Take Honduras as an Example

The caravan, the caravan…

There is a crisis going on at the California border check point where an estimated 200 migrants are attempting to gain entry into the United States by using all tactics stressing our resources and laws.

Today: The Caravan at California’s Door photo

(Note the sign provided by ANSWER Coalition)

So, the big question is if these people are desperate to leave their home countries out of fear, crime and corruption, then why have they not visited our embassies in their home countries? They just fled. People fleeing to the United States must and do travel through Mexico. So, where is the humanitarian policy of Mexico to accept these desperate people?

A large number of people attempting to enter the United States come from a handful of countries in Central America such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. So, let us examine Honduras as an example. for a summary of the crime and threat assessment in Honduras, go here.

How Instability in Central America Affects US-Mexico ... photo

In 2009, Obama cut $200 million in non-humanitarian aid to Honduras. The United States must address stabilizing these countries, rather than allowing their failures and exporting the problem(s) to the United States.

But:

Honduras, one of Latin America’s poorest nations, strives to improve its economic and democratic development with U.S. assistance. The United States has historically been the largest bilateral donor to Honduras. U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs target a variety of sectors including education, health, economic policy, microenterprise, environmental conservation, food security, municipal development, and justice sector reform. USAID has provided more than $3 billion in economic and social development assistance to the Honduran people since it began working in the country in 1961. Currently, programs focus on addressing the main push factors of migration by improving citizen security, reducing extreme poverty, and improving public administration through transparency and accountability reforms. To achieve these objectives, USAID’s efforts address citizen security through community-based crime prevention activities, with a focus on the highest crime neighborhoods and those youth who are most at-risk. Additionally, USAID strengthens local and national governance, as well as civil society monitoring and watchdog organizations; helps the poorest sectors of society increase food security and incomes; supports the sustainable management of natural resources; expands quality basic education and workplace and life-skills training; and improves the quality and participation of local citizens and civil society in decentralized basic services.

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Commerce will be dedicating $1.5 million for a customs and border management program focused on improving trade into Honduras and others parts of Central America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provided $47 million in 2015-2016 for its two programs that deliver school meals to 53,000 students and increase agricultural productivity and trade.

The United States Armed Forces maintain a small presence at a Honduran military base. U.S. forces conduct and provide logistical support for a variety of bilateral and multilateral exercises–medical, engineering, counternarcotics, and disaster relief–for the benefit of the Honduran people and their Central American neighbors. Through the Central America Regional Security Initiative, the United States supports the Government of Honduras by assisting law enforcement entities in disrupting criminal networks; building investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial capacity; and implementing violence prevention programs for vulnerable communities.

In June 2005, Honduras became the first country in the hemisphere to sign a Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Compact with the U.S. Government. Under the Compact, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation invested $205 million over 5 years to help Honduras improve its road infrastructure, diversify its agriculture, and transport its products to market. In 2013, Honduras received a $15.6 million MCC Threshold Agreement to support Honduran efforts to improve public financial management and create more effective and transparent public-private partnerships.

The State Department website for the embassy in Honduras explains that in order to obtain a visa, the applicant must establish they meet all requirements to receive a visa. The website even includes a ‘visa wizard’ that aids in the application process to determine the specific visa that best fits the case.

There is a fraud unit at all embassies and if fraud is committed during in the visa process, benefits are lost, fines are applied and a jail sentence can be applied.

There is yet another requirement for travel and approval to enter the United States, vaccines.

They include: mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus and diphtheria, pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae/type B, hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, varicella, pneumococcal disease, and seasonal influenza.

So, given just the vaccine requirements, detention in either Mexico or the United States for those attempting to enter the United States is warranted. The cost however of medical examinations and detention is significant and government agencies cannot estimate those costs to the taxpayer.

Now, here is something quite curious:

Who is a refugee?

According to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, a refugee is defined as someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…”

  • Asylum seekers have submitted a claim for refugee status and are waiting for this claim to be accepted or rejected.
  • Refugees and asylees comprise the majority of displaced persons resettled to the United States.

What are the top countries of origin and asylum*?

The top ten countries of refugee origin are Afghanistan, Iraq, Somali, DR Congo, Myanmar, Colombia, Sudan, Vietnam, Eritrea, and China.

The top ten countries of refugee asylum are Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Germany, Jordan, Kenya, Chad, China, United States, and United Kingdom.

* Countries are listed in order from greatest to least number of refugees as of Dec 2010.

Source: UNHCR Global Trends (2010)

Statistics on International Refugees and US Domestic Refugee Admissions:

Source: UNHCR, 2009 Global Trends: Refugee, Asylum-Seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless People

  • As of 2009, an estimated 15.2 million refugees were located around the world. Of these refugees, 251,500 were voluntarily repatriated to their home nations.
  • In 2011, the United States accepted 56,424 refugees for resettlement.

Source: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System (WRAPS)

The U.S. has projected a refugee resettlement ceiling of 76,000 individuals for FY 2012.
Source: Presidential Determination No. 2011-17: FY 2012 Refugee Admissions Numbers

Immigrant, Refugee and Migrant Health Branch (IRMH)

The goal of the IRMH Branch within the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine is to promote and improve the health of immigrants, refugees, and migrants and prevent the importation of infectious diseases and other conditions of public health significance into the U.S. by these groups. To accomplish this goal the IRMH branch plays a significant role in refugee health, both overseas and domestically.

Older female refugee

Overseas

  • IRMH develops and implements the Technical Instructions used by overseas panel physicians who are responsible for conducting the medical examinations for U.S.-bound refugees. The Technical Instructions consist of medical screening guidelines, which outline in detail the scope of the medical examination. The purpose of the medical examination is to identify, for the Department of State and the US Citizenship and Immigration service, applicants with medical conditions of public health concern.
  • IRMH also maintains an anonymous collection of surplus blood samples from overseas screenings called the Migrant Serum Bank (MSB). Scientists from around the world can request to use the samples for research projects.

