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Maoist Confucius Institute Infecting U.S. College Campuses

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A China Post article reported in 2014 that “Certainly, China would have made little headway if it had named these Mao Institutes, or even Deng Xiaoping Institutes. But by borrowing the name Confucius, it created a brand that was instantly recognized as a symbol of Chinese culture, radically different from the image of the Communist Party. Where indoctrination is incubated and spies are made, courtesy of China and idiot university presidents.

Modern day Mao era propaganda and education explained.

Thank you Ethan Epstein:

Last year, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an announcement to great fanfare: The university would soon open a branch of the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-funded educational institutions that teach Chinese language, culture and history. The Confucius Institute would “help students be better equipped to succeed in an increasingly globalized world,” says Nancy Gutierrez, UNC Charlotte’s dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and “broaden the University’s outreach and support for language instruction and cultural opportunities in the Charlotte community,” according to a press release.

Image result for Confucius Institute photo and more information

But the Confucius Institutes’ goals are a little less wholesome and edifying than they sound—and this is by the Chinese government’s own account. A 2011 speech by a standing member of the Politburo in Beijing laid out the case: “The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad,” Li Changchun said. “It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.”

Li, it now seems, was right to exult. More than a decade after they were created, Confucius Institutes have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the United States—including at The George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially as Hanban, the institutes are part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government is pumping an estimated $10 billion into annually, and they have only been bolstered by growing interest in China among American college students.

Yet along with their growth have come consistent questions about whether the institutes belong on campuses that profess to promote free inquiry. Confucius Institutes teach a very particular, Beijing-approved version of Chinese culture and history: one that ignores concerns over human rights, for example, and teaches that Taiwan and Tibet indisputably belong to Mainland China. Take it from the aforementioned Li, who also said in 2009 that Confucius Institutes are an “important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” Critics also charge that the centers have led to a climate of self-censorship on campuses that play host to them.

Despite years of these critiques—including a recent outcry at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the shuttering of Confucius Institutes at two of the nation’s top research universities—they’re still growing in number in the United States, albeit at a slower clip than a few years ago. Several opened on American campuses last year. And vanishingly few schools have rethought the institutes and closed them, suggesting that once they’re implanted, they’re entrenched. At several campuses, they’re actually expanding their footprints with bigger facilities and new courses. I contacted more than a half-dozen Confucius Institutes, and several officials said in interviews that they’re not looking back. (Others declined to comment or simply ignored me, further suggesting a commitment to keeping the Institutes going. The Chinese Embassy in Washington also did not respond to a request to comment by publication time.)

That so many universities have welcomed the Confucius Institute with open arms points to another disturbing trend in American higher education: an alarming willingness to accept money at the expense of principles that universities are ostensibly devoted to upholding. At a time when universities are as willing as ever to shield their charges from controversial viewpoints, some nonetheless welcome foreign, communist propaganda—if the price is right.

“Coordinate the efforts of overseas and domestic propaganda, [and] further create a favorable international environment for us,” Chinese minister of propaganda Liu Yunshan exhorted his compatriots in a 2010 People’s Daily article. “With regard to key issues that influence our sovereignty and safety, we should actively carry out international propaganda battles against issuers such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, human rights and Falun Gong. … We should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes.”

Liu’s orders have been heeded. The first Confucius Institute opened in South Korea in 2004. They quickly spread to Japan, Australia, Canada and Europe. The United States, China’s biggest geopolitical rival, has been a particular focus: Fully 40 percent of Confucius Institutes are stateside. In addition to the Institutes at universities, Hanban also operates hundreds of so-called Confucius Classrooms in primary and secondary schools. The public school system of Chicago, for example, has outsourced its Chinese program to Confucius Classrooms.

Beijing treats this project seriously, as evidenced by who runs the show. Hanban (shorthand for the ruling body of the Office of Chinese Language Council International, a branch of the Ministry of Education) is classified technically as a nonprofit agency, but it is dominated by Communist Chinese officialdom. Representatives from 12 top state agencies—including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Press and Publishing Administration, a propaganda bureau—sit on its executive council. Hanban’s director general is on the Chinese state council, the 35-member board that basically runs the country.

Hanban has been shrewd in compelling universities to host Confucius Institutes. Marshall Sahlins, a retired University of Chicago anthropologist and author of the 2014 pamphlet Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware, reports that each Confucius Institute comes with “$100,000 … in start up costs provided by Hanban, with annual payments of the like over a five-year period, and instruction subsidized as well, including the air fares and salaries of the teachers provided from China. … Hanban also agrees to send textbooks, videos, and other classroom materials for these courses—materials that are often welcome in institutions without an important China studies program of their own.” And each Confucius Institute typically partners with a Chinese university.

They’re kind of like restaurant franchises: Open the kit, and you’re in business. American universities can continue to collect full tuition from their students while essentially outsourcing instruction in Chinese. In other words, it’s free money for the schools. At many (though not all) Confucius-hosting campuses, students can receive course credit for classes completed at the institute.

