Category: An

An Ex-Jihadist Working for the Government is Smearing Trump

He fought with jihadists tied to Al Qaeda. Now he attacks Trump for the Voice of America.

 by 

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In 2017, the Voice of America attacked President Trump’s travel ban on Muslim terrorist countries. What the VOA did not tell viewers was that its ‘reporter’ was a former Jihadist.

In the 1980s, Masood Farivar, an Afghan Muslim, now a senior analyst at the government’s Voice of America media organization, had joined jihadist groups in Afghanistan whose members included Taliban leaders and which had worked with Al Qaeda. Farivar’s jihadi comrades included Awal Gul, the Taliban commander locked up in Gitmo after being paid $100,000 by Bin Laden to help him escape.

Farivar has since mourned Awal Gul, wondering “how many other Awalguls languish in Gitmo.”

But over the last eight years, Farivar has had a new enemy, cranking out dozens of articles for the VOA with titles like, “Can Trump Be Indicted for Obstruction of Justice?”, “Has Trump Done Enough to Fence Off His Business Interests?” and “Hush Money Troubles for Trump?”

The only thing more troubling than the VOA, which operates under the U.S. government, waging a sustained campaign against the president was the man whose name appeared on its articles.

In his memoir, ‘Confessions of a Mullah Warrior’, Farivar described being inspired by Yunus Khalis, Osama bin Laden’s mentor, known as the Al Qaeda leader’s ‘Father Sheikh’, who welcomed him to Afghanistan, and whose Hezb-i Islami Khalis would fight alongside Al Qaeda against American forces in Afghanistan after the Muslim terrorist attacks of September 11.

A Voice of America senior analyst described the Al Qaeda ally as “deeply pious” with a “wry sense of humor” to whom “Jihad was a means to liberate Afghanistan” whose “message while simple and straightforward reasoned with me deeply.” Before long, Farivar was fighting for the jihadist group in Afghanistan alongside “Arab volunteers” shouting “Allahu Akbar”.

How did a former jihadist go from the battlefields of Afghanistan to Washington, D.C., and a bedroom community in Fairfax County filled with mosques and government employees, and from admiring Osama bin Laden’s mentor to working for a government media agency?

The answer lies in an old USAID-funded program that was supposed to train Jihadis in Afghanistan to become reporters. Instead, it embedded the jihadis into the media. Masood Farivar was one of a number of ex-Jihadis who went to work for the global media. Farivar’s presence at VOA is part of the larger story of another USAID project backfiring badly.

Rather than propagandizing in Afghanistan, Jihadi reporters spread propaganda in America..

When a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a French crowd on Bastille Day, killing 86 and wounding over 400, Farivar responded with an article titled, ‘Learn to Live With Terrorism’ Strikes Some as Good Advice”. When Front Page Magazine covered the Hamas Oct 7 attacks, he wrote an article smearing us as an “anti-Muslim” hate group for telling the truth about Jihad.

In VOA articles, he contended that demographic replacement by Muslims was a “right-wing conspiracy theory” and that racists were responsible for most domestic terrorism. A VOA segment credited to Farivar included the claim that “the level of involvement in violent extremism by Muslims in the United States is still quite low”,

Last year, Farivar wrote a VOA analysis headlined, “The Hidden Cost Of Being Branded A Terrorist By The US Government,” echoing claims from CAIR, a terror-linked organization which celebrated the attacks of Oct 7, that America was wrongly accusing Muslims of terrorism.

After pages of portraying his subject as an innocent man wrongly monitored by the government, Farivar finally revealed that he had been a supporter of an imam linked to a Jihadist group that had operated in Afghanistan and is currently affiliated with ISIS.

To what extent did Farivar’s past inform his contemporary coverage of Islamic terrorism?

As a teenager, Farivar described joining the Islamic Unity under Abdulrab Rasul Sayyaf,who invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and whose name would be adopted by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group currently allied with ISIS, and then attended a madrassa in Peshawar, Pakistan. While the name of the madrassa is not given in his memoir, Farivar describes a speech by a sheikh calling them “the children of Jihad” who will be “participating in the Jihad”.

Sayyaf had founded a madrassa in Peshawar known as Dawa al-Jihad, or the Call of Jihad, attended by a number of future terrorists, including World Trade Center bombers Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, taught there.

I reached out to Farivar to inquire if he had studied at the terrorist school, but got no answer.

