Lawmakers Worry US Aid to Afghanistan Enriching Taliban
USAID pressed to disclose what safeguards are in place
Republican lawmakers are pressing the Biden administration to disclose what safeguards are in place to stop U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan from enriching the Taliban, according to a letter sent Friday to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Eleven lawmakers, led by House Foreign Affairs Committee member Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.), say they "are concerned about the possibility of U.S. taxpayer dollars funding the Taliban's terrorist regime," according to the letter, which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. They are demanding that USAID, which is in charge of handling aid to Afghanistan, show what steps they have taken to ensure the Taliban cannot intercept these funds.
"Humanitarian aid to Afghanistan will finance Taliban terrorists if it is incompetently distributed," Burchett told the Free Beacon. "The Biden administration needs to lay out what steps it is taking to prevent this from happening and adding more pain to last summer's embarrassing withdrawal from the country."
With more than $300 million slated to flow into Afghanistan this year as part of an effort to keep the country afloat after the Taliban regained control, the Biden administration has been mum about how it is preventing these funds from lining the Taliban's pockets. The terrorist regime controls the nation's coffers, meaning that any aid dollars that make their way to the government are at risk of being stolen. With this new infusion, nearly $800 million in aid will have been provided to the war-torn country since October 2020, making the United States Afghanistan's largest donor.
USAID, in announcing the latest infusion of $308 million earlier this year, said that it is working with the Taliban to ensure aid makes its way to the people. The agency, however, did not detail the safeguards it has put in place.
"The United States continues to urge the Taliban to allow unhindered humanitarian access, safe conditions for humanitarians, independent provision of assistance to all vulnerable people, and freedom of movement for aid workers of all genders," USAID said in a statement this week.
The Republican lawmakers say these assurances are not good enough. The Treasury Department in September 2021 issued sanctions waivers to permit U.S. transactions with the Taliban, prompting concerns the Taliban is playing a critical role in distributing American aid.
The lawmakers want answers from USAID "in light of the administration's dealings with the Taliban, and knowing that the Taliban has a history of diverting and profiting from U.S. assistance to Afghanistan," according to the letter.
The agency must also provide assurances that it will cooperate "with Congress as it conducts its constitutionally authorized oversight into all U.S. foreign assistance to Afghanistan," according to the letter. The lawmakers are seeking a commitment from the administration to "reassess and pause" U.S. assistance to Afghanistan if it is determined the cash is funding the Taliban.
The American people, the lawmakers write, "deserve to have confidence that their tax dollars are not funding terrorist activities."
The Islamists Around New York’s Mayor Eric Adams Love Jihad
"Allah is our goal. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way.”
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid believes that Muslims were in America before Columbus and spread their religion to the Indians, and that a California earthquake was Allah’s warning to America.
The Imam defended his refusal to celebrate July 4th by comparing the founding of America and Israel to dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Rashid suggested that the Charlie Hebdo terror attack and the ISIS attack on the Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas were "examples of 'chickens coming home to roost'”.
The Imam expressed support for a variety of terrorists, including Aafia Siddiqui aka Lady al Qaeda, Al Qaeda medic Rafiq Sabir, and Sami Al-Arian who was tied to Islamic Jihad.
He defended former Iranian President Ahmadinejad's call for destroying Israel and killing millions of Jews as a "sentiment born of the legitimate anger, frustration, and bitterness", and accused Muslims working with the NYPD of being "collaborators" and "house negroes".
The Imam also falsely claimed that Black Friday got its name because "the day after Thanksgiving... slave traders would sell slaves for a discount."
The site for Rashid's Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood reportedly once featured the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood, "Allah is our goal. The Prophet Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullah is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way."
Imam Rashid endorsed Eric Adams in the mayoral election, although about half of the statement which he co-signed was dedicated to virulent attacks on Israel and the United States.
And Mayor Adams has named Rashid to a role on his civic engagement transition committee.
Twenty years after the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, the members of the transition committees for the city that experienced the worst of the carnage reflect the growing dominance of Islamists and their political allies and operatives in New York City’s Democrat politics.
Unfortunately Rashid’s presence on Adams’ transition committees is not an isolated incident.
Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, who appears on Adams’ clergy committee, a top clergyman in the city’s prison system and former drug dealer who converted to Islam, had declared during the Bush administration that "the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House", ranted about allowing "the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us", and urged that Muslims must be "compassionate with each other" and "hard against the kuffar (non-Muslim)."
An FBI memo noted that Jalil admitted that he was paid “to be a good Muslim, but [was] propagating the true Islam through his job.”
Even the Bloomberg administration temporarily suspended Jalil. Adams however drew him in.
Former CAIR Community Affairs director Faiza Ali, whom Linda Sarsour described as a "close friend", serves as a "lead" in the civic engagement transition team. Ali had come out of the Muslim Students Association which, like CAIR is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was involved in the campaign to support the Ground Zero Mosque and in attacks on the NYPD.
Sarah Sayeed, Bill de Blasio’s Muslim liason, and another member of the civic engagement transition team, has claimed that she's afraid to leave the house on September 11, and has attacked the NYPD for trying to prevent Islamic terrorist attacks by monitoring terror mosques.
She had excused Muslim anger at Mohammed cartoons, defended the Ground Zero Mosque, and claimed that killing Islamic terrorists "creates more radicalization and anti-Americanism".
Aniqa Nawabi, another civic engagement transition team member, with the Muslim Community Network, had sent out an email during the Hamas attacks last year falsely accusing Israel of attacking the mosque occupying the holiest site in Judaism, and arguing that "Hamas alone is no military match for the IDF. It is misleading for media and policymakers to frame the conflict around counting the number of rockets fired from each side."
Debbie Almontaser, who was caught up in the scandal at the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a New York City public school, after promoting an “Intifada NYC” t-shirt, is listed as one of Adams' transition team members on equity and food policy. The latter likely refers to the successful push to bring halal meals into the New York City public school system.
Eric Adams has listed Murad Awawdeh as a “lead” on immigration for his transition team.
Murad Awawdeh, a "Palestinian" activist, has accused American law enforcement of a "two-decades-long campaign of terror against Muslim" and tweeted images of an anti-Israel protest accusing Jews of "settler violence and colonialism" for living in their own country.
Awawdeh has been quoted as saying that "Israel is a racist, apartheid, hostile, terrorist state.”
Imam Hassan Akbar, on Adams' clergy team, denounced Christmas trees as "idols" and warned Muslims against even taking pictures next to them. In another post, he used the hashtags “#ChristmasIsShirk #SantaShirk #ElvesShirk”. The term Shirk refers to polytheism. While a Muslim cleric is obviously not expected to celebrate a Christian holiday, defining Christians as idolaters and polytheists can be used to invoke Koranic verses justifying terrorism and violence.
For example, Mohammed Al-Wahhab, the figure associated with Wahhabism, a popular theocratic terror movement among Muslim settlers in America, wrote that if someone guilty of shirk his "blood may be shed" and his "wealth is lawful".
The former means that under Islamic law he can be killed and his property stolen.
This applies not just to Christians, but to Muslims who deviate from Islamic law and may be declared infidels, and hunted down and killed.
Akbar libeled Thanksgiving as a "massacre" and condemned Islamic organizations who send out Thanksgiving greetings. He used the hashtag “Amerikkka” and responded approvingly to a call to replace Muslim leaders with a caliphate. After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, he defended Sharia law and mocked potential media headlines questioning the justice of Sharia law such as "Women Stoned For Adultery" and "Taliban Will Bring Back Cutting Hands".
While Adams certainly bears the ultimate responsibility for his transition team, the makeup also reflects the political reality of Islamist ascendence in New York City’s Democrat party. Some, like Awawdeh and Almontaser, are associated with the Muslim Democratic Club, others with CAIR-NY and other Islamist organizations that have gone from the margins to the mainstream.
The various Islamist players in controversies over the Ground Zero Mosque, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, and NYPD surveillance of terror mosques took on significant political roles in the De Blasio administration. Some were named to official positions on his team while others found jobs with influential members of the increasingly radicalized New York City Council.
Their organizations, formerly reviled as extremists, benefited from a flow of city grant money.
In the decade after September 11, Islamist outrages in New York City benefited from some media coverage and investigations. Afterward even the New York Post mostly ceased reporting on the Islamist insurgency even as, or perhaps because, it gained power and influence.
