The IRS Refuses to Act Against a Hamas Nonprofit

Daniel Greenfield November 16, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

It has been 5 years since journalists warned that an anti-Israel nonprofit was lending its tax-exempt status to a BDS group whose coalition included Hamas and other terror groups.

Since that time the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) has held on to its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. USCPR’s response to the brutal Hamas butchery of entire families, the rapes and the abductions of children was to state that the “Palestinian people have the right to defend their homeland from Israel” and to retweet messages describing the horrors as a “response” to Israeli oppression and bragging that “Gaza just broke out of prison”.

USCPR, which calls itself the Education for Just Peace in the Middle East in tax documents, had previously been exposed as the “fiscal sponsor” for the Palestinian BDS National Committee which means that when someone donates money to the BDS umbrella group, it uses USCPR’s nonprofit status to make it a charitable tax-deductible donation.

The BDS National Committee referred to the Hamas atrocities as the “resistance of the oppressed” and the “powerful armed reaction of the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza.”

The BDS National Committee’s general coordinator had previously expressed support for Hamas terrorism which is not surprising since the BDS National Committee’s members include a coalition of Islamic terrorist organizations known as the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine.

That includes Hamas.

The Jihadist council features Hamas along with Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and two other terror groups banned by the United States. This terror coalition was the first to sign the call for BDS.

USCPR had previously lost its fundraising account over the Hamas connection, but not its nonprofit status. Both USCPR and the BDS National Committee have defended the horrors committed by Hamas as legitimate. But while many Islamic and allied nonprofits have done as much, the BDS National Committee is unique in its connection to a Hamas-backed organization.

It’s also unique in that the BDS network has been the subject of multiple campaigns to bring this to the attention of the United States government. In 2021, Rep. Burchett expressed concern that money raised on ActBlue by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the BDS National Committee, could be “directed to foreign terror organizations” because of the “ties with foreign terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

After the Hamas mass killings in Israel, the Hilton Houston Post Oak hotel canceled USCPR’s “Seize the Moment US Campaign for Palestinian Rights National Conference” gala, stating that it “cannot serve as the venue for this event because of the potential risks.” Gov. Abbott tweeted that, “Hilton Hotels in Houston was correct to pull the plug on the U.S. Campaign for Palestine Rights event hosted by Hamas supporters. Texas has no room for hate & antisemitism like that supported by Hamas. No location in Texas should host or sponsor USCPR.”

The IRS clearly does not agree. And so USCPR retains the tax-exempt status that it’s held since 2005. Over that time, the pro-terror group has taken in millions of dollars, including $1.5 million in 2021 alone, and over $1 million in 2020, 2019 and 2018. It also received over half a million dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which funds much of the anti-Israel Left. And $450,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. It’s unknown how much money the BDS National Committee may have received by utilizing USCPR’s sponsorship.

USCPR and the BDS National Committee are deeply integrated organizations. A lawsuit by terror victims noted that, “Nasser Barghouti, the brother of BNC founder and Secretariat member, Omar Barghouti, is USCPR’s Treasurer and member of USCPR’s steering committee.” Omar Barghouti had stated that USCPR “is simply the BNC’s most important strategic ally and partner in the U.S.”

Omar Bargouhti, a founder of the BDS movement, has called for the destruction of Israel and endorsed terrorism against Israel. The Barghouti clan includes top Hamas terrorists including a Hamas leader also named Omar Barghouti, now dead, several of whom have carried out attacks on Israelis including the mass shooting at a bus stop in 2018 whose victims included a pregnant woman, as well as Marwan Barghouti, a top Palestinian Authority terror leader responsible for multiple massacres and who is serving five life sentences in Israeli prison.

USCPR and the BDS National Committee are not the only examples of terror-linked groups who enjoy nonprofit status. The David Horowitz Freedom Center had previously profiled Samidoun, which was banned in Israel as a terrorist front group, and was recently banned in Germany after handing out candy in Berlin to celebrate the Hamas atrocities of October 7.

“Holding spontaneous ‘jubilant celebrations’ here in Germany in response to Hamas’s terrible terrorist attacks against Israel demonstrates Samidoun’s antisemitic, inhuman worldview in a particularly sickening way,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser stated.

Samidoun was too sickening for Germany, but not for the IRS to let it function as a charity.

In the United States, Samidoun celebrated the Hamas butchery on social media, boasting that “the resistance” is “seizing occupation settlers” and urged support for the “resistance”.

The terror front group was linked to pro-Hamas rallies. And even the Ford Foundation, the New Venture Fund and a number of other major leftist donors announced that they would stop directing money to Samidoun’s fiscal sponsor, the Alliance for Global Justice, which also sponsors some BLM groups. However the IRS has still refused to act against Samidoun. And so Samidoun assures donors that they can make a “US tax-deductible donation today, and donate safely and securely from around the world.” This would not be possible without the IRS.

As the David Horowitz Freedom Center has documented in our ongoing project, Internal Radical Service, the failure by the IRS to enforce the laws against leftist nonprofits has wrecked cities, cost lives and spurred the illegal invasion of our borders. The next step is up to Congress.

Islamic terror groups should not be subsidized by taxpayer-backed donations.

Terror nonprofits are exploiting loopholes and IRS complicity to promote banned terror groups. Hamas should not be a charity. Congress can close the ‘terror loophole’ in the tax code.

And that will make America and the world safer.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Tags: recent

 

All the President’s Islamists

By Daniel Greenfield May 01, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2014, Abdullah Hasan was a recipient of the CAIR-SFBA Islamic Scholarship Fund. He went on to defend BDS for the ACLU. Now he’s an assistant press secretary at the White House.

CAIR is an Islamist organization that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in one of the largest terror financing trials in America. Its founders were linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has opposed efforts to protect the United States against Islamic terrorism.

“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant,” CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad had declared.

