Chris Hedges | NAFTA Was CRIMINAL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-104JMiZes&list=WL&index=5
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration, which is mostly a replica of the Obama administration, “gifted” the Afghan radical Islamist Taliban that enabled al-Qaeda training-camps, whose “graduates” attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, at least $85 billion worth of weapons and piles of cash.
BE PREPARED! WATCH:
Chris Hedges | Undercurrent of REVOLUTION
9/11: A Visual History of 20 Years of War
fucking senile!
Joe Biden Marks 20th Anniversary of 9/11 Criticizing ‘Dark Forces’ in America Against ‘Peaceful Religion’ of Islam
President Joe Biden marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by criticizing Americans for the anti-Muslim anger that occurred in the United States after the attacks took place.
“We also witnessed the dark forces of human nature. Fear and anger. Resentment and violence against Muslim-Americans — true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion,” Biden said in a prerecorded video published for the occasion.
The president said that the principle of “unity” in the country was endangered by the attacks but ultimately prevailed.
“We also saw something all too rare, a true sense of national unity,” he recalled. “Unity and resilience – the capacity to recover and repair in the face of trauma, unity in service.”
Biden released his pre-recorded video, as the White House confirmed Friday he had no plans to address the nation on the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
He began by recalling a friend of his who lost their son in the attacks in New York City and sympathized with the families who lost loved ones in the attacks.
“America and the world commemorate you and your loved ones, the pieces of your soul,” he said.
Biden also recognized the fallen first responders and members of the military who lost their lives in subsequent years.
“It’s so hard, whether it’s the first year or the 20th,” he said.
Biden concluded by citing one of his favorite poets, Earnest Hemingway.
“We find strength in its broken places, as Hemingway wrote. We find light in the darkness, we find purpose to repair, renew, and rebuild,” he said.
Washington Post: Joe Biden Brings Afghans ‘Flagged for Suspected Associations with Terrorists’ to U.S.
President Joe Biden’s administration has brought Afghans to the United States who were later “flagged for suspected associations with terrorists,” the Washington Post reports.
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) vetting records reviewed by the Post, the Biden administration has flagged a total of 44 Afghans as “potential national security risks” after they were brought to the U.S.
A total of 13 of those Afghans are in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody as they undergo more vetting, which includes interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
About 15 of those Afghans have been flagged as “security concerns” and since been turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to be sent back to third safe countries. Some of those 15 Afghans, though, have been released back into the U.S.
The Post reports:
The DHS lists show several Afghans were flagged for suspected associations with terrorists, or whose phones and electronic devices contained information that raised concern among the CBP officers who screen them upon arrival in the United States. CBP and its National Targeting Center are checking Afghan passengers as they land at the two designated arrival sites, Dulles International Airport in Virginia and Philadelphia International Airport. [Emphasis added]
This week, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged that there have been Afghans who failed the federal agencies’ vetting standards but would not give a specific number.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden has brought more than 48,000 Afghans to the U.S. over a 21-day period — indicating that the administration is flying about 2,300 Afghans every day into Philadelphia International Airport in Pennsylvania and Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Already, the population of Afghans brought to the U.S. by Biden in less than a month is more than four times the population of Jackson, Wyoming.
National Public Radio (NPR) reported days ago that Afghans are arriving in the U.S. sometimes with “no paperwork” to prove their identities or with “just scraps of paper.” Likewise, the Associated Press reported that Afghans have been caught lying about their identities or destroying their passports to conceal their true identities.
Meanwhile, the Post previously reported that the Biden administration has brought Afghans to the U.S. who were later “flagged for security concerns.” Likewise, administration officials told CNN that Afghans are arriving in the U.S. who do not have any “documents whatsoever.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby has said he does not know the number of Afghans who have sought resettlement in the U.S. but subsequently were found to have been on terrorist watch lists.
Pentagon officials have told Defense One that “up to 100 of the 7,000 Afghans evacuated as prospective recipients” of Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) seeking permanent resettlement in the U.S. have been “flagged” as “potential matches to intelligence agency watch lists.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Report: Biden’s DHS May Give Work Permits to Afghans Before Vetting Them
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may issue work permits to the tens of thousands of Afghans arriving weekly to the United States before completing their vetting.
As part of Biden’s massive resettlement operation out of Afghanistan, he is hoping to resettle about 95,000 Afghans in total across the U.S. over the next 12 months. Already, more than 48,000 Afghans have been flown to the U.S. for permanent resettlement.
The overwhelming majority of Afghans arriving in the U.S. every day do not qualify for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) or even refugee status. Instead, Afghans are arriving in the hopes of getting “humanitarian parole” and are allowed to land in the U.S. without having completed their immigration processing.
Robert Law with the Center for Immigration Studies writes this week that sources inside the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency have said that top DHS officials are reviewing plans to issue work permits to Afghans before their vetting process is completed.
“Multiple [USCIS] sources tell me that agency leadership (i.e., Biden political appointees) are on the verge of ordering adjudicators to issue work permits first and ‘resolve’ vetting issues later,” Law writes:
If Director Ur Jaddou signs off on this policy, it is even more reckless than it appears. For starters, none of these Afghans have established addresses in the United States, so the work permits are either being handed to them upon release from the military bases they are temporarily being housed in or are being mailed to the advocacy groups who are sponsoring them. When derogatory information comes up, how helpful do you expect these groups to be in tracking down these aliens? And my sources tell me that the agency has already discovered numerous instances of national security or Department of Defense flags on these aliens, but they too will get work permits and be released from temporary custody. [Emphasis added]
This policy, if implemented, would tie the hands of adjudicators by requiring them to approve work permits with incomplete information and removing their discretionary authority to deny. Just days away from the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Biden administration is considering actions that would make the country less safe, and using career immigration adjudicators to do it. [Emphasis added]
Biden, this week, asked Congress to approve $6.4 billion in American taxpayer money to help resettle Afghans across the U.S.
Over the last 20 years, nearly a million refugees have been resettled in the nation — more than double that of residents living in Miami, Florida, and it would be the equivalent of annually adding the population of Pensacola, Florida.
Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to research, and each refugee costs taxpayers about $133,000 over the course of their lifetime. Within five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Joe Biden Conceals How Many Afghans on ‘No Fly List’ Sought Entry to U.S.
President Joe Biden’s agencies are refusing to disclose how many Afghans on the federal government’s “No Fly List” have sought entry to the United States since beginning their massive resettlement operation currently underway.
Last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to top Biden officials asking that the administration share the number of Afghans with ties to terrorism, the Taliban, the Islamic State (ISIS), and Al Queda who have sought entry to the U.S.
“How many individuals on the U.S. no-fly list attempted to board evacuation flights out of Afghanistan? How many successfully gained access to an evacuation flight?” Grassley asks:
How many evacuees have been flagged during the vetting and security screening process as potential security concerns or risks? How many evacuees is the U.S. government currently detaining as potential security concerns or risks? [Emphasis added]
What was the rationale for the State Department’s apparent decision to transmit a generic visa document to thousands of American citizens and SIV applicants in Afghanistan? Can you please provide a thorough explanation of what specific groups of individuals actually received it and what procedures were put in place to ensure that bad actors were not able to utilize the document to gain access to HKIA or evacuation flights? [Emphasis added]
The Bloomberg piece referenced above also stated that the FBI and state and local law enforcement might be required to keep tabs on resettled evacuees who present “ongoing security concerns.” Does the Administration, in fact, intend to resettle evacuees in the United States who present any form of “ongoing security concern?” [Emphasis added]
Grassley asked officials to respond by September 7. To date, though, the officials have yet to respond to Grassley’s request for answers on the vetting process of Afghans.
This week, a number of House Republicans with the Republican Study Committee (RSC) sent a letter to top Biden officials requesting information on how agencies are vetting Afghans with incomplete databases and as many do not have paperwork or identification cards to prove who they are.
The Republicans want to know how many Afghans have failed the vetting process, a figure that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has refused to disclose. The Republiocans write:
This vetting has already failed in the case of Afghan nationals. An Afghan male convicted of rape in the United States and deported by DHS was evacuated from Kabul, allowed to enter the United States, and not caught until he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport.
The Republicans also want to know which officials will be “held accountable” if Afghans brought to the U.S. commit crimes against American citizens.
“DHS background and security checks … cannot assure Americans’ safety … who will be held accountable and by what process will they be held accountable?” they write.
Those who signed the letter include:
Rep. Yvette Herrel (R-NM), Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), Rep. Gregory Murphy (R-NC), Rep. W. Gregory Steube (R-FL), Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL), Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC), Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC), Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL), Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-OH), Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MI), Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC), Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), Rep. Fred Keller (R-PA), Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA), Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-MN), Rep. Jerry Carl (R-AL), Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN), Rep. Ron Estes (R-KS), Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL), Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Rep. Robert Wittman (R-VA), Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), and Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX).
As Breitbart News reported, Biden has brought more than 48,000 Afghans to the U.S. over a 21-day period — indicating that the administration is flying about 2,300 Afghans every day into Philadelphia International Airport in Pennsylvania and Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Already, the population of Afghans brought to the U.S. by Biden in less than a month is more than four times that of Jackson, Wyoming’s resident population.
National Public Radio (NPR) reported days ago that Afghans are arriving in the U.S. sometimes with “no paperwork” to prove their identities or with “just scraps of paper.” Likewise, the Associated Press reported that Afghans have been caught lying about their identities or destroying their passports to conceal their true identities.
In total, Biden is hoping to resettle 95,000 Afghans in the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Video: 9/11 and Frozen Moments in Time
Prayers and tears 20 years later.
This special brief video brings a profound - and heart-wrenching - memory to 9/11. Please take the time to watch. Our thoughts and prayers are with all the victims and their families.
September 11, 2021: Twenty Years of Failure
Why we’re losing.
On Friday, September 10, 2021, the Philadelphia chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is presenting a panel discussion entitled “Remember Pearl Harbor to Never Forget 9/11: Teaching Japanese American and Muslim American Histories.” There in a nutshell is much of what has gone wrong in our nation’s response to the 9/11 jihad attacks, and why we are so drastically on the wrong path now.
The CAIR panel is as noteworthy for what it is not about than for what it is about. It is not about the victims of 9/11, the lives lost, the lives destroyed, the magnitude of human suffering that was inflicted. It is most certainly not about the ongoing global jihad: a useful panel could be held on groups that still exist around the world that hold to the same belief system, ideology and goals that the 9/11 plotters and hijackers held, and which are an ongoing threat to Americans and to all free people. Hamas-linked CAIR is never going to hold such a panel, and neither is anyone else.
Instead, CAIR, predictably enough, focuses on the people who hold the same beliefs as the jihad attackers of 9/11 and have, CAIR claims, been victimized and discriminated against in the United States as a result. Statistically speaking, such claims are wildly exaggerated. FBI hate crime statistics show that anti-Semitic hate crimes are far more common than attacks on Muslims, which actually dropped 42% in the last year. No hate crime is justified, but the idea that Muslims are living in fear of MAGA-hat-wearing redneck vigilantes in America is Leftist fantasy.
Nonetheless, that is not just the focus of this unsavory Hamas-linked group, but of the establishment media as well. The Los Angeles Times on Friday published a lengthy weeper entitled “Muslim youth in America: A generation shadowed by the aftermath of 9/11,” all about how some people say rude things to innocent Muslims just because some people did something way back two decades ago. The article begins: “On a rainy day during her sophomore year of high school, as Aissata Ba studied in the library, a photo popped into her phone. It showed a beheading by Islamic State militants, along with a caption in red letters: ‘Go back to your country.’” In the big bad, “Islamophobic” USA, the perpetrator of this horror got off scot-free: “Ba reported the incident. Administrators never tracked down the person who sent it.”
The Times explained how Muslims are the true victims of the 9/11 attacks: “Asked when they thought such incidents became common, the Ba family didn’t hesitate. ‘It started with 9/11,’ said Ba’s mom, Zeinebou, who immigrated to Chicago in 1999. That day in 2001 caused a chain of tragedies — for the nearly 3,000 people who perished during the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania; for the young men and women who died serving their country in the wars that followed; and for Muslims, and those perceived as Muslim, who became targets of hate.”
