Sunday, January 11, 2015

Charlie, Muhammad, and the Saudi 1000 Lashes of Raif Badawi

"My commitment is... to reject any repression in the name of religion... a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way." — Raif Badawi.
If he ever leaves prison, his life will have been destroyed -- by voyeurs as sexually twisted as those of ancient Rome.
"Our Prophet," Malik said, "would have been crystal clear and unequivocal in condemning [the Charlie Hebdo massacre]. But his statement points out why there is a problem. Malik was -- quite innocently, I am sure -- completely wrong. Muhammad did the same thing – many, many times.
Today we all are Charlie, and we are all Raif.
His first 50 lashes were administered Friday. After the noon prayers, outside the mosque, Saudi writer and blogger Raif Badawi, 30, received a sentence perhaps worse than death. Accused of "insulting Islam," he is to receive 1000 lashes: 50 per week for 20 weeks -- nearly half a year. "The lashing order says Raif should 'be lashed very severely,'" a twitter notice read. "If they lash him again next week we do not know if he is going to survive. He has no medical assistance," another notice said.
After that, he is to spend ten years in prison and pay a fine of $266,000. If he ever leaves prison, his life will have been destroyed -- by voyeurs as sexually twisted as those of ancient Rome.
His wife and three children have been given asylum in Canada. Her family has filed for divorce on the grounds of his supposed apostasy.
Raif Badawi and his children.

His crime is said to have been "insulting Islam." Badawi had written, "My commitment is... to reject any repression in the name of religion... a goal that we will reach in a peaceful, law-abiding way."
He is alleged to have criticized the Wahhabi clergy who run his country hand in hand with the royal family.[1] Muslims seem not to be able to handle questions, reasoned criticism or satire. Perhaps where many come from, there is only one opinion -- the dominant majority one. If there are more, as there are, there seems a wish to stamp them out. Here in the West, a major role of government is to protect the minority from the majority.
The day before, January 8, 2015, just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, BBC News in London broadcast a report that contained short interviews with a number of moderate Muslims who decried the attack and feared repercussions on their own communities.[2]
One of the interviewees was Nadeem Malik, the UK Director of the Bahu Trust, a Sufi Muslim charity that "espouses the virtues of tolerance, peaceful co-existence and equality." Malik said: "Our Prophet would have been absolutely crystal clear and unequivocal in condemning any such action. That's not in the name of Islam at all, and Muslims are sick of having their faith hijacked in this manner."
I do not doubt Mr. Malik's sincerity, and I respect the Islamic tradition (Barelwi) from which he comes as one more in keeping with a non-violent interpretation. But his statement sharply points out why there is a problem. He was -- quite innocently, I am sure -- completely wrong.
There is an inspiration for attacks like those on writers, cartoonists, and film-makers: France's Charlie Hebdo journalists; Amsterdam's Theo van Gogh; Denmark's Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose, and Sweden's Lars Vilks -- as well as the assassination attempt on the Nobel Prize winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz and the fatwa for the murder of the British writer Salman Rushdie. The inspiration for this behavior is not that the Prophet Muhammad was lampooned or criticized or mocked. The inspiration for this behavior is that Muhammad himself would have ordered or approved such attacks as revenge for assaults on his honour.
How can one make such an outrageous suggestion? The answer is that Muhammad did exactly the same thing -- many, many times. This may appear to be an Islamophobic calumny, perhaps something concocted by medieval churchmen in Europe (who did make up some fancy legends about Muhammad), but it is solidly recorded in the almost canonical biography of the Prophet by Ibn Hisham and in the canonical collections of prophetic traditions (hadith) by Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.[3]
Shortly after his move from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, for instance, when he became the effective ruler of the town, opponents emerged in the Jewish and wider communities. Poets wrote lampoons and disrespectful verses. Muhammad had them killed. Not just poets, but almost anyone who disagreed with him and his "revelations."
In 624, for example, a Jewish poet named Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf wrote verses condemning the killing of notables from Mecca. He later became a one-man Charlie Hebdo, writing obscene and erotic verses about the Muslim women. Muhammad took offense and instructed one of his companions, Muhammad ibn Maslama, to assassinate Ka'b. When Ibn Maslama expressed doubts about having to lie to Ka'b in order to trick him into going with him, Muhammad told him lying was permissible for such purposes. Ibn Maslama and some other Muslims went out with Ka'b under false pretenses and murdered him.
Ka'b ibn al-Ahraf was not Muhammad's only victim. The poets Asma' bint Marwan (a woman), Abu Afak, and Al-Nadir ibn al-Harith, and Abu Rafi' ibn Abi Al-Huqaiq were all assassinated in the same year for the same offence of mockery. In the next few years, several other poets were killed, such as Abdullah ibn Zib'ari, Al-Harith bin al-Talatil, Hubayra, Ka'b ibn Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulama, and Huwayrith ibn Nafidh. Abdullah bin Khatal and two of his slave girls were murdered for having recited poems insulting the Prophet. There is a list in WikiIslam of 43 people -- as well as all the men from the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza -- who were killed on Muhammad's orders or whose murders were sanctioned by him.
Today the lashes of Raif Badawi stand with the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo as further symbols of the determination of many extremists to reject the norms of reason, tolerance, pluralism, equality, the Universal Declaration human rights and the value that begins every chapter but one of the Qur'an: mercy.
Some people ask what inspires those who kill authors, cartoonists and journalists, while others insist that it has nothing to do with Islam. If we do not learn, if our leaders do not learn, what hope is there for us?
Today, we are all Charlie. And we are all Raif.
Denis MacEoin is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and a former university lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies.