Domestic

  • The Domestic Refugee Health Program facilitates collaboration with state and local health department partners to improve the health care and monitor medical conditions of refugees after their arrival into the United States.
  • IRMH also maintains the Electronic Disease Notification System (EDN), which notifies states and local health departments of the arrival of refugees to their jurisdictions. EDN provides states with overseas medical screening results and treatment follow-up information for each refugee.

IRMH Partners

To accomplish its goals in refugee health, IRMH works with many external partners:

 

Father of the Holy War Attended Colorado College

A History Of Islamic Extremism photo

Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?

Born in 1906 in the northern Egyptian village of Musha and raised in a devout Muslim home, Qutb memorized the Koran as a boy. Later he moved to Cairo and found work as a teacher and writer. His novels made no great impression, but he earned a reputation as an astute literary critic. Qutb was among the first champions of Naguib Mahfouz, a young, modern novelist who, in 1988, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. As Qutb matured, his mind took on a more political cast. Even by the standards of Egypt, those were chaotic, corrupt times: World War I had completed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the Western powers were creating, with absolute colonial confidence, new maps and governments for the Middle East. For a proud man like Sayyid Qutb, the humiliation of his country at the hands of secular leaders and Western puppets was galling. His writing drew unfavorable attention from the Egyptian government, and by 1948, Mahfouz has said, Qutb’s friends in the Ministry of Education were sufficiently worried about his situation that they contrived to send him abroad to the safety of the United States. More here from Smithsonian.

***

The Secret Islamist Society That Nurtured Jihadist Terrorism

In the ’50s and ’60s, Islamist radical and theorist Sayyid Qutb cultivated and trained a generation of Muslim radicals who would sow the seeds of ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Gerges: After the attacks on the U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001, Sayyid Qutb, master ideologue of radical Islamism and agitator, became a household name in America. He was seen as the godfather of global jihadism like al-Qaeda and an inspiration to radical religious activists worldwide. Security experts mined his writings for signposts about the drivers behind radicalization. An analyst called him “the philosopher of terror.” It has become more difficult to disentangle myths and facts about this Islamist agitator and theoretician who is mythologized by both disciples and distractors.

In contrast, my new biography of Qutb presents a more complex and multidimensional personality than has usually been presented, whose legacy is often deliberately misinterpreted by Islamists themselves. While Qutb’s writings have been debated by scholars,[i] his life in prison between 1954 and 1964 and in the underground has not been fully and critically examined. The prison years are pivotal. His decade-long experience in the prison camps radicalized him and convinced him of the urgent need to overthrow the secular order and replace it with a system firmly grounded in the Qur’an.

As one of Qutb’s devoted jail companions, Sayyid Eid, put it, “The prison years transformed Qutb’s thinking and writing. He turned his pen into a deadly weapon against what he called the tawagheet [tyrants] and aimed at awakening the ummah [worldwide community of Muslims] from its prolonged slumber.”

It is behind the bars of Nasserist jails that Qutb constructed his subversive manifestos that promoted an alternative revolutionary Islamist project and attempted to put it into practice. From November 1954, when he began a 15-year sentence, Qutb worked on radical amendments to his multiple-volume commentary on the Qur’an called In the Shadow of the Qur’an. Representing a rupture with his previous moderate views, this new and firmly ideological outlook emphasized revolutionary Islam and the inevitability of the confrontation with jahiliyya, a term historically used to refer to the spiritual ignorance of Arabian society prior to the arrival of Islam. Qutb drew a direct line between the “the old jahiliyya of the Arabs” with what he called al-jahiliyya al-haditha, the modern jahiliyya.

Qutb defined jahiliyya as a deviation from the worship of One God. He made a correlation between the Egypt in which he lived and the environment in which the Prophet Muhammad had first spread the message of Islam. To this end, he took a radical step in categorizing contemporary Egyptian society as jahili.

If jahiliyya amounted to the servitude of humans to other humans, for Qutb, true Islamic life involves total submission to God. Qutb preached that Islam would ultimately prevail but its triumph would not occur simply by virtue of its revelation by God but rather through a group of people understanding the task, believing in it completely and conforming to it as closely as possible.” Qutb called for the creation of a Qur’anic generation which would act as a vanguard “to point out the road of salvation to humanity and to build the road as well.”

 

Qutb and Al-Tanzim al-Sirri

This is all familiar by now. What is little known is that from the second half of the ’50s, Qutb embarked on a mission, while in prison, to recruit fellow Islamist prisoners and to rally them to his revolutionary cause. He was in a paramilitary organization subsequently named al-Tanzim al-Sirri (the Secret Organization) by the Egyptian authorities. Qutb provided ideological and practical guidance to operators who numbered in the hundreds inside and outside prisons. According to his disciples, Qutb’s goal for agreeing to be in charge of al-Tanzim was to protect the Islamist movement and ultimately topple the Nasser regime and Islamize state and society. The historical importance of al-Tanzim lies in that it served as a template for subsequent underground jihadist organizations. Qutb’s revolutionary ideas and actions continue to resonate with radical religious activists worldwide, even though there is no straightforward line between the pioneer Islamist agitator and today’s wave of Muslim extremism.

In the summer of 1965, Nasser’s security forces accidentally discovered al-Tanzim after a member they arrested exposed the underground organization. Qutb and his men lost the fight before “firing a single shot,” as one of his young lieutenants Ali Ashmawi put it. The authorities acted swiftly and aggressively to dismantle al-Tanzim’s cells and to complete the destruction of the Brotherhood. After al-Tanzim was exposed and its members arrested, Qutb took full responsibility for his operational role trying to shield his disciples and followers. In his last testament, Why They Executed Me, he implied that his goal had been to bear the brunt of the burden and to minimize the costs to al-Tanzim’s members.

The Egyptian government used confessions extracted under torture from members of al-Tanzim to indict both Qutb and the Brotherhood leadership. Qutb and al-Tanzim’s six top lieutenants were sentenced to death. According to Nasser’s chief of staff, Sami Sharaf, Nasser had taken a particularly strong line. “Nasser said that executing Qutb would deal the Ikhwan a mortal blow, as well as any future counterrevolution by religious fanatics,” he said. Thousands of members of the Muslim Brothers, including senior leaders, were arrested, allegedly tortured, and given long jail terms. “We wanted to bury the Ikhwan, period,” confessed Sami Sharaf. “Our goal was to remove the cancer from the Egyptian body politic.”

