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Andrew McCarthy: Obama Administration ‘Becoming Sharia-Adherent’ in Scrubbing ‘Islam’ and ‘ISIS’ from Orlando Jihadi’s 911 Call

June 20, 2016

Andrew McCarthy: Obama Administration ‘Becoming Sharia-Adherent’ in Scrubbing ‘Islam’ and ‘ISIS’ from Orlando Jihadi’s 911 Call, Breitbart, John Hayward, June 20, 2016

I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.”

What they’re trying to do is purge any alternative explanation. So the administration has the position that “violent extremism,” which is what they call it, is disconnected from any credible interpretation of Islam – that Islam is singularly a “religion of peace,” and there is to be no other interpretation of it. And, therefore, anything that shows the direct nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror is to be suppressed.

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Former prosecutor and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy appeared on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his latest column, “Obama: Anti-Anti-Terrorist” with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon.

When Bannon welcomed McCarthy by noting that “you basically imply there are Islamic supremacists inside the national security apparatus of the United States government,” McCarthy replied, “I hope I did more than imply it.”

McCarthy said:

I stated it outright, and think that’s pretty clear, just from some reporting that’s recently come out about Laila Alawa, a 25-year-old Syrian immigrant who’s somehow on the Homeland Security advisory council, that gives the President advice on counter-terrorism policy – a woman who said that basically 9/11 was a good thing and changed the world for good, which is just about as stunning as anything I’ve ever seen from someone who has a quasi-official government position.

“I think it should be underscored that she’s hardly singular,” McCarthy continued. “The President has been turning for advice – policy advice that has been implemented from the beginning of his administration – to leaders of Islamist organizations that are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

McCarthy said his book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America chronicles how the Muslim Brotherhood has “very explicitly stated – and this has been proved in federal court, this is not just Andy’s speculation here – that their mission in the United States, and basically the West, but particularly the United States, is the elimination and destruction of Western civilization from within by sabotage.”

McCarthy said there was little congressional oversight of the Obama administration’s alternately clumsy and outrageous handling of the Islamist threat because “people in Congress, particularly Republicans in Congress, believe that the country has changed.”

He argued:

We always like to assume, on our side, that it’s a center-right country. In fact, it’s hard to square that with the fact that there are public opinion polls that tell us with all the abusive things that have happened, all the lawlessness that has happened – and it’s not really disputable, or credibly contestable, that there’s been lawlessness – nevertheless, President Obama has an approval rating of something in the area of 52 or 53 percent.”

He said that “political cases against abuse of power don’t just spontaneously appear,” so it is “incumbent on the people in Congress to make those cases because unlike the rest of us who don’t have political authority, it’s a responsibility of the legislative branch to rein in executive abuse.”

If Congress won’t exercise that authority, McCarthy charged, they’re “as derelict as the Executive Branch officials who are causing the lawlessness, and who are conducting themselves in a rogue way.”

“When I was a prosecutor, can you imagine how successful would I have been in prosecuting a case if I just sat at the government’s table and did nothing, while the defense lawyer did all the work?” he asked. “It’s one thing to say crimes have been committed. It’s another thing to say you have the duty to get up and prove it to the jury.”

He suggested:

I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.”

McCarthy said the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that references to Islam and ISIS will be scrubbed from transcripts of jihadi Omar Mateen’s call to 911 during the Orlando attack was clear evidence that “the government is becoming sharia-adherent, and the Left is using the same tactic with respect to law enforcement against radical Islamic extremism that it uses in the area of what they call ‘climate change.’”

“That is, they have an official version of events, which may be part of a counter-universe, but it’s their story and they’re sticking to it,” he elaborated, adding:

What they’re trying to do is purge any alternative explanation. So the administration has the position that “violent extremism,” which is what they call it, is disconnected from any credible interpretation of Islam – that Islam is singularly a “religion of peace,” and there is to be no other interpretation of it. And, therefore, anything that shows the direct nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror is to be suppressed.

McCarthy noted the absurdity of the situation by looking back to his time as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when he proved “exactly that connection” in court: “that is, that there are these commands to violence in the Koran, they’re mediated by these influential jihadist sharia jurists, and then acts of terrorism get carried out.”

“For doing that, the Justice Department gave me the highest award that the Justice Department gives out,” he recalled, adding:

Now, what I proved in court is deemed to be something that’s so improper that it can’t go in the Justice Department’s official account of what happened, in what was obviously a jihadist attack. So we’ve gone from rewarding people who demonstrate what the truth is to suppressing the truth and making the people who would expose it persona non grata.

Categories: CAIR, Censorship, Countering violent extremism, Department of Homeland Security, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Islamists in America, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama administration, Sharia law
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U.S. Attorney General Scrubs Orlando 911 Transcripts

June 20, 2016

U.S. Attorney General Scrubs Orlando 911 Transcripts, Clarion Project, Meira Svirsky, June 20, 2016

Orlando-Attack-HP_3

In an interview with NBC, we learned from the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch that only a partial transcript of the 911 calls made by the Orlando shooter will be released by the FBI to the public.

