place the day after 9/11.

She then asked me if I knew any Arab American activist who was against the ban because she wanted to interview someone against the ban. She seemed shocked to hear that I do not have any Arab or Muslim friends who are protesting the ban, and that many immigrants of Islamic and Middle East origin support the ban and are fed up and embarrassed by what jihadists are doing.

She said that all she sees on CNN and other channels are riots that portray almost all Americans supporting Muslims and against Trump. I am upset over the success of the leftist propaganda all over the Middle East. It brings back memories of the life of the hate indoctrination and misinformation I lived under for most of my life.

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Muslim Brotherhood Front Organizations, U.S. and Canada by Thomas Quiggin

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

The 2008 Holy Land Relief terrorism funding criminal trial resulted in multiple convictions and was touted as the one of the largest terrorism financing trials in American history. Expectations were high that the 2008 trial would be followed by further trials involving the listed unindicted co-conspirators such as CAIR USA and the Islamic Society of North America.

However, with the appointment of Eric Holder as the U.S. Attorney General in 2009, all further actions on this file appear to have been frozen. Holder would later speak at a conference supporting one of the unindicted co-conspirators.

It is not clear if the ongoing criminal investigation focuses only on those individuals leading IRFAN at the time of its delisting as a charity and listing as a terrorism entity, or if the investigation also includes those who helped found IRFAN. This may be an important distinction, as the Canada Revenue Agency stated that IRFAN was deliberately created and designed to circumvent Canadian terrorism-funding rules.

It appears possible that the Trump Administration will crack down on Islamist extremist groups in the USA. This would likely have a spill-over effect into Canada and Europe, though greater attention to border security and issues of funding terrorism.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz last week submitted legislation to designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a Terrorist Organization.

Cruz (R-TX) earlier had a bill in the Senate which would not only ban the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. but also three of its front groups: Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) USA, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These American-based front groups have corresponding chapters or organizations in Canada as well.

Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and their members have an ongoing problem with criminal activity, terrorism-funding activities and overall negative relations with legal authorities. These problems range from being listed as terrorist groups, being charged for weapons possession and an even an arrest for alleged sexual charges involving a 12-year-old girl. Several of the charges are consistent with the extremist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood itself, given its commitment to violent political change. Both criminal investigations and terrorism listings in North America, for instance, have been directly related to terrorism funding for Hamas, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Aliens Guaranteed Entry Into the U.S.? Trump’s executive order on immigration and the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. February 1, 2017 Michael Cutler

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

Irresponsible incendiary rhetoric spewed by politicians and members of the media, in reaction to the executive order signed by President Trump to temporarily suspend the entry of aliens from a limited number of countries that are associated with terrorism, from entering the United States irrespective of whether they had been issued visas, has fired up throngs of demonstrators in New York City and elsewhere.

President Trump began his executive order by noting how failures of the immigration system enabled terrorists to carry out the murder of 3,000 innocent people in the United States on 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission was crystal clear about the ways that failures of the immigration system enabled not only the 9/11 terrorists, but others, to enter the United States and embed themselves as they went about their deadly preparation. We have seen similar attacks in the years since as I noted in my article, “Reflections On 9/11’S Vulernabilities.”

The report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.” began with this first paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

That report should be required reading for all journalists and politicians.

Trump’s action is not without precedent.

The Obama Administration Stopped Processing Iraq Refugee Requests For 6 Months In 2011.

In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter banned citizens of Iran from entering the United States as the Washington Post reported on April 9, 1980, “Carter’s Visa Crackdown Won’t Hurt Immediately.”

On February 24, 1998, just two days shy of the fifth anniversary of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information conducted a hearing on the topic, “Foreign terrorists in America : five years after the World Trade Center.”

At that hearing Senator Dianne Feinstein hammered failures of the immigration system more than three years before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Her testimony included this statement:

I am also concerned that we need to strengthen further our immigration laws and procedures to counter foreign terrorist operations. I have grave reservations regarding the practice of issuing visas to terrorist supporting countries and INS’ inability to track those who come into the country either using a student visa or using fraudulent documents through the Visa Waiver Pilot Program.

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THE LESSONS OF ROOSEVELT’S FAILURES CAROLINE GLICK

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

What Trump has learned that his opponents haven’t.

Is US President Donald Trump the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Does his immigration policy mimic Roosevelt’s by adopting a callous, bigoted position on would-be asylum seekers from the Muslim world? At a press conference on June 5, 1940, Roosevelt gave an unspeakably cynical justification for his administration’s refusal to permit the desperate Jews of Nazi Germany to enter the US.