When Hasan received his scholarship in 2014-2015, the Islamic Scholarship Fund’s board members included Hatem Bazian, one of the country’s most notorious Islamic bigots, the co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, and an alleged supporter of Hamas, who has spent decades trafficking in antisemitism.

Hasan’s fellow CAIR-SFBA recipients included Salmah Rizvi, a former fellow at Al-Haq, a BDS group listed by Israel as a terrorist organization over its connections to the PFLP. Al-Haq’s general director is allegedly a key terrorist leader in the PFLP. Despite this background, Rizvi got an intelligence position in the Obama administration and produced materials that went into the President’s Daily Brief. After leaving the administration, she bailed out her best friend,

Urooj Rahman, who had been accused of throwing molotov cocktails at a police car.

After conducting research around “primary Islamic texts and within a post-9/11 surveillance culture”, Hasan went into activism, opposing anti-BDS measures on behalf of the ACLU.

In an op-ed co-written by Hasan, he defended “lawful boycotts of Israel” and claimed that opposition to BDS was a “loyalty test”.

In 2019, Hasan ranted that, “Islamophobia is rampant even in our highest democratic institutions” like the Supreme Court.

Now he represents the Biden administration as one of its press secretaries.

Abdullah Hasan is one of a record number of over 100 Muslim staffers in the Biden administration. The growth has been especially astonishing considering that MOSAIC, an association of Muslim federal employees, could only gather 110 personnel for its second Iftar in 2016 and there are now almost as many aligned Muslims within the administration.

Kamala Harris commemorated Ramadan by posing with most of them on the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and described them as “our administration’s incredible Muslim team.”

Biden’s incredible Muslim team includes men and women whom we have already profiled like Maher Bitar, a former executive board member of Hatem Bazian’s Students for Justice in Palestine and anti-Israel BDS activist who became Biden’s Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council, Reema Dodin, Biden’s first “Palestinian” staffer who had defended suicide bombings, and Mazen Basrawi, Biden’s new Muslim liaison, who attended a conference honoring one of the unindicted co-conspirators of the World Trade Center bombing,

But there are many others who have not been fully investigated or profiled.

They include Aya Ibrahim, who started out as a legislative fellow to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the most vocal terrorist supporters in Congress, and then a legislative assistant and adviser to fellow Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley. Biden took her on and brought her into the National Economic Council and then elevated her to a senior adviser in the White House Office of Technology and Policy only six years after she had graduated with a BA in Political Science.

Sameera Fazili briefly served as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council in the Biden Administration. At Harvard, she had served as president of the Harvard Islamic Society the year that it had conducted a fundraising dinner for the Holy Land Foundation: a Hamas front group.

(The event, part of the Harvard Islamic Society’s Islamic Awareness Week was co-chaired by Faiz Shakir who went on to become a top adviser to Senator Harry Reid, worked for Nancy Pelosi and became Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager.)

At Harvard, Fazili had assailed counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson.

Fazili had a past with Karamah: Muslim Women for Human Rights which claims that “Islamic jurisprudence is the source of the knowledge base essential to the promotion of the rights of Muslim women”. The organization has defended Sharia law.

According to the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch, Fazili was a leading member of Stand With Kashmir: “best known for praising and defending violent Islamists in South Asia.” Her organization had called for the release of Islamic terrorists including supporters of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Uzra Zeya started out as a staffer at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: an informal arm of the Arab Lobby started by former diplomats to Muslim countries. While there Zeya helped compile material for a book claiming that Jews secretly control the United States. Biden chose Zeya as his undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights.

After the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown, Zeya complained that “there are activists — including some in Egypt — who face criminal charges and intimidation for the peaceful exercise of their rights.”

Salman Ahmed, a former UN Peacekeeping official, was picked by Biden to oversee his transition team’s national security and foreign policy review before taking over at the Director of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. When Biden allowed the Taliban to take Kabul, Ahmed was sent to negotiate with the Taliban in Qatar.

Rashad Hussain, Biden’s “ambassador for religious freedom”, who has a degree in Islamic Studies and had memorized the Koran, had been Obama’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. During his time working for Obama, he had been caught lying about his past defense of an Islamic terrorist. Hussain had appeared at events with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. His wife, Isra Bhatty, became famous volunteering as a translator for Islamic terrorists in Gitmo before moving on to a senior position at the Justice Department.

Even after Hussain’s appointment, he appeared at an Islamic Society of North America convention whose speakers had “promoted anti-Hindu rhetoric, called for the release of convicted terror supporters and for the establishment of a caliphate.” “One activist who spoke at the convention called convicted Hamas terror supporters, ‘the finest men.'”

Brenda Abdelall, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, had participated in anti-Israel BDS protests in college. In a newspaper op-ed in 2002, she had falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” as part of a “brutal occupation”.

“We cannot let the entire population of Palestinians suffer any longer, nor can we let the entire population of Chechens suffer either,” the Muslim activist had insisted.

Abdelall went on to work for the ACLU and then Muslim Advocates: a group working to stop America from fighting against Islamic terrorism. She taught a course at the University of Michigan Law School on ‘Islamophobia and the Law’. joined “Arab Americans for Biden” and was rewarded with a position at the Department of Homeland Security as “assistant secretary for partnership and engagement”.

Even after this appointment, Abdelall appeared at the same convention as Hussain where speakers had called for a caliphate ruled by Islamic law and freeing Islamic terrorists..

This is a snapshot of not all, but some of the President’s Islamists. As the number of Islamic staffers in the administration continues to grow, it becomes difficult to keep track of more than a few of them. What was once ‘entryism’ has become a hijacking. And yet what we do see is troubling. Despite the denials, looking into the backgrounds of some of Biden’s more than 100 Islamic staffers, it doesn’t take much to turn up support for terrorists, hostility to America and Israel, and associations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups.

The Biden administration is not, as some call it, “soft on terror”; it’s a Trojan horse of terror. 

