Tag Archive for: State Department

U.S. State Department Paying For Play Where God Is Bisexual And Communists Are Good In Bid To Push LGBT Rights Abroad

The Biden-Harris administration is paying to put on a play that portrays God as bisexual, sharply criticizes former President Ronald Reagan and paints communists in a positive light, all in an effort to push gay rights on Southeastern Europeans, federal grant records show.

Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about “LGBTQ+ issues” in the country, federal grant records revealThe play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS.

Prior Walter, the man with AIDS, begins to have prophetic visions in his hospital room after his lover, Louis Ironson, abandons him, according to the play’s text.

In one such vision, he finds that angels have “eight vaginas” and are “equipped as well with a bouquet of phalli” and that the universe was created by God “copulat[ing] ceaselessly” with these hermaphroditic beings. Ejaculate from angels “fuels the Engine of Creation,” the play recounts.

Walter recounts these visions to a man named Belize, a former drag queen who is tending to him as a nurse.

The State Department has committed $20,000 to staging the play in Macedonia, according to grant records. An additional $10,500 in non-federal funding has also been allocated for the production.

“In the Manichaean world of Angels in America, everything Reagan stood for (capitalism, etc.) is evil,” a National Review critic wrote of the play’s HBO adaptation in 2003. “The most vocal Republican in the film is Roy Cohn — the unscrupulous gay lawyer who denied his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis to his death. In Cohn, a man ultimately undone by his own lies and hypocrisy, Kushner finds his embodiment of Reagan’s administration.”

Angels in America portrays Cohn, a real lawyer who was deeply involved in the conservative movement and helped Reagan get elected, as a bigoted hypocrite prone to outbursts of anger.

Cohn was instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted in 1951 of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. Activists long maintained that the Rosenbergs were innocent, however, documents released by the government in the 90s proved that the couple was involved in a Soviet espionage operation.

Rosenberg, portrayed positively in the play, antagonizes Cohn throughout the story, telling him on his deathbed that she “take[s] pleasure in [his] misery.” She later guides Ironson, who is a secular Jew, through a funeral prayer for Cohn, who also had Jewish ancestry, symbolically forgiving him.

“We have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan,” Kushner wrote in his play’s afterword, blaming those purported problems on “individualism.” A gay character, at one point in the play, asks “if [Reagan] didn’t have people like me to demonize where would he be?”

“Kushner strips Reagan of any merit, and reduces him fictionally to an anti-gay crusader,” the National Review critic wrote of the play.

The State Department’s production of an anti-Reagan, pro-LGBT play is not its first exercise in using theatrics for the purposes of social engineering as it spent $120,000 in 2023 to “improve communication at the level of the local community on the social issue of LGBTQ rights and domestic violence via participatory theater” in the African nation of Chad.

The new grant isn’t even the State Department’s first theatrical operation in North Macedonia, as it paid to teach the country’s residents about environmental issues through theater and dance in 2023, federal grant records show.

“Culture — from music to sports to theater — is a vital component of the United States’ people-to-people diplomacy efforts in Chad and around the world and supports broader U.S. foreign policy goals,” a spokesperson for the department told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time.

The State Department did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

Robert Schmad

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Funding Theatrical Productions To Teach Africans About LGBTQ Rights

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

China Hawks Slam Biden-Harris Admin For Ignoring Growing Evidence Beijing Is Running Spy Ops Out Of Diplomatic Posts

The Biden State Department has seemingly ignored mounting evidence of China running influence and intel operations from its diplomatic posts. And national security experts and China hardliners say Americans shouldn’t expect the administration to take action anytime soon.

Linda Sun, a former high-level official under Gov. Kathy Hochul, was arrested on Sep. 3 on allegations of acting on behalf of China’s government at the direction of the New York Chinese consulate, adding to a growing list of allegations of Chinese influence activities. The State Department has several tools to deter Beijing and Chinese consulates from such activities but has not taken any visible measures to do so, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“There is a range of things the State Department could be doing… The least they could do is to reiterate the warnings of the previous [Trump administration], and where they see need of it, improve upon the warnings of the previous administration,” Steve Yates, a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) and former national security official, told the DCNF. “That hasn’t happened, and I don’t expect it to happen now.”

Yates pointed to an example where the Trump administration shut down a Chinese consulate in Texas in 2020 over concerns that it was a hub for espionage and influence activities. The Biden administration has not closed any of the four remaining Chinese consulates located across the U.S.

Sun was accused of using to position to alter public statements to read as favorable to Beijing, block Taiwanese officials from meeting with New York officials and help smuggle foreign nationals into the U.S. using falsified immigration documents — all in exchange for bribes and gifts from the Chinese consulate, which coordinated with her and provided her guidance in committing the alleged crimes, according to Sun’s indictment.

Sun is not the only alleged Chinese operative in New York’s political orbit who has been arrested for their involvement in espionage or influence activities. The DCNF previously found that Lu Jianwang, an alleged Chinese spy who was arrested in 2023, had a long history of mingling with Democratic New York Rep. Grace Meng, who herself previously praised the Chinese Communist Party’s “leadership,” according to a separate DCNF investigation.

Lu was allegedly helping operate an illegal Chinese police station in New York City — which the FBI raided in 2023 and was eventually shuttered — that spied on and intimated critics of the Chinese government and was linked to a China-based law enforcement unit that specializes in extraditing Chinese citizens. Chinese operative Chen Jinping was arrested alongside Lu in 2023 for his alleged involvement in the police station.

Lu had received an indirect request from New York’s Chinese consulate to help counter a protest of the Chinese government in 2015, according to his federal indictment. He was also present at a protest against Taiwan in 2023 that was partially orchestrated by the consulate, according to National Review.

“China has an extensive spy and infiltration network in the United States,” John Lee, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former national security adviser in the Australian government, told the DCNF, noting that New York politicians who have potentially interacted malignly with Chinese operatives should face legal consequences. “I would like to see the federal government publicize these infiltrations and condemn them openly and frequently to alert Americans at all levels of government that this is occurring.”

The State Department, tasked with overseeing U.S. relations with other nations, can take a number of steps to deter Beijing, such as by confronting and issuing warnings to China’s U.S.-based consulates or issuing public condemnations, experts told the DCNF.

In certain cases, the State Department could even expel a diplomat from the U.S., a significant move that would likely be met with an equal response from Beijing. But experts told the DCNF they feel there has been an alarming lack of action from the State Department on the matter, even though the department has an annual budget of over $80 billion. and approximately 70,000 employees domestically and abroad.