It would be much easier to sympathize with all this if not for the fact that since 9/11, CAIR and its allied groups, with eager help from the establishment media, have insisted that any honest investigation of the motivating ideology behind the attacks, and jihad terror in general, constituted “hate.” Then there are the numerous fake anti-Muslim hate crimes, fabricated apparently in order to buttress the claim that Muslims are uniquely harassed and victimized in the United States. The facts don’t bear out this claim.
The LA Times was not alone, of course. The Associated Press came out with its own Muslims-Are-Victims 9/11 story on Tuesday: “Two decades after 9/11, Muslim Americans still fighting bias.” It opened with another unsubstantiated anecdote that, as all such anecdotes do, revealed more than it intended: “A car passed, the driver’s window rolled down and the man spat an epithet at two little girls wearing their hijabs: ‘Terrorist!’ It was 2001, mere weeks after the twin towers at the World Trade Center fell, and 10-year-old Shahana Hanif and her younger sister were walking to the local mosque from their Brooklyn home. Unsure, afraid, the girls ran. As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks approaches, Hanif can still recall the shock of the moment, her confusion over how anyone could look at her, a child, and see a threat. ‘It’s not a nice, kind word. It means violence, it means dangerous. It is meant to shock whoever … is on the receiving end of it,’ she says.”
If that really happened, it’s a shame, but the fact that both the LA Times and AP had to lead with stories of people saying rude things to Muslims unwittingly reveals that they didn’t have anything worse to head up their stories: no stories of Muslims being attacked, of mosques being burnt down, of laws targeting Muslims in the United States and denying them basic rights. Nor should there be such stories. But the fact that there aren’t any gives the lie to the entire establishment narrative.
Meanwhile, SiriusXM host and frequent CNN contributor Dean Obeidallah wrote at CNN on Monday: “On September 10, 2001, I went to sleep a White guy. On September 11, I woke up an Arab.” This happened, you see, because after 9/11, people began to regard poor Dean as a member of a group that he says has been “demonized and hated by many of our fellow Americans — simply because we shared the same ethnic background, and in some cases religion, as the 9/11 terrorists.” The irony of his writing this for one of the world’s foremost media outlets, which frequently showcases his work, appears to have been lost on him.
The reality is much different from what these stories suggest. Newsweek recently noted that “as the 20th anniversary of September 11 approaches, the recent rise of many Muslim Americans to positions of power and influence—in Washington and in statehouses, on big screens and small ones, across playing fields and news desks—is a development that few in the U.S. would have predicted two decades ago, Muslims included.”
Meanwhile, opponents of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women have genuinely experienced the marginalization that Obeidallah claims to have suffered. They have been defamed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, targeted by the social media giants’ Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and shunned by the establishment media.
In all this I haven’t even mentioned the misbegotten misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. government’s adamantine determination to ignore and deny the ideological wellsprings of the global jihad. But it all works together: the lesson most Americans will be told on Saturday is that twenty years ago, some “extremists,” akin to the January 6 “insurrectionists,” hijacked the peaceful religion of Islam, and since then Muslims have been victimized. The moral of the story? We must end all remaining counterterror measures directed at stopping jihadis. They’re “Islamophobic,” and the real problem is “white supremacists,” anyway. What could possibly go wrong? Go back to sleep.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Celebrating Our Enemies, Twenty Years after 9/11
America dives, Islam thrives.
On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush - by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam - effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush - who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little - used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.
Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy - and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.
So little did Americans understand about Islam as of 2008 that they elected as their president a man who was the son and stepson of Muslims and who’d spent much of his childhood in the Muslim nation of Indonesia, where he’d been registered at schools as a Muslim, taken Koran classes, worn Muslim garb, and attended mosque. In a 2007 interview with Nicholas Kristof, he described the Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” (Kristof observed enthusiastically that “a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics...if he once studied the Koran with them.”) Delivering an address at Al-Azhar University in Cairo shortly after his inauguration, the new president hailed Islam’s purported contributions to human civilization, inventing an entire alternate history that replaced primitive violence with advanced learning and scientific discovery. If Bush had whitewashed Islam, Obama exalted it, shifting the Overton window even further away from candor about Islamic fundamentals in the direction of sheer fantasy - and deference.
In the years following 9/11, class divisions in the U.S. intensified. And one mark of the difference between the elites and the deplorables was that the former tended to parrot the pretty lies about Islam while the latter didn’t. During this period, the planet’s ultimate elite newspaper, the New York Times, perfected a subgenre of article that has won it the highest of accolades: the shameless Muslim puff piece. In 2007, Andrea Elliott was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for what the Pulitzer website describes as “her intimate, richly textured portrait of an immigrant imam striving to find his way and serve his faithful in America.” The website’s language is indicative of the supremely mendacious way in which our betters routinely frame the subject of Islam.
These are people who rarely write about a member of the Christian clergy unless he’s been caught with his hand in the collection plate or under some altar boy’s cassock. But when they’re profiling an imam, they invariably represent him as a deeply holy man, a virtuous soul “striving” to “serve his faithful.” In order to make such a profile work on the desired warm-and-fuzzy level, to be sure, they need to elide certain uncomfortable details about what that imam actually preaches. Hence the harsh reality of sharia - Islamic law - needs to be kept from the reader; indeed, legitimate expressions of concern about sharia by well-informed members of the public need to be dismissed as the ravings of ignorant bigots. (Dias, for example, quotes a Muslim activist who characterizes various states’ anti-sharia legislation as the product of “hysteria” and compares them to campaigns to ban the teaching of that other gift to mankind, critical race theory.)
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Times ran yet another of its cozy pieces about American Muslims. In “9/11 and After: Muslim Americans’ ‘Seismic Change,’” Elizabeth Dias purports to profile a “community” that is “determined to thrive” - in the face, apparently, of widespread hatred and intolerance. As is de rigueur in this subgenre, Dias opens by introducing us to somebody with whom we’re expected to sympathize:
When Sylvia Chan-Malik reflects on the aftermath of Sept. 11, she has two starkly different personal memories from the trauma.