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Daniel Greenfield Unleashed

By Rich Kozlovich

For some years Daniel Greenfield has allowed me to publish his articles if they appeared on his blog, Sultan Knish Blog.  The only problem with this is he's a prolific writer for Frontpage Magazine, and I can't publish those, however,  I can link them.  So I will occasionally run a series of links to his articles in order to help create as wide a distribution as possible for his work.

I think Daniel is brilliant because it's clear he understands the most important things necessary to be brilliant.  

Everything is the basics!

History is everything because truth and time are on the same side.  

Everything we're told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. 

Everything must be questioned.

Having been a huge history buff for all of my life has been a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is, "you know".  The curse is, "you know".  And that separates you from the vast majority of people.  You just can't go around foolishly believing just because you know things everyone else must know them also. 

That's an illusion that can cause you problems.  I've been really good at not paying attention to this piece of advice over the years, and that has caused problems in my life.  I wouldn't change a thing, because once the dust has all settled, you're left with a small coterie of friends worth having.  

For years I've told people everything they see on the news and read in the newspapers is a lie. Either lies of commission or lies of omission.  And they laughed.  Well, eventually the tide turns, and no one thinks it all that funny now.  

Please enjoy .

FBI Makes First Arrests in Pregnancy Center Attacks  -  It’s amazing. Republicans took the House and suddenly the FBI took a break from armed raids of pro-life activists for engaging in civil disobedience to investigate the nationwide campaign of domestic terrorism against pregnancy centers. The Jane’s Revenge attacks have gone on with no action on the FBI front.  But now the FBI has offered rewards for the attacks and made the first two arrests. Apparently, the only way to get the FBI to enforce the law is for Republicans to win elections...........

Senate Republican Blocks Biden Pick of Soros BDS Activist -  It doesn’t happen that often, but occasionally the good guys win one. I wrote about Sarah Margon all the way back in the spring of 2021..........Biden has stacked his administration with assorted extremists, including those linked to Soros, but this is one he didn’t get............Who could that have been? The letter was signed by the head of Soros’ J Street hate group, Rosa Brooks and Ben Rhodes. Yasser Arafat’s rotting corpse apparently wasn’t available. If there’s anyone word we can take on antisemitism, it’s the enablers of antisemitism and the murder of Jews............

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock is Fake 0- "It’s a decision our experts do not take lightly." It’s an annual ritual. One that the media enables because it enjoys clickbait and lies. And the doomsday clock has lots of both........And now it’s time for the Doomsday Clock to be set for 90 seconds to midnight. Or whatever gets media attention.............Why would anyone believe a media that promote a fake clock by a fake organization? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the best argument for distrusting the media. Now that’ll be 9 seconds to midnight.......

 Biden Admin Blasts Florida for Rejecting “Rape the White Girls” Poet - The media is still attacking Gov. DeSantis for rejecting an AP African-American class over BLM, queer theory, police defunding and general racism. The governor’s people have yet to note that it includes the writings of domestic terrorist Angela Davis or racist Ta-Nehisi Coates...........And the Biden administration decided to step in..........Let’s discuss one of those arts in particular............Shall we delve into some examples of the writings of Amiri Baraka?..............Karine Jean-Pierre finds it incomprehensible that Florida isn’t welcoming genocidal antisemitism and racism with open arms?.............

 

Meet the BDS Puppet Masters

By Civis Americanus   January 19, 2023

I have long wondered why political liberals, who claim to be foremost in the struggle against discrimination, including against women and LGBT people, are also the principal actors in the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.  Why are women's and gender studies departments around the country against the only country in the Middle East where a woman can be prime minister and LGBT people can hold a gay pride event in the capital city?  Why did the Middle East Studies Association, American Studies Association, PSC-CUNY, and Seattle Education Association join the BDS movement?  

Why are diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) departments, especially in universities, propagating anti-Semitic canards about "Jewish power" and "Jewish control"?  One would expect purportedly liberal campuses to be foremost in supporting women's rights and LGBT rights as they exist in Israel, and protesting misogynistic and homophobic discrimination and violence as practiced not only by the "Palestinians," but also Iran and the Taliban, but they are doing the opposite...............

  Now we have Hamas sympathizers in the United States, some of whom are owned by these foreign entities.  Not all, many, or even most, but some, and some are more than enough.  According to the article "Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas," "[r]esearchers have found that minority rules; when only ten percent of the public holds a firm opinion, the majority will always follow."

If you're Qatar, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or some other unsavory entity, you don't have to suborn all, most, or even many; you just have to suborn ten percent.  Colonel Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare says, however, that the number is closer to two percent (emphasis is mine).

The Communists had shown that an organization calling itself a party, actually a quasi-religious hierarchy with strong internal discipline, definite membership, and active organizational components, could control fifty times its own membership. ... [S]uch a movement needed to have youth branches, women's organizations, labor sections, clubs of its own, and so on, calling this 'mass organization.'

This two percent may well correspond to the Inner Party in George Orwell's 1984, with the Outer Party of which Winston Smith was a member corresponding to the associated organizations.  SJP, Jewish Voice for Peace, and so on also have satellite organizations of this nature..............To Read More...

 

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Favorite BDS Group Mourns an ISIS Terrorist

Daniel Greenfield July 14, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Baraa Lahlouh, an Islamic terrorist, was recently buried, he was draped in what the Agence France-Presse (AFP) misleadingly described as "a flag showing the seal believed to have been used by Islam’s Prophet Mohamed".

The wire service neglected to mention that it was more specifically The Associated Press, as documented by CAMERA, distributed photos of the burial while neglecting to describe the ISIS flag. Along with burying a terrorist, they buried the lede.

The growing presence of ISIS in Israel and its overlap with the established Islamic terrorist groups like the PLO and Hamas has forced the media into new extremes of evasiveness.

Former PLO official Hanan Ashrawi accused Israel of an "extrajudicial assassination".