“The State Department appears to be doing everything it can to downplay this situation and avoid retaliation from Beijing,” Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told the DCNF. “Deterrence is just as real in diplomacy as it is in the military realm. The State Department is signaling that it is unwilling to make it painful for Beijing to influence U.S. politics for its own gain. That’s a mistake, one that will leave us vulnerable to future predations from the Chinese Communist Party.”

Hochul said last Wednesday that she had asked the State Department to expel Huang Ping, the highest-ranking diplomat at China’s consulate in New York, given that he frequently coordinated with Sun, according to Politico. However, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters later that day that Huang did not need to be expelled because he had already left the U.S. at the end of August as his term had ended.

But Huang was seen in New York and serving in his post as of last Thursday, according to public records. China’s Embassy in the U.S. confirmed to the DCNF in a statement this week that Huang is “performing his duties as usual.”

The State Department told the DCNF that diplomats usually have 30 days at the end of their term to leave the U.S. or seek to change their diplomatic status.

“It is possible that they just didn’t do the due diligence to see what was going on. They accepted a talking point that wasn’t fact-checked and took it out publicly. That’s malpractice on their part, but you have to judge whether that’s major malpractice or a little screw-up,” Yates told the DCNF. ” I would think that it’s a degree of laziness on the part of the State Department. There’s also a degree of defensiveness on the part of this administration, which doesn’t want to escalate this because it is an embarrassment to them and an embarrassment to the government of New York.”

Broadly, the Biden administration has faced questions for its handling of U.S.-China relations in recent years, with some critics arguing that Beijing has failed to respond to diplomatic pressure and continues to attempt to undermine the U.S. through a variety of methods, including cyberwarfare, election interference, domestic espionage activities and drug trafficking.

Though New York has become a focal point for China’s influence activities, its malign influence extends well beyond the state and into the rest of the country, director of the China Policy Initiative at AFPI Adam Savit, told the DCNF.

“Unfortunately, New York is only one of many hotspots for CCP spying activity in the U.S.,” Savit said. “In many cases, the federal government has acted too late, or not at all.”

AUTHOR

Jake Smith

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

U.S. State Department Stabs Israel in the Back, Twists the Knife

Biden administration promotes Hamas propaganda by smearing Israel as a human rights abuser.

On Tuesday, the State Department published its 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. What should have been a non-political document completed the betrayal of Israel that the Biden administration began on March 25, when it refrained from having the U.S. veto a UN resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, the impact of which would enable the leadership of Hamas to survive and launch more attacks on Jews and Jewish babies. The clear meaning of the October 7 massacre was witnessed in Palestinians burning infants alive to cries of “Allahu Akbar” as though the incineration of the innocent – should they be Jews – is a holy sacrament rather than a sick episode in the wretched history of humanity’s inhumanity to its weakest members.

Far from being horrified by this celebration of evil, the Biden administration conflated the practices of the only civilized society in the Middle East with the monsters seeking its destruction.

Fox News noted that the Biden State Department report “highlighted Israel prominently, featuring concerns over the country’s precautions to minimize the civilian toll of Palestinians on the first page, which is normally reserved for the most egregious of human rights abusers.”

Not only does the report include Israel among the most barbaric human rights abusers – China, Putin’s Russia, the Taliban, and Iran, the would-be exterminators of the Jewish state — but “Israel was mentioned before the Biden administration’s State Department addressed ‘ongoing and brutal human rights abuses in Iran’ or ‘the Taliban’s systemic mistreatment of and discrimination against Afghanistan’s women and girls.’”

In Iran, they chant “Death to America” and have been waging war against their own people, brutally suppressing nationwide riots that broke out after Sharia police murdered a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. In Afghanistan, girls have been denied the right to an education, and the Taliban regime’s Supreme Leader announced in late March: “We will flog women in public, we will stone them to death in public.” No similar quotes were offered by the State Department from Israel’s leaders… because there are none.

The State Department report treats Israel as a worse human rights abuser than any of the above.

As far as the State Department is concerned, Israel’s alleged human rights violations are so egregious that they warrant being discussed immediately after the report mentions “the Kremlin’s disregard and contempt for human rights,” which “are on full display in its war against Ukraine,” and the “horrific violence, death, and destruction, including mass killings, unjust detentions, rape, and other forms of gender-based violence” that the Sudanese Armed Forces have unleashed in that country. In other words, Israel – the only non-racist democracy in the Middle East – is worse than the slaveocracy in Sudan, when it comes to the Jews’ human rights records.

This is an obscene libel. John Spencer, who is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, analyzed the IDF’s actions in Gaza and reported in late March that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Likewise, the British Colonel Richard Kemp stated early this month that in Gaza, “the ratio of deaths of civilians to military personnel was far lower than in other wars where armies had not been accused of war crimes, adding that he was ‘not aware of any war crimes [committed by the IDF].’”

The State Department has ignored both Spencer and Kemp, and shown its appreciation for Goebbels’ infamous advice that people will more readily believe a Big Lie than a small one – as it happens in this case also to further the latest campaign – to exterminate the Jews “from the river to the sea.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that not a single Jew will be allowed to live in a Palestinian state. This is not a plan for coexistence; it’s a recipe for genocide.

An Egyptian imam, Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub, made that plain in a 2009 televised sermon in which he articulated the neo-Nazi character of the anti-Israel war, saying that Muslim hatred of Jews had nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the Qur’an:

“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not…. Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies…. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.”

Got that, Secretary of State Blinken? This is a thousand-year Islamic imperative, rooted in the Qur’an’s calls to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, cf. 9:5).

Israel is in the midst of a war for its survival – not as a state but as the home of the Jews. The war against the jihadist military base in Gaza is not a political war but a desperate effort to stave off a genocidal campaign which has been pursued without relief for 75 years in Gaza and more than a thousand years in the historic home of the Jews – the land around the Jordan. Yet its principal foes are radical Islamists – aided and abetted by a criminal White House seeking votes and support from a neo-Nazi Left based in American universities and funded by a self-hating Jew – George Soros – who long ago should have been prosecuted for organizing illegal street demonstrations attacking Wall Street and endangering the lives of ordinary Americans in the process.

Thanks to the oddities of American elections, the Jews’ main enemy at this point is a criminal sitting in the White House who is desperately seeking votes in Michigan and selling his political influence to America’s enemies – and giving less of a damn about American citizens than any president in history before him.