Over a two-year period, I spent countless hours attentively listening to Qutb’s surviving contemporary disciples and his right-hand men in al-Tanzim al-Sirri (the Secret Organization) who joined his underground network and spent years by his side in and out of prison. Reminiscing about their past moments with him, they confided what had transpired behind prison walls and drew an intimate portrait of the radical Islamist theoritician. They told me about Qutb’s antipathy to Nasser and his desire to rid Egypt of its faroun (tyrant). Having spent years with him in the solitude of prisons and outside, Qutb’s disciples are best positioned to clarify the background, intentions, and implication of some of his controversial terms and his vision in general. This small circle of followers were his eyes and ears and would have sacrificed their lives for him, as they have indicated.

Those old men in their seventies and eighties introduced me to a younger Qutbian generation that seeks to carry the revolutionary torch forward. Time and again, I was told by Qutb’s followers that by the late ’50s their mentor was essentially in charge of the Brotherhood and tried to revolutionize the timid Islamist organization. Although in 1966 Nasser hoped to extinguish the Qutbian fire by sending Qutb to the gallows, his “martyrdom” provided the fuel that has powered several jihadist waves, according to his contemporary disciples. Qutb’s loyalists say that he knew that his blood would be a curse to haunt Muslim tawagheet (tyrants) and to quench the thirst of the ummah (the global Muslim community) for sacrifice and cultural and political renewal.

I have extensively relied on these firsthand interviews, recollections, and memoirs of Qutb’s contemporaries to reconstruct his life journey—from a public intellectual with a secular mentality to a revolutionary Islamist. My uninhibited access to Qutb’s most inner circle and that of the Brotherhood’s old guard and younger activists provides a unique window into a shadowy, secretive universe, allowing my biography of Qutb to zero in on these prison years and trace his footsteps and actions, thus filling a major gap in the literature.

My interviews with al-Tanzim’s key lieutenants illuminated Qutb’s role in the organization explaining the influence of prison and torture on his ideological transformation between 1954 and 1965. Moreover, Qutb’s contemporaries elaborate on the relationship between al-Tanzim and the rest of the Brotherhood and the extent to which the rift haunted the Islamist group in the following decades. These illuminating conversations highlight what has been a mysterious presence in discussions of the relationships between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nasserist state, but more importantly, they offer a new dimension to understanding the influence of Qutb and the transformation that he underwent during the prison years from 1954 till 1965.

The stirring of militancy from the ruins of the Brotherhood

In the early ’50s, the Brotherhood represented the largest social force in Egypt. Thus, when the Free Officers clamped down on the Islamist organization in 1953-1954, this confrontation ultimately morphed into a prolonged struggle between secular-leaning Arab nationalism represented by the Nasserist state and an emergent radical Islamist current led by Sayyid Qutb. After Nasser launched first wave of mass arrests against the Muslim Brothers in mid-January 1954, it only took the Islamist group a short while to get up and running again despite the imprisonment of thousands of its senior leaders and members. By June of that year, there were already reports of a revival of Brotherhood activism with the intent of securing the survival of the organization.

In the midst of the 1954 clampdown, the dominant view among senior Muslim Brotherhood, led by the General Guide Hasan al-Hudaybi, was that the organization should endeavor to absorb the shock and wait for more favorable political conditions. Meanwhile, the imprisoned members were already plotting their next moves against the state. A divide between the traditional leadership and the lower-rank members was now gradually developing. The Brothers were angry and bitter because they felt betrayed by Nasser who, without the organization’s support, would have not been able to seize power in 1952. As frustration deepened among some imprisoned Brotherhood members, their resentment increased against their own leadership for its quietism and the prisons thus became a key forum for activism.

Moreover, those who had not been caught up in the crackdown did their best to continue their activities under the oppressive new conditions. One of them was Ahmed Abdel Majid, who was both a member of the Brotherhood and an officer in the Egyptian military intelligence service during the prison years. “After the Nasser regime dismantled the Ikhwan [Islamist movement]—young men— sought to absorb the shock and plot our next moves,” he confided. “Initially, there existed no centralized authority. Each unit did its own thing. Others prayed together and talked politics… In the first two years, we kept a very low profile and refrained from recruitment outside our closest circles,” he explained. Although similar efforts were underway elsewhere, they remained organic and dispersed. “We had no idea that throughout the country other young Egyptians had organized themselves in similar cells and shared our goal,” added Abdel Majid, who was a founding member of al-Tanzim. Therefore, the repression exerted by the Nasserist state only hardened attitudes among some sections of the Muslim Brothers and supporters, both inside and outside the prisons.

The Emergence of al-Tanzim

This context is important to understanding the emergence of al-Tanzim. It formed out of units created by some of those who had remained at liberty after the 1954 clampdown and who were determined to continue their armed activism. Gradually, al-Tanzim developed into a somewhat coordinated paramilitary operation, concentrated in urban areas like Cairo and Alexandria. In the late ’50s, as various cells began to link up with one another, they soon realized they needed to put forward a clear vision or road map for the future.

Al-Tanzim’s beginnings were humble. With the dismantling of the Brotherhood’s institutions and networks, followers and supporters had lost their political equilibrium and they sensed danger. Undeterred by the Nasserist state’s concerted effort to destroy the Islamist group, and with hardly any financial backing or military experience, these young activists took great risks in an uncertain bid to unseat Nasser. The power of ideas is key to understanding their self-conscious action, regardless of how reckless and suicidal it may seem to outsiders. The lesson we can draw from al-Tanzim is still relevant to understanding the rise of paramilitary Islamist groups today, insofar as it speaks to the marrying of radical religious ideas with a sense of injustice, victimhood, and persecution.

