Exclusive — TX AG Ken Paxton on Afghan Refugees: ‘We Don’t Know Whether They’re Vetted’ or ‘Terrorists’
Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) warned that Texas is unable to verify what screening measures, if any, were applied to Afghan migrants and refugees seeking resettlement in America.
The federal government has not shared its vetting procedures with Texas, Paxton said on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“We don’t have any confidence in the Biden administration [to vet Afghan migrants],” Paxton remarked. “When you look at the border and how they’re just inviting people to come across … obviously the cartels are involved in every transaction, because you have to pay them to get across the border.”
The Biden administration’s policies toward border security enrich transnational criminal cartels by facilitating the trafficking of drugs, people, and weapons into the U.S., Paxton stated.
“We’ve got the Biden administration helping the cartels, helping them import drugs, helping them import COVID into our state, helping them import sex trafficking and other human trafficking,” he said, “and yet here we are with the Afghan refugees.”
He went on, “We don’t know anything about them. It’s very likely the federal government won’t tell us anything about them, We won’t know whether they’re vetted, whether they’re terrorists. They’ll drop them in places we won’t even know.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks at a news conference on the U.S. Southern Border and President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, in the Hart Senate Office Building on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Paxton added, “I don’t know that we’ll vet [Afghan refugees] at all. I think it’ll just be whatever the federal government says they’ve done. We won’t really know if it’s true. We won’t even know if they’ve done anything, and so, they’ll be dropped wherever the federal government wants to drop them, and they’ll disappear into our society. We’ll never know, until something bad happens, if we have a terrorist.”
Paxton warned that digital censorship imposed by Google will amplify and fuse with big government, if unchecked by appropriate regulation.
“We’re going to proceed forward [with Texas’s antitrust lawsuit against Google],” Paxton stated, “and try to demonstrate to the court and to the American people that these Big Tech companies that have such a monopoly on so many different things need to be regulated.”
He concluded, “[We] need to have some type of check on their ability to control everything that we’re doing, and if we don’t get a handle on it, they will align with big government, and we will be in a position where free speech may be a real problem, and other things that we take for granted now will be controlled by them and the federal government.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Complete the wall...around Biden
Poll: Majority of U.S. Voters Believe Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Has Opened America Up for a ‘9/11 Style Terror Attack’
A majority of likely U.S. general election voters think President Joe Biden’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has made America more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, according to a Trafalgar survey released on Tuesday.
“Do you believe the Biden Administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has made it more or less likely that America will see another 9/11 style terror attack?” the survey asked.
Out of those polled, 56.8 percent believe a 9/11 style terror attack is “more likely” and 19.5 percent believe it is “less likely.” Around 23 percent say Biden’s handling of the withdrawal will have no effect on future attacks.
When broken down by political affiliation, a slightly greater percentage of Democrats think a terror attack is more likely (35 percent) than not likely (34.7 percent), and 30.3 percent say it makes no difference.
Members of the Taliban Badri 313 military unit arrive at the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 31, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
Republicans and unaffiliated voters, however, overwhelmingly think America is more vulnerable following the withdrawal, in which 13 U.S. servicemembers were killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber. Nearly 84 percent of Republicans and 53.4 percent of unaffiliated voters think Biden’s withdrawal has put the United States in harm’s way.
Many figures in GOP circles have echoed the same sentiment before and after the official withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on August 31. In an August interview with Breitbart News, former Senior Director of Strategic Communications for the National Security Council Monica Crowley said the Biden Administration’s policies towards acceptance of Afghan migrants and refugees may invite a terrorist attack. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and 2022 Ohio U.S. Senate candidate also expressed concern over Biden’s lax foreign policy.
“Afghanistan by itself is a disaster, but you combine it with what’s going on at our southern border, you create an opportunity for all of these terrorists to flow across our country completely unchecked,” Vance said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday in September.
J. D. Vance speaks with attendees at the 2021 Southwest Regional Conference hosted by Turning Point USA at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
The survey, which was conducted between September 3-5, 2021 with 1079 respondents, and a 2.98 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level, also asked participants how confident they are in the Biden Administration’s ability to successfully lead America overall considering his handling of the Afghanistan crisis.
More overall voters, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters say they are “not confident” (55.6 percent, 83 percent, and 53.9 percent) compared to “confident” (43.8 percent, 16.5 percent, and 45.5 percent).
Democrats are the only voters to express more confidence in Biden than doubt, with 66.4 percent confident. However, nearly a third of Democrats — 32.7 percent — say they are not confident in Biden’s ability to lead following the withdrawal.
Suicide by 'Replacement Migration'
Can any nation survive when its character has been transformed?
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is also worsening our already dangerous immigration crisis. Tens of thousands Afghans are being brought into the country, with little serious vetting to discriminate between those who served loyally with our troops and intelligence agencies; and those who just want a better life or have more sinister motives. This new influx comes on top of the one million migrants who have crossed our southern border just since Biden’s inauguration. All these new migrants are being dispersed throughout the country at taxpayer expense.
This process of transforming American identity and its defining political principles and virtues has been going on since the feckless 1965 immigration bill, which provided entrance to family members of immigrants, multiplying their numbers by as much as a factor of 8. The political and economic motives for this weakening of our border have likewise long been obvious––voters for progressives, cheap labor for free marketeers.
But another dubious idea has developed to justify our and Europe’s porous borders: Replacement Migrations. Pursuing this short-sighted idea will accelerate the dilution of national identity, an outcome progressives fervently desire as a mechanism for transforming our Constitutional order of divided government, federalism, and unalienable rights into technocratic rule by a “managerial elite.” Those technocrats’ utopian ideals like “equity” an “social justice” will further compromise the rights and freedoms of others.
The pretextual rationale for Replacement Migration is pragmatic: Europe and, in recent years, the U.S. are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to maintain populations through internal growth. The U.S. rate, for example, has declined to 1.64 child per woman from the 2.1 child needed to maintain the population. Combined with medical treatments that extend longevity, this decline in reproduction means fewer younger workers contributing payroll taxes to support greater numbers of those receiving public subsidies. These trends have put programs like Medicare and Social Security on track to run out of money. The UN’s solution is Replacement Migration––importing more-fecund young immigrants, legal or otherwise, to make up the worker deficit.
Hence the erosion of our immigration laws, despite the dangers of lax immigration policies that take in peoples from less advanced regions with cultural, social, and religious customs hostile to the host countries’. In Europe, for example, generous welfare subsidies to migrants combined with restrictions on employment have created a sullen generation of Muslim immigrants exploited by jihadist recruiters working out of some of the many mosques that have arisen across Europe. In addition to the terrorist attacks that follow, migrant participation in crime, especially rape, is much greater than their share of the total population.
Moreover, in many countries, significant numbers of Muslim immigrants are segregated into “no go” neighborhoods or towns where they indulge their cultural and religious practices, such as honor-killing and polygamy, inimical to the liberal democratic principles of their host governments. These developments are the wages of failing to demand assimilation to the host country and its social and political culture.
This tendency towards Balkanization by unfettered immigration was remarked on in 1968 by British PM Enoch Powell in his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech decrying England’s feckless immigration policies and failure to require assimilation: “Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. . . Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest.”
These dysfunctions, moreover, are abetted by progressive elites of the host countries, including the U.S., who have endorsed the illiberal assumptions of multiculturalism and grievance politics, particularly the right of non-Western peoples to some sort of reparations for the West’s alleged imperial and colonial sins. A fashionable guilt has developed among progressive cognitive elites that inhibits requiring immigrants, particularly “people of color,” to assimilate to the host country. Such a demand is deemed “racist” and “xenophobic.”