Counterjihad investigative groups such as the Middle East Forum, Center for Security Policy, Jihad Watch, and the Investigative Project continue to do important work in the face of declining interest from conservative media. In researching this article, I found a plethora of material in the media from the ‘oughts’, but far less from the previous decade, let alone from this new decade.
Changing demographics have made New York City’s Islamists into political power brokers. They joined the anti-Trump “resistance” and allied with anti-Israel lefties of Jewish descent. And in the absence of a single major devastating Islamic terror plot, just a steady stream of smaller ones, mostly unsuccesful, fewer are paying attention to the ticking time bomb of Islamist influence.
Much like the silence before the storm on September 11, that is an error we will come to regret.
Iran: ‘Hard Revenge’ for Soleimani Killing Will Come From ‘Within’ the U.S.
The Islamic Republic finds its perfect moment,
Last Thursday was the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani; while the date passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, it was a major event in the Islamic Republic of Iran, featuring numerous threats of revenge from enraged Iranian leaders. One of these stood out from the others: Soleimani’s successor as Quds Force commander declared that the revenge would come from inside the United States.
Iran’s state-controlled Tasnim News Agency reported that Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani was “delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad” for the anniversary of the “martyrdom” of Soleimani. Qaani was in no mood to be conciliatory. He thundered: “We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes, as we do not need to be present as supervisors everywhere, wherever is necessary we take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes without our presence.”
“From within their homes.” It’s not an implausible threat, thanks to Old Joe Biden’s essentially nonexistent Southern border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported on Feb. 3, 2021, that Border Patrol agents near Yuma, Ariz. “arrested a group of 11 Iranian citizens who illegally crossed the border into the United States.” Nor was this a singular incident:
“For the last two fiscal years, Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents have led the nation in apprehending illegal crossers from Iran. Yuma Sector agents apprehended eight Iranian nationals in FY2020, compared to just 14 from all other border patrol sectors combined. So far in FY2021, Yuma Sector agents have apprehend [sic] 14 nationals from Iran.”
It’s unlikely, unfortunately, that Border Patrol agents apprehended every last one of the Iranians who tried to enter the United States illegally across the border from Mexico. It’s entirely possible that agents of the Islamic Republic are in the country now, ready to execute this “revenge.” Qaani offered a chance to avoid the specter of the revenge playing out on American soil: he “went on to say that it would be much wiser for the US to deal with the criminals who assassinated General Soleimani on their own, as it would be much costlier for them if ‘the children of the Resistance Front’ are to take the matter in their own hands and take revenge from the Americans by themselves.”
The “children of the Resistance Front.” Who might they be? They don’t have to be Iranians who crossed the border. Far-Left Antifa rioters have already taken up the notorious Iranian slogan, “Death to America.” Journalist Andy Ngo reported in late August 2020 that “around 700 black bloc militants and their supporters rampaged through Oakland, Cal. They chanted ‘death to America’ while starting fires and smashing cars and buildings.” The week before that, according to Townhall’s Julio Rosas, “An American flag was just burned outside the Kenosha County Courthouse. One woman screams, ‘Death to America!’ and kicks the fence.” An Antifa rioter who is already screaming “Death to America” would be a perfect candidate for carrying out Iran’s “hard revenge” inside the United States.
The Islamic Republic has found the perfect moment, should it wish to carry out terrorist attacks in America. The Left’s relentless indoctrination of American youth has begun bearing fruit, such that there is a large number of people in the country now who hate their culture and heritage and believe that the United States of America is the primary force for evil in the world today. That coincides neatly with the foreign policy perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What would have been an empty threat just a few years ago is now all too plausible, because there are so many people in the United States now who think that whatever the country gets, it deserves.
If the threat is made good and there is a jihad carnage inside the United States, instigated by someone acting at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is also true that many people inside the United States now will be pleased and will applaud openly. The Left’s campaign to shame Americans into being sorry they’re Americans will increasingly manifest itself in an unwillingness to defend this country or stand up against its enemies. Esmaeil Qaani and his friends and allies will find a great deal of comfort in what the Left has wrought.
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.
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