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a-long-walk-in-the-forest · 3 years

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Do you think the villages are cults? In my opinion, they do score quite high on the BITE model

Hello, I’m going to give a very poorly thought out and messy answer so I apologize in advance.

It isn’t really an answer to your question just my ramblings about my confusion about the term cult.

I’m not really qualified to speak on any matter concerning sociology since It’s outside my field of expertise and I’m kind of confused about what a cult is, the term to me, without further research, implies a vaguely malicious organization that engages in brainwashing and causes some sort of harm.

I looked at the definition of the word itself and it’s a word with several different definitions, most of which are very broad:

According to the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), the term cult originally referred to

worship; reverential homage rendered to a divine being or beings ... a particular form or system of religious worship; especially in reference to its external rites and ceremonies ... devotion or homage to a particular person or thing.

More recently, the term has taken on additional connotations:

A religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious...

A system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator...

a. great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work...

b. a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, 1994)

If we go based on these definitions almost anything can be considered a cult.

I briefly looked at google scholar for articles regarding the topic (I’m not sure which sources are considered reputable in this field so that is also a problem). I had a brief look at this and this. I also looked at this which said:

Robbins’s (1988) review of recent sociological contributions to the study of cults identifies four definitional perspectives:

cults as dangerous, authoritarian groups

cults as culturally innovative or transcultural groups

cults as loosely structured protoreligions

Stark and Bainbridge’s (1985) subtypology that distinguishes among audience cults (members seek to receive information—e.g., through a lecture or tape series), client cults (members seek some specific benefit—e.g., psychotherapy, spiritual guidance), and cult movements (organizations that demand a high level of commitment from members).

Rutgers University professor Benjamin Zablocki (1997) says that sociologists often distinguish cult from church, sect, and denomination. Cults are innovative, fervent groups. If they become accepted into the mainstream, cults, in his view, lose their fervor and become more organized and integrated into the community; they become churches. When people within churches become dissatisfied and break off into fervent splinter groups, the new groups are called sects. As sects become more stolid and integrated into the community, they become denominations. Zablocki defines a cult as “an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and demanding total commitment.” According to Zablocki, cults are at high risk of becoming abusive to members, in part because members’ adulation of charismatic leaders contributes to those leaders becoming corrupted by the power they seek and are accorded.

Definitions proposed at various times by associates of ICSA tend to presume the manifestation of what is potential in Zablocki’s definition. These definitions tend to emphasize elements of authoritarian structure, deception, and manipulation, and the fact that groups may be psychotherapeutic, political, or commercial, as well as religious. One of the more commonly quoted definitions of cult was articulated at an ICSA/UCLA Wingspread Conference on Cultism in 1985:

This part is what I’m assuming you mean by cult

Cult (totalist type): A group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it…), designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community. (West & Langone, 1986, pp. 119–120)

From what I understood, it goes on to say that it’s hard to label many organizations/movements as cults (has to be looked at on a case by case basis and a lot of the time there isn’t a consensus) and the lists are only things that could be cults and aren’t necessarily cults (it also greatly depends on which exact definition you are using). The other source mentioned how the term should be avoided in legal and academic matters for various reasons.

This made me question the validity of available predictive models as from what I know, having accurate and reliable data is necessary for an accurate and reliable model. A naive example would be if we wanted to predict an disease (Di) based on various symptoms (S1, S2, S3) we would have to have a bunch of data with these labels (so for example person Pi has Di and has S1 and S2 but not S3, we have these correctly labeled for n people) then we make a model based on a part of this data which will have a certain accuracy that we will check from the rest of this dataset.

If we can’t say for sure if various organizations are really cults or not then the datasets that we are building our models from are very arbitrary and inaccurate so our model isn’t very reliable. I’m going to stress again that I don’t know the first thing about sociology and I only had a brief look at some articles.

There was another source that proposed looking at various key words that were published along with the word cult for various time period to get an understanding of what the term is mostly associated with during different time periods. This method obviously also has its shortcomings and basically I have no idea.

There was this fairly recent article that said this in its abstract:

I tried to introduce a new category, “criminal religious movements,” including groups that either (or both) consistently practice and justify common crimes such as terrorism, child abuse, rape, physical violence, homicide, and serious economic crimes, as opposite to the vague or imaginary crimes of “being a cult” or “brainwashing members.” The paper argues that there would be definite advantages in replacing categories such as xie jiao, “destructive cults,” and “extremist religions” (the latter now fashionable in Russia) with “criminal religious movements,” a notion that would refer to ascertained crimes perpetrated by each movement rather than to notions so vague that they become dangerous for religious liberty.

I only read the abstract but from this I concluded that it probably really is a vague (and somewhat problematic) term. This is to say, I have no clue what a cult actually is and what model is accurate, how to judge its accuracy, ...

I also don’t think the model you mentioned is very good. It has many parts that seem questionable and dangerous to religious freedom and the person who wrote it seems very biased to me. Still, I don’t know much about the subject and I’ll leave it to people who know what they’re talking about.

If I go by just intuition and that one definition (the ICSA/UCLA Wingspread Conference one) then I’m going to say yes (since we don’t know much about the other villages I’m only talking about the leaf). The excessive devotion is there (although what constitutes as excessive is up to personal interpretation to some extent, I think the grey of their case is close enough to black to be categorized as such), they employ unethical tactics for manipulation and control (much of it is canonically unethical, hence their insistence on hiding it and their various excuses), for the leader and to the detriment of the community part is somewhat grey but overall I do think it was more a personal matter than genuinely caring about the community for most leaders (particularly the council but others as well). In general though, I can’t say for sure.

If you made it this far I apologize again for not being able to answer your question properly and hope you have a good day.

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creepingsharia · 4 years

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Notre Dame prof hails Islamic law, asks international law judges to consider “referring to parts of sharia”

Add sharia and another professor to this list: American Professors Whitewash Islamic Terror

h/t Christine Douglass-Williams who writes:

Powell’s skewed view of the Sharia is deceptive, propagandistic and dangerous. There is no comparison between international law (which is democracy-based) and Sharia (which is authoritarian and discriminatory). The violence, human rights abuses and murders committed throughout history in the name of Islam are not an aberration. They are reflections of normative Islam, fully backed by Islamic jurisprudence, which teaches the murder of apostates and gays, the conquest and subjugation of infidels, and the inferiority of women, including the head coverings (Quran 24:31, Quran 33:59) about which Powell fallaciously rambles. The arrogance displayed by Powell is also an affront to Muslim dissidents who face (and experience) imprisonment (and worse) for opposing the human rights abuses sanctioned by Islamic law. Powell’s potential influence on the young minds who must listen to her propaganda in the classroom is concerning. And she is not unique; in fact, in many colleges and universities today, she is the norm.

Islamic law and international law share many similarities, Notre Dame Professor says

The very term Sharia conjures negative images in the minds of many Westerners, in part due to its association with extremist groups. However, an in-depth look at Islamic law, as practiced in the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, reveals that it is interpreted in different ways depending on the country, its culture and the very people conducting the interpretation.

Notre Dame’s Emilia Justyna Powell, an associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law, an expert in both international law and the Islamic legal tradition, traveled to many Muslim-majority nations to research how the two systems work together in practice. Her findings were published earlier this year in the volume Islamic Law and International Law: Peaceful Resolution of Disputes.

Powell uses the differences in how women dress in various Muslim-majority countries as an analogy for the various interpretations of Sharia.

“A perfect visualization is women’s head coverings. The Taliban encourages women to cover top to bottom, not even showing the eyes. In Saudi Arabia, sometimes eyes are visible but not much else,” she said. “I was recently in Bahrain where I witnessed a new trend: Women are unzipping their abayas and you can see Western-influenced clothing underneath like jeans, ruffles and lace. Many women don’t wear the hijab scarf there and some only wear it halfway on. But who’s to say which is correct? Bahrain is no less Islamic than Saudi Arabia, for example, just different. People in all Muslim-majority countries interpret and, thus, practice the Muslim faith differently.”

International law itself is based on a broad set of norms agreed upon by people from many different nations and cultures. It is also heavily based on Western law which, itself, has deep roots in Christianity — a religion that originated at a time when Roman law was already well established. “Islam, on the other hand, had no a priori legal system to work with other than unwritten tribal customs,” Powell writes. And, while international law has moved to a more secular model, Islamic law remains based in the writings of the Quran and the sunna as well as ijma (judicial consensus) and qiyas (analogical reasoning).

“However, disconcerting the dissonance between the Islamic legal tradition and international law may appear, there are more similarities between these two legal systems than the policy world and the scholarship take into account,” she writes.

By its broad nature, international law allows for interpretation based on norms in individual countries. And many Muslim-majority states have their own declaration of human rights, she notes.

“Sometimes international law promotes the peaceful resolution of disputes, but does not give specific rules or cite specific laws for how to do so. Countries can mediate, peacefully, via negotiation in compliance with international law. Sometimes Muslim-majority countries will also sign international treaties but place restrictions on them — what are technically called ‘reservations.’”

For example, some Muslim-majority countries use reservations to remove “freedom of religion” clauses, because their religion is inextricably part of their culture, with the assumption (often part of the country’s own understanding of human rights) that many of their citizens are all Muslim. In this way, Powell says, they are complying with some international norms but allowing for their identity to remain intact.

Powell also examines how Muslim-majority nations in different geographical areas use Sharia and work within the international law framework. In general, Powell finds that if an ILS (Islamic Law State) country has a secular court system and their constitution mentions peaceful resolutions of disputes, they possess a more favorable attitude toward international courts.

“The Islamic milieu is not a monolith. In each of the ILS, secular law and Islamic law coalesce to create a unique legal framework. Every one of the ILS is different in how it negotiates the relationship between these two legal forces — the religious and the secular — along with their respective differences in socio-demographic and political characteristics. Historically, every one of the ILS has worked out its own unique answers to the question of the balance of Islamic law and secular law,” she writes.

The examples Powell gathered through interviews shed light on the cultural and religious lenses through which many Muslims view courts.

“One of my interviewees, former Jordanian Ambassador Omar Rifai, explained to me, ‘Through the court you are talking to an enemy. When you are talking directly, it could be a brother or a cousin, but when you resort to the court, it means you have given up on finding a peaceful solution or a solution between friends or brothers.’” she writes. “This statement describes relations between individuals as well as ILS collectivities. Even though Islamic law and international law put a premium on peaceful resolution of disputes, each of these legal systems has a different conception of this process. On the individual level, people who carry on the Islamic legal tradition simply embrace unique values promoted by Islam.”

Powell’s interest in researching Islamic law further is driven, in part, by the bias she sees toward Western law to the point of absolute exclusion of any facets of Islamic law in international law. In fact, some international court judges she interviewed were irritated when she asked if they would ever consider referring to parts of Sharia.

“Out of all the religions of the world, we’ve contributed to a large-scale misunderstanding of their legal tradition,” Powell said. “Islamic law and international law share many more similarities than they are given credit for.”