[1] The Al al-Shaykh are descendants of Wahhabi founder Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), who allied himself and his puritan belief system with the Al Sa'ud, an Arabian family with pretensions to grandeur.
[2] BBC News at Ten, 8 January 2010.
[3] For details, see Uri Rubin, "The Assassination of Kaʿb b. al-Ashraf", Oriens, Vol. 32. (1990), pp. 65-71; the entries on Ka'b in both editions of the authoritative Encyclopedia of Islam; Sahih Bukhari 5:59:369, Sahih Muslim 19:4436

Paris: Grand Mosque Open, Grand Synagogue Closed


Could this happen in America?

China+ ANC= Genocide 

 

Chinese troops are on South African soil, at this very moment, after negotiations that took place just before Christmas between China and the ANC. Now, let's connect the dots. My name is Engela Moorcroft Hughes. From 2009 to 2011, I resided within China; Beijing, Shunyi. When the 2010 riots between international and local companies took place, the first 100 people were taken out of the crowd and decapitated. Within seconds of these events, there was no cellphone service, no Internet connection, no television or radio services and planes could neither land nor leave the country. That is the kind of power and influence China has over the world. Control over weather, Chinese authorities didn’t become such meteorological freaks overnight. Chinese research into weather controls back to 1958. Forty years later, the government-run Weather Modification Program launches thousands of specifically designed rockets and artillery shells into the sky regularly in attempt to manipulate weather conditions. Chinese farmers, who are paid to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers. These heavy duty weapons launce pellets containing silver iodide into the clouds. Silver iodide is thought to concentrate moisture and cause rain, a process known as cloud seeding. China has invested heavily in this technology, using more than 12,000 anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers in addition to about 30 plains…???

Sanctions;

South Africa attempted to justify their foreign and domestic policies throw-out the 1960s and 1970s as combatting communism. While in truth the ANC was heavily funded by the Kremlin, Moscow. San Francisco passed registrations June 5th 1978, the result was by the end of 1989, 26 states, 22 countries and over 90 cities had taken some form of binding economic action against companies doing business in South Africa.

White Genocide;

‘We in  the ANC have declared all white farms war-zones….White Men, Woman, and Children are targets, they are part of the military and paramilitary units and the local police force’. Source: BBC Monitoring. July 10 1987 and October 28 1986.

 

WHAT IS THE INVOLVEMENT BETWEEN SOUTH AFRICA, CHINA AND WHITE GENOCIDE?


