The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
Trump's travel ban is
not recruiting more terrorists
by Eli Lake
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Fixing Immigration Law One Step at a Time
By Brian Mark Weber: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free." Little did poet Emma Lazarus know that in 1883 these words would be used as a political weapon by Democrats to open up the floodgates to virtually unlimited immigration in the 20th century. Yet Republicans now have a unique opportunity to fix our immigration system while honoring the words associated with one of our most venerated symbols of freedom.
For decades, immigration was tightly controlled and limited to select European countries. This all changed when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Cellar Immigration Bill in 1965. Largely thought to be a symbolic measure at the time, the bill resulted in millions of immigrants pouring into the country and set up today's heated battle over immigration.
Ideas for improving our immigration system are often impeded by bureaucracy, the back-and-forth power struggle between Democrats and Republicans, and a firestorm of ideological name-calling (mostly by progressives).
But perhaps the main impediment to any real progress on this issue rests with Republicans' inability to craft a coherent, unified message that would appeal to Americans across the political spectrum while tackling the problems caused by our porous national borders.
While it's true that Democrats ruled Congress with little opposition through 1994, Republicans since then have failed to take advantage of many opportunities to seize the issue as their own. Democrats, sensing that lack of political will, have removed all substance from the debate and have made immigration a purely emotional issue.
Essentially, anyone who opposes unlimited immigration is labeled xenophobic or racist. They are characterized as callous, unsympathetic and un-American. They are condemned for rejecting the powerful ideas of Lazarus' words and for demeaning the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty itself. Such demonization has prevented us from securing our nation's borders. That is, until Donald Trump became president.
Now, it's not that President Trump alone has broken the political log-jam. In fact, the suspension of his hastily implemented executive order seems to have jolted conservatives who were poised to wrestle back the immigration issue from Democrats in one swift move. Yet there does seem to be an undercurrent in the halls of Congress, the likes of which we haven't seen before.
Perhaps Republicans are still getting accustomed to acting like the party in power. Or maybe conservatives in the halls of Congress have learned too well that Republicans who talk tough on the campaign trail typically end up wading in the very swamp that Trump seeks to drain.
In any case, there seems to be a sense of urgency in the Republican Party today on a host of issues. The challenge is whether to tackle these problems in one fell swoop, or take a piece-by-piece approach that achieves the same long-term objectives.
The RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act, proposed by Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, takes a meaningful stance on immigration while framing the debate in sensible and acceptable terms.
Both Cotton and Perdue assert that a significant percentage of immigrants coming into our country work in low-skilled jobs that affect wages negatively across the board for blue-collar workers. The bill's authors thus seek to cut immigration in half (from one million to 500,000 per year). Additional provisions include limiting who can be sponsored, ending the Diversity Visa Immigrant Program and reducing the number of refugees allowed into the country.
The RAISE Act seeks to strike a balance by recognizing and valuing the important role that immigrants play in our country, while also strengthening our sovereignty and restoring respect for our nation's laws. This act addresses both our economic needs and our national security concerns while acknowledging the dignity and value of immigrants in our society.
Additionally, the act responds to the demands of impatient conservatives who want immediate solutions while appealing more broadly to millions of Americans who are still largely convinced that Republicans want to sand-blast Emma Lazarus' words from the base of the Statue of Liberty. The balanced nature of the act also negates many of the usual criticisms of Democrats; try as they might, it will be difficult to call this measure anti-immigrant.
Certainly, the act will be met with criticism from both sides. Progressives will scowl at the idea of reducing immigration by half, and some conservatives may claim the act still allows too many immigrants into the country. Nonetheless, this is a good starting point for additional measures, such as increased border security and President Trump's wall.
Immigration is one of the most contentious issues of our time, but it doesn't mean that we have to resolve it overnight or with one piece of legislation. Conservatives have every right to be anxious, given the historical lack of Republican resolve. For years, we've been told to wait for a time when the GOP controlled both branches of Congress and the White House. Well, the time is now for Republicans to make good on their promises.