But the institutes go to some length to obscure their political purpose. There’s the name, for example: Most Americans associate Confucius with wisdom, or cutesy aphorisms. It’s likely the centers would be less successful were they called Mao Institutes. The Institutes also offer a plethora of “fun” classes—not for academic credit, and often open to members of the general public—in subjects like dumpling making and tai chi.

The Chinese teachers are thoroughly vetted by Hanban, according to Sahlins’ report. They “must have a strong sense of mission, glory, and responsibility and be conscientious and meticulous in [their] work,” Hanban says. They’re also explicitly instructed to toe Beijing’s line on controversial political questions. There can be no discussion whatsoever of human rights in China, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. Sahlins found that should a student raise an uncomfortable question about, say, the political status of Tibet, Hanban’s instructors are ordered to refocus the discussion on, say, Tibet’s natural beauty or indigenous cultural practices (which, ironically, Beijing has spent decades stamping out).

Matteo Mecacci of the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet requested a sampling of the Institute’s course materials from a D.C. area university several years ago. “Instead of scholarly materials published by credible American authors, not to speak of Tibetan writers, what we received were books and DVDs giving the Chinese narrative on Tibet published by China Intercontinental Press,” he wrote in Foreign Policy, “which is described by a Chinese government-run website as operating ‘under the authority of the State Council Information Office … whose main function is to produce propaganda products.’”

One student I spoke to—a junior at the University of Kentucky, which is home to a Confucius Institute—recalls attending a Confucius event at which another student, who was considering studying abroad in China, asked about the air pollution there. The response from the Confucius faculty was that the reports of pollution were “misinformation promoted in the U.S. media.” The student says Confucius faculty also “glorified and glossed over” negative aspects of Chinese culture and politics. Another student, a Kentucky senior who has taken classes at the same Confucius Institute, agrees that the institute “promotes an overly rosy picture of Chinese culture,” though, the student adds, “I don’t think it’s a problem for students to take advantage of [Confucius Institute] resources as long as they view the institute with a critical eye and round out their perspective on China with other experiences and points of view.”

Meanwhile, if Hanban’s instructors are not adequately vetted back home, there can be trouble. Consider the case of Sonia Zhao. Zhao, a Chinese national, was dispatched by Hanban to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2011 to teach Chinese language. She’s also a practitioner of Falun Gong, the Buddhist-tinged spiritual movement that Beijing despises as a threat to its authority. Zhao quit a year into her tenure, arguing that McMaster University was “giving legitimization to discrimination.” That’s because, in order to secure her employment with Hanban, Zhao said she was forced to disguise her fealty to Falun Gong. Her employment contract with Hanban explicitly stated that she was “not allowed to join illegal organizations such as Falun Gong,” she said. This kind of open religious discrimination is illegal in Canada, as it would be in the United States. McMaster University, in light of this disclosure, subsequently shuttered its Confucius Institute in 2013, citing the institute’s “hiring practices.”

Self-censorship has become an issue as well. In 2008, a court in Israel found that Tel Aviv University, home to a Confucius Institute, had illegitimately closed an art exhibition on Falun Gong because of Chinese government pressure. A year later, North Carolina State University, host to a Confucius Institute, scuttled a planned appearance by the Dalai Lama for fear of Chinese backlash: The director of the Institute warned NC State officials that such a visit could hurt “strong relationships we were developing with China.” A few years later, similar events transpired at the University of Sydney in Australia, which drew heat from members of the Parliament of Australia.

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In recent weeks, I contracted administrators at several universities with Confucius Institutes, primarily ones that had opened recently, and none expressed regret or indeed much concern. The George Washington University, the private university nestled in the heart of the nation’s capital, has hosted a Confucius Institute for several years. The institute’s founding director, Peg Barratt, says her university’s “eyes were open” when GW opened its center in in 2013. “We were aware there was some controversy” surrounding Confucius Institutes when other universities opened theirs, she told me. “Some [other universities] had internal censorship,” she readily acknowledges. Nonetheless, she says the Institutes are innocuous, modeled, she argues, on European cultural institutes like the British Council, Goethe Institute and Alliance Française. Of course, not only are Great Britain, Germany and France not communist regimes, but those institutes are standalone enterprises, not on college campuses.

Western Kentucky University, where the Confucius Institute is expanding—it just moved into a new building—also defends its partnership. Terrill Martin, director of the Institute, told me, “I don’t believe the Confucius Institute program is controversial at all. I just believe that people don’t understand, don’t ask the right questions and make a lot of unfounded assumptions about the program, based on the failures of a few.”