AUTHORS

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

U.S. To Hand Billions To United Nations’ ‘Green Climate Fund’ For Poor Countries

President Joe Biden’s administration is committing an additional $3 billion to help developing countries fight climate change, the White House announced Saturday.

The allotment will go toward the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund and will be pledged by Vice President Kamala Harris at the COP28 summit in Dubai, according to the White House. The U.S.’ pledge will bring the fund to its largest level so far, as other countries like France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan have already made similar commitments that totaled $9.3 billion, according to Bloomberg, who first reported the funding.

“Since day one, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the entire Biden-Harris Administration have treated climate change as the existential threat of our time,” the White House’s announcement reads. “After spearheading the most significant climate action in history at home and leading efforts to tackle the climate crisis abroad, the United States heads into the 28th U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) with unprecedented momentum.”

The U.S. reached $5.8 million in international funding geared toward curbing climate change in 2022, compared to $1.5 billion allotted during 2021, according to the State Department. The Biden administration will exceed $9.5 billion this year, and the president is already planning on topping $11 million in 2024.

Wealthy countries are supposed to commit $100 billion per year to help developing countries fight climate change, a pledge that began in 2020, according to Bloomberg.

The Biden administration’s commitment follows a trend of funding green energy initiatives the president has focused on during his tenure, including his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA approved $750 billion in new spending, $370 billion of which went toward Biden’s green energy initiatives aimed at curbing climate change.

The U.S. pledged over $17 million toward an international “climate reparations” fund at the summit on Thursday. The fund is also geared toward helping developing countries fight against the impacts of climate change.

AUTHOR

MARY LOU MASTERS

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Pledges Millions To International ‘Climate Reparations’ Fund

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Admin Doubles Down On Climate Cooperation With China As Xi’s Economy Goes On Coal Binge

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it is doubling down on efforts to work with China on climate change.

The State Department unveiled a comprehensive strategy reaffirming the administration’s commitment to taking on climate change as a global problem alongside China, even during a time of rocky relations between the two nations and clear signs that China may not be inclined to ditch fossil fuels anytime soon. The countries are on the same page regarding emissions reduction targets and strategies, cooperation through international institutions, subnational agreements and numerous other specific topics, according to the State Department.

China permitted an average of two coal-fired power plants per week in 2022, according to NPR, and their climate envoy said in September that the complete elimination of fossil fuel energy is an “unrealistic” goal. Nevertheless, the Biden administration is committed to working with China to reduce numerous classes of emissions, including methane and nitrogen oxides, both of which are associated with coal.

Both countries welcome subnational agreements focused on climate, such as those reached by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to the State Department. Additionally, the countries are jointly committed to turning back forest loss, reducing plastic pollution and rapidly developing green energy generation sources.

Tuesday’s agreement on climate stands as one of several tentative deals reached this week between the two countries. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to halt the production of illicit fentanyl and resume inter-military communications in California during their first meeting in a year.

Notably, the State Department announcement also alludes to a joint plan to hold “a high-level event on subnational climate action” at some point in the first half of next year.

The two countries also committed to working together to keep United Nations average temperature targets in reach in ways that “[reflect] equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances,” according to the announcement. China is technically a developing nation in the eyes of the United Nations, despite being by far the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases and its status as the world’s second-largest economy, and it appears unwilling to pay into the so-called “loss and damages” fund, a de facto international climate reparations program by which rich countries would pay developing, poorer countries for the impacts of climate change.

The “loss and damages” program is poised to be a major topic of discussion at the upcoming United Nations climate conference, which itself is another point of collaboration between Washington and Beijing, according to the announcement.

The State Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

State Department Funded Foreign Think Tank Working To Censor Americans

  • The State Department funded the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a foreign organization that works to police online platforms.
  • ISD has partnerships with YouTube and Spotify to inform their content moderation decisions, and claims it helps platforms curb “misinformation.”
  • “By funding organizations – including foreign organizations, no less – that put their thumbs on the scale of hot-button domestic political debates, the federal government is wading into a dangerous Constitutional minefield,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. 

The U.S. State Department funds and partners with a U.K.-based think tank that collaborates with online platforms to censor perceived mis- and disinformation.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a British nongovernmental organization that styles itself as a research group working in partnership with several online platforms to combat extremism, hate and disinformation. However, the organization frequently classifies typical conservative discourse and journalism as hate and/or disinformation and has received funding from the U.S. government.

The State Department awarded the organization a grant in September 2021 to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in Europe and the U.K. after it won the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. The event, which was held in collaboration with the “U.S. Embassy Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [and] the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),” was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization which reportedly seeks to demonetize conservative news sites.

The State Department confirmed that its Global Engagement Center funded ISD to study Russian disinformation tactics against Wikipedia through a grant to Park Advisors. The department told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it plays no role in content moderation decisions on social media platforms.

“By funding organizations – including foreign organizations, no less – that put their thumbs on the scale of hot-button domestic political debates, the federal government is wading into a dangerous Constitutional minefield,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the DCNF. “The government cannot get around First Amendment restrictions by outsourcing or using surrogates or agents for prohibited activities.”

Additionally, the State Department and ISD partnered to create the Strong Cities Network, a United Nations-affiliated initiative that seeks to combat “hate, polarisation and extremism” abroad; the State Department solicited several grants as part of this arrangement, naming ISD as a sub-awardee.

The organization also lists as funders left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with several European government agencies.

ISD maintains several partnerships with platforms to inform their content moderation decisions, largely regarding extremist and terrorism-related content, but also, significantly, what it deems hate and misinformation.

The organization has a special advisory role with Spotify to “curb” misinformation on the audio streaming platform, and is tasked with flagging content for YouTube.

“The State Department’s partnership with the ISD is problematic at best and unconstitutional at worst,” Mike Davis, president of the Internet Accountability Project, told the DCNF. “Taxpayer dollars essentially funding the censorship of conservatives under the guise of ‘misinformation’ shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the Biden administration’s assault on the marketplace of ideas.”

While much of ISD’s work focuses on various forms of extremism such as radical Islam and white supremacy, a significant portion involves “disinformation” and online hate. However, the organization frequently characterizes staples of conservative discourse as hateful and/or as disinformation.

For instance, ISD appears to consider the comparison of abortion to murder as misinformation, admonishing social media platforms for not enforcing their abortion misinformation policies against such claims.

