The Pentagon says a military parade requested by President Trump will take place in Washington on Veterans Day to honor those who have served in the military from the Revolutionary War through today.
The document addressed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff provides “initial guidance,” including assurances that the display will not include tanks, to minimize damage to the city streets. The D.C. City Council had already tweeted its objections (“Tanks but No Tanks“).
The memo does not estimate the cost, but as NPR has reported, estimates have suggested it would be between $3 million and $50 million. Tamara Keith and Tom Bowman reported that holding it on Veterans Day, which also commemorates the end of World War I, could reduce complaints:
“By potentially tying the parade to the 100th anniversary of the end of the ‘War To End All Wars,’ there may be an effort to associate with the tradition of celebrating war victories and avoid associations with countries like North Korea, China and Russia, which regularly hold military parades, in part for the propaganda value.
“Members of Congress from both parties have been critical of the idea of a military parade, questioning its cost and necessity.”
The memo says the parade will begin at the White House and proceed to the U.S. Capitol, with a “heavy air component at the end.” It notes that Trump will be surrounded by military heroes in the reviewing area at the Capitol.
Full page document found here.
The memo listed a number of guidelines for the parade on Nov. 11 and said the parade route will be from the White House to the Capitol and have a “heavy air component at the end of the parade.”
Military parades in the United States are generally rare. Such parades in other countries are usually staged to celebrate victories in battle or showcase military might.
In 1991, tanks and thousands of troops paraded through Washington to celebrate the ousting of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the Gulf War.
The District of Columbia Council had ridiculed the idea of a parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, the 1.2-mile (1.9-km) stretch between the Capitol and the White House that is also the site of the Trump International Hotel.
Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion
Pritzker, Boxer, Sherman and MoveOn.org, the Strike Force
The top person on John Kerry’s Iran JPOA team was Wendy Sherman. But then we have Obama’s dear friend Penny Pritzker in the mix too, along with Barbara Boxer and Hillary’s Jake Sherman all part of this National Security Action team, which is all things against Trump. So, while we do have the Director of MoveOn in the mix…this group likely has some robust funding from Soros.
This is a strike force that even includes Jeremy Bash.
He served as Chief of Staff of the CIA (2009-2011) and Defense Department (2011-2013), was Panetta’s right hand person and perhaps we should remember it was Panetta that allowed Hollywood access to top secret information to make a movie, that Zero Dark Thirty movie.
According to a June 15, 2011, email from Benjamin Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, the Obama White House was intent on “trying to have visibility into the UBL (Usama bin Laden) projects and this is likely a high profile one.”
Ben Rhodes the aspiring novelist became Obama’s top advisor even when Rhodes security clearance was denied.
In early July 2012, Obama’s senior White House adviser on Iran, Puneet Talwar, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right-hand man, Jake Sullivan, arrived in the sleepy Arabian sultanate of Oman, 150 miles across sparkling Gulf waters from the Iranian coast. It was the first significant back-channel contact with Tehran.
FNC: A group of about 50 former Obama administration officials recently formed a think tank called National Security Action to attack the Trump administration’s national security policies.
The mission statement of the group is anything but subtle: “National Security Action is dedicated to advancing American global leadership and opposing the reckless policies of the Trump administration that endanger our national security and undermine U.S. strength in the world.”
National Security Action plans to pursue typical liberal foreign policy themes such as climate change, challenging President Trump’s leadership, immigration and allegations of corruption between the president and foreign powers.
This organization uses the acronym NSA, which is ironic. Three of its founding members – Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice and Samantha Power – likely were involved in abusing intelligence from the federal NSA (National Security Agency) to unmask the names of Trump campaign staff from intelligence reports and to leak NSA intercepts to the media to hurt Donald Trump politically. This included a leak to the media of an NSA transcript in February 2017 of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s discussion with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak. No one has been prosecuted for this leak.
Given the likely involvement of Rhodes, Rice and Power to weaponize intelligence against the Trump presidential campaign, will their anti-Trump NSA issue an apology for these abuses?