The first emir (leader) of al-Tanzim was Abdel Aziz Ali, a former army general and minister who was one of the heroes of the 1919 revolution against the British. However, he was still very much wedded to the old ways of thinking and acting. Al-Tanzim’s lieutenants, in contrast, were ambitious, impatient, and determined to pursue the riskier strategy. They thus searched for a charismatic leader with the capacity and the temperament to make their nascent organization more effective. It was at this stage, having become disillusioned with Abdel Aziz and having been turned down by Abdel Khaleq, that members of al-Tanzim began to put out feelers to Qutb. “The key word was ‘inspiration.’ We searched for a leader who would inspire us and educate us about the duties and responsibilities of jihad,” said Abdel Majid, who was head of al-Tanzim’s intelligence committee. “We were less interested in military and intelligence drills, and more so in theological and ideological renewal and transformation. Sayyid Qutb was an inspirational role model who could empower our nascent jama’a [the community].”

To their delight, al-Tanzim’s lieutenants were able to get in touch with Qutb in prison in the late ’50s via two women who acted as intermediaries: Qutb’s sister Hamida and an audacious Ikhwan activist called Zeinab al-Ghazali. Having thus made contact with Qutb, al-Tanzim’s operatives pleaded with him to be their leader and pledged to swear bay’a to him. “We were elated when word reached us that Qutb had consented to our request,” recalled Abdel A’l Aw’d Musa, an intense 76 year old who was then in his twenties and who established one of the first underground cells outside Cairo.

Before Qutb joined, al-Tanzim had consisted only of disconnected underground cells. With Qutb at the helm, a coherent and unified organization emerged, and the goal shifted from the ouster from power of Nasser and his inner circle to the transformation of society as a whole.

From Qutb’s viewpoint, the decision to offer “guidance,” as he noted in his confessions, to the organization’s young members bordered on suicidal. Sayyid Eid, the prison companion, recalled Qutb saying that he fully expected to be killed by the Egyptian authorities and that “Al-Shahid [the martyr] acted and behaved as if he was destined to be martyred at any moment,” recalled Eid. As Shazili and others noted, Qutb was not a traditional critic or a theorist confined to an ivory tower. “Qutb did not only theorize about the urgent need for a vanguard but devoted the last decade of his life to building a real vanguard,” explained Abdel Majid al-Shazili, who was in charge of a branch of al-Tanzim in Alexandria during this period, during one meeting in his apartment in Alexandria.

Pressed on the question of whether Qutb sanctioned the use of violent means to effect political change, Ashmawi, the young lieutenant, responded: “Yes, Qutb aimed at violently overthrowing the whole social and political order, not only the Nasser regime.” Furthermore, according to Ali Ashmawi, who was an operational commander, Qutb also played a pivotal role in the education and indoctrination of al-Tanzim’s cadres. “Before we connected with Qutb, we were theologically naive, blind and deaf, feeling our way in the darkness,” he said, with a loud laugh. “He opened our eyes and ears to the truth and showed us the way.” Qutb was able to endow al-Tanzim with a theological vision based on his own interpretation of the Qu’ran for the transformation of Egyptian society. Qutb’s texts were smuggled out of the prison and distributed to the five men of the leadership committee of al-Tanzim who would then spend hours studying Qutb’s words.

The Brotherhood Divided

From the second half of the ’50s until his temporary release from jail on health grounds at the end of 1964 at the behest of the prime minister of Iraq, Abdel Salam Arif, Qutb embarked on a mission to recruit fellow Islamist prisoners and to rally them to his revolutionary cause. Having suffered from breathing problems before he was imprisoned, he spent most of his years of incarceration in prison hospital facilities. During a spell in the Tura prison hospital, he interviewed scores of visiting cellmates from various prisons, particularly al-Qanatir, to find out who would be receptive to his revolutionary ideas. He succeeded in recruiting dozens of prisoners to his underground project. Although Qutb’s followers were a minority—nearly one hundred members among the incarcerated Muslim Brothers, who numbered in the low thousands—their very existence shattered the unity of the Islamist group and exposed internal ideological and doctrinal fault lines.

Throughout this time, Qutb never requested authorization from the Brotherhood leadership to recruit imprisoned members to his cause. He went to great lengths to mask his proselytizing efforts from the top leaders of the movement, and when they confronted him, he denied converting detainees. By covertly recruiting prisoners to his revolutionary scheme, Qutb went against the ethos of absolute obedience to the hierarchy that had long been a core principle of the Islamist organization. He possessed no official function or authority to replace the Brotherhood’s worldview with his own interpretation.

Senior leaders were appalled when news reached them that Qutb had been preaching subversive ideas to the rank and file. The most alarming news was his idea of takfir (excommunication), including the whole of Egyptian society: the state, ordinary people, and the ulama. Faced with this new challenge, the Brotherhood leadership grilled Qutb and demanded that he refrain from spreading fitna (sedition).

“A fitna almost tore apart the ranks of the jailed Ikhwan,” acknowledged Abdel Khaleq, Hudaybi’s trusted man. But he claimed that “the supreme guide swiftly cautioned Qutb against any unauthorized teaching and preaching, and nipped the fitna in the bud.” According to Abdel Khaleq, who as Hudaybi’s right-hand official was privy to the confrontation, Qutb disavowed such heretical views and insisted that he only taught prisoners Qur’anic lessons. “He was agreeable and nonconfrontational, seeking to dispel suspicions that he had gone rogue,” Abdel Khaleq said.

In contrast, Sayyid Eid, who was in Qutb’s camp, said that his mentor’s seemingly conciliatory stance was but an artifice. “We [both sides] put the best face on a dangerously embarrassing situation. Qutb had a low opinion of the tired old men of the Ikhwan who suffered in silence at the hands of Nasser and who willingly refused to resist oppression and injustice. He viewed them as being out of touch with the emancipatory and revolutionary power of ‘aqida,” Eid told me. “Sayyid Qutb had contempt for the Ikhwan political leadership, whom he derisively called functionaries,” he added. “He dismissed them as stupid and spineless, status quo men.” Despite his reassurances to Hudaybi and other Muslim Brothers, Qutb had unambiguously excommunicated Nasser. According to Eid, Hudaybi’s intervention did little to calm the dissidents. “Far from it,” he said. “Dozens of Ikhwan members, including myself, were steadfast in their support of Qutb’s defiance of the Nasser regime and the need to build a vanguard to carry out an Islamist revolution.”