This guilty deference communicates national weakness and a civilizational failure of nerve, a trend that also was noticed years ago in French travel-writer Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which is featured in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s index librorum prohibitorum. The story follows a spontaneous mass migration of millions of Third World poor to the south of France, whence they spread across Europe and eventually occupy it. When the French consul in India hears a Catholic bishop say he approves of the migration and is proud to be “bearing witness” to it, the consul retorts, “Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civilization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you’ve become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren’t any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you’ve given in.”
So too today, when the decades-long denigration of our national identity has over the last several years been intensified by specious ideas like “Critical Race Theory” and the “1619 Project.” Destroying our history is a means to discredit it and its political principles, clearing the space for their replacement by more collectivist and technocratic ones. Third World immigrants are weapons in this war against our heritage, and so progressives cities create suicidal policies like “sanctuary cities” where federal immigration law is nullified, and criminal illegal aliens prey on their fellow migrants and American citizens alike.
Whether by design or not, Replacement Migration is a way to transform the character of a nation. The globalist, supranational cognitive elite has for a century been denigrating national identity in favor of an imagined “global community” comprising “citizens of the world,” something that exists only for those same elites whose jobs regularly take them abroad where they socialize with other elites. For the rest of the world, identity is created by a distinct national identity comprising language, customs, mores, and traditions different from those of other nations.
But national identity based on a political system that guarantees citizen participation and unalienable individual rights for all is not the same thing as the “blood and soil” diseased nationalism of Nazi Germany. Without the affection of people for their country and their shared identity, a nation becomes defined by mere geographic proximity and shared consumption of products and popular culture. As historian Michael Burleigh rhetorically asks,
Can any nation survive without a consensus on values that transcend special interests, and which are non-negotiable in the sense of “Here we stand”? Can a nation state survive that is only a legal and political shell, or a “market state” for discrete ethnic or religious communities that share little by way of common values other than use of the same currency? Can a society survive that is not the object of commitments to its core values or a focus for the fundamental identity of all its members?
In a country like ours where multicultural identity politics divides citizens into victims and oppressors based on accidents of superficial appearance, the answer is no. “It is inhuman,” French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes, “to define man by blood and soil but no less inhuman to leave him stumbling through life with the terrestrial foundations of his existence taken out from under him.” And it is dangerous when the world is full of aggressors who have no doubt about the worth of their own national identities.
Apart from its doubtful efficacy, Replacement Migration without strict protocols for vetting immigrants and encouraging them to assimilate to our political principles further erodes the foundations of our political order in unalienable rights that transcend exclusive ethnic identities. And that ultimately leads to national suicide.
The Roots of America’s Defeat
It was laid in the days, weeks and months that followed 9/11.
Even before the suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport on Thursday evening, the US media was acting with rare unanimity. For the first time in memory, US media organs across the ideological and political spectrum have been united in the view that US President Joe Biden fomented a strategic disaster for the US and its allies with his incompetent leadership of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some compare it to the 1961 Bay of Pigs; others to Saigon in 1975; others to the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. Whatever the analogy, the bottom line is the same: Biden's surrender to the Taliban has already entered the pantheon of American post-war defeats.
Biden is personally responsible for the humanitarian and strategic disaster unfolding before our eyes. He is the only American leader in history who has willfully abandoned Americans and American allies to their fate behind enemy lines. But while Biden is solely responsible for the decision to leave Afghanistan in the manner it is, it isn't Biden's fault that after 20 years of war, the Taliban was still around, stronger than it was on Sept. 11, 2001, and fully capable of seizing control of the country. The foundations of that failure were laid in the days, weeks and months that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, then-President George W. Bush and his national security team put together the guiding assumptions for what came to be known as the global war on terror. In the years since then, some of the assumptions were updated, adapted or replaced as conditions on the ground evolved. But three of the assumptions that stood at the foundation of America's military, intelligence and diplomatic planning and operations since then were not revisited, save for the final two years of the Trump administration. All three contributed significantly to America's defeat in Afghanistan and its failure to win the war against global terror as a whole. The first assumption related to Pakistan, the second to Iran, and the third to Israel.
By rights, Pakistan should have been the first domino to fall after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Taliban were the brainchild of Pakistan's jihad-addled ISI intelligence agency. Al-Qaida operatives also received ISI support. But aside from a few threats and temporary sanctions around the time of the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the US took no significant actions against Pakistan. The reason for America's inaction is easy to understand.
In 1998 Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. By Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan fielded a significant nuclear arsenal. Following the attacks, Pakistan made clear its view of nuclear war, and the connection between its position and its sponsorship of terror.
In October and December 2001, Kashmiri terrorists sponsored by Pakistan attacked the Jammu and Kashmir parliament and the Indian parliament. When India accused Pakistan of responsibility and threatened reprisals, then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf placed the Pakistani military on alert. India began deploying troops to the border and Pakistan followed suit.
Rather than side with India, the US pressured Delhi to stand down, which it did in April 2002. In June 2002, Pakistani-backed terrorists carried out suicide bombings against the wives and children of Indian soldiers. The countdown to war began again. In June 2002, again bowing to US pressure, India pledged it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the conflict. Musharraf refused to follow suit.
Rather than rally behind India, the Bush administration wrested an empty promise from Musharraf that he would stop sponsoring terrorism and then pressured India to stand down again.
The US message was clear. By credibly threatening to use its nuclear weapons, Pakistan deterred the Americans. Less than six months later, North Korea expelled UN inspectors from its nuclear reactor at Yangbyon and cancelled its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran escalated its covert nuclear activities at Isfahan and Natanz.
The US's decision to dodge a confrontation with Pakistan following the Sept. 11 attacks empowered the ISI to rebuild the Taliban and al-Qaida after the US decimated both in its initial offensive. Taliban leaders decamped to Pakistan where they rebuilt their forces and waged a war of attrition against US, NATO forces and the Afghan army and government they built. Osama bin Laden was living in what amounted to a Pakistani military base when he was killed by US commandos. That war ended with Biden's surrender and the Taliban's recapture of Kabul this month.
This brings us to Iran. In their post-Sept. 11 deliberations, Bush and his advisors decided not to confront Iran, but instead seek to reach an accommodation with the mullahcracy. This wasn't a new policy. Since the Reagan administration, the dominant view in Washington has been that it is possible to reach an accord with the Iranian regime that would restore the strategic alliance Washington and Tehran shared before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Bush and his advisors were not moved to reassess that view when they learned that Iran provided material support to the September 11 hijackers. They didn't reconsider their assumption after al Qaeda's leadership decamped to Tehran when the Taliban were routed in Afghanistan. They didn't reconsider it when Iran served as the headquarters and the arms depot for al-Qaida in Iraq or the Shiite militias in their war against US and coalition forces in Iraq.
Barack Obama embraced and escalated Bush's assumption on Iran. Instead of confronting Tehran, he tried to realign the US Middle East alliance system towards Iran and away from America's Arab allies and Israel. He effectively handed Iran control over Iraq when he withdrew US forces. He paved Iran's path to a nuclear arsenal with the 2015 nuclear deal.
After a prolonged fight with the Washington establishment and its representatives in his cabinet who embraced Bush's assumptions, in his last two years in office, Donald Trump partially abandoned the strategic assumption that Iran could and should be appeased. Biden for his part, is committed to reinstating and escalating Obama's policies towards Iran.
