Category Archives: Iran Israel

Is the White House Forcing the Pentagon to Lie?

Posted on by

Islamic State is in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Militias standing with Islamic State have infested all of North Africa and Yemen. Analyzing the threat matrix takes a fleet of analysts, lawyers, policy and intelligence people to make any quality estimates however, it is dynamic, changing each week.

One other detail, while it was a few months ago that several Gulf States including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia listed the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization, the Kingdom has twisted that definition and is working with the Brotherhood in Yemen….stay tuned.

 

“Exclusive: Pentagon Map Hides ISIS Gains,” by Tim Mak,

April 22, 2015:

The U.S. military presented evidence that it was beating back the so-called Islamic State but it doesn’t even count coalition setbacks.

The Defense Department released a map last week showing territory where it is has pushed ISIS back, claiming that the terrorist group is “no longer able to operate freely in roughly 25 to 30 percent of populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once could.” This was touted as evidence of success by numerous news outlets.

Pushing ISIS back is clearly a good step. But the information from the Pentagon is, at best, misleading and incomplete, experts in the region and people on the ground tell The Daily Beast. They said the map misinforms the public about how effective the U.S.-led effort to beat back ISIS has actually been. The map released by the Pentagon excludes inconvenient facts in some parts, and obscures them in others.

The Pentagon’s map assessing the so-called Islamic State’s strength has only two categories: territory held by ISIS currently, and territory lost by ISIS since coalition airstrikes began in August 2014. The category that would illustrate American setbacks—where ISIS has actually gained territory since the coalition effort began—is not included….

The map also shows areas where ISIS is “dominant,” as opposed to the terrorist group’s operational reach—the areas where it can inflict violence….

“ISIL’s own doctrine says it must gain and hold territory. This map shows they are not achieving their stated goals,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told The Daily Beast, using the government’s preferred acronym for the terror group.

But Warren seemed to acknowledge that the map isn’t entirely accurate.

The document “was not meant to be a detailed tactical map—it is simply a graphic used to explain the overall situation,” he said.

The entire battlefield of the ISIS war isn’t depicted, however. For some reason, the Pentagon’s ISIS map excludes the entire western side of Syria—which, coincidentally or not, is an area where ISIS has gained a significant foothold since the U.S.-led bombing effort began last year.

Western Syria is also an area dominated by the Syrian regime, led by President Bashar al-Assad. The United States has insisted that Assad must leave office, but has not elucidated a clear strategy for how to compel this to occur.

Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow specializing in Syria at the Institute for the Study of War, said that while the map, as presented, looked accurate, she would “highlight that the map doesn’t extend to include western Syria, where there is growing ISIS presence… the map cuts off, essentially ignoring ISIS in the Syrian-Lebanese border region and Damascus.”

ISIS gains in the area excluded from the Pentagon’s map should be noted, Cafarella continued, because “they are a forward investment for ISIS that will create long-term opportunities for further expansion into zones in which coalition airstrikes are unlikely, at least in the near term, to penetrate..”

Since airstrikes began in August, ISIS has also shown its force on the northeastern suburbs of Damascus, near Qabun. More recently, ISIS made international news through a violent takeover of the area surrounding a Palestinian refugee camp called Yarmouk, which U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has described as “the deepest circle of hell.”…

Iran’s Nuke Program Clone in Oak Ridge

Posted on by

We know with near precision the current phase of all Iran’s nuclear program progress stands. How you ask? We have better scientists than Iran does and have been advancing these technologies for far longer. In fact, the United States has a clone operation located in Oak Ridge. This makes the P5+1 negotiations with John Kerry in the lead all the more…well stupid and frankly…reckless.

Primer:

ORNL plays an important role in national and global security by virtue of its expertise in advanced materials, nuclear science, supercomputing and other scientific specialties. Discovery and innovation in these areas are essential for protecting US citizens and advancing national and global security priorities. ORNL supports these missions by using its signature strengths to meet complex national security challenges in a number of areas.

Nuclear Nonproliferation – The laboratory’s expertise and experience covers the spectrum of nuclear nonproliferation work, from basic R&D to “boots-on-the-ground” implementation. This work ranges from uranium fuel cycle research to detection technologies and nuclear forensics. ORNL’s non-proliferation activities include developing, coordinating and helping to implement policies designed to reduce threats from a variety of sources, including nuclear weapons and “dirty bombs.”