In prison Qutb enlisted Muslim Brothers over the heads of their “legitimate” leaders and drove a wedge into the heart of the Islamist movement. Those who looked up to him for inspiration and guidance distanced themselves from the formal institutions of the mainstream Brotherhood, which caused a serious rift between Qutb’s men and other prisoners. According to Ahmed Ra’if, a well-placed member of the Brotherhood who was in contact with both camps at that time, the internal divide even poisoned the atmosphere in more than one jail. The two sides bickered so bitterly and intensely that Hudaybi issued a directive from his prison cell calling for a cessation to the hostilities, although neither camp adhered to a ceasefire and skirmishes frequently occurred.

Meanwhile, Qutb continued to disseminate his ideas during daily lessons to the prisoners. According to attendees, these primarily focused on two themes: ‘aqida (Islamic doctrine), and siyasa (politics). Qutb reminded his disciples that if they harnessed the hidden power of ‘aqida, they would be emancipated and fearless; they would become closer to God and act as his faithful agents in reinstituting a just and pure Islamic order on earth. “His aim was to transform members from mere religious activists into revolutionaries to confront the internal and external enemies of Islam,” confided Eid. “He made new men out of us, armed us with ‘aqida and summoned us to reestablish Islam in its purity and beauty in a similar way to that of the early Muslims.”

Eid’s recollections testify to the power of Qutb’s message, written especially for the youth who he hoped would spearhead the coming Islamist revolution. “Unfettered by previous conventional interpretations of the Qur’an, Qutb offered his own interpretation in a straightforward and accessible style and addressed us in captivating language that resonated with all of us,” Eid recalled. “My eyes welled with tears when Qutb dictated some passages of his masterpieces, Signposts and his Qur’anic exegesis,” said Eid, who transcribed books that Qutb dictated to him during their time together in prison. “I and many others felt that he was giving expression to our deepest aspirations and fears about the plight of Egypt and the ummah, and the threat posed by renegade rulers and their masters—crusaders and Zionists.”

The hardening of attitudes among some Muslim Brothers members translated into a determination to take practical steps to strike violently at the Nasserist state. Some of those who had moved in these circles at that time, whether inside or outside of prison, told me that they had wanted to kill Nasser and his close aides. More ambitious members had visions of overthrowing the regime as a whole and replacing it with a Qur’an-inspired government. A common thread among these newly radicalized recruits was visceral hatred of Nasser and what he represented.

“We wanted to pull Nasser’s junta up by its roots and liberate our Ikhwan brethren from captivity,” recollected Ali Ashmawi, who took steps to achieve these ends and planned to kill Nasser. “Initially, our aim was to prevent the Ikhwan organization from disintegrating and to prepare the ground for a future uprising against Nasser and his thugs. We wanted organizational continuity but with new blood and fresh faces unknown to the security services.”

Of all al-Tanzim’s lieutenants and foot soldiers, Ashmawi was the most forthcoming about the history of the organization because he had little to lose, having been demonized by the Brotherhood for breaking down under torture following his arrest in 1965 and exposing his co-conspirators. His old cohorts have never forgiven this “human act of weakness and treachery,” as he put it, although he assured me that when he found himself sitting next to Qutb in a courtroom some weeks after their arrest, the latter showed empathy for his plight. “I explained to him that the Ikhwan abused me and treated me like a pariah in prison. Qutb reassured me that he understood my predicament and that blaming the victim is wrong. ‘Nasser’s security men are the villains, not you,’ [he] added with a gentle smile on his face,” according to Ashmawi.

Ashmawi’s narrative is significant for this study as he was present at the birth of al-Tanzim and served as its military field commander. His is the most unscripted, comprehensive, and revealing voice on the issues at stake, and the least constrained by any existing connections with the Brotherhood. Most of Ashmawi’s recollections are corroborated by other members of al-Tanzim and independent sources.

Others who moved in these circles at the time also confirmed the shift to more militant views that was then under way. “We could not be passive while our brethren were being unjustly abused and oppressed,” said Ahmed Abdel Majid. “That would have violated one of the fundamental tenets of our religion; resisting injustice and defying renegade rulers.” Beyond the question of vengeance and a perceived duty to defend their oppressed co-religionists, taking action against Nasser under these circumstances was also seen as necessary in order to defend Islam itself. “Once Nasser’s regime persecuted the Ikhwan, it became obligatory for us to step forward and defend Islam,” said Abdel Majid. Challenged on his implicit assumption that the Brotherhood could be directly equated with Islam per se, he responded that “the Islamist movement is the guardian and protector of Islam… If you target its sons, you are harming Islam and hindering its growth.”

More and more former disciples of Qutb told me their priority had been to eliminate Nasser: “We concluded that Nasser must go. We wanted to kill the devil and rid Egypt of him,” agreed Abdel A’l Aw’d Musa, who was introduced to me by Abdel Majid. The two men knew each other from al-Tanzim and became best friends while in prison. “Blinded by hatred and revenge, many of us pledged to assassinate Nasser and be martyred in the process,” added Aw’d, who, as mentioned previously, was in charge of an underground cell which, although initially designed to assist the families of incarcerated Ikhwan members, became tasked with the more ambitious goal of subverting the Nasser regime. “My unit’s fundamental goal was to kill Nasser and avenge our persecuted Brethren,” he explained. “We recruited between fifty and seventy fit young men, raised one thousand pounds to carry out the operation, and trained and readied ourselves for an opportune moment.” The cell selected Alexandria as an ideal location and developed a plan to position three separate assassination teams armed with automatic weapons.