#Legal #Islam #Sharia #Muslim #Jihad #News #Education #Politics #Media #Travel #Immigration

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backstorywithdanalewis · 3 years

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White Terror America on Back Story with Dana Lewis podcast link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/7307512

Trump: (00:00) My fellow Americans. I want to speak to you tonight about the troubling events of the past week. As I have said, the incursion of the U S Capitol struck at the very heart of our Republic, it angered and appalled millions of Americans across the political spectrum. I want to be very clear. I unequivocally condemn the violence Dana Lewis - Host: (00:32) That was president Trump impeached for a second time this week saying he doesn't support violence. And do you believe that after all his calls to fight saying the election result was false and to this moment, refusing to admit he lost his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani called for trial by combat. Hi everyone. I'm Dana Lewis and welcome to this edition of backstory on white terrorism in America. And it shouldn't be called anything, but that I've spent a lifetime as a journalist covering terrorism around the globe. And it all looks a lot like what's developing in America from the middle East to Russia, to Afghanistan and on and on bus bombs to hostage, takings, fanatics old who justified their bloody rampage because their cause they think is just president. Trump's absolutely false claims of a stolen election have been rejected by every court, but it's ignited people who believe their president was a victim. This guy beat a policemen on the ground with an American flag. And before his arrest, he said, yeah, protester: (01:41) deaths the only remedy for what's in that building. Well, everybody in there is a traitor Dana Lewis - Host: (01:49) Trader and here's policemen, Michael fanone who was dragged down the steps of the Capitol and was going to be shot with his own gun Policeman: (01:58) Fight as best I could. Uh, I remember like guys were stripping me and my gear, these riders, uh, pulling my badge off my chest. Um, they ripped my radio also of, uh, of my vest started pulling, uh, like ammunition magazines from their holder on my belt. And then some guys started getting ahold of my gun and, uh, they were screaming out, um, you know, kill him with his own gun. Um, at that point, you know, it was just like self preservation. Um, you know, how do I survive this situation? And I thought about, you know, using deadly force, I thought about shooting people. Um, and then I just came to the conclusion that, you know, if I was to do that, I might get a few, but I'm not going to take everybody. And they'll probably take my gun away from me. And that would definitely give them the justification that they were looking for to kill me. Policeman: (02:57) Uh, if they already didn't have made that up in their minds. So the other option I thought of was you knew trying to appeal to somebody as humanity. Um, and I, I just remember yelling out that I have kids and, uh, it seemed to work. Um, some people in the crowd started to in circle me and try to offer me some level of protection. A lot of people have asked me, you know, my faults on, uh, the individuals in the crowd that, um, you know, that helped me, uh, or try to offer some assistance. Uh, and I think kind of the conclusion I've come to is like, you know, thank you, but fuck you for being there. Dana Lewis - Host: (03:42) Okay, there are lots of pictures and evidence that there were dozens of white supremacists at the Capitol rally fighting police hunting inside with zip ties to handcuff, and God knows, do what with lawmakers, extremist groups, including the pro-Trump far right antigovernment oath keepers, and the three percenters, a loose antigovernment network. That's part of the militia movement. The hateful imagery included an antisemitic camp Auschwitz sweatshirt created years ago by white supremacists who sold them on the now defunct website. Arion were also among the rioters were members of the griper army, a loose network of white nationalists, the white supremacist, New Jersey European heritage association, and the far right extremist proud boys to name a few. The growth of white supremacists is international, frightening and hard to control. And that brings us to our interview on white supremacy in America and beyond. All right, joining me now from New York is Naureen Chowdhury Fink,. uh, the executive director of the Soufan center, which is pretty much a security focused think tank or that's how I would describe it, uh, based in Washington and in New York. Hi, Naureen how are you? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (05:08) Hi, Dana. Good morning from where I'm sitting in New York. Thanks for having me. Dana Lewis - Host: (05:12) It's an incredible time in America. And what would you say is the biggest security threat right now? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (05:19) Um, you use the word incredible because I think none of us could have imagined the year we're looking at, you know, not just COVID. Um, but everything else we're saying, you asked about the biggest security threat. And I think that in the midst of a pandemic, we are seeing white supremacist and conspiracy theorists, and anti-government groups willing to use terrorism in the name of political change in, in the United States. And to me, that is the most. Um, and, and not just to me, certainly by, by many intelligence assessments and accounts, the greatest terrorist threats to the United States right now. And it's me, Dana Lewis - Host: (05:54) This was a long way in a very short time from the days of Dana Lewis - Host: (05:58) Nine 11 and Al-Qaeda, and, and, uh, you know, Islamic groups, uh, excellent Islamic extremist groups, uh, representing a threat to the United States. How suddenly has this mushroom so quickly? If I can say it's quick? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (06:13) Sure. Well, I think, I mean, first of all, it's been, we're looking at the 20th year anniversary coming up of nine 11. So it has been two decades and an eventful one at that. So we've seen things evolve and change. I think we've seen the white supremacist groups, you know, it, there's a long history there and certainly you and I just very briefly mentioned the headline. Exactly. So we are building on, uh, you know, we are building on a movement that has been there for quite some time, certainly in this country, but we know that a lot of dynamics, sometimes I hate to use the word accelerate in this context, but you know, you have catalysts and certainly with the infusion of the internet disinformation queue and on, um, sort of this deteriorating trust in government, um, I'm going to use a really long word and mess it up here. Anti-establishment, Marianism kind of take, you know, take, hold in the United States and elsewhere. I think we've seen a kind of perfect storm and no pun intended with the capital. Dana Lewis - Host: (07:15) All right. As we talked to Noreen, I should mention that she was the senior policy advisor on counter-terrorism and sanctions at the UK mission to the United nations. I mean, Naureen, you're not new to this. You've been doing this for a long time. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (07:27) That's right. More than I care to more years than I care to admit in public, but I've been looking at this, you know, for about 15, 16 years now. And one of the things I think has been remarkable as much as we talk about nine 11, certainly being the linchpin of counter-terrorism discussions for many years, this has also been a global phenomenon. And I think you, you know, when, when we talk about the security risk in the United States, we need to remember there are others abroad watching, planning to emulate, and these dynamics, you know, build on each other, right. We saw white supremacist groups really take heart in under his brave acts attack in Norway. I mean, the fact that he was able to kill like 70 kids and, and, you know, the greatest terrorist attack, um, in Norway and in much of Europe and it really served as fodder for, for groups abroad. And so what happens in the United States, certainly the greatest security threat we're seeing here may well have also international repercussions. We've already seen the attacks and Christ church attacks in Norway, and we will see more, unfortunately. So it's in the United States and beyond Trump, Dana Lewis - Host: (08:34) It was regularly downplayed the threat of white supremacist violence during his presidency. He said there were some very fine people among the extremists who sparked violence in Charlottesville in 2017. He called black lives matter, a symbol of hate, and he's regularly, regularly pushed narratives on Twitter that emphasize violence against white Americans. He seeks to Curry support in the suburbs. What would you say about Donald Trump's role in the growth of extremism within the United States and specifically white supremacy? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (09:08) You know, um, when I was growing up parents and family, friends used to say, you're known by the company you keep and that's how you'll be judged. And I think it says a lot about the fact that we had a president of the United States that was willing to serve just one community and one set of interests rather than the country as a whole. He has, we have seen provided a critical figurehead. Um, he has broken the seal on what is permissible in public, what you say, what you do and how you even conceptualize this country. And I think we, you know, it, it will be really hard to put that genie back in the bottle, whether he stays, whether he goes, he has provided that kind of ideological centerpiece for divisiveness in this country. And he has made it acceptable to use terrorist tactics to achieve the goals he talks about. So, um, I I'm afraid that, you know, whether he stays or whether he goes, and of course, whether he goes and what kind of accountability there is for the acts that he has incited, um, and committed, uh, will have a lot to do with the outcome. But the fact that he did it at all for the last four years and the fact that we have seen four years of growth and development in this narrative, the Q1 on movement, um, and the fact of polarization, I think there's grave damage done already Dana Lewis - Host: (10:34) Is mega make America great. Again, that movement is that a terror threat, James Clooney, the former head of the FBI says it is or aspects of it to quote him directly. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (10:48) I think that's a very important nuance aspects of it. We certainly live in a country where people are free to have different ideas of what constitutes greatness and government. And certainly, um, you know, I, I like to think America was great before, but if they feel, you know, if there's aspects of the maca movement that think there should be improvements in government, I would very, I'd be very hesitant and to live in a country where they couldn't have their say. What I think is extraordinary is when it tips into the use of violence, as we saw in the Capitol, you know, what happened on the Capitol, doesn't just, um, it will not obviously just affect Democrats once that is done. The use of violence for that kind of politics, um, should have been a seal that we never break. And so I don't, I don't really want to talk about the, the Maga movement as a whole, because as in any political movements, we will see nuances and layers of, you know, some people just have different political ideas and we can disagree, but debate them. Um, and some people who are willing to use violence, I think it's that latter group. We need to be careful, Dana Lewis - Host: (11:56) Bigger role. Do you think white nationalism played in the attack on the Capitol Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (12:01) A huge role? I mean, if we just look at the images, just imagine that was a group of Muslims. I mean, we talked about nine 11, we talked about the last 20 years of the global war on terror. If that was a group from the Muslim community in the United States storming the Capitol, we would not be debating the nuances of terminology like insurrection or terrorism or, you know, rebellion. We, we would, we would certainly be here at called out as terrorism. Um, and so I think there was undoubtedly a sense of entitlement, a sense of privilege, a sense of impunity tied to white supremacist and white nationalist ideas. You know, we sitting here in Brooklyn and New York, we, we saw last year what the black lives matter protests were treated like. Um, we can imagine, as I said, if these were communities, not just Muslim communities, any communities of color that tried to, to, um, perpetrate those acts we saw last week, um, the, you know, there would be no debate about a law enforcement response. A lot of this has to do with the community feeling so entitled and so privileged and able to do this. So, Dana Lewis - Host: (13:11) So in a way we see shockingly off-duty policemen that were in that crowd, flashing badges, assaulting other policemen, or using their badges to gain an access fireman, um, you know, uh, elected members of office, uh, soccer moms. But I mean, there were official people there from, and a lot of these policemen have gone back to their States now and they have been suspended and will probably be prosecuted Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (13:38) The, in the coming days and weeks, we will see what, what appears to be a very strong, our response to those who have dishonored their badges, um, and participated in this. But, you know, we are seeing reports of infiltration across the world in different law enforcement, military police, um, armed services, uh, by white supremacist far, right. Extremist groups, you know, and we have to remember, these are individuals as well. There is no, um, uniform, uh, sort of, uh, code, you know, sorry, there's a uniform code. I mean, there's no universal kind of person, right? So we will see individuals of different political and ideological color. I think it's gravely, gravely concerning. And I think very much a sort of white supremacist, um, entitlement means that many signs of this may have gone under, um, under noticed under reported. And, you know, we at the Soufan center and, and others have been calling out the white supremacist threat as something that needs to be taken far more seriously needs, far more resources, um, a lot of to it. And we hadn't seen that happening. I mean, in Germany. Dana Lewis - Host: (14:48) In fact, in fact, I read that Ali Soufan was formerly with the FBI and dealt with international terrorism. In fact, he has been threatened for his calls to name some of these groups, terrorist groups and have, and have them outlawed. I mean, if, if I can use that term Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (15:07) Well, absolutely. And I think, um, the, the, the Soufan center was out front last year, calling this out as the next greatest domestic, uh, threat from domestic terrorism, but we still did not see the kind of preventive action, the kind of resources, allot allotted to investigate and understand and preempt this threat as we saw with, with G Dana Lewis - Host: (15:31) Well, why is that? Is it because they underestimate them or because they accept them? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (15:37) Well, I think it is easier to talk about the threat outside where you don't have political financial, familial community relationships. Right. We can talk about international terrorist groups says we can talk about monitoring individuals abroad or from abroad because the, not us, it's not in our community. And so from a political social economic point of view, and in many ways it's easier to monitor foreign threats. Legally speaking, of course, we don't have a domestic terrorism law, and so we can take different kinds of action when the threat is from abroad. Um, Dana Lewis - Host: (16:17) So just explain that to me because a lot of people don't understand that. I mean, if you classify some of these groups, like for instance, proud boys or gags and flags, or, I mean, whatever, the, whatever the group is, if you classify them as a terrorist organization, then that allows the FBI a lot more leeway in terms of investigating them in terms of surveillance, in terms of monitoring, uh, electronic surveillance and also physical surveillance and all of that. And, and it allows people to look into their financing, doesn't it? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (16:54) Absolutely. And I think that latter clause is especially important also because it means you can look at material support to these groups. And we know that, you know, such groups don't just recruit fighters and finance here's right there, there are now advertising for doctors and medics and logisticians and whatnot. So they are looking at, uh, they're looking for a wide array of material support and classifying. Yes. In fact, there are echoing very much, you know, what ISIS had done ISIS had said, you don't have to be a fighter to come to the caliphate. You can come be a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, you know, come be who you want to be in the caliphate. And we are seeing a lot of, um, a lot of that now where groups are putting out ads saying, for example, you know, you don't have to be a fighter if you want to be like a medic and come help us. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (17:41) And we're seeing ads and pictures like that. Um, so I think they definitely speak to each other. Um, more broadly we've seen white supremacist groups really echo some of the learning from jihadist groups from all of, from ISIS, you know, how to make bombs, how to radicalize, how to organize, how to mobilize. They're definitely learning from each other. So yes, to your question, um, uh, domestic terror, uh, terrorism law would enable a lot of the actions, which you outlined. However, there's also a very valid concern about the potential for overreach, right? And if we, and how do we make sure that there's very strong criteria for designating a group as terrorists? You know, I would be very wary of others who would want to suddenly, um, you know, designate black lives matter protests as terrorist action. Um, I would be wary of using the terrorism label all the time, without really thinking through the repercussions on civilization. Dana Lewis - Host: (18:37) It was pretty simple to me, you know, and, and I, and I don't say it in a naive way because I've been in other countries where they have tried to deal with some of these groups. And if you say, if you designate somebody, a terror group, you were saying that they are going to take some kind of armed action to terrorize the public or represent a, a armed threat to the state. So it's not that, you know, you don't like a posting on the, on the internet. Then you say that, you know, he's a terrorist. It, it would have to be some kind of planned conspiracy to develop a physical threat and attack in America is, is why is it so complicated? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (19:22) Well, I think because many of the actions that we would consider preparatory or leading up to it are protected in the United States. So you have free speech, which allows you to say whatever, you know, certainly there's hate speech, but you know, a lot of the preparatory speech and narrative, and, you know, what we would, you know, even in, in the UK and other places, maybe look at online harms and incitement, um, in the United States, it's protected. Of course you can carry weapons here, so you can save many of these things and you can carry your weapon and you can happen to be walking past, you know, somewhere that you think is a good target. And until the moment you do something, all of those actions are protected. Um, I think so in the United States for good and for bad, many of these actions are protected. And so it is a more difficult conversation where you draw the line between protect constitutionally protected actions and speech. Dana Lewis - Host: (20:16) I think that lawmakers are prepared to draw that line. Now, though, more than they've ever been given what's happened. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (20:23) I think there will be increasing calls to look into it. And I'm, and I'm choosing my words carefully. Dana Lewis - Host: (20:29) That sounds a bit weak, not on your part, but you don't feel that it's reached this tipping point after the, the assault on the Capitol that lawmakers now will say, okay, that's it. I mean, groups like proud boys, Nazi and white supremacists, um, th that are engaging in recruiting, uh, and calling for violence. Then we have to act on that before it happens. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (20:59) I mean, there's an argument to be made and others will. I'm sorry, I've been doing a lot of, you know, I've been doing academic research and diplomacy for a while, so I will have to look at both sides, but I think there are others who will say, you can prosecute this without, you know, you can prosecute acts of murder. You can prosecute prepper, preparatory, acts towards violence, and you can prosecute incitement to violence. Um, I think that there are cases where, of course the, the terrorism label, um, and the having a domestic terror terrorism statute is important. I, I think they will be looking into it. I think it is one of the most fundamentally difficult questions to address when it's constitutional protections. We're talking about, Dana Lewis - Host: (21:42) Maybe it's better to talk about this in terms of smaller steps than at the very least these groups are now more than ever on the FBI's and Homeland security's radar. You think now they are going to start assigning more people to it, understanding that it represents a grave threat to the nation. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (21:59) Absolutely. I think we're going to see more resources allocated. I think very importantly, you know, we talked about a sense of entitlement and impunity. You'll also see more senior leaders speaking out against it. You will see more law enforcement attention to it, which means as you say, you know, resources. And like I said, these groups don't exist in an American vacuum. They have partners, funders, um, supporters abroad in similar groups. And so the more there is action at a senior level in the United States with the FBI and law enforcement agencies and politicians, it also means in other countries that we can partner up with them and make sure we address the transnational dimension of these issues. Dana Lewis - Host: (22:41) Where else, if you were just to name off the top five or two or three, w where else do you see them really proliferating, uh, in a worrisome level internationally? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (22:50) Sure. Well, we've seen in Germany reports that some of the most elite law enforcement and police and military teams have been infiltrated by far right groups. We've also seen the German government take very early and decisive action to allocate resources and, and address this head on, you know, I think it was, uh, I want to say $80 million was maybe euros. I'm sorry about that. I don't have the exact figure, but a large amount of money in the 80 million, um, uh, sort of estimate has been allocated now to look into it. The government is on notice and very public in, uh, you know, in addressing this as a threat, calling it unacceptable, unacceptable, and launching investigations. Certainly Norway we saw after the brave Vic attacks went very, very quickly into, um, you know, investing a lot more in prevention and addressing violent extremism, writ large, and certainly New Zealand. And in the aftermath of the attacks in Christ church, we have seen, they launched the Christ church call and are working very closely to look at the online dimension of this. And this is what the UK also supported. Um, prime minister, Boris Johnson had committed resources to looking at what is happening online to these groups so that we can work on, um, addressing their online presence. Dana Lewis - Host: (24:09) Do you think it is in America because probably a lot of people had the impression that, you know, there's some guys living up in the mountains in Tennessee or something, and, uh, you know, that it's very fringe, it seems like it's evolved to become far more mainstream. When I take a look at some of those videos, uh, from around the Capitol, I was shocked at that and, and, and read about the different groups that were participating. I mean, proud boys, Q Anon, um, which is a right-wing wingy cult, Nazi and white supremacists, including, you know, wearing this shirt shirt, Candace. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (24:50) Yeah. And the six M w E. Okay. Dana Lewis - Host: (24:53) Uh, noose was posted around the Capitol, which is apparently a fantasy day of, of the rope that traders will be hanged in the street gags, then flags yellow, American flags that dates back to 1778, uh, you know, w w with the rattlesnake and the words don't tread on me from the revolutionary war, the 3% are flag, which, um, I thought it's quite ominous in its own way, because it said it took only 3% of American people to revolt against the British. And in this context, it's a signal that a small number of so-called Patriots, all you, that's all you need for a successful revolution. I mean, there, there's a wide berth of very bizarre groups there that any of them stand out to you or do all of them. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (25:38) Yeah. I think it's exactly what you've just said. You've kind of hit it on the nail. It's the fact that it's many, many different groups kind of coalescing into a similar worldview. Right. Um, I think it is much more widespread. Like you, I think one of the most, like you just said, one of the most horrifying images for me was that news outside the Capitol, you know, we're, we're so transfixed on the kind of dramatic Q Anon shaman and his horns that we forget that the new, some of the zip ties is really the image, um, that we should, I think be very, very concerned about because so many different groups coalesced around these ideas, the ideas that the governments are traders, the ideas that the democratic process itself needs to be appended. So I D this is not certainly a fringe movement. Uh, we've heard a lot of families say that, you know, this is a concern in my community. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (26:31) I can no longer talk to family members because they're on some spectrum of these ideologies. Um, you know, I think we, we do have to remember, like we've seen with all Qaeda with ISIS, you know, there are some people who, because they're anonymous online, they get, they can say what they want. There's no real consequence. It requires no real courage or action or commitment to say things online. Um, what I think the problem of, you know, one of the many problems with the Capitol attack is that it mobilized people to move from an online world where things are just fantasies and maybe don't require commitment. And when you have an example of people that did follow through with action, it creates a kind of, um, you know, a Mo a very mobilizing narrative for those who may have been maybe on the, um, on the fence about whether to move from the online, into the real world. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (27:24) Um, at the same time, we know that just having a few activists, um, often they can be successful when there are layers of support behind them. You know, the ideologues, the narrators, the small financeers, the small businesses that support them, the communities that back them up, you know, the moms that defend them, the dads that egg them on, you know, um, all of these, um, you know, so I think when we look at not just those who are willing to take action, but the wide group of people that are willing to support them, I mean, just looking at the support for presence Dana Lewis - Host: (27:57) And how do you, how do you fight that? I mean, yeah, looking at the support for president Trump, and he's got a lot of it, but, you know, maybe he will fade, but, and maybe he won't, but how do you deal with that scope of so many people that have been told by him that the election wasn't free? It wasn't fair. It was a fraud, it was stolen from you, stop the steal we have to fight. And that, that message, uh, you know, is, is pretty dangerous because I, you know, I, uh, a couple of the interviews with people who went to that re that riot, um, a few months ago, uh, were not that radicalized on the internet. And so a lot of it has been compressed, uh, as, as we've, as we've heard this constant echo of president Trump saying it's been stolen from us. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (28:49) Well, part of that compression day now will also be the impact of COVID-19. There are more people at home, the more people that are scared, uncertain, spending time online, and, you know, we've seen UN reports, we've heard widespread, um, reporting there, more young people spending all day online. They, there are people with, you know, who've lost their jobs, lost their homes. And so I have to say, it's, it's really not surprising that this has all accelerated and compressed against the backdrop of a lockdown, an unprecedented global shutdown of, you know, other valves for engagement. Um, and so I think that this is not something we have seen necessarily on this scale, because we haven't had this background. Uh, we talked a bit again earlier about the 20 years since nine 11, we have worked on so many different iterations of counter narratives campaigns, counter campaigns, some are spectacular failures, some have shown some success, right? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (29:46) The ones that have shown success seem to be ones that are really tailored to local environments, really, based on a sound understanding of why people find some of this messaging messaging appealing. And that means we need to do better to understand where some of these groups are coming from, because it's, it looks like one big global message of kind of, um, militant does illusionism, but it is actually different groups with different kinds of, um, trajectories to get there. So I think we will have to start looking into our lessons learned over the last 20 years on counter messaging, counter narratives, and do better to understand the, the knowledge base of each of the groups that has come up, um, and how that operates online. But I really think we can't ignore the fact that this is happening against the backdrop of COVID and more people online, less interaction. Um, you know, on a whole more people are just interacting with themselves, with their families, with their very, very close friends, right? They don't even have access to people outdoors and in the long run, I, you know, we we'll see what that does to people, whether in a, in a very normal sense in the workforce and in day-to-day communities, but in these kinds of spaces, the potential effects are alarming. Dana Lewis - Host: (31:03) Norine child rethink from the Sioux fan center. You know, I think we're going to have another talk soon because there's just so much here. Um, and you know, it's not going to go away quickly. And a lot of it will depend on how the Republican party delivers its message in the future about this election. Uh, and, and whether they start saying that it was fair and they poke a hole in, in this, you know, ridiculous cloud that Trump has put over the electoral process and democracy, which right now they're not stepping up a lot. Some are, but some are not. Naureen really pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (31:43) Thank you for having me, Dana, look forward to speaking again, Dana Lewis - Host: (31:45) And that's backstory. I'm Dana Lewis, please subscribe to our podcast and sheriff my advice spend less time on social media, especially right now, spend more time watching mainstream press and TV news. And if Trump and his Q Anon followers call it fake news, that usually means it's not thanks for listening. And I'll talk to you again soon.

