Canary In The Coal Mine

Israel: PM Cancels Government Campaign to Entice Expats Home

by Ruth Eglash*  |  JPost.com  |  December 4, 2011

 

Ads by Immigrant Absorption Ministry receive harsh criticism from US Jewish media pundits.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday canceled an ad campaign by the Immigrant Absorption Ministry aimed at convincing Israelis living abroad to return home after it received harsh criticism from US Jewish media pundits.

Launched in September with approval from Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver, the campaign – which includes a series of billboards in several US cities and three commercials on TV channels popular with Israeli expats – sends a central message that the longer Israelis spend away from their homeland, the more chance there is of them losing their Israeli/Jewish identity.

Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev said Netanyahu put a halt to the campaign when he became aware that it was deemed offensive by American Jews.

“We are very sensitive to the concerns of the Jewish community, and when we understood that they had problems and concerns about the videos, the prime minister said to suspend the campaign,” Regev said.

JTA quoted a statement by Michael Oren, the ambassador to the United States, who said that “the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s campaign clearly did not take into account American Jewish sensibilities, and we regret any offense it caused.”

While two of the three commercials suggesting that the next generation of Israelis would not speak Hebrew or recognize certain Jewish holidays were deemed mildly acceptable, critics including a broad spectrum of writers such as Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic; Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary; Politico’s Ben Smith; and Shmuel Rosner in the Jewish Journal, said it was the third video that represented an affront on US Jewry.

That clip highlights the plight of a young Israeli woman trying to commemorate Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars but failing to adequately explain its significance to her partner.

Many of the critics assumed him to be an American Jew.

The ad’s tagline reads: “They will always remember Israel but their partners might not always understand; Help them to come back.”

The Jewish Channel, which initially highlighted the disturbing angle in these commercials, called it a “semi-covert national campaign” and suggested that the ministry had failed to differentiate between marrying an American Jew and an American non-Jew.

Jonathan S. Tobin, writing in Commentary, pointed out: “It’s one thing for Israel to try and convince expats to come home lest they assimilate into a foreign culture. It’s quite another to send a message that hooking up with an American Jew will cause them to lose their secular Israeli identity. It’s true that many expats view themselves more as Israelis rather than Jews and fear losing their connection with the Hebrew language and the secular culture of the state more than ties with their nominal religion.

“But a message that seems to reinforce the notion that Israelis and American Jews have nothing in common runs contrary to the whole concept of Zionism, let alone traditional Judaism, and not to mention the political needs of a country that relies heavily on American Jewish support.”

Goldberg, whose blog post on the Atlantic website caused the most waves online, called the campaign “chutzpadik.”

“The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic,” he wrote.

“The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters,” he added.

In its response, the Immigrant Absorption Ministry said that it had conducted widespread research into the issues that would encourage Israelis living abroad to return home and said that at no point did it consider turning its attention to the American Jewish community.

“The comments we have been hearing in the last few days that the Israeli government is trying to interfere with the personal choices of Jews in the US, have no basis in reality,” a ministry spokesman said.

“The ministry greatly admires the American Jewish community and recognizes its strong connection with Israel. The ministry respects the right of everyone to make personal choices.”

The spokesman said that since the campaign was launched in May 2010, some 14,000 Israeli expats have returned home, most of them enticed by a basket of fiscal benefits and tax breaks. He said that the current campaign had garnered more than 155,000 views on the ministry’s website.

“This debate only reinforces the position of the Jewish Agency that in open societies, a strong Jewish identity and identification with the core values of Israel is a precondition for making aliya or returning to Israel,” Jewish Agency for Israel Chairman Natan Sharansky said. “It is also a precondition for strong and vital Jewish communities and for their future leadership. We depend upon each other, and there should be no room for paternalism in our relationship.”

While the debate continued in the US, veteran immigrants also weighed in.

“I get what Goldberg is saying and I see his perspective, but I think he is taking it personally and people are reading into this campaign something that is not really there,” said Laura Ben-David, a blogger, writer and author of Moving Up: An Aliyah Journal.

She wrote on her blog: “Israel is not, as Goldberg suggests, showing contempt for American Jews. Nor for America or any Americans. The ministry is simply telling it like it is – take it as you wish. If you’re a Jewish Israeli and you leave Israel, something WILL get lost. Maybe now, maybe next generation, but it will happen.”