 

The NSA Propaganda War Waged on Social Media

The US government currently operates a MASSIVE propaganda campaign in conjunction and partnership with the British government. Recently leaked documents reveal that by way of this propaganda campaign they have actually constructed an alternate reality of transpired events during the last 15-20 years or more. Even though this program has made mainstream news, most Americans are still oblivious of the literal matrix that has been constructed around them, and they literally live in this matrix, they become part of the illusion, they help police their fellow Americans, and apparently no one ever even saw it coming.

The ultimate objective goal of this program is made very clear to us right here on this 5th slide. The objective is to bring us into complete obedience and compliance. Complete obedience to whom and compliance to what? In other words, these intelligence agencies and psychological units, hire and train and then utilize, tens of thousands of people, day and night every week, every month, and every year, to subvert any thought we may get, or any action we may take to TRULY UNITE as a pissed off American people. They know if we ever truly woke up and grew a pair, we would be able to remove these criminals from their apparently lifetime seats of power. This campaign has neutralized and frustrated our ability to mount any sort of effective offensive against the agendas that are destroying us. America is now under corporate and UN rule. We are held hostage by our own politicians. THIS is how they have kept us under control. They tell you right here in their own leaked classified secret manual, yet America continues to sleep. They remain confused, and motionless.

 


 

 

Do government agencies have the power to violate the Constitution?

Marbury v. Madison

The government of the United States is of the latter description. The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the Constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the Constitution by an ordinary act.

 

Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The Constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

 

If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts on the part of the people to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.

 

Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently, the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.

 


 

Sunday, January 4, 2015

ISIS: The Best Terror Threat U.S. Tax Money Can Buy              


The self-styled “Islamic State,” the gaggle of medieval savages and barbarians often referred to as ISIS or ISIL, is now infamous worldwide for its unrestrained brutality. The al-Qaeda offshoot exploded onto the scene in 2014 amid its gruesome and bloody effort to build an Islamic “Caliphate,” exterminate “apostates,” and overthrow the “apostate” regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. America and the West are supposedly next — at least that is what the public is being told.

Ever since ISIS emerged seemingly out of nowhere, Americans and people around the globe have been treated to a steady TV diet of beheadings, massacres, crucifixions, and other unspeakable horrors perpetrated by the group. Even young children, whose only “crime” was professing faith in Jesus Christ, have been butchered in the most grotesque ways imaginable by the terror outfit. Eventually, ISIS leaders claim, the whole world will submit to the Islamic god, Allah, and his caliph on Earth, a mystery man who goes by the name “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” and was once detained in the U.S.-run prison Camp Bucca in Iraq.