She recalls the strangers yelling epithets at her and her young daughters on their way to Eid prayers. But she also thinks of her daughters, now teenagers, seeing Hasan Minhaj, the Muslim comedian, at a sold-out theater and reading novels about Muslim girls like themselves.
Dias proceeds to quote Chan-Malik on the way in which 9/11 and its aftermath have “caused incredible violence and pain and trauma,” but also “created incredible possibility and hope and new forms of community.” Dias picks up the message, telling us that 9/11 “unleashed a deluge of anti-Muslim hate and misinformation that persists today” and that Donald Trump was elected “on an anti-Muslim platform,” resulting in “a surge in violence against American Muslims.” Of course, the only “misinformation” about Islam that persists in America is the kind served up regularly in places like the Times by way of prettifying what is, in reality, an exceedingly poisonous ideology.
If Trump is “anti-Muslim,” it’s only by the Times’s own highly dishonest standards, under which it’s an act of vicious bigotry to take Islamic theology seriously, to deal with Islamic terrorism responsibly, or to acknowledge the link between Muslim belief and violent jihad. As for that so-called surge in anti-Muslim violence, it’s as much of a canard as the bogus statistics on campus rape, spread by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its comrades on the left, none of whom ever dare to speak honestly about the violence (largely anti-Jewish) committed by Muslims in the West - or about the bloodthirsty decimation by Middle Eastern Muslims, during the last two decades, of Christian and Jewish communities in that region. No, Muslims must always be portrayed as victims - and that includes portraying them, unforgivably, as the leading victims of 9/11.
A brief detour: who, incidentally, is Sylvia Chan-Malik, this woman with whose comments about Muslim life Dias chooses to begin her article? As it turns out, she’s not just your run-of-the-mill American Muslim. No, she’s an academic-elite success story of the first water, with one of the trendiest professional CVs I’ve ever seen. A Berkeley grad with a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Chan-Malik was a visiting professor at Princeton last spring and now teaches “American studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Religious Studies” at Rutgers, with a focus on “anti-blackness, xenophobia, orientalism, and white nationalism,” not to mention “the rise of anti-Muslim racism in 20th-21st-century America” and the way in which “race, gender, and religion...interact in struggles for social justice.” There’s no indication in Chan-Malik’s Rutgers bio that she has anything negative whatsoever to say about Islam itself. On the contrary, while she deplores the “oftentimes violent legacies of white Christian Protestantism in the United States,” she balks at even the mildest and most justifiable criticism of Islam - taking issue, for instance, with those who, in her words, set up “a false opposition between ‘Islam’ and feminism.’” In other words, she’s a perfect Muslim source for the Newspaper of Record.
Anyway, getting back to Dias: balancing out all the alleged horrors experienced by American Muslims in the last twenty years, she informs us, is the triumphant entry of Muslims into the American mainstream. Example #1: “Ramy Youssef won a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of a young New Jersey man struggling with his identity.” I looked up Youssef. He calls himself an “Allah Carte” Muslim - which means that under the rules of Islam, he’s an apostate, and thereby deserving of death. (No mention of this by Dias, naturally.) Example #2: the election to Congress of Muslims like Ilhan Omar, who “successfully challenged the 181-year rule banning headwear in the House chamber.” Well, for some of us, the election to Congress of someone like Omar - a vile anti-Semite and America-hater with terrorist ties - is not something to celebrate.
But in the world according to the Times, it’s in bad taste to look too closely at such people’s more unsavory opinions and connections (or, for that matter, at such minor biographical details as her marriage of convenience to her brother). Dias goes on to note that America’s Muslim population has doubled since 9/11, so that about 1% of Americans are now Muslim. You might think she’d ponder the impact of Islamization in Western Europe, where in some countries Muslims are approaching 10% of the population; there’s no reference here to the rapid spread of no-go zones, the huge rise in violent crime, the destructive force of mass welfare dependency, or the official persecution (and prosecution) of critics of Islam. Nor does Dias cite any of the many deadly jihadist attacks that have taken place since 9/11 on both sides of the Atlantic. Preposterously, she quotes Farah Pandith of the Council on Foreign Relations, who laments “the rising of a fear-based narrative around Islam.” In fact the “fear-based narrative around Islam” became to take shape in the seventh century, with the jihadist destruction of the Sassanid Empire and the severe weakening of the Byzantine Empire.
In a saner world, needless to say, it would be considered risible for the Times to run an article bemoaning the “fear-based narrative around Islam” at precisely the moment when the Taliban, having retaken Afghanistan, is back in business destroying artworks and musical instruments, beating up journalists, forcing women back into burkas and girls into sex slavery, and beheading apostates (among others) and desecrating their remains in the gruesomest of ways. But the West today is not that saner world in which it would be admirable to speak frankly about such matters; on the contrary, it’s a world that’s been shaped since 9/11 by people like those who call the shots at the Times - a world in which it’s unacceptable to admit that the Taliban’s current actions are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of orthodox Islam, but where it’s obligatory to condemn as racist even a tame effort by Donald Trump to prevent entry into the U.S. by devout Muslims who support the Taliban’s actions.
This is where we stand, 20 years after 9/11: the West is awash in lies and cowardice; while the shady likes of Omar and Rashida Tlaib flex their muscles in Congress, while hustlers like Sylvia Chan-Malik brainwash students at our most prestigious universities, while degraded legacy media like the Times continue to sugarcoat Islam, and while a perfidious pol like British MP Stella Creasy feels obliged to say in the House of Commons that the Taliban’s iniquities are “not Islam,” brave truth-tellers on the topic, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, are put on trial, even as another, Robert Spencer, is banned from the U.K., and still another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, must live with bodyguards around the clock.