#@naureencfink #@soufan #@backstorywithdanalewis #whitesupremacists #capitolinsurrection #trumpandthebig lie

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newstfionline · 4 years

Text

Headlines: Thursday, October 1, 2020

Foreign observers note ‘chaos,’ ‘rancor’ in US debate (AP) “Chaos, interruptions, personal attacks and insults,” one outspoken Chinese newspaper editor said of the U.S. presidential debate. An Australian counterpart said it was “swamped” by the “rancor engulfing America.” The first debate pitting Republican President Donald Trump against Democratic challenger Joe Biden was not a highlight of political oratory in the eyes of many overseas. Yet interest ran high for its potential impact on what may be the most consequential U.S. election in years, now just over a month away. “The spiteful debate mirrors a country that is no longer even capable of having a dignified discussion,” read a scathing editorial published by Switzerland’s right-leaning Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper. Hu Xijin, editor of China’s nationalistic Communist Party tabloid Global Times, offered his opinion on the newspaper’s official microblog, writing that the “chaos, interruptions, personal attacks and insults” on display were a reflection of America’s “overarching division, anxiety and the accelerating erosion of the system’s original advantages.” The editor-at-large of the newspaper The Australian, Paul Kelly, described the debate as a “spiteful, chaotic, abusive, often out-of-control brawling encounter with both candidates revealing their contempt for each other.” A columnist for the newspaper, Peter Hoysted, called the debate a “shout-athon” and a “verbal shambles” that reflected American political life and the “yawning gap between the left and right.” A Emirati political scientist, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, asked, “How did America reach this level of political decline?”