The future VOA analyst returned to Afghanistan twice as a Jihadist. The second time he was fighting with Hezb-i Islami Khalis, whose members included Taliban founder Mullah Omar, Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, the Taliban’s prime minister, Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, the Taliban’s future foreign minister, and other major Taliban leaders, and which has been at war with the U.S.

But Farivar’s career took a turn toward America due to another USAID program.

USAID provided funding to set up a mujahadeen propaganda network known as the Afghan Media Resource Center. The terror media network, which reportedly required all personnel to  “sacrifice for holy jihad”, operated under the auspices of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the parent organization of Voice of America.

Through his new role as a ‘journalist’, Farivar met Carlos Mavroleon, a Harvard graduate from a wealthy Greek shipping family who had converted to Islam and taken the name Karimullah, fighting as a Mujahadeen and playing journalist, before dying of a heroin overdose with a Koran on him during an assignment for CBS News. “In London I fought the Jihad with a pen. Now I fight it with a sword. I have come to Afghanistan to take part in the Jihad,” Carlos had bragged.

“Jihad with a pen” would prove crucial to the next stage of fighting the West from within.

Mavroyan and the head of USIA got Farivar into Harvard. “I got off the plane with my big Osama bin Laden beard, my Afghan rebel hat and traditional garb,” he later recalled.

After graduating, he continued living in the U.S. without a green card, although a “friend with CIA connections” later offered him one.

He returned to Afghanistan and met with Taliban’s Minister of Culture, Amir Khan Muttaqi, currently its foreign minister, to discuss starting a radio station.

In his memoir, Farivar alternately claims to deplore the Taliban, but also admits to liking “the peace that the Taliban had restored.” When he visited the Taliban leader, it was with “a letter of introduction from the representative of the Taliban” in New York and after having “met several Taliban ministers while they were touring the United States.”

After 9/11, Farivar popped up in Afghanistan running a USAID-funded “NPR-like network” while rejecting “American-funded ads to recruit for the Afghan Army or police”. He joked, “Sometimes my wife calls me the Taliban.” He told Harvard Magazine that, “there is some self-censorship, some lines you cannot cross. Islam is a subject that you cannot touch: you can’t piss off the mullahs, can’t offend people’s faith.”

Even while U.S. soldiers were fighting Farivar’s old comrades, the U.S. was funding a radio operation that appeared similar to the one that the ex-Jihadi had pitched to the Taliban and which was hostile to American efforts to militarily secure Afghanistan from the Jihadis.

Salam Watandar, the Afghan radio network Farivar ran, operated under the umbrella of the Internews Network, a European nonprofit media group funded by everyone from Bill Gates to USAID. From there, Farivar moved to Voice of America, where he transitioned from covering Afghanistan to covering the FBI and the Justice Department.

And Trump.

Obama dismantled the firewall keeping the Voice of America from targeting Americans. And the former Jihadist became one of the vehicles for VOA’s attacks on President Trump.

After the rise of Trump, Farivar switched from covering Afghanistan and the Muslim world to domestic coverage that attacked Trump, with articles like  “Hate Crimes Surge After Trump Victory” and “Timeline: Trump’s Involvements With Russia”  others that promoted Islamist narratives “Most Terrorism Victims Are in Muslim Majority Countries” and “With Surge in Hate Crime, Muslims Seen ‘Most Disdained’ Minority” or even did both “How Muslim-Americans Drifted to the Democratic Party” and “Arab Opinion Poll Shows Support for Clinton”.

After the Biden administration raided Mar-a-Lago, Masood Farivar was working the Justice Department, pressing for confirmation that Attorney General Merrick Garland was “experiencing an uptick in death threats” from Trump supporters.

The VOA, an arm of the government, was promoting Russiagate and subtly nudging voters to turn against Trump during three presidential elections in violation of its charter and mission. The man behind some of these articles had been recruited by a related arm of the government back in the 1980s during his days as a jihadist to engage in a war of propaganda.

Now that propaganda was being aimed within the United States against the president.

And it’s still going on.

A propaganda machine once aimed at America’s enemies is now run by our enemies and aimed at us. The story of Masood Farivar shows why Voice of America needs urgent reform.

Farivar has at times sold himself as a fervent opponent of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while at other times he has appeared willing to collaborate with the Taliban. After 9/11, Farivar argued in his memoir that even though “radical mujahadeen often hated America as much as they hated the Soviet Union, the jihad was fundamentally good.”