Ben-David told The Jerusalem Post, “I left America, but I still have a tremendous amount of love for America, but my children, some who were born there and some who were born here, do not get any meaning out of American customs such as eating turkey for Thanksgiving.”

Asked whether she thought the ads, as Goldberg and other US Jews have pointed out, only divide US and Israeli Jews, Ben- David said: “Clearly it has because people have reacted in this way, however I don’t think that it had to happen.

“I tried to put myself into the minds of everyone and it does seem to me that the more people are separated from their Judaism and Israel, the more offended they are by this campaign.”

*Herb Keinon contributed to this report.

 

Source: http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=248003

Report: Sarkozy Calls Netanyahu 'Liar'

From: Ynet  |  Ynetnews.com  |  November 7, 2011

 

Microphones accidently left on after G20 meeting pick up private conversation between US, French presidents. Sarkozy (Pictured Left) admits he 'can't stand' Israeli premier. Obama: You're fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day!

French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly told US President Barack Obama that he could not "stand" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he thinks the Israeli premier "is a liar."

According to a Monday report in the French website "Arret sur Images," after facing reporters for a G20 press conference on Thursday, the two presidents retired to a private room, to further discuss the matters of the day. 

The conversation apparently began with President Obama criticizing Sarkozy for not having warned him that France would be voting in favor of the Palestinian membership bid in UNESCO despite Washington's strong objection to the move.

The conversation then drifted to Netanyahu, at which time Sarkozy declared: "I cannot stand him. He is a liar." According to the report, Obama replied: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!"

The remark was naturally meant to be said in confidence, but the two leaders' microphones were accidently left on, making the would-be private comment embarrassingly public.

The communication faux pas went unnoticed for several minutes, during which the conversation between the two heads of state – which quickly reverted to other matters – was all but open to members the press, who were still in possession of headsets provided by the Elysée for the sake of simultaneous translation during the G20 press conference.

"By the time the (media) services at the Elysée realize it, it was on for at least three minutes," one journalist told the website. Still, he said that reporters "did not have a chance to take advantage of this fluke."

The surprising lack of coverage may be explained by a report alleging that reporters present at the event were requested to sign an agreement to keep mum on the subject of the embarrassing comments.

A member of the media confirmed Monday that "there were discussions between journalists and they agreed not to publish the comments due to the sensitivity of the issue."

He added that while it was annoying to have to refrain from publishing the information, the journalists are subject to precise rules of conduct.

Source: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4145266,00.html

An Ominous Reckoning

by Robert S Wistrich  |  JPost.com  |  November 7, 2011

 

The anniversary of Kristallnacht should serve as an opportunity for the West to wake up to the rampant anti-Semitism engulfing the Arab world.

Seventy-three years ago, on November 9, 1938, the murderous Nazi onslaught against the German Jews began with a nation-wide pogrom that smashed the fabric of their existence. Known euphemistically as Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”), this state-organized orgy of violence happened in peacetime. It involved the systematic burning of hundreds of synagogues, the destruction of approximately 7,500 Jewish businesses, the murder of nearly 100 Jews, and the deportation of another 30,000 male Jews to German concentration camps.

It was a crucial turning-point in Hitler’s “war against the Jews,” a major signpost on the road leading to World War II, which Nazi Germany would initiate less than a year later.

Nazi propaganda, already then, openly warned about the imminent annihilation of Jewry through “fire and sword,” though few in the West took these threats too seriously.

Today, there is no immediate danger of a new Kristallnacht in the Western world, although levels of anti-Semitism (hiding under the more acceptable mask of hostility towards Israel) have reached levels unprecedented since 1945. But in the Middle East, the hatred of Jews burns much more fiercely – both in Iran and in the Arab world.

Islamist anti-Semitism, in particular, is soaked in some of the most inflammatory motifs that made the Kristallnacht atrocities possible in Nazi Germany and only three years later provided the rationale for the mass murder of European Jewry.

For example, there is the pervasive exploitation in Arabic of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its insistence on the reality of the “Jewish conspiracy for world domination”; there is a revival of the medieval Christian blood-libel against Jews, transplanted from Europe to the contemporary Arab-Muslim Middle East; and the mass diffusion of stereotypes about the Jews as cruel, treacherous and bloodthirsty colonialists seeking to destroy the identity and beliefs of the Muslim peoples.

To this, one must add the slanderous but widely popular identification of Zionism with Nazism and apartheid and the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians – a Goebbels-like propaganda lie that has also found a growing audience in the West.