Reminiscent of other administration scrubbings, what will be omitted from the transcripts will be references to the motive of the shooter – namely, his pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State as well as his Islamist grievances about American foreign policy vis-à-vis Muslim countries.

“What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda,” Lynch said. “We are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance [to the Islamic State].”

Yet earlier when announcing the release of the transcripts, Lynch told CNN, “It’s been our goal to get as much information into the public domain as possible, so people can understand, as we do, possibly what motivated this killer, what led him to this place, and also provide us with information.”

When pressed by CNN what those transcripts will tell us about his motivation, Lynch calmly answers, “He talked about his pledges of allegiance to a terrorist group. He talked about his motivations for why he was claiming at that time he was committing this horrific act. He talked about American policy…”

Yet, those passages will be the very ones that will be redacted, as Lynch explained in an Orwellian fashion on CNN, “The reason why we’re going to limit these transcripts is to avoid re-victimizing those who went through this horror.”

To the contrary.

The immediate victims of this attack as well as the larger American public deserve to know and be able to discuss the motivations of this attack.

It is hard to imagine how speaking openly about the motive – so that steps can be made to prevent such an attack from happening again – can “re-victimize” the victims. Loved ones have been lost. Nothing will bring them back. Others have been injured – most likely maimed for life both physically and psychologically.

Nothing will make that horror go away.

What will help both the victims and the public at large is trying knowing that proper steps have been taken to prevent such a horror from happening again, and that justice will ultimately prevail.

As pointed out by Daniel Greenfield in an article titled, “Islamophobia Kills,” a culture has been created by the Obama administration along with organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that has made Americans afraid to call out potential killers for fear of being labeled anti-Muslim racists — Islamophobes.

In the case of the Orlando shooter, when Mateen was reported by a fellow employee for his homophobic and racist comments while working for at G4S Security, the company refused to take action because Mateen was Muslim and did not want to be accused of being Islamophobic.  The employee, Daniel Gilroy, a former police officer who described Mateen as “unhinged and untable,” ended up quitting his own job to avoid Mateen after Mateen began stalking him.

Gilroy said the attack by Maten did not come as a surprise to him.

Later, when he was being investigated by the FBI, Mateen claimed he was reacting to Islamophobic comments by his co-workers. The FBI later concluded that Mateen’s professed Al Qaeda ties and terrorist threats were reactions to “being marginalized because of his Muslim faith.”

We saw a similar refusal to report suspicious activity with the San Bernadino killers. Neighbors noticed suspicious activity but didn’t report it for fear of being labeled anti-Muslim racists — Islamophobes.

The Fort Hood killer, Nidal Hasan, was also on the FBI’s radar. As Greenfield notes, “Nidal Hasan handed out business cards announcing that he was a Jihadist. He delivered a presentation justifying suicide bombings, but no action was taken. Like Omar [Mateen], the FBI was aware of Hasan. It knew that he was talking to Al Qaeda bigwig Anwar Al-Awlaki, yet nothing was done. Instead of worrying about his future victims, the FBI was concerned that investigating him and interviewing him would ‘harm Hasan’s career’.”

Greenfield adds, “One of his classmates later said that the military authorities ‘don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody’s religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.’”

An interesting poll taken in the wake of the Orlando attack shows just how far this “see something, say nothing” mentality has taken hold in America. When asked if the Orlando incident was more a function of Islamic terrorism or gun violence, 60 percent of Democratic voters answered gun violence, while only 20 percent said Islamic terrorism. (Of Republican voters, 79 percent answered Islamic terrorism.)

While it is true that a man with Mateen’s history should never have been able to have bought a gun (and this in itself is a travesty of the intent of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), the gun he used was the physical facilitator of his Islamist ideology.

“Re-victimization,” in the words of U.S. Attorney General Lynch, will apply to all of us if the Islamist ideology and motivations of these killers are not openly addressed, taken seriously and made as the basis of a plan of action to counteract them.

In addition to creating an open season for Islamist attacks, ultimately the strategy of the administration will backfire. As noted by former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz, “If we refuse to isolate, name and shame Islamist extremism, from fear of increasing anti-Muslim bigotry, we only increase anti-Muslim bigotry.“

Categories: CAIR, Censorship, Democrats, Gun control, Islamic State, Islamic terrorism, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, national security, Obama administration, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama's America, Orlando massacre, Political correctness, US Attorney General
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All Your Social Media Belong to the EU

June 10, 2016

All Your Social Media Belong to the EU, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 10, 2016

Social media

For a decade, the top search result for “EU referendum” on Google was the political blog EU Referendum. Then it was abruptly displaced by solidly pro-EU media outlets. It appeared that someone at Google had decided that search traffic should be driven to pro-EU sites. Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish columnist who covers, among other things, migrant violence, at Gatestone, had her Facebook account deleted after posting a video detailing migrant rapes in Sweden.

These seemingly isolated incidents fit into a larger pattern as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter helped create and signed a “code of conduct” banning hate speech. Facebook had already become notorious for its political agenda while Twitter had created a Trust and Safety Council filled with extremist left-wing groups like Feminist Frequency to censor the politically incorrect.