As for Israel, in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, then secretary of state Colin Powell convinced Bush to adopt two related assumptions on Israel. First, he determined that terror against Israel was different – and more acceptable – than terror against everyone else. And second, Bush determined that the war against terror would be directed at terror groups but not at governments that sponsor terrorism, (except Iraq). As former Bush administration official David Wurmser, who was involved in the post-Sept. 11 deliberations recalled recently, Powell argued that terror threatens the Arabs no less than it threatens America. This being the case, the trick to winning them over to the US side was to give them a payoff that would make it worth their while.
Israel was the payoff. The US would be able to bring Syria on board by getting Israel to give the Golan Heights to the Assad regime. Washington would bring in the Saudis and the rest of the Sunnis by forcing Israel to give Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem to the PLO.
Ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to unravel Washington's guiding assumption about Iran. He told Bush and his advisors that Iraq hadn't posed a strategic threat to Israel or anyone else in the region since the 1991 Gulf War. If the US wanted to defeat global terror, Sharon explained, the US should act against Iran. The administration ignored him.
As for the administration's assumptions about Israel, a week after the attacks, Bush deliberately left the terror against Israel out of the terror that the US would fight in the war against terror when he told the joint houses of Congress that the war would be directed against terror groups "with global reach."
Recognizing where the Americans were headed, in October 2001, Sharon gave what became known as his "Czechoslovakia speech."
Following a deadly terror attack in Gaza, Sharon said, "I call on the Western democracies, and primarily the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for 'a convenient temporary solution.'
"Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense – this is unacceptable to us. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism. There is no 'good terrorism' and 'bad terrorism,' as there is no 'good murder' and 'bad murder.'"
The administration's response to Sharon's statement was swift and furious. Sharon was harshly rebuked by Powell and the White House and he beat a swift retreat.
A month later, Powell became the first senior US official to officially endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Sharon's failure to convince the Americans to rethink their false assumptions owed to his incomprehension, and fear of Washington. Benjamin Netanyahu, in contrast had an intimate familiarity with the ways of Washington. As a result, his efforts to convince the Americans to reconsider their assumptions about Iran and Israel met with significant success. Netanyahu's first success in relation to Iran came through the Arabs.
Netanyahu recognized that the Arab Gulf states were as threatened by Iran – and by Obama's efforts to appease Iran – as Israel was. So he reached out to them. Convinced by Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia led the Arab Gulf states and Egypt in embracing Israel as their ally in their existential struggle against Iran. Confronting Iran, the Saudis explained, was far more important to the Arabs than helping the Palestinians.
Israeli-Arab unity on Iran stymied Obama's efforts to win Congressional approval for his nuclear deal. It also stood at the foundation of Trumps' decision to abandon Obama's deal.
Netanyahu used his operational alliance with the Arabs as well in his effort to undo the US's false assumptions about Israel, particularly in regard to the Palestinians. He also used public diplomacy geared towards influencing Israel's Congressional supporters and public opinion. Netanyahu's efforts derailed Obama's plan to dictate the terms of a "peace" settlement to Israel. Under Trump, Netanyahu's efforts influenced Trump's decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and convinced Trump to support Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria.
Distressingly, Netanyahu's successes are being swiftly undone by the Biden administration and the Bennett-Lapid government.
There is a growing sense that Biden's catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan is setting the world back 20 years. But the truth is even more dire. In 2001, the US was far more powerful relative to its enemies than it is today. And as has been the case for the past 20 years, the situation will only start moving in the right direction if and when America finally abandons the false assumptions it adopted 20 years ago.
A Mosque Refugee Stabbed 7 People. New Zealand is Banning Scissors
“Allah says you will be punished.”
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
After an ISIS terrorist went on a stabbing spree in a New Zealand shopping mall, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the attack had nothing to do with Islam.
And some supermarkets have taken knives off their shelves.
The Jihad may have nothing to do with Islam, but it has a great deal to do with sharp objects.
After a mosque shooting a few years ago, Ardern’s leftist government banned most guns. Now some supermarkets and stores are banning knives and even scissors because the best way to stop Islamic terrorism is to make sure that no one is able to cut open an envelope.
But it’s easier to ban scissors than to address the real problem.
“What happened today was despicable. It was hateful, it was wrong. It was carried out by an individual, not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity, but an individual person,” Ardern insisted.
Jacinda Ardern was under the impression that the ‘I’ in ISIS stands for ‘Individual’, not ‘Islamic’.
The individual of no particular faith, Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, had been living in a mosque before heading to an Auckland shopping mall, shouting, “Allahu Akbar”, and stabbing seven people. One of those people is a 77-year-old man. Another is a 29-year-old woman.
Mohamed, a Sri Lankan student named after the prophet of Islam, who received refugee status in New Zealand, spent much of his time in the country plotting to kill Kiwis for Allah.
At his trial, he had warned, “You guys put me in prison cause I'm a Muslim and you don't like my religion, that makes you an enemy. Allah says you will be punished."
Since Mohamed’s burning desire to kill non-Muslims had nothing to do with Islam, he was sent to live in the El-Bilal mosque to cure him of his Jihadist ways. Instead, Mohamed took a train from the mosque to the supermarket and began trying to kill as many non-Muslims as he could.
The refugee had publicly supported ISIS since at least 2016. Or three years after he received refugee status. He did everything but take out an ad in the paper promising to kill the locals.
Five years ago, he told a fellow mosque worshiper that he would randomly stab a bunch of people in New Zealand. During his first arrest, the police found weapons and ISIS materials, but he got off with probation and under New Zealand's liberal pro-crime laws, a name suppression order was issued so no one could possibly know that he had been charged with anything.
At his trial, Mohammed had claimed that he was interested in the Islamic State established by Mohammed, his namesake, the founder of Islam, and that he was collecting ISIS hymns for religious reasons.
Including one which declared, "We will drink from the blood of the unbelievers (non-Muslims)."
The authorities once again tried to deport Mohamed, who insisted that he was a refugee who couldn't be deported because the Sri Lankans might be mean to him. "I'm very afraid of returning to Sri Lanka because I'm afraid of authorities there," Mohamed had whined.
At this point it should have been very obvious that the authorities in Sri Lanka, assuming that they harbored any ill will for Mohamed, would have had very good reason to do so.
Not only was Mohamed not deported, at least until police bullets deported him from the precincts of the LynnMall and to whichever suburb of hell can best accommodate him, but as a refugee, his name couldn’t be released even after he had gone on a stabbing spree for Allah.
The lives of ISIS refugees count for much more than the locals who get stabbed by them.
Western elites cheered when Ardern responded to a mosque shooting by banning guns. Now she can try to ban knives and scissors. Though Mohamed proved that wouldn’t work.
The day after Mohamed was released after his previous arrest, he went out and bought a hunting knife. The police raided his place and found an ISIS instructional video about how to kill non-Muslims by cutting their throats.
Once again he was released.
After years of trying and failing to deport Mohamed, he finally carried out the Jihadist attack that he had been loudly broadcasting that he would commit for 5 years.
The mall stabbing spree was the least surprising and most telegraphed terror attack ever.
After the previous mosque shooting, Ardern had issued the Christchurch Call to Action which demanded massive internet censorship and the suppression of defined extremists.
The Christchurch Call to Action didn’t stay in New Zealand. A variety of governments adopted it.
While the Trump administration rejected its dangerous and unconstitutional measures, the Biden administration threw the Bill of Rights out the window and climbed on board. As I warned earlier this year, Big Tech had turned the Christchurch Call into a No Fly List for the internet.
Ardern’s censorship call was being used to censor Americans and millions around the world.
After Mohamed’s stabbing spree, will there be an Auckland Call to Action? Or will Jacinda Ardern build her plaster pedestal a little higher by demanding a scissors ban?