In 2002, the country singer Toby Keith reacted to 9/11 with a song, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” that was addressed to Al Qaeda:
Hey Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty started shakin' her fist
And the eagle will fly man, it's gonna be hell
When you hear mother freedom start ringin' her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Brought to you courtesy of the red white and blue
Well, we rained down hell on Afghanistan and Iraq. By force of arms, we repelled the Taliban and ISIS and al-Qaeda, but we then failed in the absurd drive to turn those countries into simulacra of the free society that America had once been but was quickly evolving away from. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said that the terrorists had lost, because the attacks had brought Americans together. Would Bush say now that the terrorists lost? Twenty years on, under the disgraceful Biden, America feels like a damaged and diminished nation - its power weakened, its alliances shaken, its once-unshakable core beliefs largely shattered, not least by the suicidal compulsion to speak well of Islam (as well as of our enemies in China and of the savage gang members who flood across our Southern border, and whom Nancy Pelosi defended with as much passion - “we’re all God’s children,” she gushed about MS-14 - as Hillary Clinton brought to bear in insulting the “deplorables” of middle America). To many Americans, especially the young, the patriotism that inspired Keith’s song now sounds quaint, if not outright offensive; in the view those who hold the future of America in their hands, saluting the flag and singing the national anthem are for “white supremacists.” The America that al-Qaeda struck at on 9/11 is no more; and 9/11 itself, and our tragically misguided response to it, are a very big part of the reason why. Islam plays a long game.
President Biden’s indifference to the parents of the thirteen American armed-forces members killed in Afghanistan spoke volumes. All too many of our elites now view GIs who’ve been wounded or killed fighting Muslims as an embarrassment - as relics of a benighted era when we resisted Islam instead of bowing to it. All those firefighters racing up the stairs of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Todd Beamer shouting “Let’s roll!” as he and some of his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 rushed the cockpit to foil the Al-Qaeda thugs? In the eyes of many of our most bien pensant types today, these are wince-inducing images - now worn into corny, cloying clichés - that no civilized individual would dredge up any longer except out of sheer Islamophobia. The other day, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKinsey actually praised the Taliban for its cooperativeness, it seemed clear that the mantra of “America bad, Islam good” had triumphed utterly over the values that the overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties once shared. So it is that, after the fall of Kabul, many of us who, not so long ago, considered America almost immune to the ideological plagues of Europe and elsewhere find ourselves nothing less than shell-shocked, haunted by Ronald Reagan’s cautionary words about freedom never being more than a generation away from extinction.
9/11, 20 Years . . . and Forgetting
Minimizing, denying -- and providing cover for the plots and the plotters
I remained rooted to my chair, transfixed, as I watched the twin towers come down—and when I finally stepped out into my front yard, I said to my neighbor: “Now, we are all Israelis.”
Michiko Kakutani reviewed the film, The Testaments, also for the New York Times. She wrote:
Atwood understands that the fascist crimes of Gilead speak for themselves…just as their relevance to our own times does not need to be put in boldface. Many American readers and viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale are already heavily invested with the story of Gilead because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and the United States—with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees—will soon be restored. We identify because the events in Atwood’s novel…now feel frighteningly real. Because news segments on television in 2019 are filled with images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know it on the planet.
However, Atwood’s Gilead reflects and foretells two other profoundly devastating realities, which neither the critics nor Atwood dwell upon.
Handmaid is about many things: Extreme misogyny, woman’s Inhumanity to woman, and post-Orwellian totalitarianism. But it is also about commercial surrogacy, a practice which has already been legalized in many American states, a commercial transaction which is seen as “progressive.”
The real handmaids in America today are the birthmother-surrogates who, out of economic desperation, or in a psychological fugue state, agree to carry a child for an “intended” parent or parents. Their diets and medical care is as closely supervised as in Gilead and they are sometimes forbidden to even see the babies in the delivery room. Breastfeeding is not an option. In one case, in California, armed guards prevented the birthmother from meeting her triplets in the NICU.
To be clear, Atwood foretold the horrific rise of surrogacy in America—but none of her admirers want to talk about this because it undercuts their pro-surrogacy agenda.
There’s another contemporary parallel that gets little attention. Gilead’s system of pseudo-theocratic totalitarian control in both her novels and in the Hulu adaptation of it does not accurately reflect what is happening in America today; it mirrors what is happening in many Islamic countries.
It is All About Afghanistan under the Taliban in the 1990s and under the Taliban right now.
Ironically, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood does mention Islam twice (to exonerate Muslims as the suspected mass murderers of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office in Gilead and again in a reference to the “obsession with harems” on the part of allegedly Orientalist Western painters who did not understand that they were painting “boredom” Atwood’s quintessential Bad Guys are Caucasian, Bible-thumping, right wing, conservative, American Christians.
But where else than in the Islamic/Islamist world do we see forced face veiling, forced child marriage, women confined to the home, polygamy (a “wife” and a “handmaid” under the same roof), male guardians and minders, cattle prod shocking, whipping, hand amputations, stoning, crazed vigilante mobs stomping and tearing people apart, and tortured corpses publicly displayed on city walls or hanging from cranes in order to terrify the populace? Or the torture murder of homosexuals? This is how the Taliban, (the Islamic Emirate), Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, and all their Pakistani and Indian Muslim Jihadist counterparts interpret, correctly or incorrectly, Sharia law.
How could all the reviewers not see what I so clearly see? Perhaps here’s how.
I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan—(I love my opening line) but a harem simply means the “women’s quarters.” It is forbidden territory to all men who are not relatives. If you can’t leave without permission or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purdah.
A romantic courtship and then marriage had transported me back to the 10th Century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.
However, I got out of the wild, wild East and I moved on. But I never forgot the way it was. I always understood that as imperfect as America and the West might be, it was still a much better place for women than the pre-Khomeini and pre-Taliban Islamic world. Forever after, I understood that barbaric customs are indigenous, not caused by foreign intervention; and that, like the West, Islam was also an imperial and colonial power; Arab Muslims owned slaves, and engaged in gender and religious apartheid.
I owe Afghanistan a great deal for teaching me this. Perhaps my radical Western feminism was forged long ago in pampered purdah in Kabul.
Like the handmaids and domestics in Gilead, the captive population in Orwell’s 1984 is monitored around the clock through “telescreens” that can view every room, each person. The telescreens broadcast Big Brother’s orders and conduct daily “hate” sessions. People are always anxious and paranoid; everyone has permanent enemies.