The jihadist savagery perpetrated by ISIS is now well documented and well known, with the group’s atrocities being used as a pretext to further empower governments and the United Nations and attack liberty and national sovereignty on a global scale. What is less known, though, is how ISIS — like countless horror shows before it — represents merely the latest bitter fruit produced by U.S. foreign policy and the machinations of the globalist establishment that largely controls it.
How the Anti-ISIS Alliance Built ISIS
Indeed, without the U.S. government and Obama’s “coalition” of Sunni Islamist strongmen, the “Islamic State” would probably not exist — much less have the resources, weapons, manpower, and training needed to seize enough territory to create a “Caliphate” (Islamic Empire) of barbarism across large swaths of Iraq and Syria. This is hardly a secret to anyone who has been paying attention to anything other than the establishment media.
In fact, at least two of the administration’s top officials — Vice President Joe Biden and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey — have publicly discussed the role of Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition in building up the terrorist group. Speaking at Harvard, Biden also admitted another truth long accepted as fact among credible analysts: Despite all of Obama’s rhetoric, there is no such thing as a “moderate” force in Syria that the White House claims to have been supporting against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“The fact is, the ability to identify a moderate middle in Syria, um, was, uh — there was no moderate middle,” Biden stated, acknowledging that history was likely to record the facts. In other words, the entire notion that Obama and the U.S. government were arming “well-vetted moderate” jihadists in Syria to battle less-moderate jihadists is a fantasy — or a fraud. It was completely discredited by the president’s own deputy in a public speech!
Biden also cited Obama’s “anti-ISIS” allies as the most important players behind the creation and empowerment of the terror group to begin with. “What my constant cry was, that our biggest problem was our allies — our allies in the region were our largest problem,” Biden continued. He specifically identified the Islamist rulers of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, along with unspecified others such as Qatar, as the main culprits. “They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war,” Biden said. So, with that in mind, “What did they do?” the vice president asked before providing a partial answer. “They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad; except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” Biden said. He did not mention the role of the CIA and the State Department in the process, of course, but that has been well documented by countless sources, as The New American has been reporting for years.
“Now you think I’m exaggerating — take a look,” Biden continued. “Where did all of this go? So now what’s happening? All of a sudden everybody’s awakened because this outfit called ISIL, which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work with Al Nusra who we declared a terrorist group early on, and we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”
Lest Biden’s uncharacteristic truth-telling be dismissed as the ravings of Obama’s “impeachment insurance,” as the vice president has come to be known, he is hardly the only senior official to acknowledge that the “anti-ISIS” coalition was actually responsible for ISIS. In a Senate hearing last fall, for example, neocon Senator Lindsey Graham — among the most ardent warmongers in Congress — asked General Dempsey whether he knew of any “major Arab ally” that embraces ISIS.
General Dempsey responded with an answer that Graham, a longtime advocate of arming and training more jihadists, was almost certainly not expecting. “I know of major Arab allies who fund them,” Dempsey explained. Graham stepped in, perhaps trying to save face, by downplaying the explosive admission. “They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn’t fight Assad, they were trying to beat Assad,” the senator from South Carolina claimed. “Let’s don’t taint the Mideast unfairly.”
Obama Support for Jihadists Helped Produce ISIS, Too
Graham might have been correct that Obama’s anti-ISIS coalition was backing ISIS to overthrow Assad, Syria’s brutal dictator, who is viewed as an “apostate” among the jihadists seeking “regime change.” But Sunni Arab dictators with different views on Islam were hardly alone in that endeavor. In fact, the U.S. government and the upper echelons of the glob­alist foreign policy establishment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and other strongholds of power were advocating and following precisely the same strategy long before ISIS officially emerged.
Mohamed “Ed” Husain, an “adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies” at the CFR, for example, is now pointing to the terrorist groups rampaging across Syria as a justification for “unifying” the Middle East under a European Union-style regime. In 2012, though, he was celebrating the role of al-Qaeda (elements of which went on to become ISIS) in furthering globalist aims. “The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results,” gushed Husain, a Sunni Muslim, in a piece for the CFR. “In short, the [Obama-backed Free Syrian Army] needs al-Qaeda now.” In reality, there was little to no difference between the FSA and al-Qaeda from the start, as mountains of evidence make clear.
Beyond the crucial support for ISIS and al-Qaeda provided by Obama’s purported allies in the alleged war against ISIS, though, the Obama administration itself has also proven essential to the emergence and strengthening of the terror group. Almost from the start of the Western-backed uprising in Syria, Obama boldly proclaimed his solidarity with the establishment-fueled “rebels.” At the time, little was known publicly about the character of the rebellion, with the “mainstream” press falsely presenting it as a “pro-democracy” uprising against tyranny, rather than a complex Western-backed Muslim Brotherhood operation.
