France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Friday some of the Paris attackers, including the mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, exploited the Syrian refugee crisis to slip into the country unnoticed.
Abaaoud, the ringleader behind last Friday’s bombings and shootings in the French capital that killed 129 people, was able to get into Europe undeterred, according to French authorities. The 28-year-old had also been linked to several plots around France including a thwarted attack by a gunman on a high-speed train in August.
French officials confirmed Thursday Abaaoud was killed in an anti-terror raid Wednesday in a suburb north of Paris. He was identified from skin samples after the Saint-Denis apartment raid.
Abaaoud had claimed he successfully moved back and forth from Europe to Syria coordinating terror attacks, and narrowly escaped a January police raid in the Belgian city of Verviers. “Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave… despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,” he told the ISIS magazine Dabiq.
Two counterterrorism officials told Fox News on Thursday that Abaaoud is comparable to Mohammed Atta – the “tactical guy” who identified and pulled together the operatives. (Read more from “Crisis as Cover: Paris Attacks Ringleader Posed as Refugee” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-20 01:00:402016-04-11 10:55:56Crisis as Cover: Paris Attacks Ringleader Posed as Refugee
Ezra Schwartz, an American yeshiva student who was killed Thursday in a West Bank terror attack, had been volunteering delivering food parcels to Israeli soldiers in the area when he was shot by a Palestinian terrorist.
Schwartz, 18, of Sharon, Massachusetts, was remembered as “a fun person to hang out with, very charismatic.”
He was one of three people killed in a terror attack near the settlement of Alon Shvut. He was studying for a year at Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh . . .
Schwartz was killed when an assailant opened fire from inside his car at vehicles near the Etzion Bloc junction. Police named 51-year-old Ya’akov Don of nearby Alon Svhut and 24-year-old Palestinian Shadi Arfah of Hebron as the other victims of the shooting . . .
The United Synagogue Youth program which Ezra joined in 2013 released a statement saying he “is remembered as being a warm and funny member of the…community. Staff on his trip recalled today that he used his deep experience in Judaism to teach other teens how to participate in Jewish ritual.” (Read more from “US Youth Slain by Terrorists Was Bringing Food to Soldiers in West Bank” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-20 00:53:452016-04-11 10:55:57US Youth Slain by Terrorists Was Bringing Food to Soldiers in West Bank
By Christopher Snyder. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is accusing President Barack Obama of making it easier for Muslims rather than Christians to enter the U.S. in the midst of the Syrian civil war.
“If you were Muslim from Syria, you can get into this country … if you were a Christian from Syria it was almost impossible to get in and yet the Christians were having their heads cut off,” Trump told a crowd Wednesday in Worcester, Mass. “It’s the most unfair thing, this is during the Obama administration … what’s wrong with us?”
The businessman, though, did admit the challenge of proving the religion of those claiming refugee status. “Well I don’t know if you can prove they are Christian, first of all I happen to be Christian, I’m protestant, and I would love to do that, but how are they proving that.”
Obama blasted the idea of admitting people solely based on their religion.
“When I hear folks say well maybe we should just admit Christians but not Muslims, when I hear political leaders suggesting religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” he said at a press conference Monday. (Read more from “Trump Just Made This Major Accusation Against the White House About Syrian Refugees” HERE)
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U.S.-Bound Syrians Detained in Honduras With Fake Passports
By Curt Mills. Honduras has detained five Syrian nationals traveling by land to the United States, and in possession of fake Greek passports.
The five men are currently being held in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. The central American nation is over 1,500 miles from the United States border . . .
The men were coming from Costa Rica, and planning to make passage into Guatemala next. (Read more from “U.S.-Bound Syrians Detained in Honduras With Fake Passports” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-19 00:30:572016-04-11 10:55:58Trump Just Made This Major Accusation Against the White House About Syrian Refugees
French President Francois Hollande today promised that “France will remain a country of freedom,” defending his decision to honor a commitment to accept migrants and refugees despite Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris.