~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/digests/47403
https://patriotpost.us/digests/47403
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Deep State Spy Agencies Engaged
In Sabotage, Attacks On President Trump
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ In setting up his question, Stuart Varney describes one of the problems that they will be discussing as “leaks from the federal bureaucracy, which are illegal and what amount in my opinion to sabotage of the administration.”... Judge Napolitano replies, “Well, I agree with you about the sabotage but I don’t think it comes from the federal bureaucracy. I think it comes from the ‘deep state.’ I think it comes from that part of the intelligence community which stays in power no matter who runs the CIA, who runs the DIA, who runs the Congress and who runs the White House.” Judge Napolitano points out, “Mike Flynn, before he left the military, General Flynn was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He knows, with absolute certainty, that every conversation that the Russian Foreign Minister has with an American is going to be recorded by American spies. He knew that his conversations would be listened to. But he did not know that some of the spies listening to him hate his boss and wanted to harm his boss by leaking transcripts.” Napolitano says that whoever did it will never be prosecuted for it, saying “it’s the same people who leaked the nonsense about Donald Trump in a hotel in Moscow. They know how to leak, they are professional spies, they are professional leakers, their fingerprints appear nowhere.”... http://rickwells.us/napolitano-deep-state-spy-agencies-engaged-sabotage-attacks-president-trump-2/
.Maryland Mosque Lauds Pakistani Assassin
{investigativeproject.org} ~ On Sunday, an American mosque glorified a terrorist responsible for killing a Pakistani governor who was critical of Pakistan's blasphemy laws, the Rabwah Times reported... Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab province, became an instant target for radical Islamists after he defended a Christian woman facing blasphemy charges. In 2011, Taseer's own bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri shot and killed him. When Qadri was executed for the killing last year, more than 100,000 Pakistanis paid their respects at his funeral. The Gulzar E Madina Mosque in Pikesville, Md. apparently shared in the mourners' zeal, hosting a celebration Sunday in Qadri's memory. The mosque held a traditional "Urs" ceremony usually reserved for holy figures, the Rabwah Times story said... http://www.investigativeproject.org/5791/maryland-mosque-lauds-pakistani-assassin
.Climate Lawsuit Threatens Free Speech
by Steve Byas
{thenewamerican.com} ~ “As a practical proposition … if I enjoy normal life expectancy, this case will consume the bulk of my remaining time on earth. In the event that I don’t, the thuggish Mann will come after my family... as has happened to my late friend Andrew Breitbart’s children.” This is how well-known political commentator Mark Steyn recently summed up his opinion about the libel suit filed against him by Penn State “climate scientist” Michael Mann, which is expected to be set for trial soon. “I did not seek this battle.… But I will not shirk the fight, and I will prevail,” Steyn predicted in a recent blog... https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/25384-climate-lawsuit-threatens-free-speech?utm_source=iContactPro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TNA+Top+Daily+Headlines
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NSA Absolutely Spying On President Trump,
No Security Over Access To Data
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ In the aftermath of the forced resignation of General Michael Flynn, William Binney, a former top NSA official turned whistleblower, who is credited with being the architect of their surveillance program... declared without reservation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is “absolutely” monitoring, eavesdropping, spying on the phone calls of President Trump. Binney, a thirty year employee of the agency when he resigned back in October of 2001, was being interviewed on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” on February 15th, a day and a half after General Flynn’s exit. He was asked directly whether he believes the NSA is tapping President Trump, to which he replied, “Absolutely. How did they get the phone call between the president and the president of Australia? Or the one that he made with Mexico? Those are not targeted foreigners.”... http://rickwells.us/binney-nsa-absolutely-spying-president-trump-no-security-access-data/
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American Man Convicted Of 253 Counts Of Terrorism
by Alicia
{patriottribune.com} ~ Cody Matthew Startt plead guilty to 253 counts of terrorism and 251 counts of making false bomb reports in North Carolina... He faces 11 to 21 years in prison. The incidents happened from May through July of last year. The suspect used apps on his smart phone and police scanners to make calls to hundreds of businesses. F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies helped trace the calls back to him. http://patriottribune.com/45995/american-man-convicted-terrorism/?newsletter_uid=2642&newsletter_date=02%2F15%2F17
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Trump's travel ban is
not recruiting more terrorists
by Eli Lake
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Since President Donald Trump last month issued an executive order banning travel from seven Muslim majority nations, we've heard a lot about how it will aid jihadists.