Nancy Gutierrez, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says the institute there will fill an unmet need. “We made the decision to host a [Confucius Institute] because we believe that this partnership will allow us to expand understanding of Chinese culture very broadly—for community members and for our students,” she says. In other words, Hanban can provide resources that UNC presently can’t. Gutierrez also says, “A faculty advisory committee will provide the intellectual guidance … ensuring that we are guided by principles of academic freedom.” And she notes that Confucius Institute courses will not offer academic credit at UNC Charlotte—at least not yet. The same is true at Western Kentucky University.

Eric Einspruch, who chairs Portland State University’s Confucius Institute, also defends it: The Confucius Institute simply offers “noncredit Chinese courses, cultural programs of interest to the community, and faculty-initiated scholarly activity,” he says. But even the Institute’s innocuous-seeming language courses have come in for criticism. They only teach simplified characters, which are used on Mainland China but not in Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore, estranging language learners from Chinese texts produced anywhere but the Mainland.

One institution that bucked the trend was the University of Chicago. The school opened a Confucius Institute in 2010, which quickly proved controversial. To Bruce Lincoln, a now-retired religion professor at Chicago who then served on the faculty senate, the Confucius Institute represented the “subcontracting [of the] educational mission” in the United States—a “hostile takeover of U.S. higher education by a foreign power,” as he told me. (Prior to his battle against the Confucius Institute, Lincoln was involved in another fight at the University of Chicago, against the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute, which would have been largely funded by conservative donors. That too represented a subcontracting of the education mission, he believes—in this case, the “corporatization of universities.”)

When Hanban’s contract came up for renewal in 2014, Lincoln, along with Marshall Sahlins, led a petition drive, which garnered the support of more than 100 other faculty members, demanding that the contract be canceled. (There was very little student involvement, Lincoln says.) That year, the University of Chicago booted the Institute because of academic freedom concerns. Chicago’s move won praise from outlets as ideologically diverse as Forbes and the New York Review of Books. Shockingly few universities have followed Chicago’s lead, though, Penn State being one notable exception; it also closed its institute in 2014, as well.

Many of those universities who maintain Confucius Institutes appear to go to great lengths to shield them from criticism. Last year, Rachelle Peterson released a thorough report about Confucius Institutes for the National Association of Scholars, a right-leaning academic organization where Peterson is a scholar. At the heart of her report were 12 case studies of Confucius Institutes at New York and New Jersey universities. Over the course of her reporting, Peterson says, “There were a lot of unanswered emails, a lot of unanswered phone calls” (an experience shared by this journalist). When she did manage to set up interviews with Confucius Institute staff, they were often canceled at the last minute, like those at the University of Albany and the University of Binghamton. Another time, when she managed to secure an interview with a Confucius Institute staff member, he insisted that the meeting “happen in a basement … not in his office.” He seemed afraid of being caught, she says.

The most disturbing event transpired at Alfred University in upstate New York. There, Peterson, says, she had “called the Confucius Institute, spoken to a teacher … and received permission to sit in on [a class].” As she observed the Chinese-language class, she recalls, the provost of the university charged into the classroom, interrupting the lesson. He ordered her removal from the classroom and told her she had to leave the campus immediately. The provost and a Confucius staffer swiftly escorted her off campus. (Alfred University did not respond to a request for comment asking to confirm or deny Peterson’s account.)

Today, there are signs of a nascent, if isolated, backlash. Just last month, a group of students and alumni from UMass Boston, home of the Bay State’s only Confucius Institute, wrote a letter to the school’s chancellor expressing deep concern that the university is “unwittingly assisting the Chinese government to promote censorship abroad, while undermining human rights and academic freedom.” The UMass group requested a meeting with the chancellor to discuss their concerns, but according to Lhadon Tethong, a pro-Tibet activist who helped spearhead the letter, that request has yet to be answered. (A spokesperson for the university told the Boston Globe that the institute has succeeded in promoting “the mutual understanding of language and culture.”)

The National Association of Scholars suggests universities shutter their Confucius Institutes. But such counsel is hardly limited the ideological right. The American Association of University Professors, America’s leading professorial guild, also recommended in 2014 that “that universities cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated,” so that the universities have unilateral control over the curriculum and faculty, Confucius faculty have the same rights of free inquiry as their fellow teachers, and contracts between Hanban and the partner universities are made public. Nonetheless, none of the schools I contacted said that they had any plans to shutter or reform their institutes.

***

Instead, Confucius Institutes continue their forward march. In 2015, they opened at Tufts University, New Jersey City University, Southern Utah University and Northern State University in South Dakota. In 2016, Savannah State University added one. And last year, in addition to UNC-Charlotte, Transylvania University in Kentucky is launching a new branch. Gutierrez of UNC concedes that, when her school announced it would open one earlier last year, many faculty members were concerned and “raised serious questions.” But the structure the school developed—so as not allowing courses to be taken for credit—allayed such fears, she says.

Confucius Classrooms, for younger students, are also ascendant these days: In October, local media reported that three new ones would be planted in Texas public schools, and UMass Boston is helping develop them at schools in Massachusetts, including the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where a Confucius Classroom just launched. At scores of universities, meanwhile, the institutes are expanding both physically and programmatically. New courses and scholarships at existing ones are announced all the time. And they’re growing rapidly overseas, particularly these days in Africa, where China has been aggressively expanding its footprint in recent years.