“Life should resume fully,” Hollande told a gathering of the country’s mayors, who gave him a standing ovation. “What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions?
In the same spirit, he added, “30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment,” explaining that they will undergo vigorous security checks.
Hollande noted that “some people say the tragic events of the last few days have sown doubts in their minds,” but called it a “humanitarian duty” to help those people … but one that will go hand in hand with “our duty to protect our people.” (Read more from “French President: We Will Go Ahead and Take 30,000 Refugees” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-19 00:26:122016-04-11 10:55:59French President: We Will Go Ahead and Take 30,000 Refugees
Two al Qaeda terrorists who had killed American soldiers were able to enter the country as refugees, according to a report released Wednesday from the House Homeland Security committee.
Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, two Iraqi refugees settled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, after killing American soldiers, whom they bragged about having “for lunch and dinner.” In 2010, they were caught handling weapons, including included a machine gun and a missile launcher, that they planned to smuggle to insurgents in Iraq.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many more than that,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. “And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me.”
The committee’s report found that the administration’s refugee resettlement program proposal will have “a limited impact on alleviating the overall crisis but could have serious ramifications for U.S. homeland security.”
Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, admitted in October at a hearing before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee that organizations such as the Islamic State might attempt to exploit the Syrian refugee resettlement program. (Read more from “Report: Al Qaeda Terrorists Entered United States Through Refugee Program” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-19 00:22:402016-04-11 10:55:59Report: Al Qaeda Terrorists Entered United States Through Refugee Program
All drugs including cocaine, heroin and crystal meth will be legal in drug-scarred Mexico within 10 years, former Mexican President Vicente Fox believes, after a court ruling that he said makes the legalization of marijuana inevitable.
“I think marijuana (legalization) is a first step,” Fox said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “It’s now irreversible.”
Fox was president between 2000 and 2006 and became an advocate of legalizing drugs after leaving office.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court approved growing marijuana for recreational use. The landmark decision blasts open the door for an eventual legalization in Mexico, where warring gangs have waged a decade of drug violence.
Now that the court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to prevent people from smoking marijuana, Fox said it would eventually have to make a similar decision for drugs like cocaine and heroin. (Read more from “Ex-Mexico President Sees Cocaine, Heroin Legal in Decade” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-19 00:14:472016-04-11 10:56:00Ex-Mexico President Sees Cocaine, Heroin Legal in Decade
On Nov. 12, President Barack Obama said of ISIS: “What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.”
On Nov. 13, ISIS-connected terrorists left 129 people dead and 352 wounded in Paris.
ISIS naturally dominated Obama’s Monday press conference at the G20 summit in Turkey. Yet although the president used the words “leader” and “leadership” fourteen times, the concept was, ironically, absent from his remarks. Speaking with as much passion as an instructional video on waste reclamation, he doubled down on his legacy of inaction, infighting, and incompetence.
The first question came from a reporter for Agence France-Presse: “The equation has clearly changed. Isn’t it time for your strategy to change?”
The president responded, “Well, keep in mind what we’ve been doing.” He then delivered a laundry list of international cooperation, targeted airstrikes, and economic pressure aimed at thwarting the Islamic State. The implication: He’s already on the right track. Nothing needs changing.
Not once did he address what was obvious to the reporter and the world: The Paris atrocity has demonstrated that his ill-defined strategy to “degrade” ISIS is a failure, one that has endangered the Western world and that clearly needs to change.
He grossly caricatured those who take issue with his strategy—or lack thereof—as “a few who have suggested that we should put large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground” and implied that his only option was the current course, “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.” This rhetoric has become a pattern: When faced with credible criticism, create false choices.
That the president is entirely unwilling to accept the need for improvement or adaptation in the light of this obvious foreign policy failure leads to uncomfortable questions about how insulated from reality the man might be.