The PLO's Foreign Ministry responded to the shooting of the ISIS terrorist by calling it a "hideous crime" It falsely accused Israel of "war crimes" against "defenseless Palestinian citizens."

WAFA, the PLO's news agency, charged Israel with "cold-blooded murder" in which, according to the terrorist outlet, the ISIS terrorist and his comrades were "ambushed and shot dead in cold blood".

The PLO’s support for ISIS terrorism against Israeli Jews is nothing new.

In March, an ISIS terrorist carried out an attack at a shopping mall in Beersheva that killed four Israelis including a rabbi who ran a soup kitchen and who left behind four children.

Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi’an, the Islamic terrorist, had previously tried to join ISIS.

Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, the PLO's official paper, praised the ISIS terrorist as a "martyr" and PA TV featured a poster of the ISIS terrorist as a “martyr”. Hamas celebrated the attack as a "heroic operation" and an Al Jazeera personality, an arm of the Qatari regime which backs Hamas, posted a message, “Four [dead]. Blessed are your hands".

That same month, two Islamic terrorists opened fire at a bus stop, one of whom had previously tried to join ISIS. They released a video featuring an ISIS flag and pledging allegiance to the ISIS caliph.

After the attack, ISIS issued an official statement boasting of, “12 infidel Jewish forces killed and wounded in a sacrifice attack carried out by soldiers of the Caliphate in northern Palestine.”

Hamas praised the "valor and courage" of the attack. Another Al Jazeera personality, Ahmed Mansour, celebrated the ISIS attack for having “killed and wounded many occupation soldiers [and] was a painful blow in the heart of Israel and of its Arab Zionist allies."

The Palestinian Authority made no official statement, but is likely to make payments to the families of the terrorists under the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program. That program was at the center of the debate over continuing foreign aid by the United States to the PLO and its Ramallah regime.

Even as ISIS is becoming part of this terrorist landscape in Israel, Biden is preparing to visit the terrorist-occupied territories inside Israel to meet with PLO dictator Mahmoud Abbas and assorted terrorist leaders.

The administration is already undermining israel by running a shadow consulate to the terrorists.

It has also poured hundreds of millions into PLO territories with official numbers topping $500 million. The unofficial numbers are likely to go well beyond that half a billion dollars.

And, as noted by Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the shadow consulate is "designed to help facilitate that aid... also illegal under the 2018 Taylor Force Act" which bans "any assistance that directly benefits the PA unless and until the PA stops paying terrorists to kill American and Israeli citizens". And the PA/PLO won’t stop doing that.

The growing presence of ISIS in Israel benefits from the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program funding attacks against Israel as well as the larger infrastructure of terrorist media and organizations maintained by the PLO. And, much as the Biden administration continues to funnel nearly $1 billion in “aid money” into Afghanistan despite the Taliban takeover, the same is true of terrorism in Israel.

Unlike the PLO, Hamas, and the Taliban, ISIS remains so horrifyingly unacceptable that the Biden administration and the media can only handle its existence by entirely ignoring it.

The whitewashing of Baraa Lahlouh’s burial in an ISIS flag by evasively describing it as the seal of Mohammed has become typical. Pro-terrorist sites like Electronic Intifada denounced the death of the ISIS terrorist as an "extrajudicial execution". And they were not alone in spewing anti-Israel hate while refusing to even mention the ISIS elephant in the terrorist room.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) mourned the ISIS terrorist and his comrades, “Laith, Baraa, and Yusuf“ as "young men with entire lives ahead of them.”

“They should be here today, but due to Israel’s relentless and deadly violence against Palestinians, their loved ones will never see or hold them again," IMEU complained.

The organization is a 501c3 non-profit. Propagandizing on behalf of a terrorist buried in an ISIS flag would seem to run counter to the non-profit regulations that never seem to be enforced against the enemies of this country, only against its patriots and its defenders.

IMEU has been funded in the past by the Soros network, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation, and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Leading leftist funders are now kissing cousins with apologists for ISIS terrorists. And it does not just stop there.

IMEU was just cited by Rep. Rashida Tlaib in her Nakba resolution attacking Israel's existence.

Tlaib has a longstanding relationship with IMEU with both the BDS group and the anti-Israel politician promoting each other. And, in the process, Islamic terrorism, including ISIS.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: ISIS, Islamic terrorism, Israel, recent

Share This: Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest Linkedin 

About Daniel Greenfield

 
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Cente

 

Zachor Legal Asks DOJ to Investigate BLM for Terror Connections and Other Criminal Activity

Ron Machol, @ Zachor Legal Institute January 27, 2021

Zachor Legal has asked the United States Department of Justice to investigate ties between Black Lives Matter and designated foreign terror organizations.

The BDS Movement successfully integrated anti-Semitism into modern American culture and their words and tactics have been embraced by Black Lives Matter.”

— Marc Greendorfer, President of Zachor Legal Institute

RED LEVEL, AL, USA, July 9, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Zachor Legal Institute (www.zachorlegal.org) has asked the United States Department of Justice to investigate apparent ties between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and designated foreign terror organizations.

In the ongoing riots and social unrest, BLM has regularly partnered with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organizations with ties to designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestine Islamic Jihad. These terror organizations pioneered the targeting of civilian populations for mass casualty attacks and have now found a willing partner in the United States.

A recent news story on the Black Lives Matter riots shows the extent of the reach of terror organizations into current domestic unrest, with designated terror groups openly calling the BLM riots an “intifada” (a term used by Palestinian terrorists when they seek the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland) and explicitly pledging their support to BLM. BLM groups, on the other hand, have reciprocated with pledges of their support for terror groups and promises to further the work of terror groups in the U.S.

Indeed, the BLM/BDS alliance not only uses the language of their terrorist partners, they also utilize the tactics of those terror groups. From the use of improvised weapons and the targeting of the most vulnerable members of society to the resurrection of hoary Marxist agitprop, BLM is rapidly incorporating the international terror playbook for its U.S. insurrection.