Soon, though, the truth about the rebels began creeping out — this was a brutal Sunni-jihadist “revolution,” with powerful backers aiming to impose a sharia-run dictatorship in Syria after Assad was gone. Even the supposedly “moderate” rebels backed openly by Western powers — operating under the banner of the “Free Syrian Army” — were exposed as Islamists perpetrating war crimes and cannibalism, exterminating Christians, advocating ethnic cleansing, cooperating with al-Qaeda, and more.
The war drums in the United States were already beating, though, and Obama was issuing secret and open proclamations purporting to authorize U.S. support — including arms shipments — for the jihadist rebels in Syria. Despite official claims that the arms were going to “moderates” (remember, Biden recently admitted to the world that there were no “moderates” among the Syrian rebels), even the establishment mouthpiece New York Times reported as early as October of 2012 that “most” of the U.S. weapons being showered on the Syrian rebels were going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists.” The rest were presumably going to regular Islamic jihadists.
A Syrian fighter defending locals in his area spoke with The New American last September. He was even more blunt than the Times or Biden. “Everyone who can hold a gun here, be sure [he] is with the [Syrian] Army or he will be with ISIS,” explained the man, whose identity is being withheld for safety reasons.
Worse still, perhaps, is that Obama was reportedly training actual ISIS fighters in Jordan under the guise of helping “moderate” rebels overthrow Assad, according to Jordanian security officials cited by WND journalist Aaron Klein. “The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria,” Klein reported. “The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.”
Even among those Obama-backed rebel forces that were not “technically” ISIS or al-Qaeda to begin with, the line between them was virtually non-existent. For example, the international press has been packed with interviews by both “moderate” rebels and ISIS/al-Qaeda leaders boasting of their cooperation with each other in the fight against Assad to create an Islamic dictatorship.
“We are buying weapons from the FSA,” ISIS fighter Abu Atheer was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera, referring to the Obama-backed “Free Syrian Army” jihadists. “We bought 200 anti-aircraft missiles and Koncourse anti-tank weapons. We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA. For us, the infidels are those who cooperate with the West to fight Islam.”
Separately, FSA commander Bassel Idriss told Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper that his group is “collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front [al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria] by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings.” Countless other examples of Obama’s “moderates” and the non-moderate ISIS/al-Qaeda terrorists celebrating their cooperation and friendliness with each other can be found in media outlets around the globe.
Another FSA commander, Abdel Basset Al-Tawil, told Al Jazeera in June of 2013 (before ISIS emerged) that his Obama-backed rebels were working with al-Qaeda to build a state in Syria based on sharia law. “It is no secret that we have ties with everybody, even the brothers in the Nusra Front, and we cooperate in many places,” he boasted, calling for even more cooperation. Tawil then threatened that if Western powers did not promptly send even more weapons within a month, “we will reveal all the evidence we have” about the chemical weapons attack Obama unsuccessfully sought to blame on Assad as a pretext for launching direct military strikes. More weapons shipments began promptly — this time, even more openly.
In November, an FSA operative by the name of “Mahmoud” was quoted in media reports admitting that he now works with ISIS and Nusra to funnel fighters and supplies to the terror groups — and that he is not alone. “Many of my friends are doing the same now,” he told the U.K. Telegraph, adding that Obama should have sent even more weapons to rebels to stop them from joining ISIS and Nusra. “ISIL is the only solution for us.... The most important thing now though is to remove the regime and ISIL is the strongest group. I will do whatever it takes.”
Meanwhile, as if to drive the point home, multiple reports from human rights groups and news agencies suggested that ISIS and many of Obama’s “moderates” signed a non-aggression pact brokered by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the French news agency, the deal states that “the two parties will respect a truce until a final solution is found and they promise not to attack each other because they consider the principal enemy to be the Nussayri regime.” The term “Nussayri” is a slur used to describe the Islamic Shia denomination to which Assad and many Syrians belong — a sect that a spokesman for the Obama-backed FSA vowed on TV to exterminate, along with all other Shias in Syria.
More recently still, last November, two of the key Obama-backed “moderate rebel” groups, the Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF), both affiliated with the FSA, also defected to ISIS and al-Qaeda. Unsurprisingly, they took their U.S.-supplied weapons with them — including Grad rockets and Tow anti-tank missiles. Before that, an entire “moderate” brigade of 1,000 Syrian rebels known as Dawud, part of the Islamic Front’s “Sham Army,” also defected to ISIS, taking its tanks and weapons with it.
Much of the expensive military hardware showered on Iraq’s U.S.-installed regime has also “mysteriously” ended up in ISIS hands, too, as have many supplies dropped from the air for “moderate” rebels. In October, meanwhile, even the establishment media was reporting that a massive amount of U.S. “foreign aid” was flowing directly to ISIS. The Daily Beast, for example, reported that “truckloads of U.S. and Western aid have been flowing into territory controlled by the jihadists.”
Blunders Galore
Aside from the arming, training, and funding of jihadists in Syria, the “anti-ISIS” coalition’s creation — ISIS — could not have come about without decades of previous U.S. foreign policy “blunders,” as the establishment likes to call them. Without each successive piece of the puzzle falling into place, ISIS and the global jihadist movement being exploited by globalists today to advance their agenda would probably not exist.