However, as division over whether it would be better to assassinate Nasser or overthrow the regime hardened, the plan never came to fruition. “As we talked to other members who had also organized themselves in small paramilitary units, our plot met with stiff resistance and opposition from senior leaders who warned against rash actions inspired by vengeance and emotion. We were told that killing Nasser would not dramatically change the system and that a like-minded secular dictator would replace him. It was not easy to postpone our short-term goal of punishing Nasser for his crimes, for the greater good of overthrowing the corrupt, decadent regime,” explained Aw’d. “While debating the decision with our Brothers, we cried and prayed for inspiration and wisdom. What you need to comprehend is that Nasser hurt us badly and left deep scars in both our souls and our bodies,” he emphasized.

Allergic to the accusation that radical Islamism sprang from within their ranks, contemporary Brotherhood leaders deny even very existence of al-Tanzim as an armed force. “Why do you keep quizzing me about Qutb’s al-Tanzim?” Mahmoud Izzat, a 70-year-old multimillionaire who currently runs the organization in exile, demanded of me angrily, arguing that “the whole thing is a Nasserist construction invented by his intelligence thugs to use as a bludgeon against the Ikhwan,” he assured me. Others within the Islamist group, while acknowledging the existence of al-Tanzim, deny that it ever had the blessing of the leadership. Senior official Abdel Khaleq continually insisted that the senior leadership, particularly the General Guide, had not sanctioned Qutb’s paramilitary organization. “Hudaybi’s hands had already been burned, and he would not let a few well-meaning and excited activists ignite a fire that would destroy the organization,” he insisted.

Although Qutb kept his recruitment of followers inside the prisons, radical activist Zeinab al-Ghazali Ghazali seems to have acted as an intermediary between Qutb and Hudaybi, the General Guide, thus pointing to some kind of awareness and approval of the existence of al-Tanzim by the Brotherhood’s top leadership. The nature of this relationship goes to the very heart of a broader question regarding whether al-Tanzim was a paramilitary arm of the Brotherhood or an independent venture undertaken by young dissidents. From the time of the exposure of al-Tanzim in 1965, the Egyptian authorities launched a propaganda offensive aimed at undermining the Islamist group as a whole asserting that al-Tanzim was its affiliate. Against this background, officials of the Brotherhood have repeatedly denied that the broader movement and its leadership played any formal role in al-Tanzim and have accused the Nasserist state of manufacturing evidence.

Primary evidence suggests that Hudaybi did in fact sanction al-Tanzim. Abdel Majid recalled that after Abdel Khaleq, the General Guide’s trusted man, had refused to take charge of the organization, its members had approached Hudaybi directly to seek his approval. “We could not have moved forward without the authorization of the supreme guide because we needed religious legitimation,” said Ali Ashmawi. The young lieutenant. “We sought and promptly received Hudaybi’s approval.”

All surviving members of al-Tanzim say that from the outset, Qutb himself had refused to head the underground group unless he obtained an official decree from the General Guide. These contradictory internal accounts are unsurprising given that the Islamist organization was in a state of virtual paralysis. Hudaybi wanted to have it both ways: to shield the political organization against accusations, while keeping his options open with regard to the possibility of militarily confronting the Nasserist state.

The Clampdown on al-Tanzim

For his part, Qutb assured his disciples that his death would in fact serve as a catalyst for his cherished Islamist revolution. There are many accounts of the final hours leading up to Qutb’s execution on August 29, 1966. A common thread that runs through these stories is that Qutb went to the gallows with no hesitation or regret. From interviews with his disciples, a portrait emerges of the man as a crusader who was unafraid to die for his beliefs and in fact welcomed martyrdom. Well versed in Islamic history, Qutb knew better than Nasser the enduring and powerful role that iconic symbols and martyrs have played in Islamic tradition. One of the few images that exist of Qutb on the day of his hanging shows him with a smile on his face.

Qutb was buried in an unmarked grave in al-Qarafa al-Kubra (the Great Cemetery) but has remained alive in the minds and hearts of Islamists worldwide, endearingly referred to as al-Shahid al-Hayy (the living martyr). “Qutb’s words have a special resonance due to his steadfastness in the face of tyranny,” said Shazili, who would eventually be imprisoned after al-Tanzim was crushed in 1965; he spent almost a decade behind bars. “By practicing and living what he preached, he set an enduring model for future generations of religious dissidents.”

Conclusion

The relationship between Qutb and the Brotherhood was fraught with tensions and contradictions. Qutb was an outsider, a belated convert to the cause. Only 18 months after his official joining of the Islamist group in 1953, he was arrested and Qutb never really developed institutional links within the Brotherhood. A maverick with a volatile character, he was not the type to toe the party line.

According to his disciples, Qutb saw himself as guiding the Islamist caravan in the right direction and rescuing Islam from oblivion. His attempted coup against the Brotherhood shows the extent of his ideological transformation as a revolutionary Islamist theorist and ideologue, and his determination to bring about real change. He aimed at dismantling all existing institutions, including his own mainstream Islamist group. This fact does not match the emphasis typically placed by Qutb’s biographers on continuity over discontinuity, and their tendency to portray Qutb as simply an extension of the Brotherhood institutional family.

What emerges from Qutb’s formative years and early adulthood was his quest for recognition and deference, no matter which circles he navigated. Unsuccessful in the literary scene and with the Free Officers, his new reinterpretation of Islam finally won him the recognition for which he had so urgently strived. In his own writings, the carefully crafted image of Qutb is that of a prophet-like, selfless man whose total embrace of Islam allowed him to reestablish the sovereignty of God on earth (hakimiyya). In this context, it is unsurprising that the political struggle between the Nasserist state and the Qutbian Islamists has come to be invested with existential overtones. With both camps repeating mirroring narratives of the Other as an existential threat, violence became the norm.

Unfortunately, this vision is still a prevalent feature of Arab politics and has contributed to the rise of waves of radical jihadists, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. This initial framing of the struggle as existential has been recycled by subsequent generations of religious activists and nationalists. Today this fierce struggle plays out in Egypt, the most populous Arab state, and in neighboring Arab countries. In their quest for power, both Nasser and the Brotherhood laid the foundation for an articulation of politics and of the relationship between ruler and people as strictly unitary and autocratic, thus paving the way for the institutionalization and normalization of one-party authoritarian rule and religious extremism.

