Times Square Ball Drop Cheers Islamic Terror

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments Thursday, January 03, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

The most miserable place in the world to be on New Year’s Eve is in Times Square where tourists who don’t know better are trapped in crowd control cattle pens with no bathrooms. Even if it doesn’t rain, no amount of corporate swag can compensate for having to stamp your frozen feet in puddles of urine with nothing to eat or drink for hours, in the faint hopes of actually seeing the big ball drop.

In addition to all the other miseries are the terror threats. With two million people expected to pack into a handful of blocks, New Year’s Eve in Times Square is on every Islamic terrorist’s Christmas wish list.

ISIS has made repeated threats to hit Times Square. And the NYPD is deploying countless cameras, drones, counter-sniper teams and bomb sniffing dogs. There are garbage trucks full of sand to stop car attacks like the one that killed 8 people near Ground Zero, when Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a Muslim Uzbek immigrant, ran down tourists, and slammed into a school bus, shouting, “Allahu Akbar”.

After Akayed Ullah, a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh, tried to blow himself up in the Times Square subway in December of last year, New York City cops are being trained to handle suicide bombers. Anyone trying to get inside the Times Square cattle pens gets screened at two separate points, sniffed by ‘Vapor Wake’ dogs, and forced to pass through a gauntlet of portable metal and radiation detectors.

The more than 5,000 police officers will be checking bags (no bombs, guns or alcohol are allowed), evacuating 125 local garages, patrolling the hallways of area hotels and screening their guests. These elaborate security measures make an already miserable event more miserable.

But they are necessary because of the history of Islamic terror in Times Square.

In 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant, tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. The 2008 IED bombing of the Times Square military recruiting station still remains unsolved, despite camera footage of the perpetrator and a sizable reward. In 2012, Raees Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi, Pakistani Muslim immigrants, scouted New York bombing targets, including Times Square.

Two other Muslim brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen refugee immigrants who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing, had wanted to detonate six bombs in Times Square.

In 2016, Mohamed Rafik Naji, a Yemeni Muslim immigrant who, like the Ground Zero car attacker worked as an Uber driver, talked about running over people in Times Square with a truck. This year, Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, the Muslim son of Egyptian immigrants to Canada, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for terror plots that included the potential bombing of Times Square.

But why bother with the wands and secondary screenings, the vapor dogs, drones and helicopters? On this New Year’s Eve, Islamic terrorism is the guest of honor at the Times Square ball drop.

Jamal Khashoggi, the media’s favorite Jihadist, is being honored as his Washington Post editor, Karen Attiah, will be one of the guests of honor looking down on the masses freezing in cattle pens below.

Khashoggi had gotten his start glamorizing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan at the behest of a man named by the Treasury Department as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers”. Osama and Jamal had been old friends and fellow members of the Muslim Brotherhood international Jihad network. When Osama bin Laden was getting Al Qaeda off the ground, he had called Khashoggi with the scoop.

Afterward, Khashoggi had gone to work for Prince Turki bin Faisal, allegedly linked to Al Qaeda by the twentieth hijacker. There, he tried to spin 9/11 by blaming it on American foreign policy and Israel.

Americans "want total cooperation in their fight against terror according to their own definition of what terrorism is and exactly who the terrorists are. But Saudi Arabia will not give in to such demands," he had declared.

After the Saudis decided to get out of the Islamic terror business, Khashoggi turned to the biggest remaining Sunni state sponsor of terror, Qatar. While the media clamors that he was a “journalist”, even his backers were recently forced to admit that his columns were actually lobbying by Qatar.

“Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government,” the Washington Post conceded.

The Qatar Foundation was set up by the terror state’s former Emir and is chaired by his consort. The Foundation had sponsored events involving Islamic clerics, including Omar Abdelkafi, who had described the Islamic massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in France as “the sequel to the comedy film of 9/11”.