It is interesting that the new anti-Trump group says nothing in its mandate about protecting the privacy of Americans from illegal surveillance, preventing the politicization of U.S. intelligence agencies or promoting aggressive intelligence oversight. Maybe this is because the founders plan to abuse U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on Republican lawmakers and candidates if they join a future Democratic administration.
It takes a lot of chutzpah for this group of former Obama officials, who were part of the worst U.S. foreign policy in history, to condemn the current president’s successful international leadership and foreign policy.
After all, ISIS was born on President Obama’s watch because of his mismanagement of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and his “leading from behind” Middle East policy. The Syrian civil war spun out of control because of the incompetence of President Obama and his national security team.
This was a team that provided false information to the American people about the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the nuclear deal with Iran. I wonder if the anti-Trump NSA will include videos on its website of former National Security Adviser Susan Rice falsely claiming on five Sunday morning news shows in September 2012 that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was “spontaneous” and in response to an anti-Muslim video.
And of course there’s the North Korean nuclear and missile programs that surged during the Obama years due to the administration’s “Strategic Patience” policy, an approach designed to kick this problem down the road to the next president. Because of President Obama’s incompetence, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un may have an H-bomb that he soon will be able to load onto an intercontinental ballistic missile to attack the United States.
It must appall this group of former Obama national security officials that President Trump is succeeding as he undoes everything they worked on.
ISIS will soon control no territory in Iraq or Syria because of the Trump administration’s intensified attacks on it and arming of Kurdish militias.
In sharp contrast to President Obama, President Trump drew a chemical weapons red line in Syria and enforced it.
North Korea is pushing for talks with the U.S. in response to strong United Nations sanctions the U.S. worked to obtain in 2017. And compliance with the new sanctions has been significantly improved, especially by China, as the result of President Trump’s actions.
President Trump repaired the damage done to U.S.-Israel relations by President Obama and has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – something several previous presidents promised but failed to do.
Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf stopped in 2017, likely due to the more assertive Iran policy of President Trump. This includes the president’s successful effort to build a stronger U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.
President Trump is right when he says he inherited a mess on national security from the Obama administration. This is because President Obama and his national security team undermined U.S. credibility and left President Trump a much more dangerous world. I doubt the new anti-Trump National Security Action think tank will succeed in convincing Americans otherwise.
List of Participants for Fusion GPS and Smear Mission
Senator Grassley is on the case. He listed names asking for all communications from the following people: For the period from March 2016 through January 2017, please provide all communications to, from, copying, or relating to: Fusion GPS; Bean LLC; Glenn Simpson; Mary Jacoby; Peter Fritsch; Tom Catan; Jason Felch; Neil King; David Michaels; Taylor Sears; Patrick Corcoran; Laura Sego; Jay Bagwell; Erica Castro; Nellie Ohr; Rinat Akhmetshin; Ed Lieberman; Edward Baumgartner; Orbis Business Intelligence Limited; Orbis Business International Limited.; Walsingham Training Limited; Walsingham Partners Limited; Christopher Steele; Christopher Burrows; Sir Andrew Wood, Paul Hauser;4 Oleg Deripaska; Cody Shearer; Sidney Blumenthal; Jon Winer; Kathleen Kavalec; Victoria Nuland; Daniel Jones; Bruce Ohr; Peter Strzok; Andrew McCabe; James Baker; Sally Yates; Loretta Lynch; John Brennan. Details here.
What happened? Hey Hillary how about you tell America who coordinated all these people and who was the architect and save a LOT of misery and resources….
*** The political wheels go round and round and given the anti-Trump envoy that has been mobilized, this operation and army of people will continue through the 2020 general election. AG Jeff Sessions and his Justice Department along with his Inspector Generals and Congressional committees are not likely to complete all these investigations any time soon….so remember these names as we head into the mid-term election and to the general election. And we have not even gotten to the whole FBI equation….
1. Shall we start with Kamala Harris? The sister of Sen. Kamala Harris, the California Democrat who has been floated as a potential presidential candidate in 2020, and the political director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are also involved with the group.
