The U.S.-Supported Terrorists of the Palestinian Authority

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

The U.S.-Supported Terrorists of the Palestinian Authority

By Matthew Vadum

A federal jury in Manhattan found the Palestinian Authority and its terrorist arm civilly liable yesterday for six terrorist attacks a decade ago that left 33 dead and more than 450 injured.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expected the “international community to continue to punish those who support terrorism, just as the U.S. federal court has done, and to back the countries that are fighting terrorism.”

“Today as well we remember the families that lost their loved ones; our heart is with them and there is no justice that can console them.”

The jury determined that plaintiffs, numbered in the dozens, were entitled to an award of $218.5 million against both the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The federal Anti-Terrorism Act provides for the damages to be tripled which brings the total sum owed by the defendants to $655.5 million. The law allows U.S. citizens who are victims of international terrorism to seek redress in U.S. courts. Last fall a Brooklyn jury invoked the law when it found Arab Bank liable for supporting the terrorist activities of Hamas. A second trial to determine damages in the case has yet to take place.

The verdict is a public relations disaster for the Palestinian Authority which portrays itself as representing moderate, pragmatic Palestinians who want both peace with Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state. In reality the authority and PLO are just as devoted to terrorism and destroying Israel as its Hamas. The authority, which constantly promotes jihad on its social media and makes idols out of suicide bombers, reaffirmed its unending hostility to Israel last year by forming a unity government with Hamas.

The huge civil judgment also shines a light on the true nature of the Palestinian Authority which is the beneficiary of enormous cash injections courtesy of taxpayers in Israel and Western countries –including the U.S.– that treat the terrorist authority as a legitimate political entity.

Meanwhile, Kent A. Yalowitz, an attorney for the families, sang the praises of the Anti-Terrorism Act last week in closing arguments. “Money is oxygen for terrorism,” he said, adding that the statute “hits those who send terrorists where it hurts them most: in the wallet.”

Rep. Keith Ellison: Apologist for Jihad

My article from the Feb. 23, 2015 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Rep. Keith Ellison: Apologist for Jihad

By Matthew Vadum

America is the root cause of violent extremism, Congress’s foremost apologist for Islamic terrorism told a White House conference last week.

In rambling remarks Feb. 18 at President Obama’s so-called Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) used the opportunity to smear America, downplay Muslim violence, and urge law enforcement to go easy on suspected Muslim terrorists.

Ellison accused the U.S. of breeding terrorists by somehow persecuting Muslims.

“The reason that we are susceptible to violent extremism is because we have not deepened opportunity in our country enough. Now it’s true that, certainly, economic deprivation makes people susceptible to being lured and seduced. That’s a fact. But it’s also true that not only is it economic deprivation, although it is certainly part of it. The other part of it is social deprivation as well and legal deprivation as well,” he said.

Of course anyone who follows the American scene knows that Muslims in this country are far from persecuted. It is more accurate to describe them as a protected class. Criticism of Muslims is met with hysterical shrieks and verbal abuse from left-wingers. President Obama, in particular, seems to think Muslims can do no wrong, as liberal Bob Beckel recently observed.

Terror Apologist Named to Federal Anti-Terror Post

My article from the Feb. 20, 2015 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Terror Apologist Named to Federal Anti-Terror Post

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama is appointing an openly terrorist-sympathizing Muslim to head a government office dedicated to countering Islamic State propaganda.

In April, Rashad Hussain will take over as director of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, a small office within the U.S. Department of State that Obama plans to make bigger. A new component called the Information Coordination Cell will be added to the expanded center and will reportedly be staffed by intelligence analysts. It will have a staff of around 80 people and will coordinate with other government agencies.

“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Richard A. Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, told the New York Times.

The head-chopping barbarians of the Islamic State will no doubt cower in fear because the U.S. government has, as the newspaper notes, “more than 350 State Department Twitter accounts, combining embassies, consulates, media hubs, bureaus and individuals, as well as similar accounts operated by the Pentagon, the Homeland Security Department and foreign allies.”

Hussain is reportedly a devout Muslim who maintains close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood’s network in the U.S.

Sessions: Obama Dismantling the Immigration System

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Sessions: Obama Dismantling the Immigration System

By Matthew Vadum

Conservative champion Sen. Jeff Sessions is accusing President Obama of “systematically” dismantling the nation’s immigration enforcement system — and he’s got proof.

Obama’s attacks on America’s immigration laws are “undermining the very rule of law upon which our nation was founded and upon which its greatness depends,” said the Alabama Republican.

Sessions has put together an exhaustive 50-page report in the form of a detailed timeline that catalogs Obama’s specific assaults on the U.S. immigration system since becoming president. Some conservatives say Obama is deliberately flooding the U.S. with illegal aliens as a means of generating future Democratic Party voters.

The history lesson from Sessions comes as Republicans attempt to overcome a Democratic filibuster of a House-passed Department of Homeland Security bill that blocks President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty. Funding for DHS runs out at the end of the month. Both House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) support some kind of immigration amnesty but object to Obama’s unilateral approach that bypasses Congress.