Lincoln, of the University of Chicago, says the institutes have proved successful, in a sense, because Hanban offers a “cheap way to teach classes that [otherwise] wouldn’t have been taught.” Public universities have suffered punishing funding cuts over the past decade: “A decade since the Great Recession hit, state spending on public colleges and universities remains well below historic levels, despite recent increases,” reads a recent report from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. According to the Center, adjusting for inflation, public spending on community colleges and universities was about $9 billion below 2008 levels in 2017. It’s unsurprising, then, that many institutes have sprung up at public universities, or that a huge amount of growth occurred from 2010 to 2012, when budgets were particularly hard hit. But those conditions could return: President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget would also severely slash funding for universities, likely pushing more schools to outsource programs.

The Economist, meanwhile, estimates that China is spending $10 billion a year to promote its image abroad through efforts like cultural festivals, foreign media (think of those China Daily inserts that are slipped into the Washington Post) and educational exchanges. Confucius Institutes are a vital part of this mission. It’s not hard to envision how they might work, for example, by one day weakening Americans’ loyalty to Taiwan.

It seems that Beijing probed, and found a weakness: money. It may be intellectually indefensible for universities to host Confucius Institutes, but at a time of reduced funding, it makes eminent sense. How ironic that the ostensibly communist Chinese seem to understand financial imperatives better than we Yankees do.

*** Meanwhile: Cases of individuals spying on the United States of America on behalf of the intelligence services of the People’s Republic of China.

 

 

List of CIA Covert Operators Compromised, Arrest Made

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Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Former CIA Officer Arrested for Retaining Classified Information

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, aka Zhen Cheng Li, 53, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, was arrested last night on charges of unlawful retention of national defense information.

Criminal complaint found here.

Dana J. Boente, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Andrew W. Vale, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, made the announcement.

Lee was arrested after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York.  Lee is a naturalized U.S. citizen, currently residing in Hong Kong, China.  According to court documents, Lee began working for the CIA as a case officer in 1994, maintained a Top Secret clearance and signed numerous non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at CIA.

According to court documents, in August 2012, Lee and his family left Hong Kong to return to the United States to live in northern Virginia. While traveling back to the United States, Lee and his family had hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia.  During each of the hotel stays, FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, and found that Lee was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense.  Specifically, agents found two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.

Lee made his initial appearance this afternoon in the Eastern District of New York.  He is charged with unlawful retention of national defense information and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted.  The maximum statutory sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes. If convicted of any offense, the sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the court after considering the advisory Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.  A criminal complaint contains allegations that a defendant has committed a crime.  Every defendant is presumed to be innocent until and unless proven guilty in court.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Hammerstrom of the Eastern District of Virginia and Deputy Chief Elizabeth Cannon of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting the case.

Highlights of DHS Report to Judiciary Cmte on Immigration

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Image result for secretary of dhs photo

Primer:

The Justice Department on Tuesday announced plans to appeal a judge’s ruling that blocked President Donald Trump from shuttering a program that gave protections and work permits to some people who entered the U.S. illegally as children.

In a ruling last week, San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered the administration to resume accepting renewal applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA. More here from Politico.

In part, highlights:

The Department has also implemented historic efforts to step up international cooperation. For the first time ever, DHS established a clear baseline for what countries must do to help the United States confidently screen travelers and immigrants from their territory. Every country in the world is now required to meet high security standards and to help us understand who is coming into our country.
As required under President Trump’s Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States (EO 13780), all foreign governments have been notified of the new standards, which include the sharing of terrorist identities, criminal
history information, and other data needed to ensure public safety and national security, as well as the requirement that countries issue secure biometric passports, report lost and stolen travel documents to INTERPOL, and take other essential actions to prevent identity fraud.
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Visa Waiver Program
We are also looking at ways to further strengthen the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). First and foremost, the VWP is a security partnership program. It mandates high and consistent standards from partner countries in the areas of national security, law enfor
cement, and immigration enforcement to detect and prevent terrorists, criminals, and other potentially dangerous individuals from traveling to the United States —
while still facilitating legitimate travel and tourism.
Currently, 38 countries participate in the VWP, which allows their citizens to travel to the United States for business or tourism for stays of up to 90 days after applying and being approved through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). In return, these countries must comply with program requirements to enter into information
-sharing protocols that enable the relay of information concerning known and suspected terrorists and criminals; consistent and timely lost and stolen passport information reporting; and robust border and travel document
screening. As a result of these program requirements, countries have adopted new laws, policies, and practices that strengthen our mutual security.
The Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015,
combined with Secretarial action, have strengthened the VWP’s security provisions over the past two years.
VWP countries are now required to issue high -security electronic passports (e-
passports); implement information sharing arrangements to exchange terrorist identity information; establish mechanisms to validate e-passports at each key port of entry; report all lost and stolen passports to INTERPOL or directly to the United States no later than 24 hours after the country becomes aware of the loss or theft; and screen international travelers against the INTERPOL Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database and notices. As with other operational activities of DHS, a full discussion of the privacy impact of these initiatives and how we mitigate the risk to personal privacy is available on our website.
Since enactment of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, DHS has realized an increase in the sharing of terrorist identity information. Several countries have increased the frequency of their reporting of lost and stolen passports —VWP countries account for over 70 percent of the almost 73 million lost and stolen travel documents reported to INTERPOL. All VWP countries are now issuing and using for travel to the United States fraud-resistant e-passports that meet or exceed the ICAO standards. Over 70,000 ESTA applicationshave been denied, cancelled or revoked under enforcement of the VWP Improvement Act’seligibility restrictions for VWP travel.
Border Security
In compliance with Executive Order 13767: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement
Improvements, DHS has conducted a comprehensive study of the security of the southern border that addresses all of the elements that provide an integrated solution for the Nation. Our first priority is to expand on our existing southern border wall system and close legal loopholes that encourage and enable illegal immigration and create a corresponding backlog in the courts. We currently have an immigration court backlog of more than 650,000 cases pending before the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. We also have a massive asylum backlog with more than 270,000 pending cases before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Recognizing the unsustainability of the asylum case backlog, USCIS has implemented efficiency measures designed to reduce adjudication times. Similarly, the Department of Justice has taken action to reduce unwarranted case continuances in immigration courts, which helps reduce the backlog while affording aliens full and fair hearings. To further

reduce the “pull factors” and restore integrity to our immigration benefits adjudication process, we must tighten case processing standards, including the “credible
-fear” standard, impose and enforce penalties for fraud, and ensure applicants are fully vetted before they are allowed access to the United States.
In addition, visa-overstays account for roughly 40 percent of all illegal immigration in the
United States. In FY 2016, more than 628,000 aliens overstayed their visas. By increasing
overstay penalties and expanding ICE’s enforcement tools, we can help ensure that foreign
workers, students, and visitors respect the terms of their temporary visas. We need Congress to authorize the Department to raise and collect fees from immigration benefit applications to fund additional enhancements to our immigration system called for by the President’s Executive Orders.
Enforcing Immigration Laws
We are also prioritizing the enforcement of our immigration laws in the interior of our country.
There are nearly one million aliens with final orders of removal across the country
—meaning these removable aliens were afforded due process of law, had their
day in court, and were ultimately ordered removed by a judge — yet they remain in our nation and ICE only has 6,000 Deportation Officers to arrest and remove them. The Administration looks to strengthen law enforcement by hiring 10,000 more ICE officers and agents, and supports the request from the Department of Justice to hire 300 more federal prosecutors.
To further protect our communities, we must end so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Hundreds of state and local jurisdictions across the country that do not honor requests from ICE to hold criminal aliens who are already in state and local custody. Instead, they allow them back into their communities, where they are allowed to commit more crimes. This also poses a greater risk of harm to ICE officers, who must locate and arrest these criminals in public places, and increases the likelihood that the criminal aliens can resist arrest or flee. Rather than enhancing public safety, sanctuary jurisdictions undermine it.
The only “sanctuary” these jurisdictions create is a safe haven for criminals. States and localities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities should be ineligible for funding from certain grants and cooperative agreements.
Authorizing and incentivizing states and localities to enforce immigration laws would further help ICE with its mission and make all communities safer.
In FY 2017, 1,761 criminal illegal aliens were released from ICE custody because of a 2001
Supreme Court decision that generally requires ICE to release certain removable aliens with final orders of removal—including violent criminals—
within 180 days, if they have not been removed and there is no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future. Legally insupportable judicial interpretations of the law regarding the detention and removability of criminal aliens have eroded ICE’s authority to keep aliens in custody pending removal.
Pursuant to this Executive Order, USCIS announced it will take a more targeted approach to combatting fraud and abuse in the employment -based visa programs, including the H-1B program. To help end H-1B petitioner fraud and abuse, USCIS has established a Targeted Site Visit and Verification Program (TSVVP). Targeted site visits allow USCIS to focus its resources where fraud and abuse of certain programs are more likely to occur. TSVVP initially focused on H-1B petitions filed by companies that are H-1B dependent (as defined by statute), employers petitioning for H-1B workers who will be placed off -site at another company’s location, or cases where USCIS cannot validate the H-1B petitioner’s business information through commercially -available data.
USCIS has also taken great strides to improve transparency with the public about employment -based immigration programs. The agency has published new data on its website to give the public more information regarding the use of nonimmigrant workers in the H-1B, H-2B, and L nonimmigrant programs. Information about the use and legal authority for employment authorization documents has also been published.
Most low-skilled immigration into the United States occurs legally through our
immigrant-visa system, which, unlike many other countries’ systems, prioritizes family
-based chain-migration. Each year, the United States grants lawful permanent resident status (greencards) to more than one million people; two-thirds of that total is based on a person having a sponsoring relative in the United States, regardless of the new immigrant’s skills, education, English language proficiency, or ability to successfully assimilate. This system of chain-migration has accounted for more than 60 percent of immigration into the United States over the past 35 years. We must end chain-migration, and limit family -based green cards to spouses and the minor children of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.
We must also eliminate the “diversity visa” lottery. Every year, through this lottery, 50,000
green cards are awarded at random to foreign nationals. Many of these lottery beneficiaries have absolutely no ties to the United States, no special skills, and limited education. The random lottery program has not been adopted by other countries and does not adequately serve our national interest. Full opening summary here.

