Day: August 8, 2021
9/11 families tell Biden not to attend memorial events unless he releases evidence of Saudi involvement
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
What is known about Saudi involvement in 9/11 is damning enough. The 28-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in the September 11, 2001 jihad attacks was finally released in 2016 (albeit with substantial portions still redacted), and it is now clear why one president who held hands with the Saudi King and another who bowed to him worked so hard all these years to keep these pages secret: they show that it is highly likely that the 9/11 jihad murderers received significant help from people at the highest levels of the Saudi government.
The report states that Omar al-Bayoumi, who “may be a Saudi intelligence officer,” gave “substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mindhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000. Al-Bayoumi met the hijackers at a public place shortly after his meeting with an individual at the Saudi consulate.”
Another possible Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, who “has many ties to the Saudi government” and was also a supporter of Osama bin Laden, boasted that he did more for al-Mindhar and al-Hamzi than al-Bayoumi did. He also “reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi government officials.” The report says that at one point, “a member of the Saudi Royal Family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash,” and that “he and his wife have received financial support from the Saudi ambassador to the United States and his wife.”
That ambassador was Prince Bandar, about whom the New York Times later noted: “No foreign diplomat has been closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.”
Then there was Shaykh al-Thumairy, “an accredited diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and one of the ‘imams’ at the King Fahad mosque in Culver City, California,” who also “may have been in contact” with al-Mindhar and al-Hamzi.
There is much more. The report redacts the name of “another Saudi national with close ties to the Saudi Royal Family,” but notes that he “is the subject of FBI counterterrorism investigations and reportedly was checking security at the United States’ southwest border in 1999 and discussing the possibility of infiltrating individuals into the United States.” There is no telling who this could have been, but Prince Bandar’s unlisted phone number turned up in a phone book of Abu Zubaida, “a senior al-Qa’ida operative captured in Pakistan in March 2002.” Abu Zubaida also had the number of “a bodyguard at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC.”
The report also mentions a CIA memorandum that “discusses alleged financial connections between the September 11 hijackers, Saudi Government officials, and members of the Saudi Royal Family.” This memorandum was passed on to an FBI investigator; yet “despite the clear national implications of the CIA memorandum, the FBI agent included the memorandum in an individual case file and did not forward it to FBI Headquarters.” Why?
“9/11 families to President Biden: Don’t come to our memorial events,” by Courtney Kube, NBC News, August 6, 2021:
Nearly 1,800 Americans directly affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are opposing President Joe Biden’s participation in any memorial events this year unless he upholds his pledge to declassify U.S. government evidence that they believe may show a link between Saudi Arabian leaders and the attacks.
The victims’ family members, first responders and survivors will release a statement Friday calling on Biden to skip 20th-anniversary events in New York and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon unless he releases the documents, which they believe implicate Saudi officials in supporting the acts of terrorism. The group says that as a candidate Biden pledged to be more transparent and release as much information as possible but that his administration has since then ignored their letters and requests.
“We cannot in good faith, and with veneration to those lost, sick, and injured, welcome the president to our hallowed grounds until he fulfills his commitment,” they wrote in a statement obtained by NBC News.
“Since the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission in 2004 much investigative evidence has been uncovered implicating Saudi government officials in supporting the attacks,” the statement says. “Through multiple administrations, the Department of Justice and the FBI have actively sought to keep this information secret and prevent the American people from learning the full truth about the 9/11 attacks.”
Among the documents the group seeks are supporting evidence found during a widespread FBI investigation into the attacks that examined alleged Saudi links and was completed in 2016.
Brett Eagleson, whose father, Bruce, died at the World Trade Center, said he and his cosigners “collectively are at our wits’ end with our own government.”
“We are frustrated, tired and saddened with the fact that the U.S. government for 20 years has chosen to keep information about the death of our loved ones behind lock and key,” said Eagleson, who is among a group of victims’ relatives who filed a federal lawsuit accusing Saudi Arabia of being complicit in the attacks.
While the 9/11 Commission report found that Saudi Arabia had been a “problematic ally,” particularly when it came to sharing intelligence, the investigation found no evidence implicating Saudi leaders in the attack.
“The Commission staff found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or as individual senior officials knowingly support or supported al Qaeda; however, a lack of awareness of the problem and a failure to conduct oversight over institutions created an environment in which such activity has flourished,” the report said.
It did, however, identify Saudi nationals as a major source of funding for Al Qaeda. The Saudi government has denied any connection to the attacks.
Eagleson said he is convinced that senior leaders in the Saudi government knew about the planned attack and did nothing to stop it.
Among the evidence he cites is the 2017 sworn testimony of former FBI Special Agent Stephen Moore, who was in charge of the Los Angeles Task Force Team for PENTTBOM, the FBI’s investigation of the 9/11 attacks.
“Based on evidence we gathered during the course of our investigation, I concluded that diplomatic and intelligence personnel of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia knowingly provided material support to the two 9/11 hijackers and facilitated the 9/11 plot. My colleagues in our investigation shared that conclusion,” Moore said in his affidavit.
The administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump also declined to declassify supporting documents, citing national security concerns. The Trump administration invoked the state secrets privilege in 2019 to justify keeping documents classified.
“Twenty years later, there is simply no reason — unmerited claims of ‘national security’ or otherwise — to keep this information secret,” the group wrote. “But if President Biden reneges on his commitment and sides with the Saudi government, we would be compelled to publicly stand in objection to any participation by his administration in any memorial ceremony of 9/11.”…
Rep. Cori Bush claims Israel ‘polices and kills Palestinians,’ ignores the jihad against Israel
As Israel Is Attacked, Democrat Cori Bush Says She Stands In “Solidarity” With Hamas’ “Resistance”
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
“We are anti-war, we are anti-occupation, and we are anti-apartheid.”