Marc Greendorfer, president of Zachor Legal Institute said: “The BDS Movement successfully integrated anti-Semitism into modern American culture and their words and tactics have been embraced by Black Lives Matter. With the adoption of Islamist terror tactics by BLM, we urge the Department of Justice to take action to fully investigate the ties among Black Lives Matter, their BDS partners and foreign terror groups that are promoting violence and unrest in the United States.”

The Implications of Biden Appointing Palestinian-American Muslim Maher Bitar to Key Intelligence Post

Jan 29, 2021 By Hugh Fitzgerald

Maybe this will all work out. Maybe alarm over the appointment of Maher Bitar will turn out to have been unnecessary. But as of now, the appointment of anti-Israel BDS activist Maher Bitar, a Palestinian-American, to be the senior director of intelligence programs at the National Security Council, promises to be deeply disturbing. A previous Jihad Watch examination of his appointment is here, and a news article on the appointment is here: “Biden appoints Palestinian American to key intelligence role,” Israel Hayom, January 25, 2021.

Maher Bitar will be ideally situated in his new and important post to learn, for example, of American collaboration with Israel on moves to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Why should we assume he would not try to limit that collaboration, or to alert Iran about these moves, or might try to influence policy by focusing on international criticism of Israel’s “settlement building,” in an attempt to manufacture an unnecessary crisis between the allies, and making that crisis into a reason for America to threaten to cut back on military aid to Israel unless it were to stop enlarging or building settlements? Without knowing Maher Bitar, a Palestinian and a Muslim, shouldn’t we assume that he identifies with his own people, and while his outward demeanor may suggest a lack of bias and parti-pris, he may be a dab hand at assuming a sober mien of objectivity while being a master of deception? “War is deceit,” said Muhammad.........To Read More...

Biden Appoints Anti-Israel BDS Activist to Head NSC Intel

Daniel Greenfield January 27, 2021@ Sultan Knish Blog

"Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?" an op-ed in the Washington Post had asked.

The group was the Palestine Solidarity Movement, a BDS anti-Israel hate group whose conferences had a history of antisemitism, supporting Hamas and the murder of Jews.

Maher Bitar, one of the executive board members of Students for Justice in Palestine, was one of the principal organizers of the 2006 conference which was being hosted by Georgetown University's SJP hate group. A photo appears to show him dancing in a keffiyah in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid”.

Despite protests from Jewish groups, the Georgetown BDS conference went ahead

Now, Biden has picked Maher Bitar as the Senior Director for Intelligence on the NSC.

In 2006, the American Jewish Committee was pleading with Georgetown to distance itself from the anti-Israel hate of PSM and SJP. Now the anti-Israel hate occupies the top of the foreign policy establishment and is set to define the foreign policy of the Biden administration.

In his new position, the former anti-Israel activist will coordinate intelligence between the White House and the intelligence community, receiving material from intelligence agencies, informing the intelligence community of White House policy, and deciding who gets access to secret information. The office also contains some of the most classified information around.

The job of Senior Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council is supposed to go to an intelligence professional. How did an anti-Israel activist go from helping host a conference for an organization whose speakers have supported Islamic terrorism to a top intelligence job?

At the PSM conference in Georgetown, Bitar had run a session describing how to best demonize Israel. Next year, he facilitated a Palestinian Student Society summit addressed by Joseph Massad who had called Israel a "Jewish supremacist state" and praised terrorism.

Massad had also argued that the idea that "any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism."

A few years later, Bitar could be found presenting at a Sabeel conference featuring some of the worst bigots like Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP ,who had invited a terrorist to address the BDS hate group, and Richard Falk, who had endorsed a book which wondered whether “Hitler might have been right after all”.

Maher Bitar went to work for UNRWA, interned at the misnamed and militantly anti-Israel

Foundation for Middle East Peace, and and studied at Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre, writing papers on the so-called 'Nakba' and on 'Palestinian' activism. He appeared to describe Israel’s security barrier as a “segregation wall”

Israel's "political existence as a state is the cause for Palestinian dispossession and statelessness," Bitar wrote in one paper. “Israel’s rejection of their right to return remains the main obstacle to finding a durable solution.”

The so-called ‘right to return’ would mean the destruction of Israel.

He helped assemble a BADIL publication: a BDS hate group which seeks to eliminate Israel through the ‘right of return’ and which has opposed bans on working with terrorists.

The issue in question denounced “Jewish colonization”

And yet before long, Bitar could be found working for the Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. From there he went on to serve as the NSC’s Director for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs and as Samantha Power’s Deputy at the UN. In under a decade, Bitar had gone from anti-Israel activism through the private network of BDS organizations to key positions shaping American intelligence and foreign policy at the National Security Council and the UN.

Even while Bitar was engaged in anti-Israel activism, he was also volunteering for the Obama campaign, and working for the UN. He started working for the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace as an extern while studying for his JD at Georgetown.

In 2016, Bitar came back to Georgetown to tell students that "those of you who might feel conflicted about or even disagree with American policy and want to change it" could do it.

When President Trump was elected, Bitar became the general counsel to House Intelligence Committee Democrats, serving as the top legal adviser to Rep. Adam Schiff and playing a key role in the first Democrat attempt to impeach President Trump. Now he’s back at the NSC.

Bitar’s rise through the ranks speaks to the abandonment of Israel by the Democrats and the ineptitude of pro-Israel advocates at fighting the personnel battles that define the government.

During the Obama administration, organizations that claimed to be advocating for Israel would come out to D.C. and take pride in receiving a personal briefing from Bitar about Israel’s security without having a clue about who Bitar was or how hard he must have been laughing at them.

Policy battles aren’t won at the executive level, but at the personnel level. The Left keeps winning policy battles even when moderates and conservatives win elections because it understands that having its people in a position to make policy matters more than elections.