Trump Approves Release of 2nd Set of JFK Files, Still not All

So, who was Valeriy Kostikov? It is said he was Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB handler. The 'Kostin' letter

In part from McClatchy: In 1975, just three years after the nearly 50-year reign of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover came to an end, the bureau looked into rumors that Oswald had penned a threatening note to the FBI office in Dallas shortly before the assassination. No records were found, but Dallas agents said that Oswald had indeed left a threatening handwritten message.

Congressional investigators established that Hosty’s boss, Gordon Shanklin, demanded that he rip up the letter and flush it down the toilet — reportedly under orders from Hoover, who was incensed that the Dallas office had embarrassed the agency by not seeing Oswald as a threat. The former Marine had defected to the Soviet Union, but returned a few years later.

The report by Hosty to headquarters, with little held from public view on Thursday, makes clear that Hosty did tell FBI bosses that Oswald was violent and had been living and working as a maintenance man in New Orleans before moving to Dallas in the spring of 1963. And it confirms Oswald was under surveillance at the time of the assassination.

Another Hosty document, which also had been partially released earlier, has Hoover gushing praise for Hosty in 1971 for work he did as a field agent in Kansas City.

“Your performance relative to a matter of considerable importance to the Bureau in the security field is worthy of praise and warrants commendation,” Hoover wrote.

Thursday’s new documents offer nothing more on Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of assassination. A single document among the roughly 35,000 released last year showed that he’d been listed in CIA files as an asset, an explosive revelation. Cabell’s brother Charles had been a top CIA leader until a year before the killing.

The documents do, however, fill in some blanks about a Soviet Embassy official in Mexico City who met with Oswald weeks before the assassination. Over the decades Oswald’s meetings in Mexico City with the Cuban and Soviet embassies, purportedly to get a visa to Cuba in hopes of returning to the Soviet Union, have gradually been revealed.

One of the Soviets he had contact with was Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov. Little was known about his role, but the CIA confirmed to the original assassination investigators that Kostikov was likely part of the feared Department 13 assassination unit of the Soviet spy agency, the KGB.

It is now known that, at minimum, Oswald had phone conversations while in Mexico with Kostikov. Among the further-released documents Thursday were references to Kostikov being “Oswald’s KGB handler.”

That’s found in a May 1982 memo from what appears to be an unidentified foreign intelligence agency or U.S. asset in the Middle East asking longtime CIA Soviet Division leader David Blee about Kostikov. The questioner notes that the Soviets were behind increased harassment of foreign embassies in Beirut — less than a year before a truck bomb leveled the U.S. embassy there, killing 241 U.S. marines and military personnel.

“The reason for our interest in KOSTIKOV will be obvious,” writes the official to Blee. That document was one of more than 15,000 that Thursday were left with some form of partial redaction.

A number of documents relating to the Miami-based anti-Castro group Alpha 66 were included in Thursday’s release, as well. One curious one, dated February 1971, documents how the group outsmarted the FBI a year earlier. The FBI had raided its Miami offices and taken files.

“Apparently Alpha 66 had duplicates hidden because today duplicates of the files which the FBI removed are in their filing cabinets,” the memo from the CIA noted.

Alpha 66 had been headed by Antonio Veciana, who still resides in Miami and is elderly and in frail health. In an interview with McClatchy last year he reasserted that a top CIA Latin America official, David Atlee Phillips, had been working with Oswald to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro. His implication was that Oswald was trained to take out Castro but turned on Kennedy.

Another Miami-related document quotes an American journalist who had been imprisoned in Cuba in 1963 as hearing from a fellow prisoner that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald just days after the Kennedy assassination, had frequented Cuba and had mafia ties on the island.

*** As an aside, Jack Ruby was a close friend of Santo Trafficante, a mafia mob boss based in Tampa with substantial investments in Cuba. The mob was called upon by Joe Kennedy to help deliver votes for JFK and that request was granted and successful. When President Kennedy named his brother, Robert as the Attorney General, Bobby took up the mission to destroy the mob and this infuriated Trafficante and other mob bosses. Prior to this, the mafia was brought in by the CIA to plot the overthrow or assassination of Fidel Castro. West Tampa Center For The Arts Blog  photo

***

New Group of JFK Assassination Documents Available to the Public
Press Release · Thursday, April 26, 2018

WASHINGTON —

In accordance with President Trump’s direction on October 26, 2017, the National Archives today posted 19,045 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act).   Released documents are available for download.  The versions released today were processed by agencies in accordance with the President’s direction that agency heads be extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, established by the National Archives in November 1992, consists of approximately five million pages.  The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.  As permitted by the JFK Act, agencies appealed to the President to continue postponement of certain information beyond October 26, 2017.  The President provided agencies with a temporary certification until April 26, 2018 to allow for a re-review of all documents withheld in full or in part under section 5 of the JFK Act and directed agencies to “identify as much as possible that may be publicly disclosed” and to be “extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement.”

Based on reviews conducted by agencies in accordance with the President’s direction, the National Archives released 3,539 documents on Dec. 15, 10,744 documents on Nov. 17, 13,213 documents on Nov. 9, and 676 documents on Nov. 3 of last year.  The 19,045 documents released today represent the final release of documents in accordance with the President’s direction on October 26, 2017.

All documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act have been released in full or in part.  No documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act remain withheld in full.  The President has determined that all information that remains withheld under section 5 must be reviewed again before October 26, 2021 to determine whether continued withholding from disclosure is necessary.

 

Online Resources:
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
Documenting the Death of a President
JFK Assassination Records Review Board
The work of the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
JFK Assassination Records FAQs
Warren Commission Report

Germany’s al Qaeda/Jihad Problems Include Welfare Payments

Primer: May 16. Ziyad K., a 32-year-old Iraqi Yazidi, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for raping two Chinese students, aged 22 and 28, at the University of Bochum in August and November 2016. Police linked the man, who was living with his wife and two children in a refugee shelter in Bochum, to both crimes through DNA evidence. “He has never shown remorse,” Prosecutor Andreas Bachmann said. “How could a person fleeing from violence and danger come to do this terrible violence to other people?”