Today, Orwell’s Thought Police sound a lot like the Afghan Taliban or like Iran’s Virtue and-Vice squads, who arrest men and women for the smallest sign of “individuality” or difference, and who harass and arrest women for showing a single strand of hair, or a glimpse of ankle. Here’s Khaled Hosseini’s fictional description of life in Afghanistan before the Taliban in The Kite Runner:
You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul anymore—for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend…the rafiqs, the [Afghan] comrades, were everywhere and they’d split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn’t…A casual remark to the tailor while getting fitted for a suit might land you in the dungeons of Poleh-charkhi…Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their own home, people had to speak in a calculated manner—the rafiqs were in the classrooms too; they’d taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.
And here he is describing Afghanistan in the Taliban era:
In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadiums, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here…the savages who rule our watan [country] don’t care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzanajan to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and naan. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on her leg for days…If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly!
Hosseini’s descriptions are right out of 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale.
Two memoirs set in Iran, Azar Nafisi’s best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran and Roya Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No, describe the savage curtailment of private life and thought—and of life itself—by radical Islamists.
According to Nafisi, Khomeini’s goon squads closed newspapers and universities and arrested, tortured, and executed beloved teachers, prominent artists, intellectuals, and activists, including feminists, and thousands of other innocent and productive Muslims. The squads constantly harassed women on the street and at work. If a woman failed the dress-code standards even slightly, or by accident, she risked being arrested, probably raped, probably executed.
In Journey from the Land of No, Roya Hakakian describes the indescribable “Mrs. Moghadam,” the newly-installed head of the Jewish girls’ high school. Mrs. Moghadam tyrannizes, terrifies, and shames the Jewish girls. She tries to convert them to Islam. However, her true passion is more Talibanesque. She informs the innocent girls that, although they do not know it, they are “diabolical,” “abominable,” “loathsome,” “lethal,” capable of “drowning everything in eternal darkness,” capable of bringing the “apocalypse” by showing a single strand of hair. To Hakakian’s credit, she presents a rather dangerous turn of events as a dark comedy.
Mrs. Moghadam is definitely an Aunt Lydia, the lead female tormentor of the Handmaids, right out of Gilead, circa 1985.
As Muslim women are being tortured, honor-murdered by their families, or stoned to death, sometimes for refusing to wear the veil, many Western multiculturally and politically correct post-colonial feminists are deconstructing and wearing the face veil and the head scarf as symbols of anti-racism and as a form of respect when they visit Muslim countries. Such feminists are also silencing and demonizing all other views in academic journals, in the media, and on feminist internet groups.
Atwood depicts an all-female power structure in which the handmaids are kept in line by cruel female “Aunts,” led by Aunt Lydia, who casually apply cattle prods and tasers, who blame them as evil sluts, punish them with group condemnation, bouts of solitary confinement, exile them to the “Colonies” to die cleaning up toxic waste, etc. Such behavior seems to contradict feminist views of women as morally superior to men and as more compassionate and intuitive.
Like men, women are human beings and as such are as close to the apes as to the angels. Women are also aggressive, cruel, competitive, envious, sometimes lethally so, but mainly toward other women. I would not want to be at the mercy of a female prison guard—or a female concentration camp guard—in the West. But let’s not forget the Wives of ISIS—the all-female al-Khansa Brigade who whipped, beat, and mutilated the breasts of girls and women when their heavy black burqas slipped.
Right now, some Afghan women are marching in favor of the Taliban.Of course, some are daring to protest Taliban rule and are facing terrifying violence as are the journalists who dare to cover their demonstrations.
Misogynist thinking and actions exist in America today but not only among right-wing conservatives. It is also flourishing among our media and academic elites. Such thinking is flying high under the banner of “free speech,” “multi-cultural relativism,” “anti-racism,” and “political correctness.” Dare to question this elite’s right to silence and shame those who challenge their views—i.e., that the West is always to blame, that jihadists are freedom-fighters, that the Islamic face veil is a free choice or a religious commandment, that polygamy encourages sisterhood, that Islam is a race, not a religious and political ideology—and, as I’ve noted many times, one is attacked as a racist, an Islamophobe, and a conservative, and swiftly demonized and de-platformed.
Atwood the divine novelist is absolutely entitled to depict whatever she wishes. But too many reviewers are playing partisan politics with her vision and are refusing to see other and larger global dangers contained in her work.
Women’s freedom and women’s lives worldwide are under the most profound siege. To focus solely on the United States or on the Caucasian, Judeo-Christian West is diversionary and blind. Women here are not the only or even the greatest victims. It is vain of us to insist upon it.
Part of this was published in my 2005 book, now out of print: “The Death of Feminism;” part of this is contained in my 2019 and 2020 books “Islamic Gender Apartheid: A Veiled War Against Women”and “A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing;” and part of this was published two years ago in Quillette. All of it remains terribly relevant.
*
Phyllis Chesler Ph.D is the author of 20 books including Women and Madness, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, An American Bride in Kabul, and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.
Has The 9/11 Problem Been Fixed?
The deadly cost of unprotected borders and unenforced immigration laws.
Twenty years later, it appears they are still there.
Had you driven through a certain intersection on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church, Virginia, yesterday or today, you would have seen a group of men — some standing, some sitting, but all waiting in the shade, apparently hoping someone would drive up and hire them to do some work.
Twenty years ago, two Saudi nationals, Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar, drove up to that very location looking for someone to help them do something illegal.
What happened then was described in a "Statement of Facts" that the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia presented in federal court in the case of the United States of America v. Luis A. Martinez-Flores.
"At all times material to this case, the defendant was a citizen and national of El Salvador living in the United States unlawfully," the statement said.
"On or about the evening of August 1, 2001, the defendant was seeking day labor from passersby in a parking lot at a 7-11 store in Falls Church, Virginia," it said.
"On that same date, Hanjour and Almihdhar drove a van with out-of-state license plates into the same parking lot while the defendant was there," it said. "Once in the lot, Hanjour and Almihdhar told the day laborers who approached their van that they needed someone to certify that they were Virginia residents on a DMV form."
Not everyone there was ready to cooperate.