Does America need a ‘good jihad’?

Baby Dies an Hour After Getting Seven Vaccines—But You Can’t Question the Shots?

  • by Marco Cáceres
  • Published 
  • Opinion
Baby Dies an Hour After Getting Seven Vaccines—But You Can’t Question the Shots?

Imagine taking your perfectly healthy baby to the pediatrician for a “well-baby visit.” You allow the doctor to give your baby all the scheduled vaccines and, within an hour, your healthy baby is dead. Considering that your baby was administered 7-8 vaccines—one right after the other, you naturally assume the vaccines may have had something to do with your child’s death. The medical staff, however, assures you that the death could not possibly have been caused by the vaccines because they had observed the baby for 20 minutes post-vaccination and there were no apparent problems. Besides, they say, other babies have been given the same vaccines and they did fine.

This story, along with the questionable medical logic, has been repeated many times in the United States and around the world for decades. Most often, they are not publicized, and so the general public assumes such cases are rare. But they’re not that rare, particularly in India, where the pentavalent (5 vaccines in one shot) vaccine is given to infants, along with several other vaccines during the first year of life.

The vaccines infants in India routinely receive include the BCG (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin) vaccine; IPV (injectable or “inactivated” polio vaccine); OPV (oral polio vaccine); PCV (pneumococcal conjugate vaccine), and rotavirus vaccine (RVV). The pentavalent vaccine contains one dose each of diphtheria vaccine, pertussis vaccine, tetanus vaccine, hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine, and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) vaccine.1 2

Just last week, The Times of India published an article about a 45-day-old baby girl in Rajanna Sircilla, India who was administered the pentavalent, HepB, and IPV shots. Since the HepB vaccine is already in the pentavalent vaccine, the reporter likely meant either the OPV, PCV, or RVV—or a total of seven vaccines. The parents of the child took her to a primary health center to receive the required vaccinations on Feb. 5, 2025.3 According to the article:

After receiving the shots, the parents stayed at the hospital for 30 minutes before returning home. About 30 minutes later, they noticed the baby was unresponsive and rushed her to a private hospital, where she was declared dead.3

The family of the child protested and alleged negligence on the part of the hospital staff as the cause of death. The staff said that they had observed the baby for 20 minutes after she was vaccinated and she appeared fine, and that another baby was vaccinated at about the same time and responded well to the shots. The local medical officer confirmed that the baby’s death was not caused by any complications related to the vaccines but rather by milk aspiration—”a condition where milk enters the lungs instead of the stomach.”3

Deaths of Babies Soon After Vaccination Usually Attributed to Something Else

Death by aspiration following the death of a baby shortly after a series of vaccinations seems to be a common refrain in India. In the case of one-month-old Aradhika Tripath, who died within two hours of being given seven vaccines, including pentavalent, Indian health officials alleged the child may have died from inhaling food or liquid into the trachea and lungs and accused the family of negligence when feeding her.4

In another case reported by The Times of India last September, a six-week-old infant in Chhattisgarh, India died after developing breathing difficulties soon after the baby was administered nine vaccines, including the pentavalent, IPV, OPV, PCV, and RVV shots. The article noted it was the third case of a baby dying in Chhattisgarh shortly after receiving the vaccinations that week.5

Vaccine Reaction has reported on at least a dozen cases of babies in India dying within hours after getting the pentavalent and other vaccines at the same time. Obviously, this is not remotely close to a complete list of such cases in this country where infants die shortly after receiving multiple vaccines. What is interesting is that in none of these cases were the deaths of the children attributed to the vaccinations just given, and there always seems to be a perfunctory rationale for dismissing a possible connection.

Consider the case of a five-month-old baby boy who died on Feb. 12-13, 2020 within hours of receiving the pentavalent vaccine. The medical officer who read a copy of the child’s post-mortem attributed the death to respiratory distress.4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 The rationale? The medical officer stated:

The same batch of vaccines were given to several hundred children. In the same [public health center], the nurse has given the vaccine to eight other infants. There were no adverse reports.6

The same rationale was reportedly given following the four-and-a-half-month-old girl shortly after a pentavalent vaccination…

The health officers said that the other children who were vaccinated did not show any adverse symptoms.15

Even in cases where a baby in India died hours after receiving the pentavalent vaccine and many other babies given the same vaccine at the same health center developed a fever and became seriously ill, health officials have been reluctant to entertain the possibility of a link to the vaccinations. In 2019, two babies, aged six and eight weeks, died within 24 hours of getting the pentavalent vaccine at a primary health center in Hyderabad. Another 32 children who received the vaccine came down with fever and at least four of them developed “serious complications.” Health officials concluded the deaths and adverse reactions were caused by doctors having given the babies the analgesic opioid drug Tramadol by mistake. In other words, “medical error.”12

Perhaps the most common explanation for Indian babies dying hours after getting half a dozen or more vaccines at one time is, “It was a coincidence.”