The Muslim population of Germany surpassed six million in 2017 to become approximately 7.2% of the overall population of 83 million, according to calculations by the Gatestone Institute.

A recent Pew Research Center study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe estimated that Germany’s Muslim population had reached five million by the middle of 2016, but that number is short by at least a million.

Pew, for instance, “decided not to count” the more than one million Muslim asylum seekers who arrived in the country in 2015-2017 because “they are not expected to receive refugee status.” European Union human rights laws, however, prohibit Germany from deporting many, if not most, of the refugees and asylum seekers back to conflict areas. As a result, most migrants who arrived in the country will almost certainly remain there over the long term.

In addition, German authorities have admitted to losing track of potentially hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of whom are living on German streets and are believed to be sustaining themselves on a steady diet of drug dealing, pickpocketing, purse snatching and other forms of petty crime. Much more detail here.

*** Copyright: Matthias Graben (WAZ) photo

According to the German newspaper WAZ, Sami A. allegedly recruited young Muslims in Bochum mosques to join the “Holy War.” The paper also linked him to the radicalization of two members of the so-called Düsseldorf al Qaeda cell.

WAZ also reported that Sami A. had taught two terrorists in Bochum mosques: 21-one-year-old Amid C. from Bochum and 28-year-old Halil S. from nearby Gelsenkirchen. Both reportedly received ideological training from him for their alleged terrorist plan. The two young men are on trial in Düsseldorf, accused of planning an attack together with two accomplices. According to the indictment, they intended to plant a cluster bomb in a crowd of people and “spread fear and terror in Germany.” More here.

Newsweek: The alleged former bodyguard of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden has been found collecting welfare checks from the government in Germany, according to local media, because he cannot be deported—even though he was refused asylum status.

A report in the German tabloid Bild said the man, named only as 42-year-old Sami A to protect his privacy, cannot be deported to his native Tunisia because he is at risk of torture there. He has lived in Germany since 1997 and has a wife and three children.

Sami A collects around $1,430 a month in welfare from the German government, a figure revealed after the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) asked questions of the local authority where he lives in Bochum, near the Dutch border.

He was accused by witnesses in a terrorism trial back in 2005 of having been Bin Laden’s bodyguard near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a few months at the turn of the millennium, something the judge said he believed to be true, though Sami A denies it.

German authorities regard Sami A as a “dangerous preacher,” reported Spiegel Online in 2012, and prosecutors say he was responsible for the radicalization of two men who later former part of a terror cell caught planning a bomb attack.

Though considered a security risk, no charges of Al Qaeda membership have so far been brought against Sami A. He must report every day to the police in Bochum, which he has done so since 2006. He was refused asylum status because of the security concerns, the BBC reported.

Lesley Stahl vs. Betsy DeVos on Education

US Parents Involved in Education, USPIE, explains more details about the Federal government in public education. Common Core is still alive in many states, while in others, it just has a different name. Furthermore, not only is the Federal government at the state level working on regulating homeschooling, there is the whole matter of zero privacy for students. This is a terrifying condition.

http://preventcommoncore.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Common-Core-Copyright.jpg photo

Wonder if Lesley Stahl reads The Hill and this significant report or if Betsy DeVos has read it.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ recent interview with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” caused quite a bit of backlash from critics.

DS: As my colleague Jonathan Butcher has written, “60 Minutes” ignored many of the facts about the state of education in America. Response to the interview drew quite a bit of criticism of DeVos and her policy solutions.

Perhaps one of the most pivotal moments came when she suggested that the United States’ heavy federal investment in education has not yielded any results. Stahl hit back, asserting that school performance has been on the rise.

But the latest government data show otherwise. According to the recently released 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s “report card,” we now have more evidence that DeVos was correct.

In fact, recent scores show virtually no improvement over 2015 scores. Eighth-grade reading saw a single point improvement over 2015 scores (10 points is considered equivalent to a grade level), while all other categories saw no improvement.

These lackluster results come on the heels of declines on the 2015 assessment, suggesting the beginning of a trend in the wrong direction for academic outcomes.

>>> Nation’s ‘Report Card’ Shows Federal Intervention Has Not Helped Students

Indeed, Stahl’s claim that the state of public schools has gotten better simply doesn’t hold up to the data. It fact, DeVos is entirely correct to point out that public school outcomes have not meaningfully improved, and that our nation’s heavy federal intervention in K-12 education has failed to help the problem.

As Heritage Foundation education fellow Lindsey Burke writes:

Forty-nine out of 50 states were stagnant on the 2017 report card, and achievement gaps persist. Historically, federal education spending has been appropriated to close gaps, yet this spending—more than $2 trillion in inflation-adjusted spending at the federal level alone since 1965—has utterly failed to achieve that goal.

Increasing federal intervention over the past half-century, and the resulting burden of complying with federal programs, rules, and regulations, have created a parasitic relationship with federal education programs and states, and is straining the time and resources of local schools.

Indeed, for decades, Washington has poured billions of dollars into the public education system under the assumption that more federal spending will close achievement caps and improve the academic outcomes of students. With mounting evidence that more federal spending is not the answer, it may be time to consider other policy approaches.

DeVos is correct to suggest school choice as a solution to lackluster school performance. Parents who cannot afford to send their child to a school that is the right fit deserve to have options. As DeVos told Stahl:

Any family that has the economic means and the power to make choices is doing so for their children. Families that don’t have the power, that can’t decide, ‘I’m gonna move from this apartment in downtown whatever to the suburb where I think the school is gonna be better for my child.’ If they don’t have that choice, and they are assigned to that school, they are stuck there. I am fighting for the parents who don’t have those choices. We need all parents to have those choices.

In light of recent evidence from the nation’s report card, “60 Minutes” and other school choice critics should consider that DeVos was correct in her framing of problems facing the nation’s schools and is on the right track with possible solutions—namely, that empowering parents is the right approach to improving American education.