There have been few lapses in leadership as maddening—and insulting to the American people—as Obama’s refusal to outline a clear path to victory against a force that certainly has a clear strategy against free nations: indiscriminate bloodshed.
A strategy connects ends and means—what is our goal (end), and how do we get there (means)? It is not clear what Obama’s goal is. Is it to destroy ISIS? Or just to keep their damage to a minimum so that it becomes the next president’s problem?
To be sure, Obama landed some pre-emptive strikes, but they were against Americans who happen to be Republicans:
You know, I had a lot of disagreements with George W. Bush on policy, but I was very proud after 9/11 when he was adamant and clear about the fact that this is not a war on Islam. And the notion that some of those who have taken on leadership in his party would ignore all of that, that’s not who we are.
The president proves more artful at destroying straw men dressed up as GOP presidential hopefuls than he is at targeting terrorists. I suppose he is most afraid of the group that endangers him professionally.
Further, he condemned as “shameful” American governors who have demanded closer vetting of Syrian refugees or refused to accept them from Washington. In light of the fact that at least one attacker in Paris had a Syrian passport, and that high numbers of those entering Europe are neither Syrian nor refugees, the governors’ concern seems prudent rather than pernicious. Slandering them for prioritizing the safety of their own citizens is as galling as it is cowardly.
The president’s clear intention was to use the aftermath of the Paris atrocity to make excuses and launch partisan political attacks. It will be difficult to unify against ISIS behind a man who is more interested in dividing his own countrymen.
Obama’s remarks on Monday morning could have been his “Tear Down This Wall” moment, his “Never Give In.” Instead, we got “I’m Too Busy for That.”
Obama’s remarks in Turkey will be studied in history and foreign policy curricula for years to come as a prideful dereliction of leadership. (For more from the author of “After Paris, Obama’s Abandonment of Leadership” please click HERE)
President Vladimir Putin vowed to hunt down those responsible for blowing up a Russian airliner over Egypt and intensified air strikes against militants in Syria, after the Kremlin concluded a bomb had destroyed the plane last month, killing 224 people.
Putin ordered the Russian navy in the eastern Mediterranean to coordinate its actions on the sea and in the air with the French navy, after the Kremlin used long-range bombers and cruise missiles in Syria and announced it would expand its strike force by 37 planes.
“We will find them anywhere on the planet and punish them,” Putin said of the plane bombers at a somber Kremlin meeting broadcast on Tuesday. The FSB security service swiftly announced a $50 million bounty in a global manhunt for the bombers.
Until Tuesday, Russia had played down assertions from Western countries that the Oct. 31 crash was the work of terrorists, saying it was important to let the official investigation run its course.
But four days after Islamist gunmen and bombers killed at least 129 people in Paris, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, said in televised comments that traces of foreign-made explosive had been found on fragments of the downed plane and on passengers’ personal belongings. (Read more from “Putin Vows Payback After Confirmation of Egypt Plane Bomb” HERE)
Even as the hunt continues for suspects in the Paris terror bombings, some Western intelligence officials have already identified their culprit: Edward Snowden.
London Mayor Boris Johnson says the former National Security Agency contractor, who two years ago outed the U.S. government’s program of telephone and Internet surveillance, effectively taught terrorists “how to avoid being caught.” CIA Director John Brennan complained Monday that “a number of unauthorized disclosures” in recent years about the extent of federal snooping has made tracking terrorists “much more challenging.” Snowden also drew a borderline-profane slam on Twitter over the weekend from former George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino.
No evidence has surfaced yet that Snowden’s revelations made a difference in this case, or that the perpetrators of Friday’s attacks used encrypted communications to conceal their activities. Many private-sector computer specialists surveyed by POLITICO were skeptical about those arguments, which if true would mesh with more than a year of warnings from intelligence officials about the growing ability of terrorists and criminals to hide their tracks online.