Going back decades, the U.S. government and its allies were instrumental in creating the Islamist Mujahedeen to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. Those Muslim “holy warriors” radicalized and armed by the U.S. government went on to become the Taliban and al-Qaeda — with al-Qaeda representing the genesis of what would later become ISIS. Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, writing in the U.K. Guardian, is one of countless sources who have acknowledged the U.S. role in creating al-Qaeda. Noting that “throughout the 80s [Osama bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan,” Cook called bin Laden “a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies.”
While not everybody agrees that it was a “miscalculation,” the fact that bin Laden and his fighters worked with and on behalf of the U.S. government and other Western powers is beyond dispute. Without having created that global jihadist powerhouse decades ago, what is known today as ISIS almost certainly would not exist.
Then came the next crucial element. Under the George W. Bush administration, U.S. forces overthrew former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein, the brutal Iraqi dictator who, seeking to stamp out competition to his bloody rule, had no tolerance for al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. In fact, there was virtually no al-Qaeda in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion and occupation. That particular interventionist U.S. foreign policy “blunder” also proved to be crucial to the emergence of ISIS, as the terror group began as an offshoot of the previously non-existent al-Qaeda in Iraq.
More recently, Obama’s UN-approved machinations in Libya involved literally backing the same terrorists previously fighting U.S. troops in Iraq and now fighting under the ISIS banner — laying the groundwork for the self-proclaimed “Caliphate” to emerge. “ISIL is certainly not a state,” Obama argued when he announced his unconstitutional “strategy” to supposedly “fight” ISIS. “It was formerly al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, and has taken advantage of sectarian strife and Syria’s civil war to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syrian border.”
But none of that would have been possible without Obama’s illegal war in Libya. Indeed, Obama’s war in Libya provided the single biggest boost of the last generation to al-Qaeda and associated jihadists.
In early December 2014, U.S. General David Rodriguez, chief of the U.S. Africa command, even noted that hundreds of ISIS were now training at ISIS terror camps across Libya ­— and nothing would be done about it, except watch.
In a 2013 interview with The New American, John Rosenthal, a Europe-based journalist and author of The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion, explained that the Obama administration had literally “switched sides” in the terror war. The administration’s Syria policy, he added, “is a continuation of its Libya policy”: siding with Islamists against secular regimes that even recently had helped the U.S. government in the “terror war.” Those same Islamists had for years been planning to overthrow the “apostate” regimes, and Obama stepped in to help at precisely the right moment.
Libya is now embroiled in a brutal civil war, with large swaths of the nation run by al-Qaeda-linked jihadists aided by the White House. From Libya, many of those Islamists gathered weapons — some from Gadhafi’s huge stockpile; others provided by the Obama administration and its allies for “revolution” — and headed for Syria to overthrow its “apostate” dictator with Obama’s assistance. Thanks to the Western-backed rebellion there — which had been in the works since at least the George W. Bush administration, according to documents released by WikiLeaks — Syria was sufficiently destabilized to make possible the rapid rise of ISIS.
Some astute U.S. lawmakers who previously warned that Obama’s strategy of arming al-Qaeda and other jihadists in Syria would backfire did speak out about the insanity. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), for example, outlined those concerns on Fox News after the president’s speech about supposedly degrading and destroying ISIS. “The one thing we need to remember about all of this,” he said, “we need to remember how we got here. The reason we got here is we took it upon ourselves to topple secular dictators who were the enemy of radical Islam.”
But what about all those air strikes Obama is supposedly conducting against ISIS? Well, according to the Assad regime, which is locked in mortal combat with ISIS and other Western-backed Islamists, Obama’s unconstitutional military adventures, perhaps not surprisingly, have done nothing to weaken it. “All the indications say that (Islamic State) today, after two months of coalition air strikes, is not weaker,” explained Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem in a recent TV interview cited by Reuters.
The most powerful military in the world could not even “weaken” a rag-tag group of terrorists after two months of air strikes and countless millions worth of military support to “moderates”? If that is the case — which sounds rather implausible — perhaps Americans deserve a refund for the hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on the military. More likely, though, is that, as top Obama officials have explained openly, the real purpose of the “anti-ISIS” war is to remove Assad — at least initially — on the road toward “world order.”
“I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance,” Obama claimed in September 2014, downplaying the insanity and deception as if it were all some confusing misunderstanding. The week before those comments, though, his own ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, admitted in a separate TV interview that deposing Assad was among the real goals of the administration’s “contradictory” Syria policy. “The training also will service these troops [Obama’s so-called ‘moderate rebels’] in the same struggle that they’ve been in since the beginning of this conflict against the Assad regime,” Power said, contradicting the key selling point for arming “moderate” jihadists — to fight ISIS.