Google has historically been a pro-free speech outlier. Its politics have never been ambiguous, but it has eschewed the overt censorship of some of its new partners working to keep the EU free of political dissent. But the code of conduct goes well beyond censorship. The companies will be working to strengthen their “ongoing partnerships with civil society organisations who will help flag content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct”. That amounts to empowering left-wing advocacy groups to dictate content removal to major companies. It means that not only Twitter, but Facebook, Google and Microsoft will get their own Trust and Safety Council. It may be called something else. It may not even have a name. But it will have power. That’s what this really means.

And it’s only a starting point in a larger propaganda initiative.

“The IT Companies and the European Commission, recognising the value of independent counter speech against hateful rhetoric and prejudice, aim to continue their work in identifying and promoting independent counter-narratives,” the press release reads.

Even more than the censorship, the counter-narratives push represents a troubling development.

Left-wing groups won’t just be embedded as censors, but major tech firms will be expected to promote their agendas. And the biggest resource that companies with massive social media platforms have at their disposal isn’t mere money. It’s the ability to decide what is trending and what isn’t.

If a story about Islamic terrorism trends, will Facebook or Twitter be expected to promote a counter-narrative from an Islamic group? How exactly is this any different than traditional propaganda?

“The IT Companies to intensify their work with CSOs to deliver best practice training on countering hateful rhetoric and prejudice and increase the scale of their proactive outreach to CSOs to help them deliver effective counter speech campaigns. The European Commission, in cooperation with Member States, to contribute to this endeavour by taking steps to map CSOs’ specific needs and demands in this respect,” the release tells us.

CSO stands for Civil Society Organization. It’s used more often now that NGO carries with it an air of contempt. That last sentence informs us that the CSOs will have “demands.” The European Commission will help leverage and assemble these demands. Meanwhile major tech firms will be working to aid these CSOs in pushing their agenda.

What will this look like? We got a preview of it with Facebook’s “Initiative for Civil Courage Online”. Facebook had been facing pressure from Germany’s Merkel who was worried over public outrage at crimes committed by her Muslim migrant arrivals. Censorship was obviously the order of the day.

The Initiative promoted Klick It Out which, in properly Orwellian fashion, urged people to “See It. Report It.” The “It” being “Social Media Discrimination.” And then users were expected to “Klick It Out”. It was a failure. But Facebook and friends are doubling down.

Tech companies love the idea of creating “counter-narratives” because it’s cheaper to throw some money at an NGO or CSO, or to boost their profile, than to invest still more money in censorship. It’s not because they have a bias for free speech, but because active censorship, even when outsourced to poorer countries, which it often is, demands more resources. Pushing an agenda is cheap.

And the goal of companies like Facebook is to increase usage, rather than reduce it, which is why COO Sheryl Sandberg championed “like attacks” in which users flood the pages of bigots with their own speech. But the code of conduct is a thorough rejection of any of that self-interested libertarianism. Censorship is packaged together with agenda pushing. There might be like attacks, but what the EU really wanted was deletion and promotion for the groups that its leaders support. And they got it.

Some fraction of these efforts may be directed at ISIS supporters, but there is no particular reason to be optimistic about that. By putting CSOs first, the message is that this isn’t about counter-terrorism, but about promoting one set of political agendas at the expense of another. Much like Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, this is about selecting who should speak and who should be silenced.

Programs like these operate under the umbrella of fighting extremism. And extremism, unlike blowing up buses or beheading hostages, is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder is a tech company standing on the left while looking to the right. The obsession with radicalization treats lawful speech as the precursor to violence. It also assumes that Muslim terrorism emerges from a cycle of extremism between Muslims and critics of Islam. Silence the critics and you stop the terrorism.

European governments, like those of Angela Merkel, are far less worried about Salafists than they are about domestic political dissent. When Merkel berated Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over insufficient censorship, it wasn’t because she objected to the pipeline that feeds Muslims from Germany into ISIS. Muslim terrorism is inconvenient, but political dissent is politically explosive. Social media comprise an alternative organizing force that counters the dominance of media narratives. That makes it a threat.

Attempts to silence more prominent voices like Richard North and Ingrid Carlqvist have run into a backlash, but it’s impossible to rally in support of each ordinary person who has their account shut down or their blog pushed down in the rankings for having politically incorrect views. Social media at their best bring people together. This initiative is about disrupting social organizations that are disapproved of.

It is about preserving the dominance of a government-media narrative while promoting astroturf organizations that try to appear independent, but really echo that very same narrative.

Private companies have the right to determine what content appears on their platforms. But Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have become part of an alliance with governments and advocacy groups to maintain a particular narrative. They will not simply be removing hateful content. Instead they have undertaken to play a role in putting forward a particular set of ideas by particular governments.

That’s propaganda and it is the opposite of how the internet was meant to be used.

The deal puts a series of private organizations, backed by EU government power, in charge of determining the content of social media, both positive and negative. Social media were meant to be centered around the user. Instead this deal displaces the user and replaces him or her with the EU.

Categories: Censorship, European Union, Freedom of speech, social media
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