However contradictory it may appear to some, the Zionismis- Nazism fabrication co-exists in the Middle East today with Holocaust denial on a broad scale. Indeed, in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Holocaust denial has become a state-sponsored weapon in the regime’s efforts to win over the Arab street and indoctrinate its own people with anti-Jewish toxins.

THE INCREASINGLY entrenched anti-Semitism in the Arab world has not, unfortunately, been diminished by the “Arab Spring.” Earlier this year, Sheikh Yusuf al- Qaradawi, one of the most authoritative religious leaders of the Sunni Arab world (and especially esteemed by the Muslim Brotherhood), told a million Egyptians assembled in Tahrir Square that he hoped their mission would be to complete Hitler’s work. Al- Qaradawi, an immensely popular cleric, publicly insisted that the esteemed German Führer had been sent by Allah as a “divine punishment for the Jews.” Not long before, CBS’s foreign correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted and brutalized in the heart of Cairo by a mob of Egyptian men screaming “Jew, Jew, Jew.” Logan is not, in fact, Jewish. But this aspect of her ordeal was, typically enough, very much downplayed by both the American and European media.

There has indeed been very little appetite in the West for reporting on the Jew-hatred that saturates the Arab world. Arab nations (not least, the Palestinians) are never held to the standard expected of the rest of the world when it comes to racism, sexism or Judeophobia.

Hence, precious little reference is made to the genocidal anti-Semitism that runs through the “Sacred Covenant” of the Palestinian Hamas, any more than the West was unduly concerned with Haj Amin al-Husseini’s role in the Holocaust of European Jewry. Haj Amin, a Hitlerian anti-Semite if ever there was one, dominated the Palestinian Arab national movement for nearly forty years, leaving a legacy of hatred that would poison the Middle East for decades.

The Arab demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state has continued uninterruptedly since 1948. It has yet to be challenged by the Arab revolutions of 2011. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, did nothing to improve the atmosphere by his recent denial at the UN that the Jews are a people with a profound historic connection to the land of Israel. His negation of Israel’s most basic rights and Jewish identity is of a piece with his brazenly racist insistence that the new PalestinianState should be “Jew-free.”

Nothing that has happened thus far in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia – where the Islamic movements have emerged greatly strengthened – leads me to believe that Arab anti- Semitism has been significantly weakened. The bogeyman of the “world Zionist conspiracy” is, unfortunately, still with us. Arab tyrants (as in Syria) continue to use it as an “opium for the masses,” but it also has powerful roots in popular Arab culture as well as in political Islam.

Even more sobering is the fact that the sickening anti- Jewish racism in Iran and the Arab world is nourished by so many Arab theologians, intellectuals, journalists, artists (See Image), deans of university faculties and so-called academic “experts.” In other words, the raw, primitive, street-hatred of the Jews has cultural and intellectual legitimacy among the educated elites, as it once did in Nazi Germany.

Over seven decades ago, Kristallnacht was an unmistakable warning to the rest of Europe as to where “eliminationist anti-Semitism” would lead. It went largely unheeded. Millions of non-Jews as well as twothirds of European Jewry would pay the ultimate price for this blindness. As Iran moves towards acquiring nuclear weapons and vows to annihilate Israel, will history repeat itself? Will the West remain silent? For Israel, the moment of reckoning comes closer by the day.

The writer is the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, 2010).

 

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=244737

ADL: Arab Press Promotes Anti-Semitism

From: Ynetnews.com  |  October 9, 2011

 

Anti-Defamation League says editorial cartoons in mainstream daily newspapers focusing on US intention to veto Palestinian UN statehood bid are rife with vicious anti-Jewish stereotypes.

The Palestinian effort to seek full membership in the United Nations was big news in the Arab media – and the focus of a number of editorial cartoons in Muslim and Arab newspapers across the Middle East.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, many of those caricatures, which focused on the declared intention of the United States to veto the membership bid should it come to a vote in the Security Council, were rife with vicious anti-Semitic caricatures and stereotypes.

On Thursday the Jewish group released a compilation of selected cartoons on this theme appearing in recent weeks in mainstream daily newspapers across the Middle East.

According to ADL, the images illustrate how the Arab media continues to promote anti-Semitic imagery and conspiracy theories about Jewish and Israeli “control” of international forums and the US government, depicting President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu using grotesque imagery and anti-Jewish themes.