Obama had put the author of "Ethnic Cleansing and the Falling Apart of Palestinian Society" in charge of the NSC desk on Israel. Biden put him in charge of NSC intelligence.

Israel will accordingly return to its old Obama understanding that it can no longer share the truly sensitive intelligence with its American counterparts because the NSC is once again tainted.

But the tainting of the NSC has larger implications that go far beyond Israel.

The Obama administration initially began spying on members of Congress who were speaking to Prime Minister Netanyahu after monitoring any effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program.

Pro-Israel legislators should once again expect to be spied on by the Biden administration.

The NSC was a key gateway for Obama’s surveillance of opposition politicians. Putting the right people in place at the NSC will be crucial to protecting the next wave of illegal surveillance.

And any effort by Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear program with its new Arab allies will be closely monitored and sabotaged by the Obama veterans who are back in charge of the NSC.

At the 2006 Georgetown anti-Israel conference, Bitar was advising attendees on how to infiltrate and blend in. Now that he has reached a career pinnacle at the NSC, he had the honor of being profiled by Politico as a “Palestinian”. But earlier versions of Bitar's story had him being "of Palestinian and Egyptian descent" and claiming "family roots [that] trace back to Palestine".

Bitar claimed that his family were “refugees”.

At the PSS summit, he described the group as those "who actively identify as Palestinian because of a shared national, historical, and cultural experience".

The dirty little secret of the ‘Palestinian’ myth is that its identity is imaginary.

The radicalism of the Democrats and their abandonment of the Jewish State however are all too real. That’s how Maher Bitar went from anti-Israel activism, from calling for the destruction of Israel, to the Israel desk at the NSC, and then the top policy intelligence position at the NSC.

"Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?” a Washington Post op-ed had asked in 2006. The question now is why are Joe Biden and the Democrats?

And what do pro-Israel groups intend to do about it?

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Tags: Biden, Israel, recent 

Share This:  Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest Linkedin

 

About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

BDS Movement: We Can Boycott Israel, but You Can't Boycott Us

December 26, 2019 By Civis Americanus

We will start this off with due credit to Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris for the basic idea. "The enemies of Israel entered this conflict under the rather childish delusion they were going to boycott Israel, and nobody was going to boycott them. Presbyterian Church USA, American Friends Service Committee, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others like them have put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

The Presbyterian Church USA has not only embraced boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, it has bleated that "Legislation Penalizing Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) Undermines First Amendment Protections" and cites the Combating BDS Act which "..........


The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." This means only that Congress cannot make it a Federal crime to advocate the destruction of Israel, blood libel Israel by accusing it of "genocide" of the Palestinians, suggest that Jews go back to the ovens, call African-Americans the N word, call white people "potential humans" who have yet to evolve, or proclaim that God hates gay people........To Read More....

What American Jews Don’t Understand About BDS

Boycotting BDS is the best way to beat it. 

August 20, 2019 Daniel Greenfield  4

 

There’s no place on earth that boycotters of Israel like visiting more than… Israel.

 

Omar Barghouti, the Qatari founder of the BDS movement, has been living in Israel for 25 years. And the activist who helped introduce the boycott of Israel to the world has spent many of those years arguing that he should be allowed to live in Israel, attend Israeli schools, and shop for Israeli products.

 

Barghouti’s one concession to his own BDS principles was cheating on his Israeli taxes. After delivering lectures around the world on the importance of boycotting Israel, Barghouti kept the lectures fees in an American bank account. The founder of BDS refused to report income of $700,000 which would have been taxed to pay for the infrastructure and amenities that he uses while living in the country he hates.

 

Earlier this year, the United States refused to allow Barghouti to enter this country, either due to his support for terrorism or the tax evasion case. The boycotter had finally become the boycotted.

And boycotting BDS is the best way to beat it.

 

Barghouti’s boycott paradox isn’t unique among enemies of the Jewish State. When Israel passed a law barring BDS supporters from entering Israel, there was an outcry from lefties. But the law should not have been necessary if BDS activists were really boycotting Israel. Instead the same BDS supporters who urge every musician who announces a concert in Israel to stay away from Israel, can’t stop going there.

 

They do it for the same reason that crazed stalkers go out of their way to harass their victims........To Read More.....

The ADL's #MeToo Moment

Posted by Daniel Greenfield Monday, February 18, 2019  1 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

When the Gillette ad condemning “toxic masculinity” aired, the ADL was quick to jump on board. The former Jewish civil rights group, whose priorities had sharply drifted away from Jewish issues, even put out a lesson plan for 8-year-old boys warning about “The trap of masculinity” and “aggressive” behavior.

It was an odd choice for a group whose CEO was under fire for an alleged physical assault on a woman.

In 2016, Ambassadors Against BDS brought together two ambassadors to the United Nations, America’s Nikki Haley and Israel’s Danny Danon, and many major Jewish groups for the first anti-BDS summit at the UN. It was an impressive accomplishment that used an anti-Israel forum for a pro-Israel event.

But behind the scenes a confrontation unfolded that would pit those organizations against each other.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s new left-wing CEO, was there and followed the lead of the pro-Israel speakers with a sharp denunciation of BDS. "Let me be clear: at its core BDS is an anti-Semitic movement," he declared. Like so many speakers who begin their sentences with, “let me be clear”, the former Obama official was actually disguising a hedge. Earlier that month, Greenblatt had written an essay arguing that the “vast majority of BDS supporters” were actually frustrated by the lack of peace.

At its core, he was suggesting, BDS might be anti-Semitic, but most of its supporters were good people.

Greenblatt’s ambiguity, condemning BDS while defending the “vast majority of BDS supporters”, was typical of the organization’s erratic course under his leadership. BDS supporters had appeared at ADL events and the formerly pro-Israel group had endorsed pro-BDS movements such as Black Lives Matter. The ADL had lobbied against anti-BDS legislation and condemned Jewish groups, like the Zionist Organization of America and Canary Mission, that fought unapologetically against BDS supporters.