While Ardern was taking her victory lap over her mosque shooting response, her system failed to stop Mohamed. No matter how much Mohamed indulged in terror plots and praise for ISIS, despite the fact that he was a refugee who clearly hated his new country, no one could stop him.
Or rather they chose not to.
While Ardern’s censorship net spread around the world, New Zealand’s broken system was censoring the identity of a career Jihadist plotter so that neighbors of the El-Bilal mosque in Glen Eden couldn’t even know that they were at risk or have any idea whom to watch out for.
An Auckland Call to Action ought to begin with the right of governments to deport Jihadists no matter how much they whine about political and religious persecution in their own homelands.
Instead of censoring a terror plotter’s name, it ought to broadcast it around the world.
And it ought to toss out once and for all the familiar excuses (Mohamed’s family is predictably blaming mental illness) and treat Jihadist beliefs seriously rather than as a reaction to a failure to integrate, financial problems, mental instability, marijuana use, or any other pretexts.
Mohamed believed in killing non-Muslims. He retained that belief for 5 years after repeated police investigations, arrests, and raids, until he finally died trying to kill non-Muslims for Allah.
Instead of repeating the same old lies, e.g. “an individual, not a faith, not a culture”, we ought to recognize that Mohamed, like his Taliban counterparts, was a serious and committed member of a religious community who was willing to dedicate his life to the triumph of his beliefs.
Westerners who underestimated the Taliban fail to take Jihadis like Mohamed seriously for the same reason. They’re not pity cases, they’re sworn enemies. When we refuse to understand that, we end up watching the fall of Kabul or mass stabbings in a local mall on television.
Until the day comes when we’re not watching it on television, but catching the real thing live.
New Zealand and the rest of the world deserve an Auckland Call to Action that sweeps away Ardern’s nonsensical myths, and deals with the hard reality of the Jihad against civilization
Joe Biden’s Victory Lap Around Afghan Defeat
Calling the evacuation mission an ‘extraordinary success’ is worse than false.
Reprinted from SpectatorWorld.com.
President Biden walked to the White House podium on Tuesday and proclaimed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan an ‘extraordinary success’. He relied on the unanimous advice of military leaders and strategic advisers for these wise decisions. If there were any failures, they were due to Donald Trump. Never in history, he said, had there been such a successful airlift. Of the Americans who wanted to leave, we got out an amazing 90 percent. Surely that’s a success all around, despite the collapse of the Afghan army, which nobody expected. Of course, as a far-sighted leader, Biden said he had ordered plans for that, too. Best of all, he said, we accomplished our goal in Afghanistan, which was to prevent al-Qaeda from setting up a base there to strike the US or its allies. After that resounding success, we no longer needed to keep troops in the country to protect America. If any terrorists reassemble, we have great ‘over-the-horizon’ capabilities to discover them and take them out.
Every one of those claims is false.
Calling the evacuation mission an ‘extraordinary success’ is worse than false. It is shameful. Biden is taking credit for a humiliating defeat that leaves thousands of innocents behind. He should be shouldering the blame, as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower did when he drafted a statement to be read if the D-Day landings failed. Fortunately, Ike never had to read that statement. Joe Biden took the opposite approach. When the evacuation mission in Afghanistan ended in chaos, he simply decided to read the ‘victory statement’. Americans are likely to see it for what it is.
It is certainly true that the US military conducted an amazing airlift in the frenzied final days, carrying vast numbers of Americans and our allies to safety. That deserves enormous praises, both for the soldiers who planned it and those carried it out. The 13 who died gave their last full measure of devotion to our country.
But getting a lot of Americans out of Afghanistan is far less that Joe Biden promised, or Americans expected. He repeatedly said that he would get all of them out. He failed, but decided to leave anyway. Those left behind are in imminent danger of being killed or taken hostage. Taliban fighters are going door-to-door to find them. Some in danger are Americans, some are Green Card holders, some hold special visas, and some are families of people who helped us, whom we refused to evacuate. Husbands, brothers, and fathers stayed behind rather than abandon their families. It is reprehensible for an American president to look at this humanitarian catastrophe, caused by his decisions, and take a victory lap.
Biden is partly right to blame the Trump administration for its agreement to leave Afghanistan by May. That, too, was a strategic error. But Biden’s blame-shifting misses several key points, aside from the time-limit we always set for blaming previous presidents. Biden owns this one. One problem is that Trump at least claims his exit strategy was ‘conditions based’. That is, we wouldn’t leave until we had gotten all our people out. Biden extended Trump’s exit date from May, before heavy fighting began, until September 11. Then some staffer must have told Biden that his new date meant the Taliban would be dancing on the grave of the World Trade Center attack on its 20th anniversary. ‘Bad optics’, as they say. So Biden moved the date to August 31. His choice, and the Taliban accepted it.
But both the August and September dates have the same fundamental flaw. They occur in the middle of the country’s fighting season, when all the terrorist warriors are out in force. The best time to execute a large scale withdrawal is winter, when Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders have pulled back to Pakistan. Yet no US military leader or civilian adviser seemed to object to Biden’s idea. They were unanimous in supporting it, as he has said time again and again amid the unfolding disaster.
There were two other major defects in Biden’s withdrawal plan. One is that the US military was given two huge, urgent tasks without the time or resources to accomplish them. They had to close down all our military, diplomatic, and intelligence facilities in a few weeks, and they had to evacuate everybody from them. Since Biden refused to send in reinforcements or delay the final date, that was a mission impossible.
The second, closely-related defect was the unilateral decision to shutter Bagram, America’s biggest military facility and air base. Biden’s military advisers agreed with his decision, apparently, because they didn’t have enough troops to defend both Bagram and the US Embassy in Kabul. That constraint was Biden’s decision, and it had profound consequences at Bagram.
Abandoning that base had three catastrophic effects. First, it deprived the US of a major location for evacuation. Second, it effectively released the worst captured terrorists in the country, who were being held at a prison next to the base. When the US left, the Taliban freed them immediately. Among those freed were top al-Qaeda commanders. That’s not surprising since the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Haqqani Network are three terrorist organizations joined at the hip. Third, abandoning Bagram in the middle of the night, without coordination with friendly Afghans, clearly told those allies that the US was abandoning them almost immediately. That signal led to their swift collapse, the very one Biden administration said was so unexpected. (That, too, is an exaggeration since the intelligence community has leaked self-serving statements that it did expect a quick collapse).
Biden’s victory speech continued a theme that both he and Donald Trump adopted, with somewhat different emphases. The US had been fighting there for 20 years and couldn’t continue this long and costly battle. The problem is that they were comparing the current, sharply-diminished US presence in Afghanistan with the far-larger war we fought for the first 10 years. Our current deployment was under 3,000, devoted most to intelligence gathering, special operations, and air support for the Afghan army. No American soldiers had been killed in the past 20 months before the suicide bombing at the Kabul Airport last week. The 13 US soldiers killed there were more than had been killed in any of the past four years. So, the real issue, first for Trump and then for Biden, was whether to keep that relatively small force in Afghanistan as vital assistance for the government and as a listening post for terrorist operations that might strike the US and its allies. We know the withdrawal collapsed the friendly government. It is a fantasy to say that shutting down the listening posts won’t seriously degrade our intelligence and ability to identify terrorist operations in real time.