Still, there’s no denying the political context. The criticism of Snowden comes as intelligence officials seek to reopen a debate over the balance between security and privacy — a balance that seemed, before the deaths of 129 individuals in Paris, to have been settled firmly in favor of civil liberties. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have complained publicly that encryption tools — in iPhones, laptops and mobile software like Facebook-owned WhatsApp — allow terrorists, drug dealers and other criminals to “go dark” and avoid monitoring.
“We’ve had a public debate. That debate was defined by Edward Snowden, right, and the concern about privacy,” former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “I think we’re now going to have another debate about that. It’s going to be defined by what happened in Paris.” (Read more from “Intelligence Officials Are Blaming Snowden for Paris” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-16 21:04:062016-04-11 10:56:04Intelligence Officials Are Blaming Snowden for Paris
On Saturday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reminded the media about a very important immigration security measure he introduced—one that was opposed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of his opponents for the presidential nomination. On June 19, 2013, Paul introduced an amendment [S.Amdt. 1200 to S. 744 (Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act)] to the Gang of Eight bill requiring DHS to establish a screening system for those who come from 27 predominantly Islamic countries on student visas. Rubio joined with the Democrats to scuttle it.
Rand Paul is absolutely correct to raise the red flag on student visas from the Middle East and take Rubio to task for obstructing the amendment.
In addition to the broader threat of Islamic immigration and refugees, one of the overlooked trends since 9/11 is the massive expansion of foreign students from the Middle East. As we’ve noted before, the creation of the Saudi King Abdullah Scholarship program a decade ago has resulted in a ten-fold increase in visas from Saudi Arabia. At 60,000 per year, the program is still growing and can expand infinitely because there are no caps on F-1 visas.
The Institute of International Education recently published its data on student visas for the academic year of 2014/2015. Here are some highlights:
974,926 foreign students were admitted for this past academic year, almost double the overall level before 9/11.
After China, India, and South Korea, the leading country of origin is Saudi Arabia with 59,945 student visas. In addition, we took in 10,724 from Turkey, 11, 338 from Iran, and 9,034 from Kuwait.
Using the 44 predominantly Muslim countries we identified in our piece on green cards from Muslim countries, I counted 156,781 student visas from those same predominantly Muslim countries. This means that Muslims likely account for 16% of the foreign students, and that doesn’t include India. Roughly 10% of the Indian population is Muslim and we bring in a whopping 138,000 students from there.
Is there any wonder why U.S. college campuses are replicas of some European countries in terms of the anti-Jewish activity and pro-Palestinian activism?
In many respects, the growing silent threat of foreign students from the Middle East is an even greater threat than the legal permanent residents (LPRs). These are predominantly young male students who are coming straight from the Middle East and, unlike LPRs, have no plans to establish a family or even attempt to share in the future of this country (to the extent most legal permanent residents ever viably achieve assimilation). We are literally recruiting from the subsection of the world that is most prone to subscribing to strict Sharia and Islamic supremacism, from those that have the zeal and energy to act on callings from ISIS and other terror groups.
As is the case with any other sphere of immigration, there are likely plenty of students who come here to learn and be productive. But there are clearly many others who bring with them the subversive and often anti-Semitic culture they have been exposed to back home. Moreover, their constant migration back and forth to their countries of origin throughout their time in U.S. universities makes them prime recruiting targets of professional Jihadist organizations.
This is why Paul’s amendment was so important. His plan would have reinstated the National Security Exit-Entry Registration System (NSEERS), which was implemented after 9/11 to properly vet and track those who come here from risky countries on a student visa. Obama unilaterally cancelled that program in 2010. To the extent we continue to commit cultural suicide and radicalize our college campuses with so many Middle Eastern students, it is certifiable not to properly monitor them.
It is simply unacceptable for a presidential candidate to have opposed such an effort. Rubio has some explaining to do. And so do all politicians who blithely ignore our suicidal immigration policies. (For more from the author of “The Other Gaping Security Hole: Student Visas From the Middle East” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-11-16 21:03:422016-04-11 10:56:04The Other Gaping Security Hole: Student Visas From the Middle East