The ADL’s double game had infuriated many in the Jewish community. And Greenblatt, a former Obama official with no experience running a Jewish organization, was equally angry. His vision of the ADL as an all-purpose social justice organization, that would act as a bridge, harnessing funds from Jewish donors for social justice causes while communicating Jewish concerns to the intersectional left, had failed.

Greenblatt couldn’t lash out at the leftist groups that had snubbed the ADL, so he directed his fury at the pro-Israel groups who saw his pandering to anti-Semites as a betrayal of the Jewish community.

And that fury allegedly reached its climax behind the scenes at the United Nations. What followed was a confrontation that has divided Jewish organizations and a scandal that took two years to reach its climax while exposing malfeasance in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization.

Ambassadors Against BDS had brought out an array of Jewish organizations and activists. The ADL was there, but so were its vocal critics at the Zionist Organization of America. The two groups didn’t just occupy different sides of the alphabet, but different sides of the political spectrum. And in the Trump era, the ZOA was every bit as relevant and pro-Israel, as the ADL had grown irrelevant and anti-Israel.

And Greenblatt allegedly decided to vent his rage on Liz Berney, the ZOA’s Director of Special Projects.

“He came up to my right side, put his arm around my back, grabbed me with his left hand on my left shoulder. He starts pushing me with the force of his arm down the hall. I was trying to get away from him, and he was restraining me,” Liz Berney related. “He’s continuing to hold my shoulder really tight, not letting me out of his grip, and basically dragging me down the hall.”

Women involved in pro-Israel activism have learned to expect not only harsh words, but physical force, from leftist advocates of peace and tolerance. But prior to Greenblatt’s alleged assault on Liz Berney, the most notorious incident had been the assault by UCLA Hillel Director Chaim Seidler-Feller on pro-Israel journalist Rachel Neuwirth and Allyson Rowen Taylor, a former vice president of StandWithUs.

“I saw my rabbi take swings to Neuwirth’s face and kicks to her legs," one eyewitness described.

"He came after me and lunged at me and started screaming and (a student) literally put his arms around him and pulled him off of me," Taylor related.

Chaim Seidler-Feller, an anti-Israel activist and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now, had attacked the two pro-Israel women at an event for Alan Dershowitz’s book, “The Case for Israel.”

Seidler-Feller later wrote a letter of apology, claiming to be, "deeply sorry that I hit, kicked and scratched you.” Despite this admission Seidler-Feller remained a respected Hillel figure. And many in the Jewish organizational world sided with him and came to his defense, rather than that of his victim.

Today, Seidler-Feller, remains affiliated with the UCLA Hillel, the Shalom Hartman Institute, the Wexner Heritage Foundation and many other Jewish groups. His name frequently appears on anti-Israel letters.

The same year that Greenblatt allegedly assaulted Liz Berney, the Jewish Journal celebrated Seidler-Feller’s “40 year legacy” at UCLA. There was a lesson here and it was a deeply troubling one.

If Liz Berney and the ZOA were to hold Greenblatt accountable, they would be swimming upstream. The celebration of Seidler-Feller and J Street’s more recent complicity in Ari Shavit’s sexual harassment showed how little accountability there was for leftist Jewish men who assaulted and harassed women.

The ADL’s #MeToo moment had arrived and the organization responded by denying everything.

“When ZOA leveled these charges privately to the ADL two years ago, we — despite their provenance — took them seriously, looked into the matter, and determined that no inappropriate conduct took place,” the ADL’s spokesman contended.

But, according to Morton Klein, the head of the ZOA, no one from the ADL had even spoken to the victim.

“ZOA has a long history of making outrageous claims against Jewish organizations they disagree with, including for many years, the ADL,” the ADL insisted. “That is why the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is currently conducting a disciplinary hearing about ZOA’s behavior."

Instead of sanctioning the ADL, the Conference of Presidents chose to go after the ZOA.

When asked for an apology for his alleged assault at a Conference meeting that July, Greenblatt allegedly shouted, “I’m never going to apologize to her.”

Nor did the Conference put any pressure on him to do so. Instead it claimed that it had no jurisdiction over an assault by a leader of one of its members, while instead focusing complaints by leftist Conference members collaborating with anti-Israel hate groups that they had been criticized by the ZOA.

The ADL, and more explicit allies of the anti-Israel left, HIAS and NCJW, often appeared more comfortable in the anti-Israel camp. The National Jewish Coalition of Women was particularly notorious for its backing of the anti-Semitic Women’s March. CEO Nancy Kaufman had earlier made it clear that her group would continue collaborating with anti-Israel activists. And yet the NCJW went unsanctioned.

“The ZOA cannot say that ADL helps anti-Semites join the anti-Israel lobby,” Jonathan Greenblatt had insisted. But, in a double standard, the ADL was allowed to accuse the ZOA of Islamophobia.

Meanwhile Greenblatt allegedly refused to show up and be questioned at the hearings. The ADL complained that the ZOA had violated confidentiality and attacked Liz Berney for going public with her story, claiming that it prevented resolution of the dispute. These tactics are typical of a cover-up.

The Conference of Presidents sided with the ADL and the anti-Israel left, allegedly violating its own due process rules by imposing sanctions on the pro-Israel group without hearing from the ZOA. Even though the ZOA had been attacked by some of these organizations, it was condemned by the Conference for the subjective metric of “the manner and tone of otherwise permissible or legitimate criticisms”.

The “manner and tone” of Greenblatt’s physical assault were left off the table.

The ZOA was accused in the Conference ruling of being “unnecessarily shrill”. It was a troublingly sexist choice of words when sanctioning the female victim of an alleged assault.