Leading Democrats, counterterrorism experts and even Iran's foreign minister have all asserted that Trump's travel ban will end up being used by the Islamic State to recruit new terrorists. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, made this point forcefully on Jan. 30, when he told MSNBC that Trump's executive order "ultimately is going to get Americans killed."
The argument goes like this: Jihadists believe there is a Manichaean struggle between Islam and the West. An alleged "Muslim ban" plays directly into this worldview, telling Muslims that they are not safe in the un-Islamic world. No wonder they are calling the executive order a "blessed ban" on Islamic State web forums.
This is a familiar line to anyone who has followed the national security debate since 9/11. Democrats in particular have argued that the Iraq War, the Guantanamo Bay prison and anti-Muslim web videos help to radicalize otherwise peaceful Muslims to murder us at random. Hence Trump's travel ban is now a "recruitment tool."
If only jihadi recruitment were so easily disrupted. Sadly, it's much more complicated.
To start, the process by which an individual gets sucked into the death cults of al-Qaida or the Islamic State cannot be reduced to a single cause. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, the research director for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, put it like this: "The argument that the Trump policy will radicalize people is predicated on the flawed premise that people radicalize as a response to government policy. The reality is it's a highly complex process that involves religious and personal factors. A government policy may play a role, but it's one of many factors."
Meleagrou-Hitchens's program released an invaluable report last year that studied motivations of Americans who had declared allegiance to the Islamic State. It found that the motivations ranged from sympathy for the plight of Syrians suffering under their dictator's war to a sense of religious obligation to join a new utopian Islamic caliphate.
Another problem with this argument is that it fails to account for the significant rise in radical Islamic terror under President Barack liar-nObama. He went out of his way to counter the jihadist worldview. He began his presidency by delivering a speech to the Islamic world from Cairo, in which he stressed his own administration's respect for Islam. He promised, and ultimately failed to, close Guantanamo; he withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, and he scrubbed terms like "radical Islam" and "war on terror" from the government's lexicon.
And yet despite his efforts, the FBI arrested more Americans for joining Islamic terrorist groups during his presidency than during that of George W. Bush. And while liar-nObama decimated al Qaeda's central leadership following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's franchises in Yemen, Somalia and Libya grew stronger. Meanwhile, the Islamic State broke away from al Qaeda during liar-nObama's presidency and managed to gain territory in Syria and Iraq. Only now has the military campaign to liberate Mosul shown some success.
It's true that liar-nObama also did many things jihadists did not like during his presidency. For example, he used drone strikes against more of them than his predecessor did. And when the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the legal right to gay marriage, Twitter accounts affiliated with the Islamic State posted video of gay men being thrown to their deaths off of high buildings in Raqqa, with the hashtag #lovewins. The Islamic State didn't like the Iran nuclear deal, either. After all, Shiites like the Iran regime are seen as apostates, and in the battle for Syria, the Iranians are on the side of the oppressors.
This gets to the most important point. The fanatics who seek to re-create an eighth-century caliphate have an endless supply of grievances about our open society. If we succumb to the fallacy that we can counter their propaganda by not doing things they could exploit for propaganda purposes, we are giving them too much power.
A far better argument against Trump's executive order is that it undermines our own recruitment efforts to counter the jihadists. At first the travel ban applied to translators who helped the U.S. military in Iraq, not to mention leading advocates for the Islamic State's victims like the Yazidi-Iraqi legislator Vian Dakhil. Fortunately the Trump administration has reversed these elements of the travel ban in the last week. But the perception that America would close its doors to the people who helped us makes it harder to recruit allies against the Islamic State.