ISIS as a Force for Globalism
ISIS is now being hyped by globalists worldwide as justification for wide-ranging assaults on liberty, national sovereignty, and more. For instance, empowering the UN, Interpol, and the self-styled “International Criminal Court” to lead the “terror war” is at the top of the glob­alist agenda. Great progress has already been made for the globalist cause under that transparently phony pretext. A global war on “non-violent extremism” is in the works, too, meaning a war on any groups such as U.S. constitutionalists, who don’t toe the globalist line. Meanwhile, the CFR and globalist forces are also touting a “Middle East Union” — another building bloc of what they call the “New World Order” — as a “solution” to the chaos and horrors those same globalists unleashed on humanity.
From arming and radicalizing Islamists who went on to become al-Qaeda to overthrowing the Iraqi dictator and supplying weapons to brutal jihadists to unseat brutal tyrants, U.S. foreign policy appears to have been practically designed to create the “Islamic State” rather than destroy it. In other words, ISIS is the “new and improved” best terror group U.S. tax money can buy. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have already paid the ultimate price for the machinations. It is time for Congress to rein in the administration before further “blowback” comes back to haunt the very American people forced to pay for it all.
License Plate Trackers Send Passenger Photos to Police Databases             

Every day, the power of the police (and their federal financiers) to track the movements of every American expands.
The latest loss of liberty involves the ability of license plate tracking software to recognize the faces of individual travelers in target vehicles.