Finally, while President Biden promised to get out every American who wants to exit, he didn’t say how he would accomplish that. He even mentioned a United Nations statement that urges the Taliban to respect human rights. Yeah, that should work just fine. They have no intention of respecting women’s rights or those of Afghans who worked with the US. Expect to see harrowing stories about them over the next weeks. Compounding that travesty, the US now has to worry about hostages. Every American left in Afghanistan is at risk from a Taliban army that has held one former US soldier for over a year. They have every incentive to grab more. And if they don’t do it, Isis-K and others will.
There was precious little truth in Biden’s victory speech and none in calling the withdrawal a success. There is no truth, either, in saying this war is over and won. The enemy gets a say in that. What they are saying is, ‘We now control the country, and some of us are planning to strike abroad. We still hold some of your people, and we now have billions of dollars of your equipment.’ These are terrorists who will do everything they can to harm America, Americans, and our friends abroad. At home, we will have to ask the hard question: is the best we could do?
Charles Lipson is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago and a contributor to The Spectator.
India: Many ‘Moderate’ Muslims Increasingly Open About Their Support For the Taliban
“Allah has given us this huge victory. . ."
Despite their negative image in popular news platforms, the Taliban is winning support from some Muslims of India. Some are wishing for the Taliban to knock on India’s doors and establish their Islamic caliphate in India as well.
The Indian Muslims who have openly declared their support for the Taliban are not a poor, uneducated bunch of hoodlums who can be dismissed as exceptional cases. Several Indian politicians, eminent citizens, government officials and teachers from the community have been found to be supporting the Taliban, with even more fervor recently than they had shown before, as they celebrate the group’s recent victory. Some social media accounts belonging to reputedly moderate Indian Muslims couldn’t contain their exhilaration following the return of Islamic rule in India’s northwestern neighborhood.
In a first, the Secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), Maulana Umrain Mahfuz Rahmani, took the nation by surprise by taking to his official Twitter account to shower praises on the terror outfit for their “extraordinary success” in Afghanistan. In a tweet written in Urdu, he also claimed that this victory had come with the help of Allah, and that such powerful decisions are “made in Heaven and not on Earth.”
Just days after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan; an Indian MP, Shafiqur Rahman Barq, tried to legitimize the jihadist outfit by likening them to the Indian freedom fighters who fought the British. “When India was under British rule, our country fought for freedom. Now the Taliban wants to free their country & run it,” asserted the people’s representative from a local leftist political party in India. He further justified the actions of the Taliban by claiming that the “Taliban is a force that did not allow even strong countries like Russia and America to settle in their country.”
A Mufti of Darul-Uloom Deoband, Maulana Mufti Arshad Farooqi, who is also the chairman of Online Fatwa Department, was seen glorifying the Taliban in a now-viral video. He hailed the Taliban for ousting the “superpower” from Afghanistan and forcing Afghan forces to concede. The Maulana of Deoband also stated that there is something special about the Taliban. He may feel elated; after all, it is from this Deobandi movement that the Taliban originally drew inspiration.
It appears as if the Taliban’s defeat of the Afghan government has sparked new hope among Islamic clerics across India. Tamil Nadu-based Maulana Shamsudeen Qasimi congratulated the outfit for their exemplary feat and asserted, “Allah has given us this huge victory to us through the victory of Taliban. The Muslim world should celebrate this victory.” He also encouraged the Muslim brethren not to be afraid to show support to the Taliban just because some “media prostitutes” have falsely portrayed them as terrorists.
An Islamic organization, the Popular Front of India (PFI), has hailed the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, expressed confidence in their “administration,” and demanded that the Indian government initiate diplomatic ties with the jihadis. Parroting the words of Maulana Shamsudeen Qasimi, the PFI chief claims that there is a conspiracy involved in how the media depicts the Afghan jihad terror outfit.
In addition to these eminent Muslim Indians and Islamic organizations that vocally endorsed the Taliban, pro-Taliban voices have surfaced from the state of Assam as well. On August 22, the state police detained fourteen civilians who were mostly in their 20s for making social media posts allegedly backing the Taliban. The accused include a medical student from Tezpur Medical College, Islamic clerics, teachers, and reporters associated with reputed media groups, among others. Shockingly, a police constable, Md Fazlul Karim Qashimi, was also among these fourteen. He also served as a leader in the local Islamic political party, All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). All of them will be charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and anti-terror laws. Various other sections of the Indian penal code will also be applied.
Some social media accounts with massive numbers of followers have also been sympathetic towards the Taliban and pounced on non-Muslims for “vilifying” the jihad group. One Instagram handle, muslim_students_of_delhi, with thousands of followers, published a string of provocative stories inciting his followers to defend the Taliban, wishing more power for the Taliban, and calling for the implementation of the Sharia across geographical boundaries, bringing about the humiliation of the non-believers. The account has since been taken down.
A Member of India’s Parliament (MP), Rakesh Sinha has expressed his concern on the matter, stating, “There is a big chunk in India which is endorsing the activities of the militant group, whether silently or vocally.”
Afghanistan Comes to America
What Biden's Benghazi means for us at home.
Conventional wisdom—correct this time—asserts that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan makes the world a more dangerous place. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Islamic triumphalists everywhere are emboldened. Fuses burning over Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine and other hot spots grow shorter.
Less recognized is how our self-inflicted Afghanistan catastrophe may create or increase threats at home. Consider four, three military, one political:
*Suppose you are a general or admiral in the U.S. armed forces. You’ve just been required by your constitutionally superior civilian leaders to head the biggest American military debacle since the fall of South Vietnam. You’ve rescued more than 120,000 but abandoned somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 more Afghan partners and their family members.
You know that as U.S. ground forces withdrew, the South Vietnamese army fought on, with massive U.S. air support defeating the North’s 1972 Easter invasion. Then a Democratic-controlled Congress cut off funds, fuel, ammunition and air support. You also recall the United States, during the Carter administration, restrained the Iranian military to ease out the Shah. That helped ease in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
And now, Kabul. If you’re still in uniform the next time civilians not just override your best advice, as is their constitutional prerogative, but do so in capricious arrogance, then attempt to deflect blame onto you, how likely will you be to snap to and salute? When President Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Jr. for insubordination over the latter’s conduct of the Korean War, MacArthur choose theatrically to “just fade away.” In a more ambiguous situation, fraught with national danger, will you?
*Suppose you’re not a flag officer but rather a colonel, lieutenant colonel or major. Imagine you implemented the orders to abandon Bagram air base at night and without notice to our Afghan allies, as well as to cut off air support for Kabul’s forces and even halt maintenance contracts for its planes and helicopters.
Further, assume you know about private efforts, like the Commercial Task Force of veterans, ex-diplomats and others that rescued a reported 5,000 or more Afghans from Taliban control. Private Americans, on short notice and from scratch, began doing what civilian leaders—with personnel, months of time and billions of dollars to prepare—proved either unserious or incompetent about doing.
How much will recent events cause you to reinterpret your oath to defend America and the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic because now you see domestic threats in high places?
*Finally, on the military side, suppose you are a member of the U.S. all-volunteer armed forces at any level, from private up. You served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq, perhaps on multiple tours. You supported those in combat, or experienced it yourself, saw buddies wounded—sometimes grievously—or killed, leaving families bereft at home.
From experience you know that—despite the size of the armed forces budget—the military is stretched thin. It’s unable to fight and win the two potential, simultaneous medium-sized or larger conflicts planners worried about not long ago.
In the next crisis, and there will be one, will you obey what sound like suicidal orders to charge or to cut-and-run? Will “thank you for your service” in a humiliating effort offset contempt for national leadership?