And, apparently, pro-jihad.
There is no doubt that the U.S. government should invest first in American communities, and lower tax rates so that people in those communities can take care of themselves and be masters of their own destiny. But her moral myopia, in claiming that Israel oppresses and brutalizes “Palestinians,” while ignoring the “Palestinian” jihad, strips her words of any moral authority.
“‘Squad’ Member Says US Aid to Israel Should Go to Homelessness,” by Aaron Bandler, Jewish Journal, August 4, 2021:
A clip of Representative Cori Bush (D-MO), a member of “The Squad,” giving a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives suggesting that United States aid to Israel should be redirected toward combating homelessness went viral on Twitter on August 4.
Bush was paying homage to Bassem Masri, a Palestinian activist who died in 2018. Bush said that Masri was among those protesting the “state-sanctioned murder” of Michael Brown in 2014 and that she learned that “the same equipment that they used to brutalize us is the same equipment that we send to the Israeli military to police and brutalize Palestinians.” She later added that the “St. Louis community sent me here to save lives,” meaning that “we oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, systems of violent oppression and trauma. We are anti-war, we are anti-occupation, and we are anti-apartheid, period.
“If this body is looking for something productive to do with $3 million instead of funding a military that polices and kills Palestinians, I have some communities in St. Louis city and in St. Louis County where that money can go, where we desperately need investment, where we are hurting, where we need help. Let us prioritize funding there, prioritize funding life, not destruction.”…
REPS. Tlaib, AOC Want Treasury to Deny Tax-Exempt Status to Groups Aiding Israel’s ‘Illegal Settlement Enterprise’
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Ever-vigilant for the integrity of our government, Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Anti-Semitic Dog Whistles) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Socialist Swag), and five of their henchmen have written to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, demanding that the Treasury Department stop granting tax-exempt status to American charities that work in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Because they’re aiding and abetting Israel’s “illegal settlement enterprise,” you see. True to form, however, the Squad duo has clearly not done its homework and betrays ignorance of the basic facts of the case.
The group, which also included the forgotten Muslim member of the House, Rep. André Carson of Indiana, and the forgotten member of the Squad, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, declared its “extreme concern that US charities are funding and providing direct support to Israeli organizations that are working to expand and perpetuate Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in violation of international law, including supporting the dispossession and forced displacement of Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem neighborhoods.”
The letter added: “We are concerned that these policies violate US obligations under international law, as well as federal tax law.” It claimed that the tax-exempt status of the groups concerned (which include Central Fund of Israel (CFI) and American Friends of Beit El) was essentially a “subsidy” from the U.S. government that was being used to pay for “serious breaches of international law and violations of internationally recognized human rights related to the expansion of the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise.” These groups were, said the Leftist legislators, “fueling the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians.”
Nor was its call limited to those two groups. The letter demands that Yellen provide a list of U.S. charities that are “operating directly or indirectly in any occupied territory.”
As is characteristic of the Left, this appeal is long on propagandistic plays on the emotions and short on facts. The falsehoods and distortions begin with the letter’s reference to “Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.” The underlying assumption here is that Israel is illegally building homes for Israelis on land that doesn’t belong to Israel, but is “occupied.” Hordes of Leftists in America and elsewhere take this for granted as axiomatically true, but it isn’t. As The Palestinian Delusion explains, Israel did indeed take control of the “occupied” territory in question after the Six-Day War of 1967, during which the Muslim Arab states neighboring Israel launched an unprovoked attack upon it; Israel followed the practice of winners of defensive wars throughout world history in taking territory from the defeated aggressors to ensure there would be no repetition of the aggression.
Nor was the “occupied” territory previously part of a state of Palestine. There was no Palestinian state, then or ever. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was occupied by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt, yet nary a word was heard in those days about “occupation,” despite the fact that neither Jordan nor Egypt had any claim on the occupied territory. In fact, there is only one nation in the world that has any legal claim to that territory, and that nation is none other than Israel. The last nation before Israel to own the territory involved was the Ottoman Empire. As that empire was dissolving, it ceded these lands to the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, which granted them to Britain for the express purpose of encouraging Jewish settlement for a Jewish national home. That national home is Israel; consequently, the land that Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and the rest claim is “occupied” and now covered with “illegal settlements,” belongs—by the international law about which they make so much—to Israel, and Israel alone.
The claim that the groups Tlaib and AOC are targeting are “fueling the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians” is likewise false and misleading. The letter to Yellen is no doubt referring to the roiling controversy over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, where there are ongoing eviction proceedings against a group of Muslim Arab residents. Are they being illegally thrown out of their homes by rapacious apartheid-minded Israelis? No. Here is a summary of the legal issues involved, and the status of the disputed properties. It shows that the land in question has been owned by Jews since 1875, when it was lawfully purchased, and that two Israeli organizations registered ownership of this land in 1973. The Muslim Arabs living there do not own the land and have consistently refused to pay rent. Tlaib and AOC are demanding that the United States come to the aid of illegal squatters, which is consistent with their war on landlords in this country, but isn’t just in either one.
The letter to Yellen is yet another example of the Left’s utter indifference to truth. If reality doesn’t fit their agenda, so much the worse for reality. And Tlaib and AOC can count on the fact that no one in the establishment media is going to challenge them. After all, today’s “journalists” believe all the same nonsense. So what do our winsome Israel-hating congresswomen have to lose?
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Hillsdale College combats CRT with 1776 curriculum for K-12
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SEE: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/Curriculum/The-Hillsdale-1776-Curriculum/