The Democracy Forward Foundation, a D.C.-based 501(c)3 nonprofit with a 501(c)4 arm called Democracy Forward, describes itself as a “nonpartisan” group that “scrutinizes Executive Branch activity,” according to its mission statement. Anne Harkavy, the group’s executive director, was a senior legal advisor to the general counsel of Obama for America, Obama’s former campaign committee. Corey Ciorciari, its policy and strategy director who oversees Democracy Forward’s policy, research, and communications teams, was a policy advisor for Clinton during her 2016 campaign.
Javier Guzman, the legal director, came from the Department of Justice. Alex Hornbrook, Democracy Forward’s operations director, served as director of scheduling and advance for Hillary for America, Clinton’s campaign committee.
Democracy Forward’s board of directors also features a number of liberal power players.
Elias chairs the board that includes Podesta. Maya Harris, Sen. Kamala Harris’s sister who helped craft Clinton’s agenda for the failed campaign and is a political analyst for MSNBC, is also a member of its board.
Faiz Shakir, who became the national political director of the ACLU in January; Ronald Klain, a Democratic operative who was President Obama’s “Ebola Czar”; Matthew Miller, an MSNBC justice and security analyst; and Scott Nathan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which was founded by Podesta, also sit on the board of directors. More here.
2. Congressional documents and recently leaked texts between Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and a registered foreign agent for a Russian aluminum oligarch indicate that Daniel J. Jones is intimately involved with ongoing efforts to retroactively validate a series of salacious and unverified memos produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, and Fusion GPS. Jones, a former Feinstein staffer who wrote a controversial top-secret report on alleged torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), currently runs the Penn Quarter Group, which bills itself as a “research and investigative advisory” and is inconspicuously named after the downtown Washington DC neighborhood where its office is located.
3. How about Shailagh Murray, a former journalist who served as senior adviser to Obama and as former Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff? Murray’s husband is Neil King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who worked at the newspaper at the same time as Fusion GPS’s three co-founders, Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, and Tom Catan. Murray also worked at The Journal until 2005. She joined the Obama administration in 2011. Devin Nunes also sent a letter and questionnaire to Colin Kahl, who served as national security adviser to Biden.
4. Okay, what about CNN ad Evan Perez? Perez covers the Justice Department for CNN. Glenn Simpson, the Fusion co-founder most often associated with the dossier, is used to working on stories with Perez. As reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Perez and Simpson regularly co-authored stories on national security. Another Fusion founder, Tom Catan, worked as a reporter for the Journal at the same time as Perez and Simpson. The third Fusion co-founder, Peter Fritsch, worked above Perez and Simpson as the senior national security editor. Details and evidence is here.
5. Seems Marc Elias as the chair of Perkins Coie’s Political Law Group, was/is the grand marshal of this operation. Marc served as general counsel to Hillary for America, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. He served in the same role for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. His political committee clients include the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Governors Associations, National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Priorities USA, Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC and EMILY’s List. He currently serves as the chair of two organizations: Democracy Forward and We the Action. He serves on the board of directors of Priorities USA and on the advisory board of Let America Vote and Access Democracy. Marc is the former co-chair of the bipartisan Committee to Modernize Voter Registration. Marc served on the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Election Law and as an adviser to two American Law Institute projects: Principles of Government Ethics and Principles of Election Law: Resolution of Election Disputes.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Marc Elias, allegedly denied media reports that the Clinton campaign had any connection to the controversial Russian Dossier. After the Washington Post ran an extensive story on how the Clinton Campaign and Democratic National Committee hired controversial research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Donald Trump in Russia in the “Russian Dossier” matter. Reporters at the New York Times have accused Elias of lying in past categorical denials of any connection to Clinton or the DNC. The reports indicate that not only did the Clinton team fund the opposition research but that Elias may have been the person handling much of the arrangements. Now Elias’ position has worsened after a report out of Congress that he was present in an interview when campaign chairman John Podesta denied any campaign role in the funding or acquisition of the dossier.