RVs are booming (WSJ) Another effect of the pandemic, perhaps because people want to leave big cities or can work from anywhere? Thor Industries, which makes recreational vehicles, is reporting that they have an order backlog valued at $5.74 billion, up from about $2 billion a year ago. People—even younger people—are snapping up RVs, and an industry group is projecting a 19.5 percent increase in shipments come 2021. In the fiscal year ending July, sales at Thor were up 4 percent, hitting $8.17 billion.

New round of protests shakes Venezuela as public services fail (Reuters) A new round of protests has started to sweep across Venezuela as discontent intensifies in the country’s near-abandoned interior due to worsening fuel shortages and the constant failure of public services, a local non-governmental organization said on Tuesday. According to reports received by the Caracas-based Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, over 100 protests have taken place since the weekend in 19 of Venezuela’s 23 states to demand authorities provide water, power and fuel. The OPEC nation’s collapsed oil industry is no longer able to supply Venezuelans with fuel for their cars, and years of mismanagement and corruption have left much of the infrastructure bringing power and water to homes in ruins. In the past, Caracas was the center of Venezuela’s protest movements, but the government has prioritized fuel deliveries to gas stations in the capital, keeping its streets mostly calm. In the rest of the country, Venezuelans spend days queueing for gasoline that often never arrives. “We’re looking at a new wave of protests with the particularity that this time the protagonists are those living in Venezuela’s villages and towns,” Marco Ponce, the observatory’s director, told an online press conference.

Vilified Early Over Lax Virus Strategy, Sweden Seems to Have Scourge Controlled (NYT) The scene at Norrsken House Stockholm, a co-working space, oozed with radical normalcy: Young, turtleneck-wearing hipsters schmoozed in the coffee corner. Others chatted freely away, at times quite near each other, in cozy conference rooms. Face masks were nowhere to be seen. It seemed very last January, before the spread of Covid-19 in Europe, but it was actually last week, as many European nations were tightening restrictions amid a surge of new coronavirus cases. In Sweden, new infections, if tipping upward slightly, still remained surprisingly low. Almost alone in the Western world, the Swedes refused to impose a coronavirus lockdown last spring, as the country’s leading health officials argued that limited restrictions were sufficient and would better protect against economic collapse. Analyses show that Sweden’s death rate at the height of the pandemic in the spring far surpassed the rates in neighboring countries and was more protracted. Now, though, the question is whether the country’s current low caseload, compared with sharp increases elsewhere, shows that it has found a sustainable balance, something that all Western countries are seeking eight months into the pandemic.

Madrid heads for lockdown after Spain announces new virus restrictions (Reuters) Madrid residents are set to be barred from leaving the city except on essential trips under new coronavirus restrictions announced by the Spanish government on Wednesday. The city’s borders will also be closed to outsiders for non-necessary visits under the new measures for large municipalities with high coronavirus infection rates. Another nine cities in the metropolitan area will also be affected. People will be allowed to cross municipal boundaries to go to work or school, visit the doctor or go shopping, but must remain within the city for leisure activities, according to the agreement. Other measures include the closure of bars and restaurants at 11 p.m., from a previous curfew of 1 a.m., as well as the closure of public parks and playgrounds. Social gatherings will be limited to six people.

EU slams Poland, Hungary as cash-for-democracy fight heats up (Reuters) The European Union’s executive slammed Poland and Hungary on Wednesday for failing to live up to core democratic standards, giving ammunition to those in the bloc pushing to shut them out from funding unless they beef up freedom of media and courts. The European Commission’s first report on shortcomings in the rule of law comes as the bloc is making access to EU money, including a new 750 billion euro coronavirus recovery fund, conditional on respecting democratic checks and balances. Warsaw and Budapest are at odds with the EU over undercutting democracy through putting courts, media, NGOs and academics under more state control. Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Slovakia were also criticised for shortcomings in ensuring their courts’ independence. The Commission decried corruption scandals in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Malta.

New sanctions on Lukashenko (Foreign Policy) The United Kingdom and Canada both imposed sanctions on Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko and several senior officials in his government over allegations of election rigging in last month’s presidential election. The sanctions, the first of their kind for major Western powers, include travel bans and asset freezes. Western governments were initially reluctant to challenge Lukashenko due to his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but they have ramped up the pressure this week after Lukashenko was inaugurated in a secret ceremony last weekend.

Indian court acquits Hindu nationalist leaders accused of demolishing 16th-century mosque (Washington Post) It was one of the most divisive moments in modern Indian history: the illegal razing of a 16th-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya in 1992 by a mob of Hindu extremists. Nearly three decades later, a judge on Wednesday delivered a long-awaited verdict in the case. All 32 people on trial—who stood accused of conspiring to destroy the structure and stoking religious enmity—were acquitted. They included several senior politicians from India’s ruling party and a sitting member of Parliament. The ruling marks a watershed in the country’s bitterest religious dispute. The conflict has led to thousands of deaths and fueled the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement that today dominates Indian politics. Saba Naqvi, author of a book on the recent history of the BJP, said she was stunned by the verdict. The destruction of the Babri Mosque was “the most public crime in contemporary India,” Naqvi said, yet “the judge has let everyone go.” The ruling sends the message that “there are certain crimes for which people will not be punished,” she said.

Bangladesh and the fashion industry (CNN) The fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water annually, and the environmental impacts of that are difficult to comprehend. When it’s said that “water is used,” it’s not like it boils off or is used and then cleaned, it means used mostly during the finishing and dyeing process and then just dumped back into the river full of chemicals and dyes. Those chemicals are particularly difficult to remove and dyes by design don’t degrade easily—otherwise they wouldn’t be used to permanently color apparel—and the result is that rivers in Bangladesh (where textiles account for 20 percent of GDP and employ 4 million people) are seriously polluted.

In Japan, a revolutionary response to the pandemic: Better work-life balance (Washington Post) Picture the traditional grind of the Japanese salaryman: the corporate warrior in suit and tie, commuting to the office in a packed subway train, working long hours then drinking with his boss and coming home to a cramped Tokyo apartment. Then imagine another type of worker—perhaps a woman—cycling to her office on a picturesque island, with an equally challenging career but spending her weekends by the sea, immersed in nature or relaxing in a hot spring. That’s the vision of Yasuyuki Nambu, the chief executive of Japanese employment and staffing company Pasona, who aims to move its headquarters from Tokyo, population 37 million, to the Japanese island of Awaji in the Seto Inland Sea, population 129,000. It’s a revolutionary idea in Japan’s rigid corporate culture—and a sign of how the coronavirus pandemic is reimagining where and how people work worldwide. In Japan, working from home was almost unthinkable before the pandemic, but now appears to be gathering some momentum. Some innovators, such as Nambu, are even looking to shift offices to less stressful locales to introduce a novel concept in Japan: a bit more work-life balance. But many in Japan have fought it. A July survey of 14,300 companies by Tokyo Shoko Research found that 42 percent had never implemented working from home despite government appeals to control the spread of the coronavirus.

A new age of mercenary wars (Washington Post) Dozens have been reportedly killed amid ongoing clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave of ethnic Armenians encircled by Azerbaijani territory. Both Turkey and Armenia allege that the other side is importing mercenaries to the front lines. The Guardian reported that a group of Syrian fighters from Idlib province, the lone rebel-held bastion where Turkey holds considerable sway, were recruited in recent weeks to work for a private Turkish security company operating in Azerbaijan. According to the outlet’s sources, as many as 20 such fighters may have been killed in fighting this week in the Caucasus. Ankara denies these claims and has wheeled around on Armenia, accusing the government in Yerevan of busing in Kurdish militiamen from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, to help train Armenian fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh. These charges point to a broader emerging phenomenon of mercenary outfits on the front lines of the 21st century’s wars. Turkey, after all, established a template for enlisting Syrian fighters for its proxy wars when it transported hundreds to Libya to aid the government in Tripoli. But Ankara is hardly alone on this front. The Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked Russian private security company, has deployed mercenaries over a wide spectrum of the world’s battlefields, from eastern Ukraine to Syria and Libya. And, often with the financial support of the United Arab Emirates, Sudanese fighters have served as ground troops in civil wars in Yemen and Libya. The prevalence of Syrian fighters in places like Libya, argued Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reflects “a global trend toward the outsourcing of extraterritorial military force driven partly by the availability of itinerant, pay-for-hire fighters from failed revolutions and civil wars in Africa and the Middle East and the growth of private military companies.”

Gazans left stranded abroad by Israeli-Palestinian standoff (AP) For the last four months, Ahmed al-Kurdi, his wife and three children have been stranded in Jordan, where they traveled from their home in the Gaza Strip for life-saving medical treatment for his 2-year-old daughter. They find themselves stuck, not because of quarantine measures, but because of a dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. They need an Israeli permit to return to Gaza through the occupied West Bank and Israel, which would normally be facilitated by the PA’s civil affairs division. But the Palestinians officially cut off all ties with Israel in May to protest its plans to annex parts of the West Bank, making it even more complicated to get permission to travel. The Palestinians had hoped to pressure Israel by forcing it to assume more of the burden of its half-century occupation of the territory. Instead, the decision has mainly hurt ordinary Palestinians, underscoring the control Israel exerts over nearly every facet of their lives. Al-Kurd and his wife, who left Gaza with their children last December, have been on unpaid leave, relying on relatives to pay rent and support them in Amman, Jordan’s capital, where prices are much higher than in Gaza. They are among dozens of families who left Gaza for health or other reasons and cannot return. They applied for a permit through the Palestinian Embassy in Amman but were told it is no longer in contact with Israel.

#headlines #news

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fapangel · 7 years

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Thoughts on Antifa?

Antifa is just thetip of the iceberg.

I first got thisquestion in my inbox shortly after the first Antifa riot on the nightof Milo Yiannopoulos’s Berkeley speech, but I’ve been sitting on it for two reasons:one, to take time to formalize my thoughts better, and two, to avoida “rush to judgement.” You see, it’s not Antifa specifically wemust worry about, but rather how the left wing itself reacts to them.

In my multipleresponsesto my Friendly Local Antifa, I’ve been very clear that just becauseextremists exist (andthey will always exist -)doesn’t mean that they speak or act for any larger group. To claimthey do is a classic fascist tactic,as evidenced by Hitler’s exploitation of the Reichstagfire as a casus bellito round up his Communist political opponents. Lettingviolent radicals act without serious efforts to stymie or punishthem, or even praising and normalizing their motivations while weaklyimpugning their behavior, is also aclassic authoritarian tactic, something the left wing is quick tonote in the context of the Ku Klux Klan, but never apply to the likesof the Earth Liberation Front. That’s why I mention “IllinoisNazis” so much - the mere existence of some goose-steppingretards doesn’t even establish them as a threat in and of themselves,much less a movement with actual national political power.

Thisapplies to “Antifa” because what they really areis pro-Communist radicals.It’scurious that reporting on Antifa never, ever seems to mention it,even though tenseconds on Google turns up some damningimages pretty fast. These people have neverbeenshy about being Communist radicals, or advertising it to the world.Considered in a vacuum, then, they’re just Illinois Commies brawlingwith Illinois Nazis. As the Beatlesreminded us, just because they carry picturesof Chairman Mao doesn’t mean they’re gonna makeit with anyone, anyhow. SoI waited, and watched, to see if the larger wave of hysteria,obstructionism and outright violence would abate naturally as peoplewound down from the heightened passions of the election.