The Washington Post, the Times Square Alliance and New York City are treating an Osama bin Laden friend and terror state lobbyist as a journalist, while the Qatar Foundation that ran him sponsored an Islamic figure who mocked the actual murder of journalists by Islamic terrorists.

The Qatar Foundation had also allegedly hosted Saleh al-Moghamsy, who had praised Osama bin Laden, Abdulaziz al-Fawzan, who had urged "positive hatred" of Christians, and Salman al-Audah, who had accused Jews of baking matzos for Passover with "human blood", claiming that they believe "that this brings them close to their false god.”

This is what the Washington Post got in bed with when it began publishing the Qatar Foundation’s catspaw. And this is what the rest of the media crawled into bed with when it turned him into a martyr.

This is the toxic torrent of Jihadist anti-Semitic, anti-Christian filth being celebrated with the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

When Salman al-Audah was facing the death penalty as part of Saudi Arabia’s new reform initiatives, Qatar’s Al Jazeera informational propaganda network came to his defense, calling the vile bigot a “reformer” and “prominent scholar” who has fallen victim to a crackdown on “dissent” against the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Saudis have also arrested Abdulaziz al-Fawzan, and Qatari and Muslim Brotherhood fronts have launched a “human rights” campaign in his defense.

When the media stands on the side of Qatar, this is what it’s supporting. And the stench of Qatari collaboration is worse than even the smell of sweat and urine in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

The Qatari terror regime is closely tied to Iran and backs every Islamic terror movement from the Taliban to Hamas. The 9/11 Commission report found that a member of the Qatari royal family had harbored Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on America.

Abdulkarim al-Thani, a member of Qatar’s royal family, allegedly ran a safe house for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the mastermind of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terror group that eventually turned into ISIS.

Why bother subjecting tourists from Wisconsin and Texas to multiple screenings to stop ISIS, when you’re using the ball drop as a platform for the political allies and backers of 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 at the above link.

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Sen. Ron Wyden Smears Opioid Task Force. Why?

By Josh Bloom — December 28, 2018

It is now indisputable that the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, United States, 2016 was a catastrophe by any measure. Not only have the "guidelines," predictably, metastasized into laws, but they are also scientifically without any merit. (See Opioid Policies Based On Morphine Milligram Equivalents Are Automatically Flawed). One size fits none.

The past two years have been a bloodbath for both users and abusers of opioids. Since 2016, chronic pain patients, even those who had been treated successfully for decades with opioid analgesic drugs, have been forcibly tapered from their medications or denied them entirely. These patients, many of whom have become disabled without the drugs they need, exist in a state of constant terror. What happens when their meds run out? Increasingly, the only alternative is suicide. Most of the pain patients I have spoken to or corresponded with -- hundreds of them -- have a suicide plan in place; indeed, stories of suicides of undertreated patients are becoming all too common.

Addicts, who were supposedly going to be protected by these laws, have fared even worse. Within the past five years, the number of opioid prescriptions has decreased by 25%. The result? The number of deaths from these drugs has remained constant, while during the same time, the number of overdose deaths from fentanyl and heroin -- the real killers -- has increased by five-fold. The conclusion is inescapable: as prescription opioid analgesics become more difficult to obtain, those who are dependent upon them, both addicts and patients, increasingly turn to the streets where a fatal dose of illicit fentanyl can be waiting in any bag or vial.

Fortunately, there is now an ongoing effort to undo some of the damage. Two years ago, the Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force was formed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to reexamine the original guidelines. It's about time. right? Maybe not. Some policymakers apparently don't want anything reexamined.

The task force's draft report was issued today, but that didn't stop certain people and/or groups, who apparently are opposed to any changes, from starting a smear campaign against the task force and some of its members earlier this month. The smear was appallingly unoriginal, claiming that they were "bought off" by pharmaceutical industry money.

Is there any merit to these trite charges, or are they just baseless smears? Who is behind the smear campaign and why? You don't have to look far, just West. Specifically, 405 E 8th Ave. # 2020 in Eugene -- the Oregon office of Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) (1).

Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) December 18th letter to Alex Azar, the head of HHS, objected to the composition of the Task Force, claiming that some people in the 29-member committee should not serve because they have been bought off by money from the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, corruption.

That's a serious allegation and should be backed up with serious evidence. Is there any? That's an easy one. No.

The entire 29-person task force was vetted for conflicts of interest. And they all passed. The vetting process was no different from that of all other panels and groups. Wyden certainly knows this, yet that didn't prevent him from writing the following about one of the members:



Dr. Cheng addresses these charges:

I was on a scientific review committee that reviewed investigator-initiated research proposals on non-opioid alternative treatment for chronic pain. All the research proposals were submitted by investigators from academic institutions in the US. None of the proposals were submitted by Purdue Pharma employees or affiliates as specifically defined by the request for applications (RFA).  In this role, my sole involvement was to review and critique the scientific merit of the research proposals, nothing else. I was not involved in any way or shape in any Purdue Pharma’s promotion of its products. In the end of 2016, I was elected president-elect of American Academy of Pain Medicine. So I divested from industry involvement as required. At that time and still to this date, I have no financial relations to industry... there has been no conflict of interest between my work in HHS and industry. Jianguo Cheng, MD, Private Communication, 12/27/2018

 Cheng was not alone. Dr. Rollin Gallagher, who has a long and distinguished record in pain management, also got slimed:

But Dr. Gallager tells quite a different story:

My salary as Editor in Chief of Pain Medicine has by contract always been paid by AAPM through a stipend for editorial services from the publishers of Pain Medicine; it is not paid by industry funds as Senator Wyden suggests. This arrangement assures independence of the editorial peer-review process from sponsoring societies. Furthermore, I voluntarily stopped all relationships with industry, consulting or advisory, more than 10 years ago, to assure the editorial independence of Pain Medicine. Finally, authors are required to disclose any industry involvement in their research when submitting their papers for peer-review. I have held leadership roles in Federal Medicine for more than a decade, including National Director for Pain Management for the VA. Industry relationships are not permitted.  Rollin Gallagher, M.D. Private communication, 12/28/2018

Given the strict vetting process and the response from both physicians, it is not a stretch to conclude that Wyden knowingly put out false or misleading information to throw a wrench into the work of the Task Force. But why? Could it possibly be due to this?

Table 1. Ron Wyden's top contributors by industry for the 2015-16 election cycle. Source: OpenSecrets.org

Table 1 is rather revealing. Three (red) of the 10 top contributors (by industry) to Wyden's campaign would financially benefit by restricted use of opioid drugs. Three others (yellow) may or may not; there is no data to prove or disprove this, although OpenSecrets.org says that lawyers and lobbyists may act to pass through money from industries to campaigns. Perhaps most interestingly, Wyden, who equates the pharmaceutical industry (green) with the devil himself, gets a substantial amount of money from it.

And then there's this:

 

Sen. Wyden was a top recipient of contributions from three health-related industries between 2013-2016. (Source: OpenSecrets.org)

 

It would seem that Sen. Wyden received substantial support from companies and industries that stand to gain financially by restriction of opioid drugs. Of course, none of this was in his letter to Secretary Azar.

Who is more believable? A Senator who smears a thoroughly vetted Task Force while himself taking substantial sums of money from industries that stand to benefit from his discrediting of the group? Or the Task Force itself, which, as pointed out by Drs. Cheng and Gallagher has no conflict of interest whatsoever?

You decide.

NOTES:

(1) It is probably not a coincidence that Wyden is an Oregonian. Oregon is arguably the worst of all states for pain patients, especially if they are poor (See Shades Of Tuskegee - Oregon's Monstrous Experiments On Poor Pain Patients). The state is so anti-opioid that a proposal by Oregon's Health Evidence Review Commission (HERC) would have ended Medicaid payments for long-term pain relief starting January 1, 2019, had they not backtracked, but not by much.