Moreover, in a 2022 report on “climate disinformation,” ISD profiled a form of discourse it labeled “delayism,” which accepts as a premise the existence of climate change but does not, in ISD’s view, advocate strong enough or urgent enough policy solutions. Criticism of particular policies designed to address climate change, such as the promotion of electric vehicles, were also included within the “disinformation” report.

“In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible,” the report read.

ISD cited as an example a Facebook post from Republican Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw that warned of the “radical obsession with wind and solar as the only clean energy solution” and argued instead for nuclear energy and natural gas with carbon capture technology.

Another example was a meme that compared an electric vehicle to a Flintstones-esque rock car.

“This outlandish form of censorship cannot be allowed to happen in America, such as simple policy preferences related to electric cars being labeled as misinformation,” Davis told the DCNF.

The organization characterized Libs of Tik Tok, a conservative Twitter account that publicizes examples of left-wing pedagogy including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology, as a “prolific spreader of hate,” and classified conservative journalist Scott Morefield as an individual “known to spread disinformation and amplify hateful right-wing talking points.”

ISD also considered “misgendering” an example of “anti-trans hatred” in a report on social media discourse surrounding the participation of men in women’s sports. ISD concluded by urging platforms to take action against posts that misgender trans individuals.

While ISD’s work is primarily research-oriented, the organization has successfully embedded itself in roles informing content moderation decisions within hugely influential social media and technology companies. Much of ISD’s work with online platforms focuses on terrorism and violent extremism, but the organization’s purview also includes mis- and disinformation.

ISD is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, formed in 2022 as a response to criticism of the audio streaming platform for Joe Rogan’s December 2021 interview with COVID-19 vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone.

The council, though not tasked with directly making content moderation decisions, is nevertheless empowered to “inform” Spotify’s policies and enforcement actions regarding “misinformation.” In ISD’s own words, the group will help Spotify “curb the spread of misinformation” on its platform and “independently keep watch over the platform’s content and safety policies.”

Additionally, ISD is part of YouTube’s “Trusted Flagger program,” an initiative in collaboration with several nongovernmental organizations and government agencies designed to improve YouTube’s enforcement of its guidelines. Trusted Flaggers are able to flag more content than average users, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014, and receive special treatment from YouTube.

“[O]ur teams prioritize flags from Trusted Flaggers for review,” Google’s description of the program reads.

ISD partnered with Google.org for its Impact Challenge on Safety grant initiative which distributed €10 million to organizations working to “counter hate and extremism” in Europe, and also received a $1.3 million grant from Google in 2017 to counter hate in the U.K.

The organization also boasts partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon’s audiobook platform Audible and Facebook.

“The State Department exists to represent the American public’s interests abroad,” Chamberlain told the DCNF. “If they are interested in countering concerns about weaponizing the government, they could start by not assisting outside groups that target the speech of American citizens.”

ISD did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

AILAN EVANS

Associate Editor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

State Department Weighs Funding Sex Change Treatments For Employees And Their Kids

The Department of State is weighing its options for funding gender transition services for diplomats and their dependents, according to a strategic plan for 2022-2026.

The State Department is assessing what resources are available for foreign diplomats and their dependents who wish to transition to the opposite sex, according to the strategic plan. Gender transition treatments can include talk therapy, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, though it’s unclear what forms of support the State Department aims to provide and whether that would apply to dependents who are minors.

The move comes after an August report revealed the State Department was pressuring foreign countries to crack down on forms of therapy for children with gender identity issues that don’t automatically affirm their transgender status.

The strategic plan includes a subsection on LGBT inclusion at overseas posts, including goals such as creating more gender-neutral bathrooms and locker rooms in overseas facilities and promoting pro-LGBT policies for children in schools abroad.

The plan proposes that the State Department “develop a Department-wide targeted plan to achieve equity in the advocacy plan to obtain the accreditation of same-sex spouses overseas … assess resources for gender dysphoria and gender transition care at posts for employees and their dependent [and] increase gender-neutral restrooms and locker rooms in overseas facilities.”

The plan recommends guidance be created for protesting policies of foreign countries viewed as discriminatory and recommends the State Department collaborate with accreditation agencies for overseas schools to provide “social-emotional support” for LBGT students.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently told embassies to “submit robust information on the so-called ‘conversion therapy’ practices” in their host countries as part of their annual human rights reports, according to an August City Journal report. Blinken believes the “wait and see” approach to childhood gender issues, which doesn’t automatically affirm a child’s transgender identity, is a form of conversion therapy.

The memo was met with outrage from Republican lawmakers, who rebuked the guidance in a September letter.

“The State Department’s memo is a form of radical gender imperialism that threatens our relationships with other nations and harms our standing in the world,” the lawmakers wrote. “Many countries in Europe … employ either ‘last line of defense’ policies on ‘gender affirming care,’ or have banned gender surgeries for youth altogether. These more restrictive policies now risk making Western European nations “human rights abusers” in the eyes of the State Department, putting them on similar footing as the People Republic of China (PRC), which has committed genocide.”

The State Department did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social and culture reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden’s Handlers Alter Federal Laws to Make it Easier for Terrorists to Enter the United States

The Biden Admin Just Made It Easier for Terrorists To Enter the United States

by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, June 29, 2022:

The Biden administration altered federal law to make it easier for individuals who have worked with designated terrorist groups to legally enter the United States.

The State and Homeland Security Departments last week amended federal immigration laws to allow foreigners who provided “insignificant material support” to designated terror groups to receive “immigration benefits or other status,” according to the policy published in the Federal Register but not formally announced by the administration. Examples of individuals who would fall into the new category, according to the announcement, include individuals who provided “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” to terror groups.

The policy shift is fueling concerns that the Biden administration wants to make it easier for individuals who work with or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to enter the country. Notice of the change came several days before the Biden administration and hardline Iranian government resumed talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal.

A State Department spokesman said the law was amended to help vulnerable Afghans, who might have inadvertently worked with terror groups, gain refuge in the United States following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal that left the Taliban in power. Lawmakers and former U.S. officials, however, say the new regulations are so broadly written that they would apply to organizations like al Qaeda and the IRGC. The policy change is also raising red flags as U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, face credible death threats from Iran.

The rule does not specifically mention Afghanistan but is written to cover all U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the IRGC and al Qaeda, experts told the Free Beacon. The Taliban is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, leaving lawmakers and former U.S. officials concerned the changes extend far beyond vulnerable Afghans and cover those tied to some of the globe’s most violent terror groups.

Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, said that “the Biden administration is claiming this regulation is all about Afghanistan, but they didn’t even mention Afghanistan once in their action, and have made no serious attempt to limit the scope to the situation there.”

“Instead,” said Noronha, who is a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America think tank, “this looks like a massive watering down of our immigration restrictions against members of terrorist organizations.”

The State Department says the changes are limited to Afghanistan, but would not say why the country is not mentioned once in the new order….

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

State Department Nominee Must Tame The Bureaucratic Beast

The way the media is discussing the choice facing President-Elect Trump over his State Department nominee, you would think it’s a choice about stocking-stuffers. Should I give Mitt the slide whistle, the chocolate truffle, or the lump of coal?

The answer is: none of the above. And as Kellyann Conway noted on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump loyalists are wondering why Mitt Romney thinks he deserves to hang his stocking on our mantle to begin with.

Secretary of State is one of three key national security positions, but even more than the National Security advisor or the Secretary of Defense, this is the person who becomes America’s face and voice to seven billion people around the planet. This is the person who will personify American values, who will hold high the flag of freedom.

And most important of all, this is the person who will ensure that President Trump’s agenda actually gets carried out by an unruly, often recalcitrant bureaucracy at the Department of State, filled with partisan Democrats who have burrowed their way into career track jobs to avoid getting automatically axed come the inauguration.

Mitt Romney may be willing to recant his harsh attacks on Donald Trump’s character during the campaign, and Mr. Trump may be willing to forgive him. But the real issue – and it applies to any potential nominee – is this: can he or she ascend to the seventh floor and tame the bureaucracy?

After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting of his employees. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history. Everyone in this building was constitutionally obligated to serve him, he said.

As I recounted in my 2008 book, Shadow Warriors, one of Powell’s subordinates returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks to her assembled staff, she commented: “Well, Senator Kerry receive the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Sen. Kerry would be President Kerry today.”

The employees of her regional bureau owed no allegiance to the president of the United States, especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she told them. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it.

I fully expect the next Secretary of State will face the same type of open insubordination from political hold-overs, many of whom weathered eight years of George W. Bush. They will use every ruse to undermine President Trump’s policies, especially where those policies conflict with their elitist, globalist agenda – which will be just about everywhere.

Want to slash the $1 billion funding to promote “climate change” initiatives? All of a sudden, that money will get buried in another budget line. Want to stop spending U.S. taxpayer dollars to promote an LGBT lifestyle overseas? The next secretary will get blank stares when he or she gives such an order to the bureaucrats.

And these are relatively small matters. What about moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, a policy Congress has made law and Donald Trump promoted during the campaign? I guarantee you, the shadow warriors at State will find legal excuses where none exist, and magnify the objections of regional partners who never set foot in Israel anyway.

The State Department has many talented, career professionals, who understand that their job is to promote the policies of the United States of America as defined by the President and his Secretary of State. But it also has many secret and not-so-secret partisans, who believe their duty is to act as so many Edward Snowden’s inside the belly of the beast, leaking to the media and to President Trump’s political enemies.

The next Secretary of State cannot close his eyes to this fact. He must tame the bureaucracy and, like the Swedes, not fear to send those he cannot fire to the “elephant’s churchyard” in the basement.

That’s what happened to Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission under Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, after Hicks had the temerity to testify before Congress that his superiors back in Washington had denied scores of requests for additional security in Tripoli and Benghazi.

The media will scream, and Senator Chuck Schumer will join them, calling the Secretary a vicious partisan, vindictive, or – heavens! – unfair. We need a Secretary of State who will not flinch at the slings and arrows of the president’s political adversaries, who can sweep them away with skill, good humor, and firm resolve.

Do you see Mitt Romney doing that?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the DailyCaller.com.

U.S. State Department: 9,500 foreigners whose visas were revoked for terrorism go missing

The solution: bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees whose ties to jihad terror will be impossible to vet.

“Feds can’t say whereabouts of those whose visas were revoked over terror threat,” Fox News, December 19, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

The Obama administration cannot be sure of the whereabouts of thousands of foreigners in the U.S. who had their visas revoked over terror concerns and other reasons, a State Department official acknowledged Thursday.

The admission, made at a House oversight hearing examining immigrant vetting in the wake of major terror attacks, drew a sharp rebuke from the committee chairman.

“You don’t have a clue do you?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Bond initially said the U.S. has revoked more than 122,000 visas since 2001, including 9,500 because of the threat of terrorism.

But Chaffetz quickly pried at that stat, pressing the witness about the present location of those individuals.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The startling admission came as members of the committee pressed administration officials on what safeguards are in place to reduce the risk from would-be extremists….

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U.S. State Department Denies Middle East Christians Refugee Status

iraqi christiansThe NER November edition interview with U.S. Iraqi Christian leader Joseph T. Kassab, “Iraqi Christians Face Extinction” is illustrated by the experience of Syrian Christians  Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom writes about them in a National Review on-line article published, today,  “The State Department Turns Its Back on Syrian Christians and Other Non-Muslim Refugees.”  Shea’s bottom line tells why so few imperiled Iraqi and Syrian Christians and other non- Muslim minorities have been admitted by our State Department for asylum as humanitarian refugees. They are largely ‘urban refugees’ as Kassab pointed out in our Iraqi Christian interview. They don’t qualify under UN rules that our State Department slavishly adheres to. One of our first NER articles in January 2008 drew attention to that problem, “Why Is the UN Determining Who Becomes Humanitarian Refugees in the US?

Note this exchange with Kassab in our interview about the quandary facing Iraqi Christian ‘urban refugees’ in the Kurdish Regional Government:

Gordon:  What are the current conditions of Iraqi Christian refugee camps in the Kurdish Region and what kinds of assistance are they receiving?

Kassab:  The current conditions for Iraqi Christian IDPs are very chaotic and horrific. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) is doing its best to provide for them. However, they are unable to absorb more than 3 million refugees from Syria and Yazidis in their region. The Iraqi government has done nothing for its citizen IDPs. Corruption is very high among the Iraqi government officials and that by itself makes distribution of relief to its IDPs very poor. The UN and humanitarian local and international NGOs are unable to function properly due to lack of coordination and efficient capacity. Therefore people are losing hope and are availing of any opportunity to escape abroad. Christians are urban refugees-IDPs meaning that they do not live in UN refugee camps. Instead they seek shelter with relatives, in unfinished buildings, parks and churches. Overall, this support can be very short lived because volunteering always has a sunset.