“Anti-Semitism is once again the leitmotif for cartoon commentary Muslim and Arab newspapers since the Palestinians took their statehood bid at the United Nations,” says ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman.

“Rearing its ugly head in the visual depiction of stereotypical hook-nosed or black-hatted images of Jews plotting to control the United States government and the world is a theme lifted right out of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’

"Arab newspaper cartoonists have been engaging in this type of anti-Semitic incitement for decades, and yet it is especially troubling in the current context, the very antithesis of encouraging peacemaking.”

In the run-up to the Palestinian statehood bid, editorial cartoons on the subject appeared in newspapers in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the region. Many called up traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Some cartoonists demonized American and Israeli opposition to the Palestinian appeal by playing on themes of Jewish and Israeli domination and control of the United States, President Barack Obama or the UN.

A cartoon appearing on September 30 in the Qatari daily newspaper Al-Watan typifies that sentiment: A caricature of a bearded Orthodox Jew with hook nose and black hat is shown in the driver’s seat of an automobile, his hand resting on a stick-shift representing President Barack Obama’s head, and the steering wheel in the shape of the UN symbol.

Other recent examples of this theme include:

• A smiling President Obama and an American flag stick out of the suit-pocket pocket of a fat-cat Jew with a Star of David emblazoned on his tie (Ad-Dustur, Jordan, September 23).
• Netanyahu and Obama as serpents entwined around the globe with a caption that reads, “American foreign policy in the Middle East” (As-Sabil, Jordan September 25).
• A Palestinian Arab man wearing a shirt that reads “The Palestinian State” is shown being crucified on the letter “T” in the word “VETO” (Tishrin, Syria, September 22).

Source:  http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4132866,00.html

'First Jewish Global 24 Hour News Channel Set To Launch'

by EJP  |  JPost.com  |  September 18, 2011

 

Jewish News One unaffiliated with political movements, will be broadcast in Europe, America and Middle East, according to EJP report.

 

BRUSSELS - Jewish News One (JN1), the world’s first Jewish global 24hr news  channel "that offers a new vision of current affairs," will be launched next week.

JN1 presents itself as a fully independent worldwide news channel "which is not tied to any nation, government or political party."

Its slogan is "informing opinion, expanding horizons."

It will broadcast in 8 languages.

"The arrival of JN1 on the global media landscape reflects the 21st century trend towards international news broadcasting diversification towards an ever-wider range of perspectives and points of view," the channel explained.

It seeks "to provide objective and balanced coverage of events while offering a fresh and unique perspective on contemporary affairs, filling a gap which existing channels are currently unable to provide."

The channel owners are Igor Kolomoisky and Vadim Rabinovich, respectively President and Vice President of the European Jewish Union (EJU), a body dedicated to promote Jewish life in Europe.

Jewish News One will have news bureaus in Tel Aviv, Brussels and Kiev. In the coming months the channel is planning to open further bureaus in Washington, Paris and London

The arrival of JN1 on the global media landscape reflects the 21st century trend towards international news broadcasting diversification.

JN1 will begin broadcasting on September 21 via satellite and will be available in Europe, America and the Middle East.

A launch and presentation event will take place in Brussels on the same day. 

 

Source

CAIR Regularly Slams America on Iranian TV

by David J. Rusin, The Middle East Forum  |  Islamist-Watch.org  |  July 22, 2011

 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) uses Press TV, the biased English-language channel run by the Iranian government, as a platform to peddle its favored meme of "Islamophobia" in the U.S. One clip spotlighted last month by the Investigative Project (IPT) features CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper lamenting "a cottage industry of Muslim bashers," "Islamophobic groups," and "right-wing politicians and commentators pushing anti-Muslim sentiment in our society." However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Of the Press TV segments posted on CAIR's YouTube page since July 1, 2010 — roughly a year ago — 28 include interviews of CAIR officials conducted by the network's journalists. More often than not, those CAIR figures promoted the notion that life in America is a nightmare for Muslims. A few choice quotes from the Press TV clips, in reverse chronological order:

• Cyrus McGoldrick, CAIR-NY: "Muslims have become an acceptable target for a lot of America, of the bigotry and hate that, I think, a lot of people already hold in their hearts."

• Ibrahim Hooper: "American Muslims pretty well assume now if they go to a mosque, they're going to be either under surveillance or going to be in the hearing radius of some agent provocateur."

• Nihad Awad, CAIR executive director: "The ones who are training the government … about Islam and the Muslim community in the counterterrorism area are the ones who see Islam as the enemy and the Muslim community as the enemy in the United States."