In Roosevelt’s words, “Among the refugees [from Germany], there are some spies… And not all of them are voluntary spies – it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

The current media and left-wing uproar over the executive order US President Donald Trump signed on Saturday which enacts a temporary ban on entry to the US of nationals from seven Muslim majority countries is extraordinary on many levels. But one that stands out is the fact that opponents of Trump’s move insist that Trump is reenacting the bigoted immigration policies the US maintained throughout the Holocaust.

The first thing that is important to understand about Trump’s order is that it did not come out of nowhere. It is based on the policies of his predecessor Barack Obama. Trump’s move is an attempt to correct the strategic and moral deficiencies of Obama’s policies – deficiencies that empower bigots and fascists while disenfranchising and imperiling their victims.

Trump’s order is based on the 2015 Terrorist Travel Prevention Act. As White House spokesman Sean Spicer noted in an interview with ABC News’ Martha Raddatz Sunday, the seven states targeted by Trump’s temporary ban – Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Libya, Yemen and Somalia – were not chosen by Trump.

They were identified as uniquely problematic and in need of specific, harsher vetting policies for refugee applications by former US president Barack Obama.

In Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, the recognized governments lack control over large swaths of territory.

As a consequence, they are unable to conclude immigration vetting protocols with the US. As others have noted, unlike these governments, Turkish, Saudi Arabian and Egyptian officials have concluded and implement severe and detailed visa vetting protocols with US immigration officials.

Immigrants from Somalia have carried out terrorist attacks in the US. Clearly there is a problem with vetting procedures in relation to that jihad-plagued failed state.

Finally, the regimes in Sudan and Iran are state sponsors of terrorism. As such, the regimes clearly cannot be trusted to properly report the status of visa applicants.

In other words, the one thing that the seven states have in common is that the US has no official counterpart in any of them as it seeks to vet nationals from those states seeking to enter its territory. So the US must adopt specific, unilateral vetting policies for each of them.

Now that we know the reason the Obama administration concluded that visa applicants from these seven states require specific vetting, we arrive at the question of whether Trump’s order will improve the outcome of that vetting from both a strategic and moral perspective.

The new executive order requires the relevant federal agencies and departments to review the current immigration practices in order to ensure two things.

First, that immigrants from these and other states are not enemies of the US. And second, to ensure that those that do enter the US are people who need protection.

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Trump Does Scalia Justice With Gorsuch Pick Senate Democrats signal a war ahead. Joseph Klein

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

President Trump has nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, 49, to fill the Supreme Court seat held by Justice Antonin Scalia until he passed away last February. In announcing the nomination, President Trump said, “Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous discipline and has earned bipartisan support.” President Trump added that Judge Gorsuch was “the man our country needs and needs badly to ensure the rule of law and the rule of justice.”

Judge Gorsuch was a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, a Harvard Law School graduate, and a clerk for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He served in a high-ranking position in the Justice Department before he was nominated by former President George W. Bush and confirmed by voice vote in the Senate for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in 2006.

Judge Gorsuch shares Justice Scalia’s originalist legal philosophy. Like Justice Scalia did throughout his judicial career, Judge Gorsuch seeks to interpret the Constitution through strict construction of its text and an understanding of the Founding Fathers’ original intent.

“The great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators,” Judge Gorsuch remarked at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. He said that judges should refrain from imposing their own moral predilections in their decisions. Instead, they should use “text, structure and history” in their interpretations of the law. Legislators “may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future,” Judge Gorsuch said. However, “judges should do none of these things in a democratic society.”

As Judge Gorsuch put it in one of his opinions, judges should “apply the law as it is, not as they wish it to be.”

It is this approach, as reflected in his opinions, which explains Judge Gorsuch’s ranking near the top of the so-called “Scalia Index,” created by some legal academics, to analyze who would be likely to best follow in Justice Scalia’s footsteps.

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Victoria Kincaid: ISIS, Child Soldiers and Islamic Schools

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

While ISIS is ransacks the Middle East, and while the intolerable fundamentalist Muslim communities in Western cities are ignored by the Left, Muslim children suffer immeasurably. They will continue to suffer until the Western world finally recognises that the underlying problem is Islam.
The subjugation and exploitation of women and girls in Islam is well publicised. The moderate factions promote the sexual shaming of women under the guise of “modesty” by the hijab, niqab and burqa. The extremists conduct the increasingly prolific sex-slave trade of Yazidi women as a recruiting tool for the Islamic State. It is no secret that Islam is the most misogynistic institution in the world. However, what is not widely considered is the appalling treatment of children under Islam. The Left will cover its ears and insist child abuse is a global phenomenon, not attached to any particular ideology. But child abuse in the Muslim world occurs for reasons that are Islamic, rather than universal. Its purpose is not only to disempower, but to brainwash.