Shea cites the paltry admissions of Syrian Christians and other minorities by the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration:

Over the past five years of Syria’s civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Syrian Christian refugees, a loneYazidi, and fewer than ten Druze, Bahá’ís, and Zoroastrians combined. That so few of the Syrian refugees coming here are non-Muslim minorities is due to American reliance on a United Nations refugee-resettlement program that disproportionately excludes them. Past absolute totals of Syrian refugees to the U.S. under this program were small, but as the Obama administration now ramps up refugee quotas by tens of thousands, it would be unconscionable to continue with a process that has consistently forsaken some of the most defenseless and egregiously persecuted of those fleeing Syria.

The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group — Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions — constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then.

Here is the explanation given by a State Department official concerned about religious minorities:

In an e-mail to me, Knox Thames, the State Department’s new special adviser for religious minorities, wrote that “many minorities have not entered the UN system because they are urban refugees.” That is, because they live far from the remote U.N. camps and aid centers, they lack the information and access to register. And, as is widely known, many non-Muslim refugees try hard to avoid these camps.

Like Iraqi Christians who opt for church-run camps over better-serviced U.N. ones, Syrian minorities fear hostility from majority groups inside the latter. According to British media, a terrorist defector asserted that militants enter U.N. camps to assassinate and kidnap Christians. An American Christian aid group reported that the U.N. camps are “dangerous” places where ISIS, militias, and gangs traffic in women and threaten men who refuse to swear allegiance to the caliphate. Such intimidation is also reportedly evident in migrant camps in Europe, leading the German police union to recommend separate shelters for Christian and Muslim migrant groups.

Shea noted the response by the current UN High Commissioner for Refugees at a recent Washington conference:

At a discussion of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom on October 27, I directly questioned U.N. High Commissioner António Guterres, an otherwise ardent advocate of diversity, about the short shrift that his office has given all Syria’s non-Muslim minority communities. His rambling reply failed to reassure. He said that, while some individuals should be resettled, as a Catholic he felt that Christians should not leave, because they’re part of the “DNA of the Middle East”; moreover, he said, Lebanon’s former president asked him not to resettle the Christians. Was he revealing a policy of religious bias and unlawful geo-political calculations for U.N. refugee determinations? Or was his sentiment a smokescreen behind which he was trying to flick off an issue he regarded as insignificant?

Like Iraqi Christian advocate Kassab, a prominent Chaldean Bishop in the Western US, Sarho Jammo, is “imploring that Christians be included in the new allotments for humanitarian refugees from the Middle East issued by the Administration.

Shea concludes:

According to a recent UNHCR posting, 19,000 Syrians picked straight from “refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan” have received U.N. approval and are awaiting resettlement in the U.S.  In October, President Obama ordered their expedited admission. Without further action, however, only token numbers of non-Muslim minorities will be among those rescued. George Carey, former archbishop of Canterbury, called it right about the Christian refugees and his words equally apply to Syria’s other non-Muslim communities: They are being “left at the bottom of the heap.”

It is clear from both our NER interview with Kassab and Shea that without Congress amending the Refugee Act of 1980 the State Department is fostering the extinction of Middle East Christians by adhering to UNHCR allotment criteria. If they cannot be provided sanctuary and asylum in the US, under the current UNHCR definitions, then special waivers should be granted lifting those restrictions to utilize the special P2/P3 Family Reunification Visa program.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Rising Concerns over Muslim Refugee Resettlement in U.S. [Video]

Ann Corcoran’s brief video on Muslim Refugee Resettlement in the U.S. has gone viral since being put up on YouTube on April 20, 2015 by the Center for Security Policy. It has had over 200,735 hits to date climbing every day. Clearly, Corcoran’s message has resonated among concerned Americans. Watch it on YouTube:

Refugee Resettlement and Hijra jpgThe CSP YouTube video is a complement to her recently published book on the problems confronting America over the threat of mass Muslim migration that has transformed Europe and now troubles grass roots America, “Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America .

Corcoran and her team chronicle news and developments about this issue on the blog where she is editor, Refugee Resettlement Watch. You may have read our interview with Erick Stakelbeck, ISIS Threat to America  in the current edition of the NER where he drew attention to the Somali refugee communities in the American heartland sending jihadi terrorists in Somali and Syria.  He spoke of young Somali émigré men who have joined up with, first Al Shabaab in Somalia, and now increasingly, join the Islamic State to fight for the self-declared Caliphate in Syria and Iraq.   We have drawn attention to the problems of Somali refugee resettlement in NER articles and Iconoclast posts over the past eight years.  They have  covered  severe cultural and integration problems in the American heartland  in places like Shelbyville, TennesseeEmporia, KansasGreeley , ColoradoMinneapolis, Minnesota,  Columbus, Ohio, and Lewiston, Maine.

The Somali émigré jihadis aren’t the only terrorists among admitted refugees. Think of the brothers Tsarneav who perpetrated the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. See our NER article, “Refugee Jihad Terror in Boston.”  An ABC investigation reported that dozens of terrorists have been admitted fraudulently under the U.S. Refugee Admission Program.

 One example was two Iraqi refugees, al Qaeda operatives, arrested in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2011 convicted in 2013. They were charged with sending weapons and cash to Al Qaeda. They lied on their Federal Refugee Admission forms about their prior terrorist involvements in Iraq. One had constructed IEDs, involved in killing four members of a Pennsylvania National guard unit in 2006 in Iraq. A check of fingerprints on the shards of the IED caught the perpetrator. Watch this 2013 ABC Report. Recently, one of those convicted, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, filed a motion seeking to overturn his conviction because his counsel said he wouldn’t get life.  That episode briefly raised the criticism of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

In excess of 250,000 Somali and Iraqis have been admitted to the U.S. as refugees.  An estimated one million have immigrated to the U.S. from Muslim lands. Through births and admittance of relatives under the problematic P-3 Family Reunification Visa program the impact could mean millions of additional Muslim émigrés in the U.S.  Virtually all of the Somali and Iraqi refugees were Muslim.  Endangered Christians and other minority religion accounted for less than 8 percent of Syrian Refugees admitted under the State Department administered U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Eleven Christian, Jewish and special interest NGOs or voluntary agencies (VOLAGS) are paid by the billion dollar State Department refugee program to process and place refugees in American communities. VOLAGS like Catholic Charities, Lutheran World Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the International Rescue Committee. The total annual federal and state program costs of refugee resettlement are estimated to range in excess of $12 to $20 billion annually.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees  establishes priorities for U.S. Admissions under the Refugee Act of 1980. An Act co-sponsored by the late Edward Kennedy and then Senator, now Vice President in the Obama Administration, Joe Biden. The U.S. may be poised to accept another wave of over 75,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years.   Doubtless they and growing number of  Muslim refugees from  elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia will be “seeded”  in American cities under the Fostering Community Engagement  and Welcoming Communities Project of  the Office of Refugee  Resettlement with the Soros-backed  NGO, “Welcoming America“.