*Politically, President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan mismanagement might have opened the door to former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The reactionary left base of the Democratic Party, cosmetically labeled “progressive,” applauds Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s fantastical budget concoctions; approves the unprecedented influx of illegal migrants along the southern U.S. border; and can’t be bothered by the anti-American (and, not coincidentally, antisemitic) incitement of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Squad-mates Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayana Pressley, et. al. This brightened Republican prospects for the 2022 congressional elections.
But the shame of Afghanistan is a double-edged political sword for Trump and pro-Trump Republicans. Although the previous administration’s accomplishments included historically low unemployment, “Operation Warp-Speed” development of anti-Covid-19 vaccines and the remarkable “Abraham accords” Arab-Israeli peace agreements, it began the ill-considered withdrawal negotiations with the Taliban.
Trump now indicts Biden for botching what he started. But talking with the Taliban over the heads of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and continuing to do so though the jihadis kept up terror attacks on Afghan civilians might tarnish Trump—and potential GOP presidential candidates like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—as well as Biden.
Weakened American deterrence and further corroded U.S politics mean a more fragile world indeed.
Eric Rozenman is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and author of the forthcoming book From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling.
Top Biden Officials Backed the 2014 Bergdahl Deal. Now, the Terrorists Released Are Taking the Reins in Afghanistan.
Blinken and Psaki said prisoners posed no threat
When President Barack Obama struck a deal with the Taliban in 2014 to free several high-ranking terrorists being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, his defenders argued their release would do little to harm U.S. national security. Now, four of those terrorists are serving in senior roles in Afghanistan's newly formed Taliban government.
The Obama-era deal's prominent defenders include officials now serving in senior posts in the Biden administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House press secretary Jen Psaki. They claimed there was no indication these terrorists, known as the Taliban Five, would return to the battlefield, let alone rise to senior leadership positions in the Taliban government following the United States' much-criticized evacuation from Afghanistan. The prisoners were swapped for Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was later charged with desertion.
Blinken, who was then serving as deputy national security adviser, told NBC that "any threat they would pose to the United States [and] to Americans has been sufficiently mitigated." Blinken also claimed the terrorists would be "very carefully monitored" by Qatar, which helped facilitate the trade and provided safe haven to the five detainees after their release. "There will be restrictions on their travel, on their activities," Blinken said.
Jen Psaki, who served as the State Department spokeswoman at the time of the deal, hailed it as a signature achievement by the Obama administration. "Was it worth it? Absolutely," Psaki said in 2015.
Biden himself, who was vice president at the time, also celebrated Berghdahl's release on Twitter.
The ascension of these former prisoners is a sign the Taliban has no interest in moderating its behavior since the United States fled Afghanistan and allowed it to reclaim control of the war-torn country. With Americans and vulnerable Afghans still stranded in the country, these prisoners-turned-leaders could play a central part in the Taliban's efforts to arrest, detain, and kill those they accuse of aiding America during its 20-year presence in Afghanistan.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban last month, the former prisoners flew to Afghanistan to join the new government.
Former detainee Khairullah Khairkhwa is now the acting minister for information and culture, according to national security expert and Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Thomas Joscelyn. Norullah Noori now serves as acting minister of borders and tribal affairs, while Abdul Haq Wasiq is the acting director of intelligence and Mohammad Fazl is the deputy defense minister.
Haq Wasiq was a senior intelligence official for
the Taliban prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks
and worked with al Qaeda as it plotted the
strike that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
Fazl was the Taliban's deputy defense minister in 2001 and now resumes that role. He also worked with al Qaeda and terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant.
Before he was arrested, Khairkhwa inked an agreement with Iran to fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan post-9/11.
Biden Builds the Taliban Back Better: Weapons, Military Equipment Fuel Resurgent Islamists
President Joe Biden has dubbed his presidential agenda “Build Back Better,” but instead of rebuilding America, he has so far only succeeded in building back the Taliban better with billions of dollars in American weaponry.
The billions of dollars in American taxpayer-funded military equipment are now in the hands of the Taliban, to use against Afghans who until last month were partnered with the U.S. government.
The Taliban is also using that equipment to quell the last bit of anti-Taliban resistance in the country.
And the equipment is somehow also falling into the hands of Iran, America’s top adversary in the region. An Iranian Telegram channel recently released images of U.S. military vehicles in Iran, according to the BBC.
According to the British-based Times, the vehicles included American tanks, Humvees and “MRAPs,” or Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected light armored vehicles that are resistant to roadside bombs.
The U.S. has spent nearly $84 billion dollars on training, equipping, and otherwise building the Afghan security forces between 2002 and 2018, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published on January 27, 2021.
That figure tracks closely with figures published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on July 30, 2021, which said cumulative appropriations for the Afghan Security Forces Fund stood at nearly $82.90 billion, with more than $76.19 billion having been obligated and more than $75.20 billion disbursed.
The U.S. also turned over at least 10 military facilities worth billions of dollars to the previous Afghan government, which are also now in the hands of the Taliban. Bagram Airfield, which was turned over to the now-defunct Afghan Ministry of Defense on July 1, 2021, was valued at $565,840,912, according to SIGAR.
A recent Sunday Times article graphic showed how much U.S. military equipment had been supplied to Afghan security forces, citing the GAO.
Oryx, a military equipment blog, has tried to do an accounting of all the U.S. military equipment that is known to have been captured by the Taliban.
According to Oryx, the Taliban have captured at least 12 tanks; 51 armored fighting vehicles; 61 artillery and mortars; eight anti-aircraft guns; and 1,980 military trucks, vehicles, and Jeeps.
Also according to Oryx, the Taliban have also captured at least a dozen American-supplied fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft — including a A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft; a Cessna 208; UH-60A Blackhawk transport helicopters; MD-530F attack helicopters; and Boeing Insitu ScanEagle drones. They have also captured Russian-made Mi-17 transport and Mi-35 attack helicopters.
This list does not even include small arms, including M4 and M16 rifles, M24 sniper rifles, and M2 .50 caliber machine guns, nor does it include ammunition, communications equipment, night-vision goggles, or biometric devices used to identify Afghans who assisted Americans.
And the blog’s authors say their counts of equipment are based on photographic evidence only and not all Taliban members have high-end cell phones.
The White House has been vague about how much U.S. military equipment may have fallen into Taliban hands. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said at a White House briefing on August 17:
We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone. But certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and, obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki became defensive when asked about leaving the Taliban with military equipment at a briefing on August 30. “Certainly our objective was not to leave them with any equipment but that is not always an option when you are looking to retrograde and move out of a war zone,” she said.
However, Democrats have resisted Republican efforts to find out how much equipment was left for the Taliban.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) proposed an amendment during a September 1 House Oversight Committee business meeting that would ask the Pentagon inspector general to figure out what and how much military equipment has been seized by the Taliban.
“The Taliban is now armed with significant resources, equipment, arms, artillery, helicopters, drones, weapons, ammunitions from the United States. You name it, they have it. We even gave the Taliban an air force in recent weeks,” she said, adding that reports of Iran buying equipment from the Taliban is “enormously problematic” and “does impact our national security.”
Retired Lt. Col. Oliver North said in a recent interview on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily that the Taliban, Islamic State-Khorasan, and the Haqqani Network, would collectively become the “best armed criminal enterprise in the history of mankind” due to the haul left behind by the U.S.
He also predicted some of it will be sold to China and Russia and be reverse-engineered and used against the United States in other campaigns.
“What’s happening to a lot of it is that they’re being dragged across the border in Conex boxes and on trucks [to Pakistan],” he said.