Abu Hamza was Notified of the 9/11 Attacks 4 Days Earlier

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Abu Hamza was once deeply affiliated with the Finsbury Park mosque including raising funds for jihad there. Born Mustafa Kamel Mustafa in Alexandria, Egypt, on 15 April 1958, Abu Hamza was the son of a naval officer and a primary school headmistress. He initially studied civil engineering before leaving for England in 1979. More here.

A trustee at one of London‘s best-known mosques is a senior member of ‘terrorist organisation’ Hamas’s political wing, it was reported.

Mohammed Sawalha holds the role of trustee at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, which was formerly linked to extremism but which insists it has since undergone an ‘complete overhaul’.

It emerged today that Mr Sawalha represented the militant Palestinian organisation Hamas at recent talks in Moscow.

Sawalha, who lives in London, was appointed a trustee of the mosque in 2010 and is legally responsible for overseeing the mosque’s management, The Times reported. More here.

He was one of five senior figures from the Islamist organisation who were sent to Moscow in September, where they met Russia’s deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov and other Kremlin officials.

*** Image result for abu hamza photo/
ABU Hamza’s son, Sufyan Mustafa, has said he will fight to return to his life in Britain after the Government stripped him of his passport, leaving him in war-torn Syria. In 2012, Imran Mostafa, another of Hamza’s sons was jailed for his role in a jewellery heist in Norfolk.

Abu Hamza, Britain’s most notorious hate preacher, says militant contacts in Afghanistan called him four days before the 9/11 attacks to warn: “Something very big will happen very soon.”

The hook-handed cleric says he interpreted the message as being about an impending terrorist strike on America and believes the phone at his west London home was being “tapped” by police at the time.

Related reading: The Mustafa Indictment document

His claim raises questions about whether British authorities were aware of the warning and failed to pass it on to their American counterparts before al-Qaeda operatives flew hijacked jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in September 2001.

Details of the phone call are revealed in American court papers, seen by The Sunday Times, which also reveal that Abu Hamza acted as an agent for MI5 and Special Branch under the code name “Damson Berry”. The former imam of Finsbury Park mosque in north London is appealing against his conviction for terrorist offences and his “inhuman” incarceration at an American“supermax” prison.

Related reading: Finsbury Park Truck Attack

In a 124-page handwritten submission, Abu Hamza says he has been singled out and “punished” since 9/11. He writes in broken English: “What made pro-war governments and intelligence [agencies on] both sides of the Atlantic more furious about the defendant [Abu Hamza is] that defendant received a call from Afghanistan on Friday, Sept 7, 2001, from 2 of his old neighbours in his Pakistan time (1991-93) saying ‘Something very big will happen very soon’ (meaning USA).”

Abu Hamza denies the call came from al-Qaeda figures, but says he thought “this news is widely spread and everyone is phoning friends . . . the intelligence [agencies] of many countries must have had an earful about it”.

The preacher’s claim could not be independently corroborated this weekend, but his standing in extremist circles makes it plausible.

How Iran is Competing with America in the Middle East

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Reading through the summary below, it begs the question once again: Did Iran demand Obama remove troops from Iraq in order to advance the talks on the nuclear agreement? It also adds a similar question: Did Iran demand the same in Afghanistan?

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Related reading: Why Obama Let Iran’s Green Revolution Fail

Modern War Institute: In March 2017, the head of Iran’s Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs stated, “Some 2,100 martyrs have been martyred so far in Iraq and other places defending the holy mausoleums.” These 2,100 Iranian deaths over the past five years of fighting in Iraq and Syria are nearly equivalent to the 2,400 American deaths in seventeen years of combat in Afghanistan. Yet, although initial domestic support for American intervention in Afghanistan was the highest of all such military action since Gallup started collecting data in 1983, by February 2014, as casualties mounted, a plurality of Americans viewed the war in Afghanistan as a mistake. In contrast, the Iranian government narrative that its soldiers are protecting Shi’a holy sites in Syria has driven consistently high public approval with 89 percent of Iranians supporting the defense of shrines in Syria and about 65 percent supporting the deployment of Iranian soldiers to do so.