Theyhaven’t. On the 15thof April (two days ago,) yet another wave of mass protests werestaged across the country, with the theme being “Trump shouldrelease his tax returns.” The closest one to me was only twelvemiles distant, in Ann Arbor, MI. Home of the University of Michigan,the city’s small, wealthy, ultra-left and nestled in the middle of aconservative, rural area - and the protest’s highlight speakers(including a few Senators) delivered their speeches on theUniversity’s quad. (Thisis the exact kind of campus speaking event that Antifa used violenceand thuggery to silence at Berkeley when the speaker wasconservative.)Obama-appointed government officials have openly defied the lawfulorders of the sitting President, and been openly and loudly laudedfor it by the left wing. Members of our intelligence agencies havecommitted actual,unambiguous treason by leaking classified intelligence to acorporate media that writes every article with malice aforethought ina concerted and untiring effort to undermine the legitimacy of theoffice of the President of the United States. The left has proudlybragged of the multiplemunicipal governments - you know, cities - swearing to defyFederal law and law enforcement authorities, and some have evencalled for left-wing enclave California to secedefrom the Union. Theyhave scrambled to erect every possible barrier to the President’scabinet nominations, damn the consequences to effective governance,and the unfolding intelligence scandal is revealing how the power ofsecretive agencies was abused by Obama’s administration to undermineand slander his incoming successor. And of course, there’s thethuggery and violence on the street, waged by the likes of Antifa.

Theseare the tangible consequences ofthe left wing’s constant calls for “resistance” to the President- these are notjust words, but a national policy that’s been put into action. Thisisn’t justcute pins to show off to your lit club buddies how “woke” you are- it’s widespread, tangible popular support for the politicians,bureaucrats and businessmen working towards their ends. And thoughthey might call that end “resistance,” theyreally meanrevolution.

DanielGreenfield of Frontpage Magazine wrote a beautifullysuccinct summary that you should absolutelyread in full, but his mostcrucial paragraphs were these:

“There is no form of legal authority that the left acceptsas a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authorityselectively when it controls them. But when government officialsrefuse the orders of the duly elected government because theirallegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with thePresident and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics orcivil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority inthe White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted itscenter of authority to Federal judges and unelected governmentofficials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate frommore democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin.Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegianceto the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by itsideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’tjust mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means thattheir first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not theConstitution, not our country or our system of government. All ofthose are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.”

The ideological divide in the left wingis nothing new - it started in earnest in 1969, when thesocialist-communist bloc of the party first gained real tractionversus the “classic” New Deal progressive Democrats. The rift hasgrown steadily since then, culminating in the last election, when theNew Deal Democrats, the blue-collar union voters flipped the “bluewall” of the Rust Belt red for the first time since Reagan. Thedifference now is that the socialist-communist based branch ofthe party now control it, definitively. Their ideology andvalues are completely alien to the founding principles of America,the principles for which its laws were built to enshrine, nurture,and protect. This is why political compromise has grown more and moredifficult in America - the common ground between parties simplydoesn’t exist, and even if it did, socialist-communistideology has never been based on the concept of compromise orreconciliation.

Communist ideology is based onrevolution - in fact it’s a cornerstoneof the ideology. Revolution, by definition, is a complete andutter rejection of the legitimacy of the existing structure ofsociety. The left wing reveals their disdain for our society ineverything they say and do - their perennial crusade against everyaspect of capitalism, (“Big Whatever,” “Occupy Wall-Street,”)their endless trust in the sanctity and flawlessness of publicinstitutions versus “greedy” private enterprise and, above all,their unceasing devotion to righting the myriad “crimes” of“social injustice.” Hell, with “social injustice” it’s rightthere in the name. They reject, on every possible level, the mostbasic building blocks of Western society in general.

The true significance of Antifa is thewidespread popular support their thuggery has received from the leftwing - it indicates the final abandonment of any pretense todemocracy or fair dealing on their part. This is precisely why theirlanguage has taken on the tones of revolution and war as of late,dividing the populace into “us” versus “Nazis.” In oursecular society, Nazis are tantamount to demons; inhuman, beneathconsideration save through a rifle scope. The label’s a simple andeffective way to dehumanize people, and that’s the first step in theconditioning required to kill.

It’s already accelerating. After theBerkeley police made a point of confiscating weapons - and anythingusable as a weapon - from anyone converging on the park ahead of thelatest scuffle in Berkeley, Antifa took to reddit to argue foroutright arming themselves withfirearms. (Note how California’s ban on open carry, implementedby DemocraticGov. Jerry Brown in 2011 suddenly becomes Reagan’s fault.) Andother outlets are calling for leftists todegrade or destroy any government apparatus they do not control.

We have been down this roadbefore, more than once - the spate of anarchistbombings back in 1919, the radical left terrorist bombings by theWeathermanUnderground, and many others. But even at the height of anti-waractivism in the late 60s and early 70s, things were never thisbad. Much of it owes to new media - it’s atrophied theonce-ironfast stranglehold the corporate media had on politicaldiscourse in this nation, which has pushed the left wing to resort tomore brutish tactics to silence their opposition - doxxing, threats,intimidation and, of course, “de-platforming.” New media has alsoallowed the classic “grassroots” organizational tactics pioneeredby Chicago machine politics to go large-scale (moveon.org et al.) Theolder people, the wiser people, the experienced and the jaded - I’vetalked to them all, and they all agree that it has never been thisbad. The battle lines have been clearly drawn and the battles arebeing waged openly, vigorously and without apology.

Not every Democrat or liberal isa leftist - far, far from it, in fact. But I fear that the Democraticparty is far too gone for the sane people to reassert controlover it. As Greenfield points out, the left has retreated to“cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralizedtremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests andvalues of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it isconvinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced bycompliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will forma permanent demographic majority for its agenda. But it couldn’twait that long because it is animated by the conviction thatenforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned whathad been a hidden transition into an open break.” Thesepeople, long assured of their intrinsic superiority, are nowconfident in their eventual supremacy - and thus they are contestingthe legitimacy of the President of the United States, and indeed ourentire government, directly. We have been down this path before, too- it led to the Civil War.

That phrase - civil war- is the second reason I letthis post percolate for so long. I’m naturally antithetical tohysterical “sky is falling” arguments, as they’re invariably fullof shit and trying to sway people with fear and emotion, the facts beutterly damned. The current spate of gay,lesbian and transgender people buying guns for self-defenseagainst the imaginary hordes of Right-Wing Gestapo comes as nosurprise, because I’ve watched Conservatives panic-buying AR-15safter every shooting on the evening news for eight goddamn years. Andfor eight years I called them hooting morons becauseObama’s desire to “gitall yer gunz” far, far outstrippedhis ability to do so,legally and politically. Political vigilance against gun control isalways needed, yes, but people rushing to the stores and stockpiling(then-scarce) ammo in their basement were expecting a ban tomorrow,despite over a decade ofDemocrats losing ground on the national gun control debate, to saynothing of the Supreme Court rulings upholding - and incorporating -an individual right to keep and bear arms. Andthe ones I scorned and mocked the most were the ones insisting theymight need to use theirnew rifles in the not-so-distant future; that social unrest and evenviolence was just around the corner. I held these people to be theright-wing incarnation of the hysterical left-wing ninnies I soloathed and spared not my scorn, because being on myside of the fence didn’t make them any less an idiot.

Theday after the Berkeley riot, I decided it was about time I got off myass and purchased an AR-15.

For the first time in my life, Iam truly afraid for my country - and for my friends, my family, andmyself.

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itsfinancethings · 5 years

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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the fugitive emir of ISIS, the man who transformed a breakaway al-Qaeda group into a transnational terrorist franchise that brutalized and killed civilians in more than a dozen countries and who threatened to rewrite the map of the Middle East by luring foreign recruits to wage jihad in Iraq and Syria, is dead.

So what happens to the terror organization that he painstakingly assembled?

In many ways, the group is already evolving. ISIS leadership ranks have proved resilient despite more than five years of war. The group has been quick to adapt to new circumstances. No longer capable of seizing and holding territory, the surviving foot soldiers have instead gone back to their guerrilla roots, carrying out ambushes, bombings and assassinations. And despite the loss of its territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has expanded its reach to include 14 separate affiliates in countries across Asia and Africa.

In the long-term, analysts say, what may be most significant about Saturday’s Special Operations commando raid is not al-Baghdadi’s decapitation from ISIS’ shadowy hierarchy but the ease with which he will be replaced. The group, like its predecessor organization, Al Qaeda in Iraq, routinely taps new commanders to fill the vacuum left by those who are assassinated. The replacements occur with such regularity that the U.S. Special Operations community jokingly refers to removing leaders as “mowing the grass.”

“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death —welcome and important though it may be— is not a catastrophic blow to the quality of leadership in ISIS,” says Michael Nagata, who retired as Army Lieutenant General and strategy director from the National Counterterrorism Center in August.

Nagata, who served in the Middle East as a Special Operations commander in 2014 when the counter-ISIS campaign began, says ISIS now has a cadre of young battle-hardened leaders who are climbing toward the top echelons and establishing themselves in the terror group’s global network. “ISIS isn’t a crippled organization because Baghdadi’s gone,” he says. “The depth and breadth of ISIS leadership, in my judgment, is unprecedented for this type of terrorist group.”

Since the first days of U.S. involvement in the war against ISIS, Special Operations forces and intelligence agencies hunted and killed the group’s leaders one-by-one. But they’ve always regrouped.

“As we’ve seen over the last several years, the group also has a strategy to carry on operations into the next decade,” says Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and co-author of “Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counterterrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda.” “It’s good to take out the leader, but it’s not just a terrorist group —it’s an ideology as well; stamping out the idea of the Islamic State will prove to be much more difficult than one successful military/intelligence operation.”

“It’s good to take out the leader, but it’s not just a terrorist group—it’s an ideology as well.” After all, al-Qaeda endured after founder Osama bin Laden was killed in a 2011 Navy SEAL raid. And Al Qaeda in Iraq lived on as ISIS after its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ,was killed in a 2006 U.S. airstrike.

U.S. counterterrorism officials expect ISIS to name a successor in the coming days or weeks. A likely candidate is al-Baghdadi’s defense chief, Iyad al-Obaidi. But regardless of who leads the Sunni extremist group, it is now a shadow of the organization that launched a lightning offensive in Iraq and Syria that resulted in the seizure of territory the size of Britain and raked in millions of dollars a day.

The seeds for resurgence, however, are there. According to a recent Defense Department Inspector General’s report, ISIS has between 14,000 and 18,000 members who’ve pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi. In addition, there are more than 30 detention camps that hold about 11,000 ISIS fighters, sympathizers and other associated detainees across northern Syria. Another camp for internally displaced persons known as al-Hol, in northeastern Syria, holds nearly 70,000 people, including thousands of ISIS family members. The U.S. military reported in February that “absent sustained pressure,” the terrorist group would re-emerge in Syria within six to 12 months.

Moreover, ISIS remains a worldwide threat because the group has a constellation of affiliates in places as far-flung as Nigeria and Pakistan, according to a report from the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. “ISIS’ global presence provides footholds from which to further metastasize, launch attacks, and gain resources to fund its resurgence in Iraq and Syria,” the report said, documenting recent plans for attacks on the West that emanated from affiliates in Libya, Somalia and the Philippines.

The death of militant leaders, however, frequently leads to fractures within terror organizations and new directions in strategy, says Norman T. Roule, a former senior CIA officer with experience in Middle East issues. “In the wake of Baghdadi’s death, ISIS groups abroad could go in a number of directions,” he says. “Some may decide to reconcile with al-Qaeda, some may decide to undertake revenge operations to demonstrate that ISIS remains potent. Some planned operations could be accelerated if the ISIS planners believe the intelligence found with Baghdadi might identify them.”

Omar Haj Kadour—AFP/Getty ImagesA Syrian man inspects the site of helicopter gunfire near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha on Oct. 27, 2019.