The war on 5G Nationally and Internationally
The first, 1G, was invented by Motorola in 1973. The 1G networks provided basic phone service with analog protocols and speeds of 2.4 kilobits per second. Compare that to today’s 4G network speed of 100 megabits per second and 5G’s proposed 100 gigabits per second. Also in 1973, IEEE Member Robert M. Metcalf invented Ethernet, one of the key enablers of wireless and local Internet access. Ethernet is part of the IEEE 802 suite of standards that underpins wireless networking applications and includes access to the Internet. The 802.11 standard is better known by its trademark name: Wi-Fi. More here.
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When fourth generation (4G) services launched early this decade, the U.S. led the way. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unlocked valuable spectrum, and carriers responded by accommodating a radical, 20-fold growth in global mobile data traffic. The massive investment in wireless network infrastructure rewarded American consumers with faster wireless speeds at affordable prices. In addition to speeding up smartphones in our pockets, the U.S. economy saw an estimated increase in GDP between $73–$151 billion and up to 700,000 new jobs as a result and America was established as the test bed for innovation in the global digital economy.
Now our country faces a similar opportunity and challenge with fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, and it warrants the attention of consumers, the mobile industry, and policymakers. The economic stakes for 5G may be significantly higher than for 4G, led by large-scale job creation and incubation of new devices, applications, and business models that could dramatically stimulate the U.S. economy. More here.
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As of 2017, development of 5G is being led by several companies, including Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, Nokia, Huawei, Ericsson, ZTE and others. Huawei and ZTE are part of the Chinese government and all our intelligence agencies have declared they are NOT safe to use in the government realm or the private sector. Canadian media is warning the same due to cyber vulnerabilities. This is all about the expanding digital economy where various cyber currencies will prevail over tangible currency and those respective values cannot be controlled or managed.
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photo
“Those towers are going to go up, and you’re going to have great, great broadband,” Trump said.
But telecom companies don’t have plans to expand 5G to rural areas. Where are they going? To urban and suburban neighborhoods where the business-friendly FCC is considering rules that would limit local governments from having as much of a say over where they go, how they look and how much they can charge for use of public property. Published in partnership with the New York Times
Small cells, the next generation of wireless technology that telecommunications firms and cell-tower builders want to place on streetlights and utility poles throughout neighborhoods nationwide. The small cells come with a host of equipment, including antennas, power supplies, electric meters, switches, cabling and boxes often strapped to the sides of poles. Some may have refrigerator-sized containers on the ground. And they will be placed about every 500 or so feet along residential streets and throughout business districts.
Telecom companies say the cells will be both unobtrusive and safe, and insist the technology is needed to bring faster internet speeds required by a more connected world.
Telecommunications companies say the current 4G network is becoming overloaded as more people stream more videos and use more data-heavy apps. The advent of driverless cars, smart homes, telemedicine and virtual-reality will create more demand on wireless networks, requiring more bandwidth and faster speeds.
What’s needed, the wireless industry says, is 5G. The next generation network, still in development, is a combination of advanced hardware and standards such as distributed antenna systems, more fiber-optic cable, new data management practices and higher frequencies that will enable the network to carry more data up to 100 times faster than 4G.
5G will depend on so-called millimeter waves. These high-frequency bands, however, don’t travel as far as the signals 4G relies on and are easily blocked by walls, trees and even rain. So the network needs to be dense, with cells placed much closer together. That means way more wireless facilities. More than 300,000 cells are now in operation nationwide, and estimates for the number of small cells needed to make 5G work range from hundreds of thousands to millions more.
The rollout of 5G will be evolutionary, with the standards for the full complement of advanced technologies expected after 2020. Small cells already are being erected with 5G tests in many cities, and as that’s happened, citizens have descended on government meetings to express their anger — from Woodbury, New York; to Liberty Township, Ohio; to Charlotte; to Pasco County, Florida; to Olympia, Washington.
5G promises to generate huge profits for the wireless companies, with as much as $250 billion in service revenue expected annually by 2025. And 5G will unleash an economic boom, say supporters of pre-empting local rules. They frequently cite a report by the consulting firm Accenture, which concluded that wireless firms will invest $275 billion over the next seven years deploying small cells, creating 3 million jobs and eventually boosting the national economy by $500 billion annually.