Critics of Trump's travel ban are not inclined to make that argument. After all, Democrats were silent when liar-nObama abandoned the Iraqi sheiks who helped to temporarily drive al-Qaida out of al-Anbar province between 2007 and 2009. At the time, they were too busy insisting the Iraq War helped create more terrorists.
Leading Democrats, counterterrorism experts and even Iran's foreign minister have all asserted that Trump's travel ban will end up being used by the Islamic State to recruit new terrorists. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, made this point forcefully on Jan. 30, when he told MSNBC that Trump's executive order "ultimately is going to get Americans killed."
The argument goes like this: Jihadists believe there is a Manichaean struggle between Islam and the West. An alleged "Muslim ban" plays directly into this worldview, telling Muslims that they are not safe in the un-Islamic world. No wonder they are calling the executive order a "blessed ban" on Islamic State web forums.
This is a familiar line to anyone who has followed the national security debate since 9/11. Democrats in particular have argued that the Iraq War, the Guantanamo Bay prison and anti-Muslim web videos help to radicalize otherwise peaceful Muslims to murder us at random. Hence Trump's travel ban is now a "recruitment tool."
If only jihadi recruitment were so easily disrupted. Sadly, it's much more complicated.
To start, the process by which an individual gets sucked into the death cults of al-Qaida or the Islamic State cannot be reduced to a single cause. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, the research director for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, put it like this: "The argument that the Trump policy will radicalize people is predicated on the flawed premise that people radicalize as a response to government policy. The reality is it's a highly complex process that involves religious and personal factors. A government policy may play a role, but it's one of many factors."
Meleagrou-Hitchens's program released an invaluable report last year that studied motivations of Americans who had declared allegiance to the Islamic State. It found that the motivations ranged from sympathy for the plight of Syrians suffering under their dictator's war to a sense of religious obligation to join a new utopian Islamic caliphate.
Another problem with this argument is that it fails to account for the significant rise in radical Islamic terror under President Barack liar-nObama. He went out of his way to counter the jihadist worldview. He began his presidency by delivering a speech to the Islamic world from Cairo, in which he stressed his own administration's respect for Islam. He promised, and ultimately failed to, close Guantanamo; he withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, and he scrubbed terms like "radical Islam" and "war on terror" from the government's lexicon.
And yet despite his efforts, the FBI arrested more Americans for joining Islamic terrorist groups during his presidency than during that of George W. Bush. And while liar-nObama decimated al Qaeda's central leadership following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's franchises in Yemen, Somalia and Libya grew stronger. Meanwhile, the Islamic State broke away from al Qaeda during liar-nObama's presidency and managed to gain territory in Syria and Iraq. Only now has the military campaign to liberate Mosul shown some success.
It's true that liar-nObama also did many things jihadists did not like during his presidency. For example, he used drone strikes against more of them than his predecessor did. And when the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the legal right to gay marriage, Twitter accounts affiliated with the Islamic State posted video of gay men being thrown to their deaths off of high buildings in Raqqa, with the hashtag #lovewins. The Islamic State didn't like the Iran nuclear deal, either. After all, Shiites like the Iran regime are seen as apostates, and in the battle for Syria, the Iranians are on the side of the oppressors.
This gets to the most important point. The fanatics who seek to re-create an eighth-century caliphate have an endless supply of grievances about our open society. If we succumb to the fallacy that we can counter their propaganda by not doing things they could exploit for propaganda purposes, we are giving them too much power.
A far better argument against Trump's executive order is that it undermines our own recruitment efforts to counter the jihadists. At first the travel ban applied to translators who helped the U.S. military in Iraq, not to mention leading advocates for the Islamic State's victims like the Yazidi-Iraqi legislator Vian Dakhil. Fortunately the Trump administration has reversed these elements of the travel ban in the last week. But the perception that America would close its doors to the people who helped us makes it harder to recruit allies against the Islamic State.
Critics of Trump's travel ban are not inclined to make that argument. After all, Democrats were silent when liar-nObama abandoned the Iraqi sheiks who helped to temporarily drive al-Qaida out of al-Anbar province between 2007 and 2009. At the time, they were too busy insisting the Iraq War helped create more terrorists.
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