The Sessions report also comes as a federal court slaps the Obama administration with a preliminary injunction preventing the government from moving forward with Obama’s extra-legal immigration amnesty. President Obama unveiled the unpopular plan late last year in the wake of his Democratic Party’s humiliating defeat in congressional elections.

Texas-based federal Judge Andrew S. Hanen found late Monday that Obama exceeded his authority in unilaterally granting benefits to more than 4 million illegal aliens. (Details of the injunction are available at Townhall.) The Department of Homeland Security had been planning to begin accepting applications for the amnesty and processing work permits for the affected illegal aliens today. The Obama administration plans to appeal the court decision.

Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the extreme-left National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), called the decision “judicial vigilantism” and implied the judge was racist and xenophobic. By contrast, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called the court ruling a “major victory for the rule of law” and “a major turning point in the fight to stop Obama’s lawless amnesty.” Cruz noted that Texas is “leading a coalition of 26 states to block the illegal executive actions and to protect our states, cities, and communities.”

In his report Session notes pointedly that President Obama previously said he had no power to pursue the very amnesty he is now trying to implement.

Obama White House Partners with ISIS-Linked Group

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Obama White House Partners with ISIS-Linked Group

By Matthew Vadum

A Boston-based hub of terrorism associated with a top Islamic State propagandist and producer of hostage-beheading videos will receive the red carpet treatment at an anti-terrorism conference at the Obama White House this Wednesday.

The so-called Summit on Countering Violent Extremism comes as President Obama seeks formal authorization from Congress to wage war against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL).

The terrorist-friendly Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which is a known front for Islamist terrorist groups, operates mosques in and around Boston.

Members of the anti-terrorist community are outraged that officials of ISB will participate in discussions of anti-terrorism best practices on Feb. 18.

In a recent Washington Times op-ed, Charles Jacobs and Ilya Feoktistov of Americans For Peace and Tolerance, warned that ISB “and its political arm, the Muslim American Society, seen as the go-to groups for civic and law enforcement partnerships, have links to many extremists who are either in jail, in flight from federal authorities, or have been killed during terrorist attacks.” The group also ran a full-page ad about ISB’s participation in the summit in the Washington Times under the headline, “Why is Boston a Hub For ‘VIOLENT EXTREMISM?'”

Social media guru Ahmad Abousamra, who is now the chief propagandist for the Islamic State, attended ISB’s Cambridge mosque. His father was a vice president of the Muslim American Society of Boston. The FBI suspects Abousamra is in charge of Islamic State’s slick English-language propaganda campaign that produces videos of beheadings and various atrocities. The campaign has succeeded in recruiting at least 300 American jihadists and thousands of volunteers from other Western nations.

Long before the Islamic State arrived on the world scene, the Islamic Society of Boston had already long been a hotbed of terrorist activity, according to DiscoverTheNetworks.

ISB was founded by Hamas and Hezbollah supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi, who in 2004 was sentenced to 23 years in prison on terrorism-related charges. ISB’s Cambridge mosque is run by the Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors say is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi benefactors helped to fund a sister mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC), in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.

The Real Kayla Mueller

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

The Real Kayla Mueller

By Matthew Vadum

The presumed Islamic State murder victim Kayla Mueller isn’t quite the saintly martyr that President Obama and the media are trying to make Americans believe.

Family and friends told reporters Mueller was “a deeply idealistic young woman eager to help those less fortunate.” A neighbor of hers, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran, said Mueller “represented everything good about being an American. In the outgoing battle between good and evil, she represented the best of the good. She took great risks to help other people.”

Fresh from the golf course, President Obama praised Mueller effusively, saying she was “the best of America,” and adding that she “worked with humanitarian organizations in India, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, compelled by her desire to serve others.” Kayla’s “compassion and dedication to assisting those in need shows us that even amongst unconscionable evil, the essential decency of humanity can live on.”

Only someone with Obama’s twisted, pro-Islamist perspective could lie so passionately on Mueller’s behalf.

It turns out the 26-year-old Islamic State hostage killed last week in Syria wasn’t many of the things her supporters described her as.

Mueller wasn’t a humanitarian aid worker. She wasn’t a peace activist. She wasn’t trying to make things better for everyone in the Middle East. She was part of the problem, an ally with medieval theocratic totalitarians against Western civilization.

Mueller was an Islamic terrorist sympathizer who worked for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which certainly is not a humanitarian organization. The ISM is a terrorist-linked organization that attempts to sabotage the anti-terrorism activities of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The ISM backs the enemies of Israel, including Hamas, and those in the Palestinian Authority who seek to destroy Israel.

The ISM said Mueller “worked with Palestinians nonviolently resisting the confiscation and demolitions of their homes and lands.”

ISIS Claims Another American

My article from the Feb. 12, 2015 issue of FrontPage magazine:

ISIS Claims Another American

By Matthew Vadum

Kayla Mueller, the young American activist kidnapped by Islamic State terrorists 18 months ago, is dead, probably after being murdered by her captors.