 But now there is pushback by American cities, as witnessed by concerns expressed in letters to Secretary of State Kerry by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), chairman of the House Judiciary Sub Committee on Immigration and Border Security. Both The House Subcommittee and the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) hold annual hearings over refugee allotments. Gowdy’s letter of April 13, 2015 was prompted by constituent complaints in Spartanburg, South Carolina of the establishment of a VOLAG office to processing Muslim refugees. He wrote Secretary Kerry seeking answers as to why the office was being established and had not been reviewed with state and local agencies. He ended his letter:

I request that any plans to resettle refugees in the Spartanburg, South Carolina, area be placed on hold until my constituents and I receive your substantive responses to the questions and information requested in this letter. Additionally, before moving forward, both the Spartanburg community and I should have time to substantively review the information and be comfortable with the information provided.

As previously stated, I am troubled by the lack of notice and coordination with my office and the Spartanburg community, particularly local officials, regarding the plans to resettle refugees in the area. In that vein, I request at least one month’s notice prior to the arrival of the first refugee[s] in the Spartanburg area.

To find out more about what could become an important issue for evaluation of 2016 Presidential candidates, be sure to listen to an interview with Ann Corcoran of RRW by Jerry Gordon and Mike Bates on 1330am WEBY “Your Turn.” The program will air at 5:30 PM CDT (6:30 PM EDT), Tuesday, May 12th.  You may Listen Live here. The recorded program will be archived and posted following the broadcast.  A transcript of the interview may appear in the June edition of the NER.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

The President’s Conference and its message: “Think Again, Turn Away”

Today starts a three day conference in Foggy Bottom at which President Obama will appear before an audience of representatives from 60 countries dealing with the threat of “violent extremism”.  The White House and State Department have made it abundantly clear that they refuse to identify the perpetrators and the victims of the Paris Charlie Hebdo and Kosher Supermarket attacks, this weekend’s attacks in Copenhagen, among them Jews, and the grisly beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya by ISIS.  The critics of this no name policy suggest that if you cannot define the threat of radical Islam and its basis, Qur’anic doctrine and Sharia Islamic law,  that you can’t develop a strategy for “degrading “and” defeating” the Islamic State.

Given what happened in Egypt’s Sinai and this past weekend in Libya, the area of conflict with IS might be expanded to include North Africa and, obviously, the West, given the attacks in France, Belgium and Denmark, as well as America and Canada. Thus the “violent extremism” conference will focus on warning potential IS recruits of foreign fighters from across the globe to “Think Again, Turn Away.” That message is  being  refined by the State Department  Center  for Strategic Counter-terrorism Communications (CSCC) set up under an executive order issued by President  Obama in 2011. Otherwise, the recruits might end up dead either as suicide bombers or at the hands of IS masterminds. The CSCC has a daunting task. According to its website:

CSCC is comprised of three interactive components. The integrated analysis component leverages the Intelligence Community and other substantive experts to ensure CSCC communicators benefit from the best information and analysis available. The plans and operations component draws on this input to devise effective ways to counter the terrorist narrative. The Digital Outreach Team actively and openly engages in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and Somali to counter terrorist propaganda and misinformation about the United States across a wide variety of interactive digital environments that had previously been ceded to extremists.

As a New York Times (NYTarticle on the conference pointed out the State Department CSCC coordinator, Ambassador Alberto Fernandez is leaving shortly after trying to lead the messaging effort across a broad spectrum of competing internal State, Homeland Security and intelligence echelons. This comment by former State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin sums up why Fernandez will retire in April, 2015. “After its first year or two, it was never taken seriously and got little support from higher-ups.”

The CSCC has endeavored to communicate that the IS Salafist jihadist slick presentations in videos, tweets and Face book pages corrupts the central message of Islam of “peace and justice” – that is only to adherents of the faith. In point of fact, the IS following in the way of Allah, Jihad.

How slick is the IS agit-propaganda spewed out on-line to the unwary recruit? One recent example is reflected in a new release translated by MEMRI, entreating recruits to come to Libya and join the gateway to the Conquest of Rome – a thought that should be unnerving to Pope Francis. The NYT CSCC article cited as examples of effective “messaging”:

One online image two years ago, for instance, showed photographs of three American men who traveled to Somalia and died there, including Omar Hammami, a young man from Alabama who became an infamous Islamist militant. The accompanying message reads, “They came for jihad but were murdered by Al Shabaab.”

Another image showed a young man weeping over a coffin. The message read, “How can slaughtering the innocent be the right path?”

Each of the online posts carried a warning: “Think again. Turn away.”

Last June, Islamic State supporters warned fighters to beware of the center’s Twitter account and not to interact with it.

The reality of the CSCC mission, is that it has been corrupted- to quote Egyptian President Al-Sisi- by the origin of  IS and Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  As late as January 2015, the State Department was caught in a conference with alleged Egyptian MB leaders.  There were graphic messages on twitter set against the backdrop of the Seal of the State Department by one of the participants flashing the ‘rabbia’ hand sign-a signal to support ousted President Morsi and hundreds of others currently being tried for sedition in Egypt.  Last May, the State Department was embarrassed by a tweet it sent about the presence at a White House meeting on messaging with Sheik Bin Bayyah, a deputy to notorious MB preacher, Yusuf Al Qaradawi.  Bin Bayyah had been there before along with another Egyptian legislator and member of a terrorist group in 2013.

The President’s Conference on Violent Extremism is being stage managed by a skilled media expert, Richard Stengel, former Time Magazine managing editor, who was appointed in 2013 as Undersecretary Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.  Stengel will be assisted at the Conference by Ambassador Rashad Hussein, current Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and former Deputy White House Counsel with MB connections.  Stengel admits that countering the ISIS supremacy in messaging its appeal to young impressionable Muslim recruits is daunting. He was cited by the New York Times saying, “We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content…. These guys [meaning IS] aren’t BuzzFeed; they’re not invincible in social media.”