There is a calculated endeavour by Muslim conservatives and extremists to exploit children of both genders. They use children to project fundamentalist Islamic ideals into the future. Little girls are not the sole recipients of physical and psychological abuse in the name of Islam, such as beatings by male relatives, and the ever-present horror of genital mutilation. Little boys, both in radical and so-called “moderate” Islam, are also suffering.

The most extreme issue facing boys under Islam is the recruitment of child soldiers by the Islamic State. A series of photographs and videos released in 2015 and 2016 featuring children as young as four or five years old, depicted either watching or conducting gruesome acts of war, has propelled this epidemic into the spotlight. The Islamic State has dubbed these child-warriors “the Cubs of the Caliphate”.

A study by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) in February 2016 has analysed photographs and videos released by IS between January 2015 and January 2016 eulogising eighty-nine “martyred” child recruits. Mia Bloom, John Hogan and Charlie Winter, who conducted the study, have concluded that the number of child soldiers significantly exceeds previous estimates. They assert that while the phenomenon of child soldiers is by no means new, the Islamic State’s use of prepubescent recruits is different from that of other violent Islamist organisations such as the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

“What this database points to is the fact that use of children is far more normalized,” Winter revealed when interviewed about the study. “They are not just being used to shock people in execution videos. They are being used for their operational value as well. This is something that sadly we have to expect to increase and accelerate as the situation becomes more precarious for ISIS in the years to come.”

IS’s prolific use of children in its ranks indicates the group has a long-term purpose in mind: to indoctrinate another generation of fighters into the extremist regime. This will enable potentially thousands of heavily indoctrinated children to continue the battle for the Caliphate for decades to come.

The data suggests the mobilisation of young boys and teenagers for military purposes is increasing:

On a month-by-month basis, the rate of young people dying in suicide operations rose, from six in January 2015 to 11 in January 2016. The rate of operations involving one or more child or youth is likewise increasing; there were three times as many suicide operations involving children and youth in January 2016 as the previous January. It seems plausible that, as military pressure against the Islamic State has increased in recent months, such operations … are becoming more tactically attractive. They represent an effective form of psychological warfare—to project strength, pierce defences, and strike fear into enemy soldiers’ hearts. We can expect that, as their implementation increases, so too will the reported rate of child and youth deaths.

Boys as young as eight are recruited, fed information on weaponry and ways of war, and thrust onto the battlefield. Some boys are from the Yazidi religious minority who have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. They are then sent to camps and subjected to brutal training regimes. Reports of gruelling physical drills and beatings are rife. In early 2016, reports revealed an incident of children being threatened with rape if they did not submit to the Islamic State’s authority.

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Trump’s Iran Notice Tehran tests the new President with another ballistic missile launch.

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

One early test for the Trump Administration will be how it enforces the nuclear deal with Iran, and that question has become more urgent with Iran’s test last weekend of another ballistic missile.

The test of a medium-range, home-grown Khorramshahr missile is Tehran’s twelfth since it signed the nuclear deal with the U.S. and its diplomatic partners in 2015. John Kerry, then Secretary of State, insisted that the deal barred Iran from developing or testing ballistic missiles. But that turned out to be a self-deception at best, as the U.N. Security Council resolution merely “called upon” Iran not to conduct such missile tests, rather than barring them.

Iran has little reason to stop such tests because the penalties for doing them have been so light. The Obama Administration responded with weak sanctions on a few Iranian entities and individuals, even as it insisted that Iran is complying with the overall deal and deserves more sanctions relief. In December Boeing signed a $16 billion deal to sell 80 passenger planes to Iran, never mind that the regime uses its airliners to ferry troops and materiel to proxies in Syria.

President Trump has offered contradictory opinions about that sale, but he has been unequivocal in his opposition to what he calls the “disastrous” Iran deal. In a call Sunday with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, the President pledged to enforce the Iran deal “rigorously,” and on Monday the Administration requested an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the latest test.

That meeting probably won’t yield much, thanks to the usual Russian obstruction, but it will put a spotlight on the willingness of allies such as Britain to do more to uphold an agreement the enforcement mechanisms of which they were once eager to trumpet. Whatever happened to the “snapback economic sanctions” that were supposed to be the West’s insurance policy against Iran’s cheating?