Mueller was abducted by Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) as she left a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria and held by IS in its stronghold of Raqqa, Syria. A U.S. mission to liberate Mueller and other American hostages last year failed.

After bungling the rescue effort, President Obama now plans to use Mueller’s death to press Congress for more authority to pursue Islamic State. Whether Obama can be trusted to use any new authority or war materiel properly is an open question.

Obama described Islamic State as “a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla.”

Obama added, “On this day, we take comfort in the fact that the future belongs not to those who destroy, but rather to the irrepressible force of human goodness that Kayla Mueller shall forever represent.” [italics added]

Perhaps in an effort to save on speechwriting fees, Obama cut and paste from his awful 2012 speech to United Nations in which he bloviated that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

It’s not like Obama is serious about the threat that Islamism poses to Western civilization. When it comes to a U.S. hostage being killed by Islamists or French journalists being slaughtered for mocking Islam, Obama is phoning it in. His heart isn’t in it because he sides with the Muslims and shares many of their complaints about the United States.

The passing of the 26-year-old woman from Prescott, Ariz., was confirmed by her family days after the Islamic State claimed Mueller died in an airstrike against IS carried out by Jordan. The IS group provided no evidence to support its claim about the manner of Mueller’s death but reportedly informed the Muellers of their daughter’s demise by email.

Killing Qaddafi: Hillary’s Secret Role

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Killing Qaddafi: Hillary’s Secret Role

By Matthew Vadum

To justify an illegal ouster of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Hillary Clinton falsely claimed the Libyan leader was planning genocidal attacks against his domestic enemies, an investigative report in the Washington Times suggests.

Documents and audio recordings examined by the newspaper suggest the former U.S. secretary of state had no clear plan for how to deal with the Libyan crisis she created and whether the lawlessness and chaos she spawned in that country led to the deadly Muslim terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.

Clinton was secretary of state on that terrible day. Despite her disastrous tenure at Foggy Bottom which saw Muslim irredentist movements gain ground in North Africa and the Middle East, she continues to be the early frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She resigned as secretary of state in early 2013, paving the way for the utterly undistinguished then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to take over as chief public cheerleader for the Obama administration’s pro-Islamist campaign.

When that fateful 3 a.m. telephone call her 2008 TV ads warned about finally came, Mrs. Clinton snoozed on through it, allowing a comedy of errors consisting in part of incompetence and arrogance to dictate the U.S. government’s bungled response to Benghazi. Clinton and her fellow Obama White House officials lied over and over again about the catalyst for the attack, refusing for weeks even to call it a terrorist attack.

Instead Clinton blamed the Benghazi attack on an obscure U.S.-based filmmaker who made an anti-Islam movie trailer just about no one saw. Officials told anyone willing to listen that a spontaneous demonstration sparked by Muslim anger over the video had magically materialized in a city blanketed by al-Qaeda flags and that within hours this supposedly organic melee had claimed the lives of four Americans, including J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Bowing to Shariah law, Clinton had the filmmaker imprisoned on a flimsy legal pretext, America’s First Amendment be damned.

U.S intelligence did not concur with Clinton’s public rationale for invading Libya, a military action that was never approved by the United States Congress, according to the newspaper report. She had claimed Qaddafi was planning to commit acts of genocide aimed at liquidating his regime’s detractors. But intelligence operatives “had come to the opposite conclusion: that [Qaddafi] would not risk world outrage by killing civilians en masse even as he tried to crush the rebellion in his country.”

Obama’s Shadow Visa Network

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

Obama’s Shadow Visa Network

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama is running a massive illegal operation that has issued 5.5 million work permits never authorized by Congress, according to a disturbing new report from the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies.

The report comes as Congress prepares to vote today on legislation that would reverse some of Obama’s executive overreaches that reward illegal aliens with lawful status for breaking the nation’s immigration laws.

The report also comes as Republicans grapple with profoundly disturbing comments made by the president’s nominee to replace Attorney General Eric Holder. Loretta Lynch, currently U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at her confirmation hearing last week that she believes illegal aliens possess the same legal right to work in the U.S. as American citizens possess. This is tantamount to a promise to refuse to enforce the immigration laws of the United States and an in-your-face demonstration that Lynch isn’t qualified to carry out parking ticket prosecutions in Flatbush, let alone head up the U.S. justice system.

There is no reason to believe Lynch would be perturbed by the existence of Obama’s shadowy visa-issuing operation. She doesn’t, after all, care about the rule of law, at least as it pertains to immigration and border security.

The scheme uncovered by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) “is a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the limits set by Congress that inevitably impacts opportunities for U.S. workers, damages the integrity of the immigration system, and encourages illegal immigration,” according to Jessica M. Vaughan, CIS’s director of policy studies.

CIS uncovered the existence of the Obama scheme by obtaining statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA). The data indicated that approximately 5.5 million new work permits were given to aliens from 2009 to 2014, over and above the quantity of new green card and temporary worker admissions in that five-year period.