The study appears everywhere — mentioned by FCC commissioners in speeches, cited in an official FCC docket, in wireless carriers’ comments, and in statements by the powerful Washington associations that represent them. What most don’t mention is that the study was paid for by the wireless association CTIA, one of Washington’s top lobbying spenders.
The wireless industry argues that localities’ high fees, design requirements and delays in processing permits have effectively prohibited the deployment of broadband, which they argue is a violation of federal law; they’ve asked the FCC to make that clear in reining in cities and counties.
Wireless carriers and the companies that build towers for them have begun flooding city and county permitting offices with applications for attaching small cells to poles and building new ones. Cities that normally see a few dozen such applications yearly began in 2016 to get hundreds, such as Houston. Montgomery County said it had at one point more applications filed in four months than in the previous 18 years.
Wireless companies complain local governments can’t process the permits fast enough because their systems are set up to review applications for massive cell towers, not the small cells they claim are less intrusive. The process needs to move quickly, they say, because 5G requires so many more cells, and they want to beat other countries to set standards.
The FCC issued a notice in April that it would consider rules to streamline cell deployment by reducing the time cities’ and counties’ have to review applications. The agency also said it would study, with the possibility of proposing rules later, both how the FCC could limit cities’ requirements on the look and design of small cells, and if local fees to attach to poles are excessive. The FCC also asked for ways it could amend its own rules. The agency may consider the proposals by the summer.
Pai, a former attorney for Verizon, also created last year a committee of representatives mostly from the wireless industry to develop model codes that cities and counties can adopt to speed the permitting of small cells and to reduce costs to telecoms. The committee is considering proposals, which it plans to formally submit to the FCC later this spring, that run the gamut, from simply calling on cities and the wireless industry to work together to controversial recommendations such as capping what cities charge to attach to public property.
Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose, California, one of the few members on the committee representing local interests and who has been critical of wireless companies’ efforts to weaken local rules, resigned from the group in January, saying the wireless industry “has sought to create a set of rules that will provide it with easy access to publicly-funded infrastructure at taxpayer-subsidized rates, without any obligation to provide broadband access to underserved residents.”
In response, Pai said in a statement that the committee has “brought together 101 participants from a range of perspectives” and he looks forward to working with the committee and others “to remove regulatory barriers to broadband deployment and to extend digital opportunity to all Americans.”
Bipartisan agreement
Congress is also weighing in — in rare bipartisan fashion — on the side of the telecom firms. Numerous bills in both the Senate and House would ease regulations and fees for erecting cells on federal lands, such as a bill the Senate passed last summer that would exempt certain small-cell deployments from environmental and historic reviews. The bill, which the House has yet to consider, is sponsored by South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the Republican chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., the ranking member of the committee.
Also last year, Thune joined Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz from Hawaii to circulate a draft bill that rolls back local government control over wireless facilities including small cells, including shortening the permit review times to 60 days on applications to collocate wireless facilities and 90 days for other wireless applications — the same time frames wireless providers are asking the FCC to consider.
Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., introduced a bill that would exempt small cells being deployed in a public right of way from environmental and historical reviews under certain circumstances. A companion bill is in the House. Numerous other bills are moving through the House
Wicker and Thune are among the top 25 senators who have received the most campaign contributions from AT&T and Verizon since 2010, pulling in $32,500 and $30,500, respectively, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Schatz has received $29,000 from the two carriers, the third most among senators since 2014, when he ran his first campaign.
With such bipartisan support in Congress, and with an FCC that is sympathetic to telecoms, cities view their control over small cells as slipping away. That leaves people like King resigned to what is coming.
“A Russian woman stood up to speak at one of these public meetings, and she said that when she lived in Russia, the government slam dunked her and she had no say,” King said. “Now she lives in the United States of America, where she’s getting slam dunked by the government and she has no say. That gives you a window into what’s going on here.”
Qatar Foundation Buying American Education/Teachers
Remember when the Obama regime traded out the top Taliban commanders from Gitmo to Qatar for Bowe Bergdahl? Remember when the Obama regime was working to normalize relations with the Taliban by funding an embassy for them in Qatar?