Colin P. Clarke, a fellow at the Soufan Center and author of “After the Caliphate: The Islamic State and the Future of the Terrorist Diaspora,” says there have already been signs of an “ISIS 2.0” emerging. “It’s unclear what Baghdadi’s death could do to exacerbate the changes underway,” he says. “Baghdadi was the face of the ISIS brand. He had a cult of personality.”

Born into a religiously devout lower-middle-class Sunni Muslim family in Iraq in 1971, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri, who years later adopted the nom de guerre al-Baghdadi, was an unexceptional, shy child, according to recent biographies based on interviews with those who knew him. He never excelled at religious scholarship but was talented at the recitation of Quranic verse. In college and graduate school, he studied the style and technique of reciting the Quran, and he wrote a master’s thesis on a medieval commentary on the subject.

Al-Baghdadi’s finishing school in radicalism was unwittingly provided by the U.S. In February 2004, after the invasion of Iraq, he was visiting a friend in Fallujah when U.S. Army intelligence officers burst in and arrested them both. Al-Baghdadi was taken to the notorious prison at Camp Bucca, which inadvertently came to serve as an incubator for Sunni jihadism, according to former camp officials. There he was a skilled networker, courting radical factions and building a reputation as a religious leader based on his Islamic studies.

These talents didn’t register on his captors, though, who judged al-Baghdadi to be a low-risk prisoner. Released at the end of 2004, he returned to the Iraqi capital, where he pursued a doctorate and joined a series of jihadi groups invigorated by the fall of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupation. In early 2006, he found his ultimate home in the Iraqi al-Qaeda offshoot led by Zarqawi, a former violent criminal from Jordan whom U.S. forces killed that June. Al-Baghdadi’s nominal religious qualifications and rigid dogmatism carried him quickly through the ranks, and in May 2010, after the U.S. killed the only two men above him, he emerged as the emir.

Along with his ambitious territorial goals in the Middle East, al-Baghdadi elaborated an apocalyptic vision of a final battle between the forces of radical Islam and the West. In a Ramadan sermon in mid-2014, he declared slavery the universal human condition: Muslim believers are indentured to Allah, while nonbelievers are the rightful property of Muslims. He also said the time of death for each man and woman is preordained, implying that all killings must be the will of Allah. This teaching paved the way for his chief spokesman to deliver the following message to ISIS supporters everywhere a few months later: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European,” the spokesman said, “kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military.”

Gabriella Demczuk for TIMEPresident Donald Trump announces the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a raid by American special operations forces in Syria, at the White House on Oct. 27, 2019.

The bloodthirsty rhetoric, often relayed on slickly produced videos that pin-balled around social media, proved an innovative tactic that resonated with disaffected youth. ISIS recruited around 43,000 fighters from 120 countries to the caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Some acted in al-Baghdadi’s name at home, killing hundreds of innocents at hotels, mosques and concert halls from Paris to the Sinai, Beirut to San Bernardino, Calif.

The widespread violence earned al-Baghdadi a $25-million U.S. bounty on his head and enemies across the world. He went underground. For years there were erroneous reports that he was seriously wounded or killed. After the collapse of his self-proclaimed caliphate, al-Baghdadi had been shuttling back-and-forth in the desert between western Iraq and eastern Syria, traveling mostly in cars and Toyota pickup trucks with a small entourage that included heavily armed bodyguards, according to a U.S. intelligence official. He rarely stayed more than one night in the same place, and like bin Laden, communicated by courier rather than using phones or computers, the official said. Al-Baghdadi was located when Iraqi forces picked up two members of his entourage in an unrelated operation and passed the intelligence they collected to the CIA.

After a five-year absence from public view, al-Baghdadi had appeared April 29 in an 18-minute propaganda video. In a black tunic with a Kalashnikov rifle at his side, he stated that ISIS’s fight against the West was far from over. “Our battle today is a war of attrition to harm the enemy, and they should know that jihad will continue until doomsday,” he told a roomful of followers seated cross-legged on the floor.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on al-Baghdadi’s death, told TIME that danger still looms from al-Baghdadi’s call for followers to shift from larger attacks to more small actions outside Iraq and Syria. Even so, the official said that al-Baghdadi’s death, while partly symbolic, would “silence maybe the most inspirational terrorist voice that remained.”

—with reporting by John Walcott and Kimberly Dozier from Washington

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newstechreviews · 5 years

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So what happens to the terror organization that he painstakingly assembled?

Omar Haj Kadour—AFP/Getty ImagesA Syrian man inspects the site of helicopter gunfire near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha on Oct. 27, 2019.

—with reporting by John Walcott and Kimberly Dozier from Washington

#Blogger

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gyrlversion · 5 years

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Terrorism trial could allow gunman to espouse his ideological views

Accused Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant could avoid terror charges amid fears the trial will allow him to ‘espouse’ his ideological views.

The suspected gunman was charged with one count of murder over the weekend, but authorities are now weighing up all options including charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

Legal experts, however, have warned that a trial on terrorism charges will pose more of a challenge for prosecutors, while also having unintended consequences for the families of the victims.

They would have to prove Tarrant intended to kill and terrorise a community based on political and ideological reason – as opposed to just murder.

Tarrant could now face multiple murder charges, according to experts.

Brenton Tarrant (pictured) has been charged with one initial count of murder over the mass shootings that killed 50 people in the southern city of Christchurch and faces life in prison

Tarrant was arrested on the sidewalk by two training police officers on Friday after he allegedly shot and killed 50 Muslim worshipers

‘In my view, the elements are all made out, but to minimise the impact on victims, straight murder is easier to prove,’ former Crown prosecutor Ross Burns told Stuff.

‘And there’s less scope [for the accused] to use a platform to espouse his ideological reasons.’

‘You’ve got 50 people killed and probably ten times that number directly affected so it will be a long trial and will be unduly traumatic for everyone,’ he added.

Burns previously led New Zealand’s Operation 8 case, the only known case to use the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 during the 2007 police raids trial.

The charges were later abandoned after it was ruled that evidence under that legislation could not be used and four people were convicted on firearm charges.

If tried under terror charges, Burns said Tarrant could use the trial as platform to tout his extremist views.

In his 74-page manifesto, Tarrant allegedly revealed his Neo-Nazi ideology and hatred for Muslims.

‘If he’s denied a platform, he’s failed in his objective,’ Burns said.

Alexander Gillespie, a law professor at Waikato University in New Zealand, said it’s possible Tarrant will face multiple murder charges, 9news reported.

‘There’s a lot of debate on whether he should be charged under terrorism legislation or whether he should be charged under the Crimes Act for the simple act of murder – in many ways it’s academic debate,’ he said.

In New Zealand, being found guilty of murder usually comes with a minimum of ten years in jail before possible parole.

Legal experts have said the 28-year-old Australian’s alleged crimes were so extreme they could warrant the heaviest sentence imposed by a judge in the South Pacific nation since the abolition of the death penalty in 1961.

A Muslim man kneels facing the Masjid Al Noor mosque surrounded by flowers and tributes to the victims

Young women weep as they hold each other for comfort during a students vigil near Al Noor mosque on Monday

Nearly three days since the horrific terror attack in Christchurch which left 50 worshippers dead, new details about the innocent victims are emerging

‘He may be sentenced to imprisonment without parole. There is a very significant possibility,’ criminal lawyer Simon Cullen told AFP, adding that such a sentence would be ‘unprecedented’.

‘This would seem to be… the type of situation that may well attract consideration of that type of sentence.’

The longest-ever murder sentence imposed in New Zealand was in 2001, when a judge sentenced William Bell to life imprisonment with a 30-year minimum term for a triple murder.

University of Auckland criminal procedure expert Bill Hodge said despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern labelling the massacre an act of terrorism, prosecutors may shy away from terror charges.

The Terrorism Suppression Act was only introduced in 2002, after the US 9/11 attacks and is untested in the courts.

‘We haven’t used our terrorism laws previously and the laws are designed to inhibit or prosecute those involved with groups and financing and publications and the like,’ Hodge told AFP.

A woman is seen paying her respects to victims by floral tributes laid outside the mosque

‘I’ll kill as many invaders as I can’: Christchurch ‘copycat’ threatens to murder Muslim worshippers at an Australian mosque

Kylie Stevens for Daily Mail Australia

A Christchurch ‘copycat’ has made a chilling post on social media threatening to kill worshippers at a mosque in regional Victoria.

Victoria Police has confirmed they are investigating a report of ‘concerning’ social media posts detailing plans to carry out a mass shooting at the Islamic Society of Geelong mosque.

The threats were made on Sunday, just hours after hundreds of worshippers and community members flocked to the mosque to pay their respects to the 50 people killed in New Zealand‘s Christchurch terrorist attack on Friday.

Imam Shaykh Mohammad Ramzan (second right) welcomed thousands at the Geelong mosque on Sunday, including federal Labor frontbencher Richard Marles (second left) and Labor federal member Libby Coker (right)

The anonymous post was directed at Geelong.

‘Yes I am a copy cat I will be visiting the mosque and kill as many invaders as I can in the time I get I will then shoot myself in front of police,’ the post stated.

Police attended the mosque on Sunday night and conducted checks. The area was deemed safe before before the mosque was closed for the evening shortly after 6.30pm.

An anonymous post directed at the mosque threatened to ‘kill as many invaders as I can’

‘Local police have reached out to leaders from within the mosque community and will also ensure an increased police presence in and around the area,’ a Victoria Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia.

‘It is concerning that at times we see members of the community think they are entitled to use intimidation and or violence to express their views and are intolerant of communities.’

‘As the investigation is ongoing it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment further at this stage.’

The mosque represents more than 8,000 Muslim families in Geelong, according to its website.

‘Our vision is to build a better community for all Australians through the empowerment of Muslim,’ it states.

Victoria Police are investigating social media threats towards the Geelong mosque (pictured)

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neptunecreek · 5 years

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The Foilies 2019

Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency

The cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese American family set in Orlando, Florida, in the late 1990s.

In a January episode of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, the Huang family’s two youngest children—overachievers Evan and Emery—decide if they sprint on all their homework, they’ll have time to plan their father’s birthday party.

“Like the time we knocked out two English papers, a science experiment, and built the White House out of sugar cubes,” Evan said. “It opened up our Sunday for filing Freedom of Information requests.”

“They may not have figured out who shot JFK,” Emery added. “But we will.”

The eldest child, teenage slacker Eddie, concluded with a sage nod, “You know, once in a while, it’s good to know nerds.”

Amen to that. Around the world, nerds of all ages are using laws like the United States’ Freedom of Information Act (and state-level equivalent laws) to pry free secrets and expose the inner workings of our democracy. Each year, open government advocates celebrate these heroes during Sunshine Week, an annual advocacy campaign on transparency.

But the journalists and researchers who rely on these important measures every day can’t help but smirk at the boys’ scripted innocence. Too often, government officials will devise novel and outrageous ways to reject requests for information or otherwise stymie the public’s right to know. Even today—20 years after the events set in the episode—the White House continues to withhold key documents from the Kennedy assassination files.

Since 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, privacy and government transparency in the digital age) has published The Foilies to recognize the bad actors who attempted to thwart the quests for truth of today’s Evans and Emerys. With these tongue-in-cheek awards, we call out attempts to block transparency, retaliation against those who exercise their rights to information, and the most ridiculous examples of incompetence by government officials who handle these public records.

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award - City of Greenfield, California

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

Sunshine laws? Tech giants think they can just blot those out with secretive contracts. But two nonprofit groups—Working Partnerships and the First Amendment Coalition—are fighting this practice in California by suing the city of San Jose over an agreement with Google that prevents city officials from sharing the public impacts of development deals, circumventing the California Public Records Act.

Google’s proposed San Jose campus is poised to have a major effect on the city’s infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. Yet, according to the organization’s lawsuit, records analyzing issues of public importance such as traffic impacts and environmental compliance were among the sorts of discussions Google demanded be made private under their non-disclosure agreements.

And it’s not just Google using these tactics. An agreement between Amazon and Virginia includes a provision that the state will give the corporate giant—which is placing a major campus in the state—a heads-up when anyone files a public records request asking for information about them. The Columbia Journalism Review reported Facebook has also used this increasingly common strategy for companies to keep cities quiet and the public in the dark about major construction projects.