With the relationship between military intervention and domestic public support in mind, the comparison of forces between Iran and the United States depends more on willingness to use those forces than the capabilities they represent. On the surface, Iran faces the overwhelming power projection of the United States, along with the conventional superiority of US and Gulf Cooperation Council military forces. Despite this disparity, Iran is able to use a suite of conventional, unconventional, and proxy forces to deter potential aggressors, compete with regional peers, and influence states it considers vital to its national security. Along these lines, Iran attempts to circumvent American military strengths against which the Iranian military would lose, in favor of asymmetric concepts including its ballistic missile program; anti-access, area denial tactics; and support to proxy groups.

These three methods hinge on a competition of resolve between Iran and its rivals to incur the costs of conflict: the former two affect the cost calculation of potential adversaries and the latter displays Iran’s willingness to assume more risk than its opponents in pursuit of its political ends abroad. Determining the interests for which Iran is willing to incur high costs is essential if the United States expects to “neutralize Iranian malign influence,” a priority identified in the 2017 National Security Strategy. This comes as the US public decidedly prefers intervention in the form of airstrikes and Tomahawk cruise missiles rather than ground troops who could actually influence partner forces determined to counter that Iranian influence.

Balance of Power in the Middle East

Kenneth Waltz quipped that “power begs to be balanced” while defending the notion that proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to Iran would stabilize the Middle East. For Waltz and other theorists who espouse a realist view of international politics, the Middle East faces a two-pronged challenge to future stability based on the distribution of power among states therein. First, Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons under “strategic ambiguity” makes the relationship between Israel and other states in the region inherently imbalanced and therefore prone to conflict. Second, US abandonment of its “dual containment” strategy in favor of aggressive interventionist policies in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks destroyed Iraq as a major Middle East power and the regional bipolar balance between Iraq and Iran as a consequence.

According to realists’ view, even distributions of power promote stability and peace as the cost-benefit analysis of war yields little chance of positive gains against an adversary of similar strength, whereas uneven distributions of power increase the uncertainty of intentions between states who assess war as a likely result of a zero-sum security competition. In this latter scenario, weaker states tend to balance against stronger rivals by increasing political, military, and economic power through either internal means or alliance formation. As Stephen Walt further points out in his work “Alliance Formation and the Balance of Power,” this balancing behavior is most likely when states assess a rival as having not only the capability of attacking, but also the intention of doing so. Furthermore, situations where states face an overwhelming power differential are particularly vexing because the prospects of successfully balancing are so grim.

There is, however, a difference between possessing military power and actually using it, especially when doing so involves risks to domestic political support and stability. Whereas William Wohlforth in his article on unipolarity predicts that no state would bother attempting to balance against the clear and unambiguous military and economic superiority of the United States, the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led potential rivals to reassess US willingness to use its insurmountable ability to project and sustain military force. Therefore, rather than competing with the entire US military, Iran must make foreign policy decisions based on the military forces it expects the United States and its partners to use regionally. When the fight is between proxies and special operations forces, Iran’s prospects for balancing against its regional rivals and expanding its influence are less daunting and even optimistic.

Iran’s Play in Syria

Iran has been on a trajectory of increasing commitment to Syria since an uprising nearly deposed the regime of Bashar al-Assad starting in 2011. Unwilling to lose a longstanding ally and mechanism of supporting proxy groups in Lebanon and Palestine, Iran has relied upon the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), especially the externally oriented Quds Force, to support the Syrian regime. Originally founded to defend the Islamic revolution in Iran from internal and external threats, the IRGC has expanded in scope as the political and military mechanism of choice for Iran to expand its influence in the Middle East. Beyond sending its own forces, Iran has used the IRGC to lead foreign fighters and has directed the deployment of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters to Syria by the thousands. Iran’s model for applying force in the Middle East plays to its asymmetric strengths, while exploiting the perceived weaknesses of the United States and its allies, which Iran regards as risk averse, sensitive to casualties, and reliant on technological superiority and regional bases from which to project power. Iran has displayed not only a willingness to assume risk by deploying IRGC operatives to contested and denied areas, but has also been sustaining casualties in its campaign in Syria.

These casualties have varied in number, nationality, and military unit since the beginning of Iranian intervention in Syria, which speaks to Iranian resolve to support the Assad regime. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has done extensive research on Iranian media reporting of casualties in Syria. At first, the majority of those killed under the direction of Iran were Lebanese and Afghan, due to extensive Hezbollah deployments and IRGC recruitment of Afghan Shi’a to fight in Syria. Iranian casualties however, tended to be high-ranking IRGC members such as its deputy commander, Gen. Hossein Hamedani, who was killed in October 2015 near Aleppo. This indicates that IRGC operatives were training, advising, and leading Syrian units and foreign fighters, rather than their own military formations of lower-ranking Iranian soldiers.