"When the first two laborers who approached Hanjour and Almihdhar refused to help the men, the defendant came forward and agreed to help Hanjour and Almihdhar in return for a cash payment of $100," the statement said.
At that time, a person could get an identification from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles even if they did not produce a document that demonstrated they did, in fact, live in Virginia. Instead, they could get a third party to swear to a document called a DL51, which certified that they did live at a Virginia address.
This is what Hanjour and Almihdhar needed Martinez-Flores, the "national of El Salvador living in the United States unlawfully," to do for them.
"Once the matter was agreed, the defendant got into Hanjour and Almihdhar's van and directed them to the Springfield DMV office in Springfield, Virginia," the statement said. "There, the defendant helped both Hanjour and Almihdhar to complete a DL51 form." They claimed to have an address on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church.
"This address did not belong to either Hanjour or Almihdhar, but was rather the address on the defendant's Virginia identification card," it said. "The defendant no longer lived at that address, but had in the past."
"Once they had completed the DL51 forms, the defendant, Hanjour, and Almihdhar swore that the information on the forms was correct before a DMV clerk," it said.
"A few moments later, DMV clerks issued both Hanjour and Almihdhar Virginia identification cards," said this "Statement of Facts."
It was time for Martinez-Flores to get paid.
"Once Hanjour and Almihdhar had received their identification cards, the defendant, Hanjour and Almihdhar got back in the van and returned to the 7-11 store," said the statement. "Almihdhar then obtained $100 in cash from an automated teller machine inside the 7-11 store and gave the money to the defendant."
Timothy P. Carney and I co-authored a story on this incident that was published by Human Events on Nov. 5, 2001. It cited an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Jesus H. Gomez that had been filed in federal court.
"DMV records also show that Hanjour and Almihdhar used the address Martinez gave them on August 1, 2001, to complete DL51 forms for Majed Moqed (Moqed) and Salem Alhazmi (Alhazmi) on August 2, 2001," Gomez wrote.
"DMV records further show that Hanjour used the address Martinez gave him on August 1, 2001, to complete a DL51 form for Ziad Jarrah (Jarrah) on August 29, 2001," said Gomez.
On Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia. Four of the five hijackers on that plane had gotten Virginia identifications using the address provided to Hanjour and Almihdhar by Martinez-Flores. They were Hanjour — the hijacking pilot — Almihdhar, Moqed and Alhazmi. That plane flew into the Pentagon.
The fifth hijacker who used that address on a Virginia identification was Jarrah, the hijacking pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In February 2002, a federal judge sentenced Martinez-Flores to serve 21 months in prison.
"Luis Martinez-Flores, 28, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador living in Falls Church, had pleaded guilty to document fraud for falsely certifying that Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar — two of the hijackers aboard the jet that hit the Pentagon — were Virginia residents," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported then.
After the 9/11 attacks, Virginia stopped using DL51s to issue identifications.
Only a government agency such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement could determine whether the men who still regularly congregate in the same area where Hanjour and Almihdhar picked up Martinez-Flores are legally present in this country. But it is not unreasonable to conclude that in the 20 years since 2001, our federal government has not secured our borders or fully enforced its immigration laws.
In August 2004, the staff of the 9/11 Commission published a report on terrorist travel that discussed the Virginia identifications secured by Hanjour, Almihdhar, Moqed, Hazmi and Jarrah.
"In all," said that report, "the five hijackers based their Virginia identification documents on the residency information of one bribed Salvadoran."
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSnews.com.
Biden Will Not Deliver Live Remarks on 9/11 Anniversary
President Joe Biden will not give a live speech to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. He will instead release a prerecorded video of his remarks.
"You will hear from [Biden] in the form of a video in advance—or if that will be available that day, I should say," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
The president will attend events at all three 9/11 memorial sites—in New York City, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon—on Saturday, the anniversary of the attacks. Psaki said Biden's busy schedule that day precluded him from giving a live address.
Former president Donald Trump delivered live remarks to commemorate the attacks on each of the four years of his administration, as did former president Barack Obama each year of his two terms.
Stay away, Joe
Stay Away, Joe was an Elvis movie about a half-breed who returns to the reservation. Maybe Senator Elizabeth Warren should watch it and learn something.
"Stay away, Joe." Yes, stay away from the 9/11 celebrations, Mr. President.
The 20th celebration of 9/11 is sort of like an anniversary party for a couple that announced their breakup last week. What are we celebrating?
On the morning of 9/11, I watched on TV as the second plane hit one of the towers. I remember sitting at the office, and everybody was watching the TV in the boss's office. At lunchtime, eating was a second thought because everyone was looking at the TV screen. I remember calling my wife and hearing that she was picking up the boys from school. Later that evening, I got a message that the opening of fall baseball was delayed because too many parents did not want their kids outside. Finally, what about that eerie feeling of looking up and not seeing all of those planes normally lining up to land at DFW Airport?
It was a horrible day, as Fred Kaplan remembers:
Everyone was in a state of horror. I talked with several people walking away from the disaster, some coated with ash. One man, a Xerox executive who worked a block from the towers, told me he’d seen “pieces of fuselage and body parts falling from the sky” and “strewn all over the street.” This was the first moment I realized that the weapons in the sky hadn’t been small prop engine planes, perhaps rented by saboteurs; they were passenger jetliners, hijacked by terrorists.
The subways were closed down. Cellular networks were mangled. I walked uptown toward the apartment of my Globe colleague Elizabeth Neuffer (a tenacious reporter who would die two years later in Iraq). The streets were empty and quiet, except for the sound of news broadcasts blaring from car radios and bars. At each one, and there were several on every block, dozens of people gathered around to hear the latest. Rumors were rife that planes had also attacked the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Capitol. (One of those reports was true.)
What we saw that day was police officers and firemen walk into the towers. Many did not make it out. They did their duty.
Days later, we saw young men volunteer to defend their country. Some of them died over there.
Of course, let's not forget the families or the "let's roll" warriors.
What in the world is President Biden going to say to these people? As he speaks in New York or at the Pentagon, the Taliban will be celebrating the victory they never won in Kabul. They will use the U.S. Embassy as the backdrop for their speech of how they defeated the army of young men that President Biden will attempt to memorialize.