While reports abound of many other infant deaths occurring after vaccination in India, health officials in that country continue to express doubt as to whether the deaths are truly attributable to vaccination. As one Indian health official noted:

Infant deaths after immunization are usually coincidental. These deaths have other co-factors linked to them, other than vaccination. … Such incidental deaths during vaccination are extremely unfortunate.15

Widespread Reluctance of Health Care Pros in India to Blame Vaccines for Any Sudden Death of a Healthy Child

There have been countless cases in India and around the world of babies and older children dying within hours or days of getting a vaccine or two. The reluctance of doctors and health officials to blame the shot in these cases has been consistent. This reluctance does not appear to be affected by the number of vaccines administered. In India, giving babies 7-8 vaccines, including the “5-in-1” pentavalent, is considered safe, despite reports of deaths soon after their administration.

You would think that, at some point, doctors and health officials would intuitively sense that an unknown number of babies and children cannot tolerate multiple vaccines administered simultaneously. But, for the most part, this does not appear to be happening.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assures parents that “getting multiple vaccines at the same time has been shown to be safe” and that the “scientific data show that getting several vaccines at the same time does not cause any chronic health problems.” This belief is promoted by many doctors and other health care professionals.16

“Theoretically, there’s no maximum number of vaccines you can get at the same time if you’re willing to have sore arms. You can get four or five together,” said Sten Vermund, MD, PhD, a professor of public health, an infectious disease epidemiologist, and a pediatrician at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut. “We have no reservations from a medical standpoint. There’s no upper limit to how many you can get at one time,” says Ana Weill, MD, MPH, a researcher and infectious disease specialist with University of Washington Medicine in Seattle.17

Then, of course, there’s my personal favorite from pediatrician Paul Offit, MD, a vaccine developer and patent holder at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia… ”

“A more practical way to determine the diversity of the immune response would be to estimate the number of vaccines to which a child could respond at one time…  Infants have the “theoretical capacity to respond to about 10,000 vaccines at any one time.”18

With this kind of thinking, it’s no wonder that so many doctors and other health care professionals remain stuck in this “denial at all costs” mindset. After all, if the “experts” believe that giving children dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of vaccines at one time is safe, then giving just a few at a time must certainly be safe. Consequently, any death temporally associated with recently administered vaccines must unquestionably be caused by something else.

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Click here to view References:

1 Indian Academy of Pediatrics. Polio Vaccines.
2 Team Acko. Newborn Baby Vaccination Chart – India 2025. Acko Jan. 23, 2025.
3 TNN. Vaccines not to blame for baby’s death, say officials. The Times of India, Feb. 7, 2025.
4 La Vigne P. Indian Girls Die Following Vaccinations. Vaccine Reaction Dec. 12, 2017.
5 TNN. Infant dies after vaccine shots, 3rd case in CT in a wk. The Times of India, Sept. 6, 2024.
6 TVR Staff. Infant Boy in India Dies Within Hours of Receiving Pentavalent Vaccine. The Vaccine Reaction Apr. 11, 2020.
7 TVR Staff. Infant Boy in India Dies After Getting Pentavalent Vaccine. Vaccine Reaction Mar. 10, 2020.
8 TVR Staff. Infant Boy in India Dies a Day After Receiving Pentavalent Vaccine. The Vaccine Reaction Feb. 27, 2020.
9 TVR Staff. Infant Girl in India Dies a Day After Receiving Oral Polio and Pentavalent Vaccines. The Vaccine Reaction Sept. 11, 2019.
10 TVR Staff. Baby Girl in India Dies a Day After Getting the Pentavalent Vaccine. The Vaccine Reaction July 3, 2019.
11 TVR Staff. Infant Boy in India Falls Unconscious and Dies After Vaccination. The Vaccine Reaction June 27, 2019.
12 TVR Staff. Babies Die in India After Getting “5-in-1” Vaccine. The Vaccine Reaction Apr. 3, 2019.
13 TVR Staff. Two Infants and a Toddler in India Die Shortly After Vaccinations. The Vaccine Reaction July 9, 2018.
14 TVR Staff. Two Infants in India Die Following Pentavalent Vaccination. Vaccine Reaction Mar. 15, 2018.
15 Isalkar U. Pentavalent vaccine alert after suspicious death. The Times of India, Jan. 5, 2016.
16 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Multiple Vaccines at Once. Dec. 20, 2024.
.17 Upham, B. Is It Safe to Get Multiple Vaccines at the Same Time? Everyday Health, Sept. 12, 2024.
18 Cáceres‎ M. Dr. Offit Quotes: Top 10 List. Vaccine Reaction Mar. 26, 2017.