The Administration could also warn Iran that the Treasury Department will bar global banks from conducting dollar transactions with their Iranian counterparts in the event of another test, and that it will rigorously enforce “know your customer” rules for foreign companies doing business with counterparts in the Islamic Republic, many of which are fronts for the Revolutionary Guards.

The U.S. needs to provide allies with military reassurance against the Iranian threat. Supplying Israel with additional funds to develop its sophisticated Arrow III anti-ballistic missile system would send the right message, as would an offer to Saudi Arabia to sell Lockheed Martin’s high-altitude Thaad ABM system. The State Department and Pentagon will have to explore diplomatic and military options in case the deal unravels.

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What Kind of a Judge Is Neil Gorsuch? He carefully follows the law, and writes as engagingly as Scalia, without the abrasiveness. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, is a native Coloradan and avid outdoorsman. He clerked for a federal appellate judge and two Supreme Court justices and spent a decade practicing law before his appointment in 2006, at age 39, to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the decade since, he has written some 850 opinions.

The way to take a judge’s measure is to read his opinions, and so we set out to review Judge Gorsuch’s. It was not an arduous task, for his prose is unusually engaging—think Scalia, with none of the abrasiveness. Justice Elena Kagan has declared herself a fan of his writing style. The only difficulty in summarizing Judge Gorsuch’s output is the compulsion to quote, at length, from so many of his opinions.

One opens this way: “Haunted houses may be full of ghosts, goblins, and guillotines, but it’s their more prosaic features that pose the real danger. Tyler Hodges found that out when an evening shift working the ticket booth ended with him plummeting down an elevator shaft.” The case, by the way, was a prosaic dispute between insurers. Another opinion starts: “What began as a fight at a strip club finds its way here as a clash over hearsay.”

Judge Gorsuch shows a concern for the people whose disputes are before the court. Each opinion typically begins with the name of the person seeking relief and why. A recent example: “After a bale of hay hit and injured Miriam White while she was operating her tractor, she sued the manufacturer, Deere & Company.” Ms. White’s appeal was summarily denied, but even the brief, three-page opinion reflects a serious engagement with her arguments and the facts—in contrast with the boilerplate language judges often use in such decisions. Win or lose, parties appearing before Judge Gorsuch surely know that they have been treated with fairness, consideration and respect.

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Rashid Khalidi Worries that Jews Will ‘Infest’ the Trump Administration The famous Columbia professor repeatedly used a Nazi-era metaphor to depict Jews as vermin. By Dore Feith

Posted By on February 1st, 2017

Rashid Khalidi is unapologetic. The longtime Columbia University professor last month said repeatedly that supporters of Israel would “infest” the Trump administration — language that evokes the imagery and metaphors of the Nazis. But for all the on-campus sensitivity seminars and trigger warnings that dominate our age, don’t expect an apology in this case. Apparently, no language, even if it is dehumanizing and deeply rooted in historic anti-Semitism, is out of line in condemning Israel.

Professor Khalidi is well known as Columbia University’s professor of modern Arab studies. January 17, in a lengthy radio interview on WBEZ Chicago’s “Worldview,” Khalidi warned that this infestation would begin under the new president. Describing Israel supporters in terms that evoke vermin was not a momentary lapse or slip of the tongue. He used “infest” three times, saying “these people infest” the Trump transition team and will soon “infest” the government.

Who are “these people?” In his view, they’re a bit crazy but also scheming. Khalidi explains:

There are a group of people, a lot of them in Israel and some of them in the United States, who live in a world of their own. That is to say, they think that whatever they want, and whatever cockamamie schemes they can cook up, can be substituted for reality.

Free speech is a blessed thing, and hypersensitivity to offensive language is a curse on college campuses. I have no desire to stifle discussion, but it’s fair to ask: What’s become of “reasonable people can differ”? What’s become of civil discourse? What’s become of the golden rule? One has to suppose that Khalidi would take offense if someone analogized Palestinians, rather than Jews, to rats or cockroaches.

His remarks may not be the ugliest comment along these lines that ever emerged from the Middle East–studies faculty at Columbia. Professor Hamid Dabashi once described the soul of an Israeli Jew as containing a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.” But the “infestation” theme is nasty enough to warrant special notice.

What makes it especially nasty is its historical resonance. To be sure, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism and not all anti-Semitism is Nazism. But there’s no getting around the fact that in his memoir, Mein Kampf, Hitler over and over again described the Jews as an infestation of vermin. That was one of the book’s main metaphors. And that’s why Nazi officials made a point of saying their Jewish policy aimed not to “kill” but to “exterminate” (vernichten), a word more appropriate for bugs or lice than human beings.