• Ibrahim Hooper: "It should be the FBI's role to stop terror attacks and terror plots. It shouldn't be their role to manufacture terror plots. … We've seen too many cases where the FBI actually instigates the alleged plot."

• Corey Saylor, CAIR legislative director: "What's really disconcerting is how brazen certain elements of our country have become in attacking Muslims."

Remarks of a similar tone can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

CAIR's YouTube page does not even contain the complete set of its officials' appearances on Press TV. The IPT-highlighted Hooper interview is not there. Also missing is a 2010 panel discussion during which he stated, "The same arguments that are used to target the American Muslim community and the European Muslim community are those types of arguments that were used by the Nazis in pre-war Germany." Surely more clips await discovery and dissection.

The trend of CAIR spewing Islamist propaganda on the Iranian regime's media mouthpiece is downright shameful — "the equivalent of Ted Kennedy going on Soviet TV to bash American capitalists during the Cold War," in the words of one blogger. Of course, if CAIR's leaders were capable of shame, they would not be working for CAIR in the first place.

Source:  http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2011/07/cair-regularly-slams-america-on-iranian-tv

TLC's Latest Reality Show Will Look at Muslim Families in America

by Joe Flint  |  LATimesBlogs.LATimes.com  |  July 20, 2011

 

 

Call it “Muslim Modern Family.”

Cable channel TLC is hoping to do for Muslims what it did for polygamists and Sarah Palin -– put a new spin on controversial subjects that people often make judgments about without knowing the whole story.

The reality show “All-American Muslim” will follow the lives of five Muslim American families, some of whom are related, who reside in Dearborn, Mich., a suburb of Detroit that has a large Muslim population. The show will debut in late November.

The people participating in "All-American Muslim" seem to run the gamut from very religious to more casual, and all struggle to find a balance between their American home and their Muslim background.  One cast member is a football coach and another is in law enforcement. There are even splits in the level of devotion in some of the individual families. One family features two sisters –- one of whom wears a traditional head scarf and another who has tattoos and piercings and married an Irish Catholic.

"I don’t have a camel parked in my backyard," said one cast member, Suehaila, in an early episode. Another cast member, Nawal, quipped, "I buy Burberry, I buy Louis Vuitton, I buy Fendi."

"We wanted to show there was diversity even within the Muslim community," said TLC General Manager Amy Winter. "These are families that might have beliefs that are different than yours, but we are all living similar daily lives and hopefully we will bring that to light."

“All-American Muslim” is the latest TLC show that is certain to generate strong reactions. Its show “Sister Wives” about a man who has made a family with four women became a hit for the cable channel as did its series on Sarah Palin and her family called "Sarah Palin's Alaska."

Asked if TLC expects a backlash from viewers and advertisers, Winter said, "We usually find with TLC that the backlash occurs as soon as we start marketing something and once viewers experience the show, we get a far different response."

 

Source:  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2011/07/tlcs-latest-reality-show-will-look-at-muslim-families-in-america.html

Controversial Al Sharpton 'Gets MSNBC TV Show' After Outgoing Host Claims Producers Told Him To Be 'More Establishment'

by Mark Duell  |  DailyMail.co.uk  |  July 21, 2011

 

• He'll be only black host of a U.S. primetime news show
• Bosses weren't happy with outgoing host Cenk Uygur
• Sharpton known as civil rights campaigner

Controversial: MSNBC is reportedly handing civil rights campaigner Reverend Al Sharpton, 56, the 6pm primetime slot in a move bound to cause a storm.

 

He’s the controversial civil rights campaigner whose colourful past includes accusations of bigotry, racism and anti-Semitism.

Now cable news network MSNBC is reportedly handing Reverend Al Sharpton the 6pm primetime slot in a move bound to cause a storm.

Rev Sharpton, 56, has been guest hosting the slot for three weeks, after radio host Cenk Uygur had a six-month try-out that failed.

The former Democratic presidential candidate is set to become the only black host of a U.S. primetime cable news show.

Sharpton's profile rose in the late 1980s when 15-year-old Tawana Brawley was discovered sitting in a bin bag outside a New York flat.

She claimed to have been raped by a group of white men in a racist attack and Rev Sharpton hit out at her alleged rapists - but doctors found no physical rape evidence.

A grand jury decided not to press charges and the court decided that she had made up her story - but Rev Sharpton still believes her.