“They’re going to be heading to the port where they will be loaded aboard a ship and taken to communist China for exploitation. That’s what’s happening to anywhere between five and ten of every piece of equipment. The Taliban, by the way, are getting rich on this. They’re selling them,” he said.
Even now, the equipment is being used to snuff out the anti-Taliban resistance in the Panjshir Valley — which had not even been overcome during the Russian occupation.
Times reporter Anthony Loyd reported that the Taliban — apart from using rifles, Humvees, and machine guns — are also using American handcuffs against resistance fighters. He wrote, after observing one prisoner:
I noticed too that his hands were secured behind his back with American handcuffs. The fact that his wrists were bonded by steel etched with the words Peerless Handcuff Company Springfield MA seemed somehow more grotesque than any other detail beneath the angry blue of the late summer sky as the last pocket of defiance to Taliban rule in Afghanistan was extinguished.
Donald Trump Jr. quipped in a tweet on Tuesday, “The only thing Joe Biden ‘Built back better’ was the Taliban.”
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook.
Yet we grab a hundred thousand older, random, low IQ, non-English speaking inbred men, and their forced child brides, and give them a golden ticket. These are the kind of men who gang-raped a disabled woman in Sweden. The type of men who have been torturing women in Afghanistan since we left. Why bring them here?
The next generation of jihadi terrorists may now be in America, rushed there on planes that should have carried the American citizens who were frantically waving their passports through the closed gates of Kabul Airport, with the State Department ordering we ignore them. Unverified single, Afghan men took their places.
President Biden Must Be Impeached
Joe Biden should not be allowed to resign to escape punishment for he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. He must be impeached.
Even American allies agree.
In the British Parliament, Tom Tugendhat, MP and decorated former British officer who fought in Afghanistan, said, “This week has torn open old wounds. We have demonstrated that we, the West, abandoned our allies.” Hinting at Biden, he added, “We cannot rely on a single leader.”
Colonel Richard Kemp, former Commander of UK Forces in Afghanistan alongside local Afghan forces, insists that Biden, as Commander in Chief, should be court-marshaled, the military version of an indictment.
Add treason to the charges of a necessary impeachment.
Biden threatened, in the depth of his self-induced chaos, “Any attack on our forces or disruption of our operations at the airport will be met with a swift and forceful response.”
When his warning was answered with a suicide bombing outside the gates of the airport that left 13 US servicemen and women, and an estimated 170 Afghanis, dead, plus tens of other American soldiers badly maimed, Biden abandoned his commitment to remain until every American in Afghanistan was home.
Instead, he cut and ran, keeping to a self-imposed arbitrary deadline. The American President deserted his countrymen and women, leaving them to their fate in enemy territory.
The death of those outside the Kabul Airport’s perimeter was preventable. The Taliban had offered America full control over Kabul until August 31. Biden refused. This negligent act gave Kabul to the Taliban and, with it, full control of the city including all the access roads to the perimeter fence of the commercial airport.
As Commander in Chief, Biden is solely responsible for this asinine decision and everything that resulted from it.
Biden claims his military commanders told him to abandon Bagram Airport. General Mark Milley denied this, stating from the Pentagon that his instructions were to protect the US Embassy in Kabul and control the capital airport for imminent troop withdrawal. The limited forces at his disposal did not allow him to protect the embassy, the airport, and Bagram.
Biden said nobody predicted the chaos. Not true. A State Department memo in mid-July warned of Kabul’s collapse. Additionally, the transcript of Biden’s conversation with Afghan President Ghani shows Ghani warning Biden that Afghanistan’s collapse was imminent collapse if US forces made a hurried, unconditional exit.
Biden told the American people and the world that Kabul and its airport were safe, and Americans and their allies would be protected. In the end, none of that was true.
On August 18, Biden appeared on the “Good Morning America” TV show and said, in a clear voice, “If there are American citizens left, we’re going to stay and get them all out.”
That was another lie.
Any doubts that the Biden Administration had utterly deserted Americans were removed when Ron Klain, Biden’s White House Chief of Staff, said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ program in early September that the administration was “hopeful” that Americans may be able to get seats on departing Qatari flights out of Kabul. “We’re obviously going to look to see if Americans can be part of those flights.”
Now, trapped Americans must depend on other countries such as Qatar, to get them out of Afghanistan. That is unless the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or ISIS, don’t get to them first. After all, the Biden State Department, led by the feckless Anthony Blinken, admits giving the Taliban the biometric details of all Americans and their allies left behind in the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan.
On TV, Blinken begged the Taliban to accept his ransom money and allow Americans to leave. He knows they are in danger. On August 31, this was the travel advisory that Blinken’s State Department gave to trapped American citizens: “Make contingency plans to leave when it is safe to do so that do not rely on US government assistance.”
This is the ultimate US Government betrayal of American citizens abroad. This is treason by the Commander in Chief who once admitted that the buck stops with him.
Instead of taking responsibility, Biden became a Taliban spokesman when he spoke to the nation on August 31, the last day, saying, “The Taliban made a public commitment broadcast on television and radio across Afghanistan on safe passage for anyone wanting to leave including those who worked alongside Americans.”
That was a lie. We already know some of the things the Taliban is doing.
Human Rights Watch reported that the Taliban had taken 44 people from their homes in the towns of Spin Boldak, Kandahar, and executed them. All 44 had received amnesty from the Taliban. How many others have been exposed and murdered?
The most sacred American promise is to leave no one behind. Biden broke that oath and that is the ultimate reason to impeach, indict, and sentence him.
Biden must also be impeached for threatening American national security.
Former Defense Secretary under President Obama, Leon Panetta, said “There is no question that our national security has been threatened by what has happened. Afghanistan will become a safe haven for Al Qaeda, ISIS and for other terrorists to be able to reorganize and strengthen themselves again and potentially use Afghanistan as a base for attacking not just the United States but other countries as well.”
As Steve Hilton said on his ‘Next Revolution’ program, “Biden has betrayed his allies, broken his sacred trust, brought shame and humiliation on the presidency and on America. But our contempt for this despicable man is not enough. He must be held accountable. Biden must be impeached.”
If impeached, Biden can bring evidence implicating others, Generals Milley and Austin in particular.
Perhaps in a Special Counsel investigation, we’ll learn that Susan Rice and her West Exec Advisor executives, Anthony Blinken and Avril Haines dictated Biden’s decisions. They were intimately involved in the Benghazi disaster when an ambassador was brutally murdered and his security team members killed.
Finally, if it was legitimate to impeach President Trump over a phone call to the Ukrainian President, it is equally legitimate to impeach President Biden over his phone call to President Ghani in which, according to the official transcript, Biden pressured Ghani to lie about the dangerous circumstances that Afghan was in at the time of his July call. That was a clearly impeachable offense.
There are increasing calls for a 9/11-type Commission on the Afghan withdrawal. This may precede a formal Special Counsel investigation but, whether impeachment comes first or later, the Commander in Chief should step down pending the outcome of such a tribunal.
Biden has left the world more dangerous, which is not an American-only issue. America’s allies demand legal clarity as a prelude to effective action preventing Afghanistan from exploding in our capitals and America’s major cities.
The man who didn’t want to target Osama Bin Laden in 2011 sacrificed US soldiers in 2021. Biden surrendered Americans and an air force base with $83B of the finest military equipment to the terrorists who protected Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the ones who flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001.
The next generation of jihadi terrorists may now be in America, rushed there on planes that should have carried the American citizens who were frantically waving their passports through the closed gates of Kabul Airport, with the State Department ordering we ignore them. Unverified single, Afghan men took their places.
It is vital that we act against Biden now and get the truth before the next 9/11.
Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
Widespread ‘F*ck Joe Biden’ chants are a warning to politicians and the media
Over the weekend, at least four college football stadia echoed with chants of “F*ck Joe Biden,” and the practice already has spread to concerts and other mass gatherings. Twitchy has collected a number of tweets demonstrating this trend that should worry Democrats and the media that does its best to pretend that the Republic is in peril with a senile old corruptocrat in charge:
Not just at the games:
This phenomenon is likely to escalate, as people fed up with the media ignoring their passionately held feelings and beliefs (rage over abandoning Americans in Afghanistan, vaccine mandates, and many other issues) and elites treating them like ignorant rubes. It all has a Cold War Soviet Bloc feel to it – masses alienated from their political leadership, their grievances either ignored or ridiculed, resisting in places and ways where they cannot be retaliated against.
"FJB" grafitti appearing all over the place would be a logical next step.
Image credit: Twitter video screengrab
The administration seems to be acting with malice aforethought
A legal term, malice aforethought identifies intentional murder or malicious bodily harm. From the election to COVID policy, to how we left Afghanistan, to inflation and the budget, to energy policy, to our lawless border, there is no way our entire U.S. government is stupid enough to make so many grievous policy decisions without malice and planning. They’re throwing ingredients into the stew pot to create socialism and it’s a very unsavory dish.
I am not a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ because what I see is real—although leftists use the term against anyone sounding the alarm on any alarming event. From Hunter’s laptop to the election, to the border crisis, to the Delta variant and vaccination, anyone who has questioned the integrity of our government is a “conspiracy theorist.” We have bent over backward to avoid these labels. No longer! Our country is being destroyed, and yes, it is a conspiracy or a series of them. There is simply no other explanation.
The entire COVID fiasco was cooked up in a lab Anthony Fauci fund with taxpayer dollars in China, our number one political, financial, and social enemy. What better way to eliminate freedom and privacy in our country? The “curve” wasn’t meant to be flattened. Easy, effective treatments for COVID were banned. The death count rose in a satisfactorily alarming manner. Hospitals filled; everyone stayed home, losing a year-and-a-half of life, livelihood, and school; and we hid our shameful faces behind masks. Ask yourself, who loses and who benefits?
If we used early treatment with repurposed, cheap drugs, which would have helped people under 70 without co-morbidities survive, we wouldn’t need the vaccine, except for the elderly and those with other health risks. There wouldn’t have been a blanket emergency use permit. These are untested drugs, with unknown long-term effects
but stories like this one, although anecdotal, are disturbing. Look at the alarming VAERS data. It shows nearly 14,000 vaccine deaths, and 18,000 people “permanently disabled.” The CDC stopped tracking whether COVID cases were among the vaccinated or unvaccinated in May. Yesterday’s American Thinker article by Brian Joondeph outlines clearly the ramifications of having done so. Another ignored issue, head in the sand government, media complicit, abetted by tech.
Two interviews with Dr. Robert Malone, who was an initial developer of the mRNA vaccine, sound alarm bells, as well. The most salient takeaway? Vaccinating during an epidemic causing the virus to evolve rapidly and dangerously. Watch the interviews.
Add in the border mess. A rapid influx of poor people with myriad third-world health problems, no education, no skills, and yes, plenty of COVID infections. All disbursed willy-nilly around the country. They focus government resources on the people who don’t pay taxes.
Then inflate the currency by printing boatloads of money, and what each of us has or earns or saves, becomes far less. Then, up the budget to unheard of levels, and tax us all more! We lost autonomy and, soon (if they get their way), all will become more beholden to the largesse of government. Just like Venezuela, that dimming star of South America.
Add Afghanistan to the stew pot. First, we abandon our secure airbase in the dead of night, leaving all our ordnance and equipment behind and free a couple of prison-loads of radical jihadists. Then, we say “no thanks” when the Taliban offers to let us control all of Kabul, not just the airport, temporarily. We hand them all the biometrics on our people still in-country, and neglect to arrange for any of our citizens or the people who helped them over the last 20 years, to be transported out. Now, they’re all hostages. Imagine life inside those 6 airplanes, sitting for days on the field.
Yet we grab a hundred thousand older, random, low IQ, non-English speaking inbred men, and their forced child brides, and give them a golden ticket. These are the kind of men who gang-raped a disabled woman in Sweden. The type of men who have been torturing women in Afghanistan since we left. Why bring them here?
Then there’s Biden begging OPEC to increase oil production after closing our hard-won Keystone pipeline. I don’t know about where you live, but here in California, if you have to commute, the cost just rose astronomically, squeezing families even more.
There’s somebody in charge or a bunch of somebodies. I doubt they are the members of Biden’s cabinet. Ric Grenell just mentioned on air (on Stuart Varney’s FOX show) that the President doesn’t even remember the names of his cabinet members. Ric thinks Susan Rice is formulating our foreign policy. She, of the erstwhile “Fundamentally Transform America” crew, the Obama administration.
If we don’t want to fundamentally transform our country into a hell hole, it’s time to loudly badger our elected representatives, making them take action. Speak the truth, so they can’t help but hear us. Hold them accountable, along long with the fake news media and the technocrats who allow the Taliban to have a voice on Twitter but cancel patriots.
Image: Scary Fairytale by The Neutered Satirist.
Trial Begins of 20 Men Accused Over 2015 ISIS Paris Attack That Killed 130
PARIS (AP) – In a secure complex embedded within a 13th-century courthouse, France on Wednesday will begin the trial of 20 men accused in the Islamic State group´s 2015 attacks on Paris that left 130 people dead and hundreds injured.
Nine gunmen and suicide bombers struck within minutes of each other at France’s national soccer stadium, the Bataclan concert hall and Paris restaurants and cafes on Nov. 13, 2015. Survivors of the attacks as well as those who mourn their dead are expected to pack the rooms, which were designed to hold 1,800 plaintiffs and 350 lawyers.
The lone survivor of the extremist cell from that night, Salah Abdeslam, is the key defendant among those being tried for the deadliest attack in France since World War II. He is the only one charged with murder. The same IS network went on to strike Brussels months later, killing another 32 people.
Dominique Kielemoes, whose son bled to death at one of the cafes that night, said the month dedicated to victims’ testimonies at the trial will be crucial to both their own healing and that of the nation.
“The assassins, these terrorists, thought they were firing into the crowd, into a mass of people. But it wasn´t a mass – these were individuals who had a life, who loved, had hopes and expectations, and that we need to talk about at the trial. It´s important.” she said,
Twenty men are charged, but six of them will be tried in absentia. Abdeslam, who abandoned his rental car in northern Paris and discarded a malfunctioning suicide vest before fleeing home to Brussels, has refused to speak with investigators. But he holds the answers to many of the remaining questions about the attack and the people who planned it, both in Europe and abroad.
The modern courtroom was constructed within the storied 13th-century Palais de Justice in Paris, where Marie Antoinette and Emile Zola faced trial, among others.
For the first time, victims can also have a secure audio link to listen from home if they want with a 30-minute delay.
The trial is scheduled to last nine months. The month of September will be dedicated to laying out the police and forensic evidence. October will be given over to victims´ testimony. From November to December, officials including former French President François Hollande will testify, as will relatives of the attackers.
Abdeslam will be questioned multiple times. He has so far refused to talk to investigators.
None of the proceedings will be televised or rebroadcast to the public, but they will be recorded for archival purposes. Video recording has only been allowed for a handful of cases in France considered to be of historical value, including last year’s trial for the 2015 attacks against the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris and a kosher supermarket.
No comments:
Post a Comment