As the civil war continued and foreign fighters could no longer sustain the tempo of operations, Iran began committing its own forces in 2015, including lower-ranking soldiers from IRGC units like the 2nd Imam Majtaba Brigade, 7th Vali Asr Division, and 2nd Imam Sajjad Brigade. These units are from the IRGC Ground Forces, whose security mandate is more internally focused than that of the Quds Force. This indicates not only a shift from a training and advisory mission to a more direct role in the fighting, but also a commitment of a larger portion of the Iranian armed forces to the fight in Syria. As a result, Iranian fatalities skyrocketed. However, Iran has given no indication of war weariness in the face of mounting human and economic costs of its unconventional fight in Syria, with even the semiofficial Fars news agency openly reporting IRGC casualties.

Domestic Backlash in Iran

Iran is no stranger to internal protests over domestic politics and foreign affairs. The Green Movement of June 2009 protesting the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed that Iranian authorities cannot simply ignore public opinion and revealed a true power struggle between the government and the opposition. While the lasting effects of the Green Movement on the relationship between public opinion and Iranian decision-making are unclear, polling leading up to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action indicated vast public support in Iran for a deal, often in contrast with the public statements of Ayatollah Khamenei against it.

Recent massive public protests against Iranian macroeconomic conditions including high inflation and high unemployment have further displayed the Iranian government’s exposure to domestic political backlash for its policies. President Hassan Rouhani was reelected in 2017 by wide margins on a platform of economic hope in the wake of sanctions relief under the nuclear deal. However, inbound investment that results from improving economic relationships tends to benefit large conglomerates often owned by the IRGC like Khatam al-Anbiya, which has large stakes in the oil, transportation, and construction industries. Meanwhile, unemployment among youth and inflation remain high, as Iranian economic policies have not promoted growth that would create jobs for most Iranian citizens. As novelist Suzanne Collins’ character President Snow said in The Hunger Games: “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.” Iranians have a lot of hope about their economic future; failure to deliver might lead to disaster, especially as Iran announces vast increases in military spending with an extra $7.5 billion to the IRGC (15 percent increase), $2.7 billion to the Iranian army (25 percent increase), and a separate $72 million subsidy directly to Khatam al-Anbiya.

Cost Calculation in Foreign Policy

Iran’s willingness to incur the costs of an aggressive foreign policy is not uniform across the Middle East. Iran views the outcome of the Syrian civil war as critical to its national interests and is therefore willing to expend physical and economic costs to sustain the Assad regime. However, Iran is reticent to suffer Syria-type casualties in places like Yemen, where Iran has limited its intervention to Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and high-ranking IRGC operatives leading Houthi militias. This is reminiscent of the “train, advise, and assist” mission that marked the initial phases of Iranian intervention in Syria. As a result, Iran has only sustained forty-four fatalities over the past two years of fighting in Yemen and has not publicized those deaths. This is problematic for Iran as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates show no signs of wavering in support of the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur al-Hadi, despite international backlash against the air campaign.

Conflicts like those in Yemen and Syria display the gruesome truth of the competition between the United States and Iran in the Middle East; namely, it boils down to a question of who wants it more. While the United States has shown its willingness to incur human and economic costs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past fifteen years, it is not clear whether the American people would support another effort of similar size and scope in the near term. In fact, according to Gallup, American support for the ongoing campaign in Syria has reached historic lows when compared to other conflicts over the past thirty-five years. Furthermore, US Central Command, charged with leading military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, is preparing to shift its priority back to Afghanistan—this as Iran shows no intention of decreasing its presence in either Iraq or Syria.

This is not to say that the United States cannot achieve its foreign policy goals vis-à-vis Iran in the Middle East without incurring high costs; it means that the United States will need to enable partners who are willing to do so. However, merely funding and providing material support to partner forces does not guarantee that they will act according to US national interests. That more elusive objective depends on the influence that sponsors have over proxies and still involves accepting a degree of risk. Although varying in scope depending on the target country, Iran exposes its IRGC operatives to the inherent dangers of the battlefield and shares that risk with its partners. Combined with what is often an ideological connection with proxies, this shared danger does much to influence the forces with which Iran partners. In contrast, the United States rarely exposes its special operations forces in the same way. In Iraq and Syria especially, the United States has largely demanded that its proxies assume the vast majority of the tactical risk, which negatively affects the perception of American resolve to accomplish its stated objectives.

Even overwhelming military force is only a useful deterrent if adversaries believe a state has the resolve to use it. American reticence to use the breadth of its military strength to counter Iranian influence in the Middle East has reduced the competition to irregular forces and both state and nonstate partners. In this realm, displaying resolve is still vitally important. Although recent protests indicate Iran is not immune to domestic backlash, Iran has shown a willingness to use and lose its special operations forces in external operations. The United States risks losing influence in the Middle East and control of its partner forces if it is not willing to expose its own special operations forces in a similar way. In the end, the competition between the United States and Iran in the Middle East comes down to resolve.