Stay away, Joe, because nobody wants you there.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk).
Image: Gage Skidmore.
IF WE ARE GOING TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY WE MUST RID OURSELVES OF JOE BIDEN!
9 MONTHS AND UTTER DESTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING THE MAN TOUCHES!
Joe Biden Wants Billions in Welfare for Afghan’s Economic Migrants
President Joe Biden’s deputies are pulling unvetted Afghans through an emergency side door in the nation’s immigration laws — and are now asking Congress to let the tens of thousands of economic migrants get billions of dollars in American-funded welfare programs.
Few of the Afghan migrants are eligible for “Special Immigrant Visas” (SIVs) that were created for Afghans who fought alongside the United States, such as interpreters.
So Biden’s officials have declared the many non-SIV migrants are “vulnerable” migrants and are letting them in through the “parole” side door. That door was created by Congress for rare problems, such as a sick crewman on a foreign fishing ship.
Now the parole door is being used to import a wide variety of Afghans, many of whom face little danger from the Taliban, and some of whom forced their way past U.S. soldiers to get on U.S. aircraft in Kabul. Officials are suggesting that at least 80,000 Afghans will be pulled through the parole door.
But federal law does not provide any welfare or aid for the non-SIV migrants who enter via the side door.
So the White House is asking Congress to let the Afghans enroll in American-funded healthcare and welfare programs — along with their chain-migration spouses, children, and parents. The welfare programs include Medicare and Medicaid, Obamacare, Section 8 housing vouchers, and food stamps, along with specialized teachers for their non-English speaking children.
Many of the paroled Afghans do not speak English. Many do not read or write, and many lack the workplace skills to stay out of poverty in the United States. So the welfare cash will help employers train them for jobs that would otherwise go to Americans at higher wages. The cash will also help the eight big refugee resettlement organizations settle the migrants in towns throughout the United States, so boosting rents for Americans.
The groups have also asked for $6.4 billion in resettlement funds, in addition to the welfare offered to the Afghans.
The welfare request is buried on page 25 of a 34-page page list of budget requests to Congress, titled “Continuing Resolution (CR) Appropriations Issues”:
(c) Benefits – Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an Afghan national described in subsection (a), whose parole has not been terminated, shall be: (1) eligible for resettlement assistance, entitlement programs, and other benefits available to refugees admitted under section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) (8 U.S.C. 1157) to the same extent, and for the same periods of time, as such refugees;
(2) considered to be in a lawful status for the purpose of eligibility for a driver’s license or identification card under section 202 of the REAL ID Act of 2005, Pub. L. No. 109-13, Div. B (49 U.S.C. 30301 note); and
(3) eligible for any or all services described under section 412(d)(2)(B) of INA ( 8U.S.C. 1522(d)(2)(B)), if under the age of 18 (or such higher age as the State’s child welfare services plan under part B of title IV of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 620 et seq.) prescribes for the availability of such services to any other child in that State) and unaccompanied as defined by 6 U.S.C. 279(g)(2).
(d) Spouses and Children – A spouse or child (as defined in section 101(b)(1)(A), (B), (C), (D), or (E) of the Immigration and Nationality Act) of any Afghan national described in subsection (a) who is subsequently paroled or admitted into the United States at any point after the entry of that Afghan national shall be entitled to the same treatment described in subsections (c) and (f).
The Democrats have the votes to push the welfare expansion through Congress — unless GOP Senators oppose it or force some curbs.
Nationwide, 55 percent of non-citizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of welfare compared to just 32 percent of households headed by native-born Americans, according to a report by Steven Camarota, at the Center for Immigration Studies.
But the Democrats are taking a political risk in helping many unidentified Afghan migrants land in the United States.
RealClearPolitics.com reported September 8:
Former Force Reconnaissance Marine Chad Robichaux … [said] The U.S. military and State Department officials operating at the Kabul airport pretty much did … a pat-down for weapons and explosives and put them on planes, but there was no processing or vetting.”
The Washington Post reported September 5:
It was 2:30 a.m. when Mustafa, finally safe in the cargo bay of an American military plane after surviving the chaos and violence of the Kabul airport, glanced around at the other weary Afghans and was struck by what he saw.
Many had minimal identification and did not appear to have worked closely with the United States as he had, serving as a translator and analyst. They were “just people,” he said, who took advantage of a disorderly evacuation to flee their turbulent country.
“Nobody knows who was the good guy and who was the bad guy getting into the plane,” said Mustafa, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect relatives still in Afghanistan. He added, “It’s a risky thing that I believe happened.”
The migrants include many older men who bring other families’ young girls as their wives, ensuring the two families can begin their chain migration from Afghanistan to Americans’ welfare rolls. YahooNews.com reported September 8:
“U.S. officials at intake centers in the United Arab Emirates and in Wisconsin have found many incidents in which Afghan girls have been presented to authorities as the wives of much older men,” says a Sept. 5 report by the Office of Intelligence and Analysis in CBP’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.
…
A U.S. government official familiar with the reports of alleged child brides said the problem is a result of poor vetting of Afghans. “The concern is, we’re seeing a lot of family units with very young girls. These girls are brought into the U.S. as wives,” the official said. “It’s not a small number.”
But homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas only offered a sentimental portrayal of the migration during a September 9 event at the National Press Club, saying:
What we have seen across the country is an extraordinary outpouring of generosity regardless of political party affiliation … a united effort to extend this Nation’s generosity in its proud tradition of being a place of refuge.
…
as the Afghans disembark from the bus that has brought them to the military facility [in Virginia], the soldiers provide the children with an American flag. And when the children wave that flag, their fathers place their hands over their hearts in gratitude, in reverence, and out of respect for what our country has meant to them.
The White House’s request for welfare is accompanied by a request that Congress put the migrants on a fast track to citizenship, theoretically allowing them to vote in the 2028 presidential election.
A majority of Americans oppose the resettlement of more than 50,000 Afghans in the United States, according to a survey by Rasmussen Reports. The August 18-19 survey included 1,000 likely voters.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
So far, GOP legislators have done little or nothing to oppose Biden’s Afghan migration.