But the entire process had been troubling from beginning to end. In the #MeToo era, the Conference silenced a woman who claimed to have been assaulted while empowering an alleged abuser. It ignored the most damning issue at hand and instead engaged in tone policing in defense of the ZOA.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations had come face to face with the ADL’s #MeToo moment and had behaved as badly as the establishment had after the Seidler-Feller assault. Instead of using the incident as a teachable moment, it had enabled not only an alleged abuser, but the larger betrayal of the Jewish community by organizations collaborating with the anti-Israel Left.

And the two are inseparably interrelated.

When the umbrella group of major Jewish organizations won’t take the side of Israel against the Left, why expect it to take the side of a pro-Israel woman against the leftist leader accused of assaulting her?


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The Poor Murderers

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Outside the synagogue a police car waits silently painting the sidewalk red and blue. No matter what the mayor and his pet police commissioner says, the NYPD is bracing for a terrorist attack.

After 9/11, the sight of heavily armed police officers became the new normal in New York. It's the new normal in gun-free Europe where the capital cities of the continent fall are locked down and the people are told to stay away from the windows.

It's just life.

Growing up, just before I was old enough to go to school, there was a terrorist attack. The targets were Jewish children. After that, the school was a fortress. There were two sets of heavy steel doors. One on the inside and the other on the outside. Children came and went in staggered groups.

If a Muslim terrorist did attack, he wouldn't be able to get us all. Not at once.

It was just life. With Islam.

A New York City teacher/arms dealer was just sentenced for trying to sell weapons to terrorists. He knew right away where to point the attackers. To a police station or a Jewish community center.

Since 9/11, Jewish synagogues have been some of the most frequent targets of Muslim terror plots. And each time the professional civil libertarians, the lawyers and the reporters dismiss the attacks.

Four Muslim men wanted to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx. The media came to their defense. HBO even ordered a documentary defending the attackers. It won a Peabody award. Ahmed Ferhani and Mohammad Mamdouh planned to attack a synagogue and maybe a church. Again the media and the activists of the left rushed to their defense. They were entrapped. They never wanted to do it.

The victims were not the Jews they wanted to kill. The victims were the murderers. As the Guardian wrote of the four Muslim terrorists, "Poor, black, and jailed." It's enough to make an HBO exec weep.

The Muslim murderers always have tragic problems to sympathize with.

The Times Square bomber had mortgage issues. As the New York Times empathized, "His anger toward his adopted country seemed to have grown in lockstep with his personal struggles. He had lost his home to foreclosure last year." The Boston Marathon killers also faced "personal struggles" and had "difficulty adapting". To a journalist, every terrorist just seems to be a lonely little boy inside.

And it's all abstract. Just another game of social justice. A little white wine and a little intersectionality. Throw in a dose of noble savage and watch civilization burn.

But then there are police cars outside synagogues, soldiers in Paris and lockdowns in Brussels, then you stand watching the ash fall in Lower Manhattan, then you walk into schools that are more secure than prisons, then you deal with a reality that is more real than Twitter hashtags.

The ADL and the AJC have joined BDS organizations in a push to fill America with Syrian migrants. Even the Orthodox Union has signed on while shamefully invoking the Holocaust. When Netanyahu pointed out that a major Muslim Brotherhood ally had played a key role in the Holocaust, the media howled with rage and accused him of exploiting the Holocaust. But when it comes to promoting the arrival of tens of thousands of Syrian Muslims, from a country that hosted real Nazis, then the media trips all over itself to compare a population which supports ISIS and Al Qaeda to Jews in WW2.

A poll of Syrian refugees found that 13% supported ISIS. Out of Obama's first batch of 10,000 refugees, that's 1,300. How many will they kill? Whom will they kill?

In real life, terrorism is ordinary. It's something horrible that happens. You can see it on videos of Muslim terrorists chasing after Jews on the streets of Jerusalem. You could see it on September 11, a scene that countless blockbusters have tried to recreate with robots and aliens. You saw it again in Paris.

We live in a state of civilization. It's a state as fragile as the human body. It's big, but so are skyscrapers. Anything can be destroyed when you find a weak point.

Sometimes it's a plane flying into a building. Sometimes it's a photo of a dead child.

Courage is a moral force. It makes us who we are. But it isn't always right. The SS were courageous and so were the Bolsheviks. So are the ACLU lawyers who rush to defend Muslim terrorists and their clients who blow themselves up to kill non-Muslims and their infidel civilization.

Warped morals that invert the innocent and the guilty, that turns murderers into victims, make courage into an evil thing. They make it into a crime.

Murder is not a mystery. Its harbinger is the police car, the plane flying low, the smiling man who opens his coat. Evil is not a mystery either. It is moral courage tuned to the destruction of civilization. The murderer can be courageous, but not creative. The ends of evil are power and ruination.

Liberalism is all too often the cult of the poor murderer. The thug who kills over inequality. The terrorist who bombs over bigotry. And it is outrage at the victims of its own Utopian crimes.

Utopia is another name for power. It is an absolute good that negates the humanity of every person on earth. It doesn't matter whether it's the Islamic Caliphate of ISIS or the Socialist gulag. The destruction of the individual is not only necessary, but celebrated as evidence of the triumph of the ideology. Destroying people shows the absolute power and total importance of the creed.

That is the force that destroys civilizations. It's a moral force, but it's the moral force of evil.

Civilization is the moral force that resists destruction. It is the speech that dares to name murderers, murderers. As civilization dwindles, streets darken and savages and their lawyers hunt the night. Murderers become victims, destroyers become the future and good is invoked in the name of evil.

Sometimes upholding civilization is a difficult thing. It can mean being a soldier on the front lines or a police officer sitting in a car waiting for a terrorist to strike.

Or sometimes it can simply mean speaking the truth. And that is something that any of us can do.

Even at the best of times, civilization is a fragile thing. At the worst of times, it can be held up with a few words, with a few people reminding each other that truth is worth fighting for.

Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.