In 2017, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis placed the blame for the current mess in Afghanistan squarely on the Obama administration, telling Congress Wednesday that by cutting support for the Afghan forces prematurely, President Obama allowed the Taliban to regroup and recover.
“I believe that we pulled out forces at a time, as you know, when the violence was lower, but we pulled them out on a timeline rather than consistent with the maturation of the government and the security forces,” Mattis told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.
“The result was that as security declined, all the other stresses have come to bear, to include heavy casualties on the part of the Afghan forces, other nations pulled their forces out as well, and the Taliban was emboldened.”
Or remember when Eric Holder traveled to Qatar in 2009 to deliver a speech on financial corruption? Did he know that the Qatari Fund was buying American teachers and spreading hate against Israel and promoting Islam in the American education system? uh huh….
The emirate’s educational foundation spreads anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda in U.S. schools.
NR: On January 27, Qatar Foundation International (QFI) sponsored a continuing-education event titled “Middle East 101” for public-school teachers in Phoenix, Ariz. It was hosted by the Arizona Department of Education — which is not surprising, given that QFI has donated over $450,000 to Arizona public schools (and over $30 million to public schools across the country). Unfortunately, while there was a good deal of interesting material, teachers also got a large helping of Islamist propaganda, designed to influence American schoolchildren and ultimately to advance Qatari foreign policy.
QFI program officer Craig Cangemi introduced QFI as an American member organization of the Qatar Foundation (QF), which he blandly described as “a private, education-focused foundation in Doha, Qatar.” In fact, QF is a massive apparatus directly managed by Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family, which conducts a tremendous range of state-development activities ranging from technology research to higher education. This includes “Education City,” a district in Doha that hosts Qatari branches of American universities, including Texas A&M, Northwestern, Georgetown, and others, which QF funds to the tune of more than $400 million annually. Georgetown alone received nearly $300 million in grants from QF between 2011 and 2016.
However, while the American universities are able to preserve some freedom of thought, other QF-backed schools in Doha enforce a rigid ideological program. QF schools and mosques often host the most virulently radical Islamist preachers, including one who referred to the 9/11 attacks as a “comedy film,” another who said that Jews bake Passover matzoh with human blood (“believing that this brings them close to their false god”), and a third who accused the Shia of “poisoning” and “sorcery.”
A featured lecturer of the QF-backed Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies was Mohamed El-Moctar El-Shinqiti, currently a professor at the QF’s flagship Hamad bin Khalifa University. El-Shinqiti was once an imam at a West Texas mosque, where he openly encouraged young people to engage in terror attacks against Israel and Egypt. The dean of the QF’s College of Islamic Studies (CIS) is Emad al-Din Shahin, a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose prominence led Egypt’s military regime to sentence him to death in absentia. Other CIS faculty are connected to the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), the Muslim Brotherhood’s American think tank that is the nexus of a terror-finance network named the SAAR Network. These CIS faculty include Louay Safi, former IIIT executive director and research director, and Jasser Auda, also an IIIT lecturer. Other faculty seem closely aligned with the IIIT’s long-term goal of the “Islamization of knowledge,” including one professor working under Auda who has written about “Revelation as a source of engineering sciences.”
An American educator who worked at a QF educational institution in Doha told the Middle East Forum that faculty were not allowed to purchase maps showing the state of Israel, the entire territory of which was instead labeled “Palestine.” Even tangentially mentioning the existence of Israel or the Holocaust in class would provoke severe reprisals from the Qatari Ministry of Education. The official government policy was “Israel doesn’t exist.”
QF is a committed supporter of Islamist extremism, particularly at its Al-Qaradawi Center for Islamic Moderation and Renewal — named in honor of Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who chaired the committee that established the Center’s faculty. (Al-Qaradawi has repeatedly endorsed suicide bombings, terrorist attacks against the United States, and the total extermination of the Jews. He is barred from entering the U.S. because of terrorism concerns.) And in 2012, QF hosted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (who was just designated as a terrorist by the federal government) and gave him a “victory shield” featuring the Dome of the Rock.