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

Courtesy of National Security Counselors

After suing the CIA to get access to information about Trump’s classified briefings, Kel McClahanan of the National Security Law Center was expecting the agency to send over eight agreed-upon documents.

What he was not expecting was for the files—each between three and nine pages each—-to be spread out across six separate CD-ROMs, each burned within minutes of each other, making for perhaps the most unnecessary box set in the history of the compact disc.

What makes this “extra silly,” McClanahan said, is that the CIA has previously complained about how burdensome and costly fulfilling requests can be. Yet the CIA could have easily combined several requests onto the same disc and saved themselves some time and resources. After all, a a standard CD-ROM can hold 700 MB, and all of the files took only 304 MB of space.

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

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Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com

After repealing the Open Internet Order and ending net neutrality, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai doubled down on his efforts to ruin online culture. He released a cringe-inducing YouTube video titled “7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality" that featured his own rendition of the infamous “Harlem Shake” meme. (For the uninitiated, the meme is characterized by one person subtly dancing in a room of people to Baauer’s track “Harlem Shake.” Then the bass drops and the crowd goes nuts, often with many people in costumes.)

Muckrock editor JPat Brown filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails related to the video, but the FCC rejected the request, claiming the communications were protected “deliberative” records.

Brown appealed the decision, and the FCC responded by releasing all the email headers, while redacting the contents, claiming that anything more would cause “foreseeable harm.” Brown did not relent, and a year later the FCC capitulated and released the unredacted emails.

“So, what did these emails contain that was so potentially damaging that it was worth risking a potential FOIA lawsuit over?” Brown writes. “Pai was curious when it was going live, and the FCC wanted to maintain a veto power over the video if they didn’t like it.” The most ridiculous redaction of all was a tiny black box in an email from the FCC media director. Once removed, all that was revealed was a single word: “OK.”

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

When President Trump tweets attacks about the intelligence community, transparency groups and journalists often file FOIA requests (and subsequently lawsuits) seeking the documents that underpin his claims. The question that often comes up: Do Trump’s smartphone rants break the seal of secrecy on confidential programs?

The answer seems to be no. Multiple judges have sided with Justice Department lawyers, concluding that his Twitter disclosures do not mean that the government has to confirm or deny whether records about those activities exist.

In a FOIA case seeking documents that would show whether Trump is under investigation, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that the President’s tweets to that effect are “speculation.” Similarly, in a FOIA suit to get more information about the widely publicized dossier of potential ties between Trump and Russia, U.S. District Judge Amir Mehta said that the President’s statements are political rather than “assertions of pure fact.”

And so, whether Trump actually knows what he’s talking about remains an open question.

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

One of the benefits of public records laws is they allow almost anyone—regardless of legal acumen—to force government agencies to be more transparent, usually without having to file a lawsuit.

But in Washington State, filing a public records request can put the requester at legal risk of being named in a lawsuit should someone else not want the records to be made public.

This is what happened to Sarah Schacht, a Seattle-based open government advocate and consultant. For years Schacht has used public records to advocate for better food safety rules in King County, an effort that led to the adoption of food safety placards found in restaurants in the region.

After Schacht filed another round of requests with the county health department, she received a legal threat in November 2018 from Stanford Law School professor Daniel Ho’s attorney threatening to sue her unless she abandoned her request. Apparently, Ho has been working with the health department to study the new food safety and placard regulations. He had written draft studies that he shared with the health department, making them public records.

Ho’s threat amounted to an effort to intimidate Schacht from receiving public records, probably because he had not formally published his studies first. Regardless of motive, the threat was an awful look. But even when faced with the threat, Schacht refused to abandon her request.

Fortunately, the lawsuit never materialized, and Schacht was able to receive the records. Although Ho’s threats made him look like a bully, the real bad actor in this scenario is Washington State’s public records law. The state’s top court has interpreted the law to require parties seeking to stop agencies from releasing records (sometimes called reverse-FOIA suits) to also sue the original requester along with the government agency.

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

Courtesy of Jessica Huseman

ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman has been digging deep into the child welfare system and what happens when child abuse results in death. While following up on a series of strangulations, she requested a copy of a case file from the St. Joseph County Superior Court in Indiana. Apparently, the clerk on the other end simply took the entire file and ran everything through a scanner. The problem was that the file contained a CD-ROM, and that’s not how CD-ROMs work. “Well this is the first time this had happened,” Huseman posted to Twitter, along with the blotchy black-and-white image of the top of the disc. “They scanned a CD as part of my FOI and didn’t give me its contents. Cool cool.”

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

As tech companies experiment with autonomous vehicles on public roadways, reporters are keeping tabs on how often these cars are involved in collisions. That’s why The Information’s Matt Drange has been filing records requests for the crash data held by state agencies. Some government departments have started claiming that every line of the dataset is its own, individual record and subject to a copy fee. Our winner, the Michigan State Police, proposed to charge Drange a 25-cent fee for each of a 1.9 million-line dataset, plus $20 for a thumbdrive, for a grand total of $485,645.24, with half of it due up front. Runners-up that quoted similar line-by-line charges include the Indiana State Police ($346,000) and the North Carolina Department of Transportation ($82,000). Meanwhile, Florida’s government released its detailed dataset at no charge at all.

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

In 2016, the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), an infamous neo-Nazi group, staged a demonstration at the California State Capitol. Counter-protesters fiercely opposed the demonstration, and the scene soon descended into chaos, leaving multiple people injured. When the dust settled, a member of the public (disclosure: also a co-author of this piece) filed a California Public Records Act request to obtain a copy of the permit the white nationalist group filed for its rally. The California Highway Patrol rejected the request for this normally available document, claiming it was related to a criminal investigation.

Two years later, evidence emerged during criminal proceedings that a CHP detective used the public records request as a bargaining chip in a phone call with the TWP protest leader, who was initially reluctant to provide information. The officer told him how the request might reveal his name. “We don’t have a reason to...uh...deny [the request],” the officer said according a transcript of the call. But once the organizer decided to cooperate, the officer responded, “I’m gonna suggest that we hold that or redact your name or something...uh...until this thing gets resolved.” In light of these new facts, the First Amendment Coalition filed a new request for the same document. It too was denied.

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

In defiance of the law enforcement lobby, California legislators passed a law (SB 1421) requiring police and sheriffs to disclose officer misconduct records in response to California Public Records Act requests. These documents, often contained in personnel files, had historically been untouchable by members of the public and the press.

Almost immediately, police unions across the Golden State began to launch lawsuits to undermine these new transparency measures. But the Inglewood Police Department takes the prize for its efforts to evade scrutiny. Mere weeks before the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2019, the agency began destroying records that were set to become publicly available.

“This premise that there was an intent to beat the clock is ridiculous,” Inglewood Mayor James T Butts Jr. told the LA Times in defending the purge. We imagine Butts would find it equally ridiculous to suggest that the fact he had also been a cop for more than 30 years, including serving in Inglewood and later as police chief of Santa Monica, may have factored into his support for the destruction of records.

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

One Wednesday morning in April, 15 Halifax police officers raided the home of a teenage boy and his family. “They read us our rights and told us not to talk," his mother would later tell CBC. “They rifled through everything. They turned over mattresses, they took drawers and emptied out drawers, they went through personal papers, pictures. It was totally devastating and traumatic."

You might well wonder, what was the Jack Bauer-class threat to geo-political stability? Nothing at all: The Canadian teen had just downloaded a host of public records from openly available URLs on a government website.

At the heart of the ordeal was some seriously terrible security practices by Nova Scotia officials. The website created to host the province’s public records was designed in such a way that every request and response had a nearly identical URL and placed no technical restrictions on the public’s ability to access any of the requests. This meant that regular public records requests and individuals’ requests to access government files about them, which included private information, were all stored together and available on the internet for anyone, including Google’s webcrawler, to access. All that was necessary was changing a number identifying the request at the end of the URL.

What Nova Scotian officials should have done upon learning about leaks in their own public records website’s problems was apologize to the public, thank the teen who found these gaping holes in their digital security practices, and implement proper restrictions to protect people’s private information. They didn’t do any of that, and instead sought to improperly bring the force of Canada’s criminal hacking law down on the very person who brought the problem to light.

The whole episode—which thankfully ended with the government dropping the charges—was a chilling example of how officials will often overreact and blame innocent third parties when trying to cover up for their own failings. This horror show just happened to involve public records. Do better, Canada.

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

When self-described transparency advocate and civic hacker Matt Chapman sent his request to Seattle seeking the email metadata from all city email addresses (from/to/BCC addresses, time, date, etc), he expected some pushback, because it does sound like an incredible amount of data to wrangle.

Seattle’s response: All the data can be yours for a measly $33 million. Officials estimated that it would take 320 years worth of staff time to review the roughly 32 million emails responsive to Chapman’s request. Oh, and they estimated charging an additional $21,600 for storage costs associated with the records. The fee request is the second highest in the history of The Foilies (the Department of Defense won in 2016 for estimating it would take $660 million to produce records on a particular computer forensic tool).

Then the city did something entirely unexpected: It revisited the fee estimate and determined that the first batch of records would cost only $1.25 to process. We get it, math is hard.

But wait—that’s not all. After paying for the batches of records with a series of $1.25 checks, Chapman received more than he ever bargained for. Rather than disclosing just the metadata for all 32 million emails, Seattle had given him the first 256 characters of every email. Those snippets included passwords, credit card numbers, and other personally identifying information.

What followed was a series of conversations between Chapman, Seattle’s lawyers, and the city’s IT folks to ensure he’d deleted the records and that the city hadn’t just breached its own data via a public records request.

Ultimately, Seattle officials in January 2018 began sending the data to Chapman once more, this time without the actual content of email messages. The whole episode doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Seattle officials’ ability to do basic math, comply with the public records law or protect sensitive information.

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

Seattle isn’t the only city to stumble in response to Matt Chapman’s public records requests for email metadata. The Vermont governor’s office also wins for its scissor-and-glue approach to releasing electronic information.

Rather than export the email information as a spreadsheet, the Vermont governor’s office told Chapman it had five interns (three of whom were unpaid) working six hours each, literally “cutting and pasting the emails from paper copies.” Next thing Chapman knew, he had a 43-page hodgepodge collage of email headers correlating with one day’s worth of messages. The governor’s attorney told Chapman it would cost $1,200 to process three more days’ worth of emails.

Chapman pushed back and provided his own instructions on exporting the data using a computer and not, you know, scissors and glue. Sure enough, he received a 5,500-line spreadsheet a couple weeks later at no charge.

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

In the last few years, we’ve seen some great resignation letters from public servants, ranging from Defense Secretary James Mattis telling President Trump “It’s not me, it’s you” to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ forced resignation.

But the Trump DOJ seems to have had enough of the tradition and has now determined that U.S. Attorney resignation letters are private in their entirety and cannot be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, civil servants should have their private information protected by their employer, but that’s precisely what redactions should be used to protect.

Past administrations have released resignation letters that are critical of executive branch leaders. The change in policy raises the question: What are departing U.S. Attorneys now saying that the government wants to hide?

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

After the tragic Parkland shooting, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel went to court to force the Broward County School Board to hand over documents detailing the shooter’s education and disciplinary record. A judge agreed and ordered the release, as long as sensitive information was redacted.

But when reporters copied and pasted the file into another document, they found that the content under the redactions was still there and readable. They broke the story of how the school denied the shooter therapeutic services and alternative education accommodations, but then uploaded the school board’s report with working redactions.

Rather than simply do better with double-checking their redactions next time, the school board struck back at the newspaper. They petitioned the court to hold the newspaper in contempt and to prevent anyone from reporting on the legally obtained information. Although the local judge didn’t issue a fine, she lambasted the paper and threatened to dictate exactly what the paper could report about the case in the future (which is itself an unconstitutional prior restraint).