Last fall, Stengel was interviewed by the Voice of America while in the midst of the propaganda war with IS:

VOA: What are some challenges in terms of dealing or confronting the ISIS propaganda machine?

Stengel: There are a lot of challenges. They are very sophisticated. They will stop at nothing, so to speak. They are not bound by the truth in any way. There are structural problems in the Middle East and the Arab world that can sometimes make Daesh’s ideology attractive, attractive to young men who don’t have jobs, who don’t see a great future for themselves, who have only heard a kind of misbegotten idea of Islam. So that is part of the challenge. What we’re trying to say, along with the coalition partners, is that Daesh is not the true face of Islam, it doesn’t represent what the prophet or the Koran stands for, and that the vision they’re creating of a caliphate is a false vision where none of the things they say are true are true.

Clearly, Stengel is toeing the White House line that IS is ‘misinterpreting’ Islam, even as  some scholars believe it is reflecting the core doctrine of Salafist/Jihad.

Last October, Stengel appeared at a forum on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California’s Center for Public Diplomacy (CPD).  Watch the video of his talk and Q&A here:

USC Professor of Journalism and International Relations Phillip Seib in a CPD article suggested that countering ISIS messaging capability is in the wrong place at State’s CSCC. Rather it should be transferred to the CIA. He wrote:

A much more effective approach to combat their message would be a bare-knuckles operation: no disclaimers and a product that matches up better against the videos coming from Al Hayat, ISIL’s video production arm (the name stolen from the pan-Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat).

These videos should feature imams denouncing ISIL’s tactics and women urging their sisters not to be enticed by ISIL’s recruiting messages. They should include video testimony from disillusioned ISIL fighters who have returned home. And they should show the ravaged Muslim communities that have been attacked by ISIL. But few anti-ISIL speakers want to participate in a State Department-branded video. And even fewer jihadist recruits believe it. American credibility in the region remains low, and many Muslims are wary of a new round of U.S. involvement in their homelands.

Our comment on the President’s “violent extremism” Conference this week in Washington is soft power is trumped by raw Islamic Jihad every time. That is embodied in failure to recognize the Qur’anic doctrine behind the rise of IS. To paraphrase the CSCC motto, “Think Again, Turn Away” from Taqiyya – lying for Allah.

RELATED ARTICLE: Islamic supremacist groups including Hamas-linked CAIR say Obama terror summit wrongly singles out Muslims

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Egypt’s Al-Sisi Takes Revenge for Slaughter of Coptic Christians by Isis in Libya

Many were appalled by the video depicting the slaughter of Coptic Christians by masked ISIS supporters in war torn Libya.  Unlike some in the West Wing and the State Department who wring their hands, condemn  and deplore such savagery, after destabilizing Libya, President al-Sisi  has shown  he has the mettle to  take revenge for the murders of  Egyptian Coptic Christians. He launched immediate air attacks against the bases in Eastern Libya of the ISIS affiliated Jihadists. This despite the savage on-going war that Egypt is fighting against the ISIS affiliate in the Sinai, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis.

While the National Security Council and State Department invite in Muslim Brotherhood leaders to discuss messaging to combat the rise of ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa, Al-Sisi is trying ousted President Morsi and hundreds of other MB leaders in Egypt for endeavoring to create an Islamic State. Like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Egypt has designated the MB and affiliate in the US, the Council of American Islamic Relations, as terrorist organizations.  Meanwhile,  the White House issued a statement not identifying the religion of the murdered Coptic Christians. Even the UN  did that.

Fox News/AP reported Al-Sisi’s response to Jihad slaughter of Coptic Christians in Libya:

Egypt’s military said Monday that it had launched airstrikes against ISIS-affiliated militants in Libya after a video purporting to show the mass beheading of Coptic Christian hostages surfaced Sunday.

A spokesman for the Armed Forces General Command announced the strikes on state radio Monday, marking the first time Cairo has publicly acknowledged taking military action in neighboring Libya, where extremist groups seen as a threat to both countries have taken root in recent years.

The statement said the warplanes targeted weapons caches and training camps before returning safely. It said the strikes were “to avenge the bloodshed and to seek retribution from the killers.”

“Let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them,” it said.

[…]

The Egyptian government had previously declared a seven-day period of mourning and President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi addressed the nation late Sunday night, saying that his government reserved the right to seek retaliation for the killings.

“These cowardly actions will not undermine our determination” said Al-Sisi, who also banned all travel to Libya by Egyptian citizens. “Egypt and the whole world are in a fierce battle with extremist groups carrying extremist ideology and sharing the same goals.”

Libya’s air force commander, Saqr al-Joroushi, told Egyptian state TV that the airstrikes were coordinated with the Libyan side and that they killed about 50 militants. Libya’s air force also announced it had launched strikes in the eastern city of Darna, which was taken over by an ISIS affiliate last year.

[…]

In Washington, the White House released a statement calling the beheadings “despicable” and “cowardly”, but made no mention of the victims’ religion, referring to them only as “Egyptian citizens” or “innocents”. White House press secretary Josh Earnest added in the statement that the terror group’s “barbarity knows no bounds.”

Also Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry called Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. He offered his condolences on behalf of the American people and strongly condemned the killings. Kerry and the foreign minister agreed to keep in close touch as Egyptians deliberated on a response, according to a release from the State Department.

On Monday, Al-Sisi visited the main Coptic Cathedral of St. Mark in Cairo to offer his condolences on the Egyptians killed in Libya, according to state TV.

The U.N. Security Council meanwhile strongly condemned what it called “the heinous and cowardly apparent murder in Libya of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by an affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” using another name for the terror group.

The foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, also condemned the mass killing, calling it an “ugly crime.”

“The United Arab Emirates is devoting all its resources to support the efforts of Egypt to eradicate terrorism and the violence directed against its citizens,” he said.

Sheikh Abdullah added that the killing highlights the need to help the Libyan government “extend its sovereign authority over all of Libya’s territory.”

The savage murder of the 21 Coptic Christina hostages in Libya underscores the failure of the Administration’s policy of leading from behind. Confounding adoption of a strategy is the Administration’s refusal to  identify the threat of Salafist Jihadist Islamic doctrine, virtually one and the same with that promoted by the MB and its supporters in the Muslim Ummah and here in the West.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the New English Review.