A company called ElsaAG North America (a division of Finmeccanica, an Italian defense, aerospace, and security conglomerate) has developed automatic license plate readers (ALPR) and is aggressively marketing its high-tech trackers to U.S. law enforcement. Vigilant Solutions, another ALPR manufacturer, boasts of being a “trusted provider to tens of thousands of law enforcement professionals.” The Vigilant database reportedly “contains 2 billion entries," with “70 million additional license plate photographs being added each month.”

 
Lest anyone doubt the scope and power of these tracking technologies, consider the following description of one of Vigilant’s latest products, the Mobile Companion:
Vigilant Solutions’ Mobile Companion is an industry-exclusive mobile app delivering the benefits of Vigilant’s Intelligence-Led Policing Package (including license plate recognition (LPR) and facial recognition technologies) to your mobile device.
The Mobile Companion is available to every officer with a mobile device and proper user permissions, as set by an Agency Manager.  With the Mobile Companion, officers are now able to scan license plates, match against agency hotlists, query historical data, use the exclusive Mobile Hit Hunter feature to locate nearby hits generated by the Vigilant LPR network, and verify identities in the field using facial recognition. [Emphasis added.]
Simplicity is the selling point of this technology, according to information provided by Vigilant on its website.
“Plate capture is simple,” they boast.
“Mobile Companion’s interface is incredibly intuitive,” they claim.
And:
Facial Recognition is made incredibly simple and convenient on the Mobile Companion. Simply take a picture, or upload an image from a file or from social media, and match against the available gallery. Vigilant prepopulates the gallery with mugshot data, CrimeStopper data, and registered sex offender data. Agency Managers may upload additional images into their gallery (using the web interface) for better matching against local known individuals.
For your sake, I hope you don’t drive anywhere that suspected criminals frequent, because Vigilant’s Mobile Companion app empowers police to “query for possible associates of known criminals with just a few clicks of the mouse based on license plates frequently seen in close proximity to the subject.”
The Vigilant-developed facial recognition software supporting the expanded capabilities of the license plate trackers is known as FaceSearch. In order to lure new law enforcement customers, the power of the product is proudly proclaimed:
FaceSearch is an easy-to-use facial recognition solution that works. Available via the web, on mobile devices, and as a PC-based application, FaceSearch was developed by Vigilant to deliver a functional, scalable and affordable solution like no other. Hosted in the cloud, FaceSearch offers easy importing and integration capabilities, along with pre-populated face image data from Vigilant.
Over 350 facial vectoring algorithms are at the heart of Vigilant Solutions’ FaceSearch. Rather than making use of commercially available facial recognition engines, Vigilant leveraged its experience in image recognition to develop these new facial vectoring algorithms in-house. Why? — to benefit you in terms of accuracy, speed, and flexibility in deployment.
Then, lest any potential police department believe that this tool would be just too hard to use, Vigilant provides the following testimonial from a satisfied customer: “FaceSearch is the simplest interface I have seen for a facial recognition product. It has just the right amount of functionality without getting too technical or difficult.”
An article at theNewspaper.com announcing the marriage of license plate tracking and facial recognition technology advises that:
Though primarily intended for fixed security camera installations, the software could allow police to identify the occupants of vehicles when the system is supplied with a clear photograph of a car's interior. In states such as California and Arizona where red light cameras and speed cameras photograph the front of a car, the video stream can be analyzed in "near real time" to catalog and identify the driver and anyone in the passenger seat of passing vehicles, flagging any "person of interest.”
 
This roll-out of mobile and fixed tracking tools raises questions about the proper job of law enforcement. More and more, it seems, police are being trained and equipped to behave like soldiers rather than peace officers. Rather than protecting and defending, cops are injuring and falsely accusing. All of this unfortunate transformation is aided by a federal government all too willing to give billions in grant money and used military equipment to local law enforcement agencies in exchange for additional federal-local “cooperation.”

Not to mention that the expansion of the surveillance state — as chronicled for years by The New American — is creating a country where there isn’t an unmonitored place in the real or cyber world. From Trapwire to Prism, from XKeyscore to the monitoring of snail mail, the federal government and the law enforcement that is regularly the beneficiary of its legal plunder of citizens are always watching us.
One picture of a car and its passengers, one unwarranted wiretap, one unwarranted seizure of a phone record, one search of records of an individual’s digital communications is too many. If we are a Republic of laws, then the supreme constitutional law of the land must be obeyed.
The standard is not whether the spies or their bosses think the deprivations are necessary. The standard is the Constitution — for every issue, on every occasion, with no exceptions. Anything less than that is a step toward tyranny.

Taken together, the surveillance and tracking programs in use by the federal government place every American under the threat of constant surveillance. The courts, Congress, and the president have formed an unholy alliance bent on obliterating the Constitution and establishing a country where every citizen is a suspect and is perpetually under the never-blinking eye of the government.
The establishment will likely continue construction of the surveillance apparatus until the entire country is being watched around the clock and every monitored activity is recorded and made retrievable by agents who will have a dossier on every American.

The fight can yet be won, though. Americans can attack the sprawling surveillance state on several fronts. First, we must elect men and women to federal office who will honor their oaths of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Then, once in office, each of them must be held immediately accountable for each and every violation of that oath.

Next, we must fill our state legislatures with men and women who will refuse to enforce any act of the federal government that exceeds the boundaries of its constitutionally granted powers. These lawmakers must force the federal beast back inside its constitutional cage and never accept even a degree of deviation from the blueprint drawn in Philadelphia in 1787.

Though the hour is late, there is still hope. Beginning today, Americans can refuse to re-elect any local or federal lawmaker who has voted to fund any tool or technology that can be used to violate constitutional restraints. We can unite, as our forefathers, in the ennobling cause of the end of tyranny and the promotion of those unalienable rights granted to us — and revocable only — by our Creator.