Fame: Rev Sharpton, speaking when the Tawana Brawley case was ongoing in 1988, became well-known in the late 1980s when he helped the 15-year-old.

 

There was uncertainty over who would fill the 6pm MSNBC slot when Keith Olbermann left in January and the network shuffled it's primetime lineup.

Mr Uygur was given the slot and his ratings were solid but failed to satisfy the channel’s president, Phil Griffin, who decided to give Rev Sharpton a try-out.

Mr Uygur said he turned down a new contract including a weekend show because he thought Mr Griffin had come under political pressure.

He believed he had upset White House officials - and was seen as the fiercest MSNBC host who criticises President Obama and Democrats.

Mr Uygur claimed Mr Griffin told him MSNBC was part of the 'establishment' and 'you need to act like it'.

Previously: The former 6pm host was Cenk Uygur, pictured, whose ratings were not bad but failed to satisfy the channel's president, Phil Griffin.

 

Mr Griffin denied he had fallen to political pressure. ‘We never told Cenk what to say or what not to say,’ he told the New York Times.

But he explained producers found Mr Uygur’s aggressive body language and demeanour were making it tougher to book guests.

‘I didn’t agree with everything said on the show,’ White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer told the New York Times.

‘But (I) certainly didn’t have any problem with it.’

Other controversial and unsuccessful MSNBC hosts include Jesse Ventura and Michael Savage. 

Mr Savage was fired for his on-air comments suggesting gay people should die of Aids.

 

Source:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017378/Controversial-civil-rights-campaigner-Reverend-Al-Sharpton-gets-MSNBC-TV-show.html

Two Muslim Converts in Seattle Charged with Plotting to Attack U.S. Military Recruitment Center

by Erick Stakelback, CBN News Terrorism Analyst  |  Blogs.CBN.com  |  June 25, 2011

 

 

 

 

I appeared on CBN Newswatch yesterday to discuss the arrest of two Muslim converts in Seattle who were plotting to attack a military recruitment center. Click on the viewer to watch (I pop up after brief report on the arrests).

 

 

 

Source:  http://blogs.cbn.com/stakelbeckonterror/archive/2011/06/25/two-muslim-converts-in-seattle-charged-with-plotting-to-attack.aspx

Video - Congress Investigates “Fast and Furious” and “Islamic Radicalization”

From: C-SPAN.com  |  June 18, 2011

 

Law enforcement and terrorism programs examined.

A number of events this past week examined terrorism and law enforcement issues facing the United States.

“Islamic Radicalization”

Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee held the second in a series of hearings on "Islamic radicalization" in the United States.  The committee focused on the radicalization of prisoners, including discussions on various cases from the states of New York and California.

Witnesses at the hearing included law enforcement and an official from a U.S. attorney's office.

A previous hearing in March by the House Homeland Security Committee focused on radicalization in the American Muslim community. 

Recently, Secretary Napolitano set up a Department of Homeland Security task force to review and assess Islamic radicalization in the U.S. prison system.

“Fast and Furious”

The top lawmaker on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee held two hearings on a controversial program intended to curb the illegal flow of guns to Mexican drug cartels.

The program “Operation Fast and Furious” was initiated under Project Gunrunner, which was operated by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agency. "Fast and Furious" allowed gun stores near the Mexican border to sell semiautomatic weapons in bulk to straw purchasers. ATF agents would then track their journey. Many of the guns were linked to crimes, including the killing of a Border Patrol agent.

ATF Agent John Dodson told Rep. James Lankford (R-OK) at the hearing that ATF stopped tracking the weapons once they traveled too far from the border. He said ATF lost track of 1500 - 1800 weapons.

At Wednesday’s hearing, the Chair of the Committee, Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released a report on the program, which says border patrol and ATF agents were told to "surveil" weapons and not interdict. It also said agents warned of devastating consequences, including criminal activity, but supervisors ignored their warnings.

Dodson said, "Every time we questioned that order, there was punitive action."

Monday’s hearing examined the constitutional role of the Justice Department to respond to subpoenas.

Issa issued a subpoena on March 31, 2011 to acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson to determine what he knew and if he signed off on the program. Rep. Issa said the Department of Justice is refusing to provide the committee with information.  Issa said the administration ignored committee requests for documents on “Fast and Furious." 

 

 

 

 

Source:  http://c-span.com/Events/Congress-Investigates-Islamic-Radicalism/10737422300-5/