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award - City of Greenfield, California

The Monterey County Weekly unexpectedly found itself in court after the city of Greenfield, California sued to keep the newspaper from publishing documents about the surprising termination of its city manager.

When Editor Sara Rubin asked the interim city manager for the complaint the outgoing city manager filed after his termination, she got nothing but crickets. But then, an envelope containing details of a potential city political scandal appeared on the doorstep of one of the paper’s columnists.

The weekly reached out to the city for comment and began preparing for its normal Wednesday print deadline. Then, the morning of publication, the paper got a call saying that they were due in court. The city sued to block publication of the documents, to have the documents returned and to have the paper reveal the identity of the leaker.

Attorney Kelly Aviles of the First Amendment Coalition gave everyone a fast lesson in the First Amendment, pointing out that the paper had every right to publish. The judge ruled in the paper’s favor, and the city ended up paying all of the Monterey County Weekly’s attorney fees.

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

Brigham Young University’s Police Department is certified by the state,* has the powers of the state, but says that they’re not actually a part of government for purposes of the Utah transparency law.

After the Salt Lake Tribune exposed that the University punished survivors of sexual assault for coming forward and reporting, the paper tried to get records of communications between the police department and the school’s federally required sexual assault coordinator. BYU pushed back, saying that the police department is not subject to Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act because the police department is privately funded.

This actually turns out to be a trickier legal question than you’d expect. Brigham Young University itself isn’t covered by the state law because it is a private school. But the university police force was created by an act of the Utah legislature, and the law covers entities “established by the government to carry out the public’s business.” Investigating crime and arresting people seems like the public’s business.

Last summer, a judge ruled that the police department is clearly a state agency, but the issue is now on appeal at the Utah Supreme Court. Sometime this year we should learn if the police are a part of the government or not.

*Because BYU police failed to comply with state law, and was not responsive to an internal investigation, the Utah Office of Public Safety notified the department on February 20th that the BYU police department will be stripped of its certification on September 1, 2019. The University police also plan to appeal this decision.

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

Congressional elections can turn ugly, but the opponent of newly elected U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger got a boost when the U.S. Postal Service released Spanberger’s entire personnel file, including her security clearance application, without redaction of highly sensitive personal information.

When a third party requests a person’s federal employment file without the employee’s permission, the government agency normally releases only a bare-bones record of employment dates, according to a Postal Service spokesperson. But somehow Rep. Spanberger wasn’t afforded these protections, and the Postal Service has potentially made this mistake in a “small number” of other cases this year. Security clearance applications (Form SF-86) are supposed to be analyzed and investigated by the FBI, raising questions about how the FOIA officer got the information in the first place. The Postal Service has apologized for the mistake, which they say is human error, but maybe security clearance applications should be kept just as secure as the state secrets the clearance is meant to protect.

The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass, Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, Frank Stanton Fellow Camille Fischer, and Activist Hayley Tsukayama. Illustrations by EFF Art Director Hugh D'Andrade. For more on our work visit eff.org.

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swedna · 6 years

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Google, Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. have taken significant steps to expunge Islamic State propaganda and other terrorist content from their platforms.

But taking no chances, the European Union is set to propose a tough new law anyway -- threatening internet platforms, big and small, with fines if they fail to take down terrorist material, according to people familiar with the proposals that could be unveiled as soon as September.

While the details of the measures are still being thrashed out, they would likely be based on the EU guidance from earlier this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public.

The EU in March issued guidelines giving internet companies an hour from notification by authorities to wipe material such as gruesome beheading videos and other terror content from their services, or face possible legislation if they fail to do so.

"It’s true that the positive role that some of the big companies are playing today is incomparable to the situation three years ago,” said Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s anti-terrorism czar. “But so is the scale, breadth and complexity of the problem." An additional step in the response is "essential," he said, given the diverse online aspects of the recent attacks in Europe.

Big Strides Large tech firms say they’ve been making big strides in the fight to wipe terror propaganda, videos and other messages from their sites, partly thanks to automated tools that in some cases can detect such content before users even see it.

"We haven’t had any major incidents to rush legislation," said Siada El Ramly, head of Edima, a European trade association representing online platforms including Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Online services take the fight against terrorist content extremely seriously, said Maud Sacquet, senior manager for public policy at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, an industry group that includes Google and Facebook as members.

“This proposal seems rushed and its publication in the fall much too early to take into account the outcomes of already ongoing EU initiatives,” she said.

A commission spokeswoman declined to provide more details on the proposals.

Violent Extremism In April, Google said more than half of the YouTube videos it removes for violent extremism have fewer than 10 views. Facebook said the same month that in the first quarter of this year it either removed, or in a small amount of cases flagged for informational purposes, a total of 1.9 million pieces of Islamic State and al-Qaeda content. Twitter says it has suspended a total of more than one million accounts, with 74 percent of accounts suspended before their first tweet.

Some European member states have been vocal about the dangers of online radicalization and the spread of terror propaganda, particularly in the wake of deadly terror attacks in some European capitals in recent years. In a speech in April, French President Emmanuel Macron called on internet giants to speed up their process to remove terror content.

Germany didn’t wait around and last year pushed ahead with new rules that threaten social networks with fines of as much as 50 million euros ($58 million) if they fail to give users the option to complain about hate speech and fake news or refuse to remove illegal content.

Gaming the Systems

For companies, detecting harmful content is a constant battle as some groups continue to try to game their systems to spread their messages online as widely as possible. One tool that’s helped: a shared industry database, among Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies, of known terrorist videos and images so they can see what each other’s platforms have taken down and remove the same content on their own websites.

Europol has said the cooperation with the big internet platforms on taking down terror content that they flag is "excellent." The agency works with more than 70 internet and media companies and on average they remove more than 90 percent of the content that’s flagged to them within two to three hours.

While big platforms have been able to speed up their removals, any legislation could hit smaller companies with fewer tools disproportionately harder. And excluding them from the scope of the law could make them more attractive for terrorist groups and their fans to carry their communications over to those platforms.

No Clarity For Edima, the concern is the threat of fines could force companies to err on the side of over-removal if there isn’t sufficient clarity around when time-frames for removal begin or what groups are considered terror organizations, for instance.

"We’re concerned that if we don’t have clarity” in the new rules “that platforms could be forced to become the judge and jury as to how to classify that content," El Ramly said.

Still, some critics say the big internet giants need to do more. The non-profit organization Counter Extremism Project, which aims to combat the threat of extremist ideologies, said in April that gaps remained in Facebook and others companies’ approaches to combating extremism.

The group said Facebook has only emphasized the removal of Islamic State and al-Qaeda content and has provided insufficient transparency about its progress in removing content from other extremist groups. Facebook didn’t respond to requests for comment. Google and Twitter didn’t comment on the EU’s legislation.

#Google

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jeremyfrechette · 6 years

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A Legacy of Hate, Race, Division and Discord

I find it amusing Donald Trump is routinely derided as “divisive” and hateful when his predecessor set race relations back by 50 years and weakened/disparaged America at nearly every opportune moment. For those rabid critics who “misremember”, it was Barack Obama who mocked middle-America voters as bitter, small town xenophobes needlessly clinging to their guns and bibles. If I may, when did supporting the Second Amendment, LEGAL immigration and honoring our nation’s founding Judeo-Christian values become a radical concept? And yet it was under his explicit direction the IRS admitted to singling out businesses and community organizations that identified as conservative, patriotic or even Christian. Yes, once again, nothing remotely discriminatory here. Why again did Homeland Security place proud, law-abiding citizens on the Terror Watch list by declaring “liberty lovers” as America’s greatest terrorist threat…in a country predicated upon liberty and amidst the horrific aftermath of 9/11, no less? The same government operatives who never punished Islamic businesses over their marriage beliefs and ignored the terror radicalization occurring within American mosques, harassed Hobby Lobby and Catholic churches for refusing to provide birth control or insurance coverage for abortions; a procedure that violated their faith and religious freedoms. Still not convinced yet? Of course not.

As much as Obama’s election was a watershed moment in American history, his proclivity for racial discord has been exponentially greater. He immediately politicized the cases of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, with little regard for the evidence or their criminal records, resulting in riots, destruction of property and further loss of life. Sadly, the former President made no such emotional tributes or pleas for justice after 25 year-old NYPD officer Brian Wilson was shot in the head or when Kathryn Steinle was murdered in San Francisco on July 1, 2015 by an illegal immigrant with seven felony convictions. In response, Democrats publicly vowed to save Sanctuary cities. Barack Obama sent sizable delegations to the funerals of all three black males, personally and very publicly mourned the passing of each individual, but failed to even mention the tragic death of American sniper Chris Kyle in February of 2013. Rather, the White House issued a statement commemorating the death of Whitney Houston later that same month. When you’re busy bribing millions of minorities with free “Obama phones” using taxpayer money, who has the time for such colorblind statesmanship, or better yet, basic human empathy?

Anytime a sitting Commander-in-Chief plays golf during the funeral of General Harold Greene – the highest ranking service member killed in combat since Vietnam – no imagination is required to decipher his true loyalties. Mr. Obama’s incessant race-based rhetoric eventually gave rise to militant groups like Black Lives Matter and AntiFa, but more profoundly incited a partisan war on police which triggered an unprecedented wave of assassinations against law enforcement; including 5 officers gunned down in Dallas, Texas. Instead of bringing a troubled nation together, one increasingly fractured by his cynicism, anger and clear racial favoritism, he was content praising Colin Kaepernick for his “courageous” decision to kneel during the national anthem only a few months following the traumatic bloodshed. The same man who illuminated the White House in LGBT colors to spike the proverbial football of social justice, found no such nerve to honor those fallen officers murdered in cold blood while serving their communities.

Not to question the unifying theme of “Cops are Pigs” socks worn by a celebrated racist athlete, but did Barry ever condemn a single case of police brutality regarding a white, Hispanic, or Asian victim, justified or not, let alone publicly decry (without media coverage) a single cop murdered by a drug dealer or due to a violent suspect resisting arrest? No? I guess we should just be satisfied the media’s former Uniter-in-Chief spent hundreds of billions providing for and protecting illegals while our veterans slept in the streets or died waiting for inadequate medical care. Does it even matter the Obama administration denied the request and visa applications of countless Christians attempting to flee oppression in the Middle East and Indonesia in favor of transporting thousands of improperly vetted and/or tracked Muslim refugees into cities across America; many under the veil of night? After all, what American president in their right mind wouldn’t honor tyrannical Cuba as a progressive state, green-light extremist Iran’s nuclear aspirations – a country that vows to annihilate America and Israel on a daily basis – in addition to sending a $400 million dollar ransom payment, attempt to illegally transfer $221 million to the militant Palestinian Authority just before leaving office, characterize the murderous exploits of ISIS as the amateur actions of a “JV team”, or dine with the racist leaders of la Raza and the Muslim Brotherhood?

Any offended critic claiming Donald Trump is the most racially divisive and inflammatory leader in recent memory, must have been completely oblivious, asleep or complicit to the toxic rhetoric and subversive dealings of Barack Obama. At no point in our 241 year history has the needle of American politics moved as far left as it did during the course of his 8 year tenure. In fact, if his Marxist upbringing and radical beliefs received the same level of media scrutiny and hostility as his successor, he never would have even been nominated. Unless I’m completely foreign to the true nature of division and discrimination, nearly all of those who benefited from Obama’s ill-conceived policies and personal associations were either non-white, non-Christian/Jewish, openly hostile towards America, or all of the above. Are we talking about an equitable, patriotic leader defending the interests of all people - most notably the survival and sovereignty of America - or a bitter, divisive bigot who despises America’s heritage with his every breath and still seeks atonement by judging everything through the prism of race and wealth distribution? Until everyone is held to the same standard of accountability, offered the same level of innate respect, racism, sexism, and all other forms of hate will endure unchecked; especially when such distinctions are now repeatedly wielded as weapons to attack any dissenting opinion. It’s just too bad so many supposedly “educated” men and women at the forefront of our national media, entertainment world and social activism no longer have the desire or the decency to admit the difference because they’re still too preoccupied crying over an election.

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