Meanwhile, during the “Middle East 101” event, Cangemi insisted that QFI (the American branch of QF) sets its own policies, saying, “We are an autonomous organization. . . . We do not have any ties with Qatar: the government, the state, or really [the] Qatar Foundation.” This is patently false. The CEO and nominal founder of QFI is Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al-Thani, the daughter of Qatar’s former emir. The chairman of the board of QFI is Sheikh Jassim bin Abdulaziz Al-Thani, another member of the royal family. As of 2012 (the most recent year for which public records are available), the treasurer of QFI was Khalid Al Kuwari, a senior Qatari government official and a scion of the powerful Al-Kuwari clan. QFI is in fact a key instrument of Qatari state policy.
Evidence of this is found in the teaching materials that Cangemi recommended to his schoolteacher audience. Al Masdar, for instance, is QFI’s flagship curriculum project. It offers lesson plans and resources about countries all over the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, the most flattering collection is about Qatar. One resource offered is even titled: “Express Your Loyalty to Qatar.” No lesson plan appears particularly critical of Qatar, whereas other countries discussed in Al Masdar’s resources are subject to much more varied discussion.
Other lesson plans contain anti-Semitic and anti-American material, particularly several lessons produced by the Zinn Education Project, which claims to promote a revisionist “people’s history.” These include “Greed as a Weapon: Teaching the Other Iraq War,” which examines the “greed” of the corporations ostensibly responsible for the Iraq war in order to “feast on Iraq’s economy,” and “Whose ‘Terrorism’?”, which questions the definition of terrorism, creating scenarios for students to discuss — for example, if “Israeli soldiers taunting and shooting children in Palestinian refugee camps, with the assistance of U.S. military aid” should be considered an example of terrorism.
The main speaker at the “Middle East 101” event was Barbara Petzen, a senior staff member at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who once worked for the Saudi-funded Middle East Policy Council (MEPC). Petzen has been longaccused of anti-Israel bias in educational fora. During her presentation, she repeatedly argued that religion or ideology had no relationship with Islamic terrorism, which she claimed was more immediately rooted in Muslim political grievances against the West for its support of Israel and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Petzen hit similar themes in a 2015 presentation for QFI.)
Petzen particularly whitewashed the role of Islamism, a religious-political ideology with roots in 20th-century totalitarianism that demands political supremacy as a religious value, and thus leads inevitably to political violence. She argued that Islamism, as represented by Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is focused on governing society (albeit in a religiously severe fashion), and is therefore opposed to extremism, since “extremism, by definition, turns things over — is destabilizing. . . . If you’re in power, you don’t want extremism because it destabilizes your control.” (By this faulty definition, no ruling ideology can be “extremist.” Indeed, ISIS would not be considered “extremist” once it set up its government.)
Similarly, when commenting on the June 2017 decision by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and seven other Muslim countries to sever ties with Qatar, Petzen downplayed the importance of the Qatari regime’s deep, systematic support for Islamism and terrorism. Instead, she claimed the diplomatic crisis was motivated mainly by Qatar’s close economic relations with Iran, a geostrategic competitor of Saudi Arabia. This ignores the fact that Qatar’s neighbors fear destabilization by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters and have abruptly reversed their own prior support of the Brotherhood in response.
Petzen’s claim echoes the line taken by QFI itself. In July 2017, QFI and Al Jazeera jointly produced a propaganda video condemning the so-called blockade of Qatar. In November, QFI organized a panel discussion claiming that the Gulf states’ isolation of Qatar was due to “fake news,” a claim that QFI’s executive director, Maggie Salem, explicitly endorsed on Twitter. For QFI to belittle the very real alarm that other Muslim states feel about Qatar’s support for extremism is telling, and it calls into question QFI’s claims of independence from the Qatari state.
Qatar Foundation International presents itself as a beneficent charity, merely working to spread knowledge of different cultures. In fact, it is an agent of Qatari foreign policy, with the aim of influencing American schoolchildren to support the Qatari agenda. No matter how attractive Qatari money may be, American educators must reject QFI.