Colombia Caves To Trump’s Threat Of Tariffs Within An Hour After Previously Refusing To Accept Deportation Flights

TOPSHOT - Migrants board a plane during the first deportation flight of undocumented Venezuelans from the United States to Venezuela, in Harlingen, Texas, on October 18, 2023. The United States said on October 5, 2023 it will resume deportation flights to Venezuela after a deal with Caracas, as President Joe Biden, seeking reelection, comes under pressure to halt border crossings. Washington has for years halted sending migrants back to Venezuela due to instability in the South American nation and still maintains sanctions against the government of President Nicolas Maduro. (Photo by VERONICA G. CARDENAS / AFP) (Photo by VERONICA G. CARDENAS/AFP via Getty Images)
Migrants board a plane during the first deportation flight of undocumented Venezuelans from the United States to Venezuela, in Harlingen, Texas (Photo by VERONICA G. CARDENAS/AFP via Getty Images)

OAN Staff Blake Wolf
12:24 PM – Sunday, January 26, 2025

President Donald Trump slammed Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro for refusing to accept deportation flights while vowing to respond with tariffs and travel bans for Colombian officials.

Socialist Colombian President Petro announced on Sunday that the country is refusing to accept deportation fights into the country, before quickly reversing course following Trump’s tariff threat.

“The U.S. cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals. I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory. The United States must establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them,” Petro wrote in an X post.

Two U.S. military flights headed towards Colombia, presumably carrying illegal Colombian migrants, were forced to turn back after Petro’s declaration, according to a flight tracker.

President Trump responded to Petro’s announcement on Sunday, writing “I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia. This order was given by Colombia’s Socialist President Gustavo Petro, who is already very unpopular amongst his people.”

“Petro’s denial of these flights has jeopardized the National Security and Public Safety of the United States, so I have directed my administration to immediately take the following urgent and decisive retaliatory measures,” Trump continued.

The measures include an “Emergency 25% tariffs on all goods coming into the United States. In one week, the 25% tariff will rise to 50%,” along with “Visa Sanctions on all Party Members, Family Members, and Supporters of the Colombian Government.”

Trump also vowed to implement a travel ban and “immediate Visa Revocations on Colombian government officials,” as well as “Enhanced Customs and Border Protection inspections of all Colombian Nationals and Cargo on national security grounds.”

“These measures are just the beginning. We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!”

Following Trump’s threat, the Colombian government quickly caved, even offering its own presidential plane to accept Colombian nationals who illegally migrated to the United States.

“The Colombian Government, under the leadership of President Gustavo Petro, has arranged for the presidential plane to facilitate the dignified return of the compatriots who were to arrive in the country this morning from deportation flights. This measure responds to the Government’s commitment to guarantee dignified conditions,” the Colombian government wrote in an official statement.

Trump responded to the swift victory with an AI image depicting him in a mobster-like outfit, along with the phrase “FAFO” which means “F*** around and find out.”

Colombia’s decision to refuse to accept Colombian migrants and quickly reverse course follows a similar scenario Mexico recently underwent after defying Trump’s deportation orders, only to quickly reverse course after President Trump applied pressure.

“Thanks to President Trump: Yesterday, Mexico accepted a record 4 deportation flights in 1 day!” press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced in a Friday X post.

“This comes in addition to unrestricted returns at the land border, the deportation of non-Mexicans & reinstatement of Remain-in-Mexico. Mexico has also mobilized 30k National Guard,” she added.

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