National Defense – ORNL works with the US Department of Defense to respond to global challenges by developing and delivering advanced technologies in areas such as special materials; information management, synthesis and analysis; advanced sensor technology; energy efficiency technologies; early warning systems for chemical and biological threats; and unmanned air, ground and sea systems.

Then there is Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago where scientists have been at the forefront of nuclear reactor technology since the lab’s founding in 1946 as the home of the world’s first reactors. Groundbreaking research performed at the lab over the following decades led to the creation of the current generation of American nuclear reactors.

Checks and Balances for negotiations:

In Atomic Labs Across U.S., a Race to Stop Iran

WASHINGTON — When diplomats at the Iran talks in Switzerland pummeled Department of Energy scientists with difficult technical questions — like how to keep Iran’s nuclear plants open but ensure that the country was still a year away from building a bomb — the scientists at times turned to a secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities built deep in the forests of Tennessee.

There inside a gleaming plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation were giant centrifuges — some surrendered more than a decade ago by Libya, others built since — that helped the scientists come up with what they told President Obama were the “best reasonable” estimates of Iran’s real-life ability to race for a weapon under different scenarios.

“We know a lot more about Iranian centrifuges than we would otherwise,” said a senior nuclear specialist familiar with the forested site and its covert operations.

The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation’s nine atomic laboratories — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them — to block Iran’s nuclear progress. As the next round of talks begins on Wednesday in Vienna, the secretive effort remains a technological obsession for thousands of lab employees living the Manhattan Project in reverse. Instead of building a bomb, as their predecessors did in a race to end World War II, they are trying to stop one.

Ernest J. Moniz, the nuclear scientist and secretary of energy, who oversees the atomic labs, said in an interview that as the Obama administration sought technical solutions at the talks, diplomats would have been stumbling in the dark “if we didn’t have this capability nurtured over many decades.” Although Mr. Moniz would not discuss the secret plant at Oak Ridge, parts of which date to the American and Israeli program to launch cyberattacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, he said more generally that the atomic labs give the United States “the capacity to carry through” in one of the most complex arms-control efforts in history.

It has also changed the labs. In the bomb-making days, the scientists largely kept to their well-guarded posts. But anyone traveling to the Iran talks over the past year and a half in Vienna and Lausanne, Switzerland, saw the Energy Department experts working hard as the negotiations proceeded, and heading out to dinner after long days of talks.

It was over one of those dinners in Vienna last summer that several of the experts began wondering how they might find a face-saving way for Iran to convert its deep-underground enrichment plant at Fordo, a covert site exposed by the United States five years ago, into a research center. That would enable Iran to say the site was still open, and the United States could declare it was no longer a threat.

“The question was what kind of experiment you can do deep underground,” recalled a participant in the dinner. By the time coffee came around, the kernel of an idea had developed, and it subsequently became a central part of the understanding with Iran that Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Moniz announced this month. Under the preliminary accord, Fordo would become a research center, but not for any element that could potentially be used in nuclear weapons.

Sometimes, during negotiations in Switzerland, a member of the scientific team would dump a bowl of chocolates on the table and rearrange them to show the Iranians how a proposed site rearrangement might work. “It was a visual way,” an official said, “to get past the language barrier.”

But much of the work was done back at the labs, where specialists who had become accustomed to more 9-to-5 days found themselves on call seven days a week, around the clock, answering questions from negotiators and, at times, backing up the answers with calculations and computer modeling.

A senior official of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kevin Veal, who has been along for every negotiating session, would send questions back to the laboratories, hoping to separate good ideas from bad. “It’s what our people love to do,” said Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It can be very rewarding.”

Given the stakes in the sensitive negotiations, the labs would check and recheck one another, making sure the answers held up. The natural rivalries among the labs sometimes worked to the negotiators’ advantage: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mountains of New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, was happy to find flaws in calculations done elsewhere, and vice versa.

“A lot of what we did was behind the scenes,” said Charles F. McMillan, the Los Alamos director.

A prime target of the effort was redesigning Iran’s still-under-construction nuclear reactor at Arak, a sprawling complex ringed by antiaircraft guns. The question was how to prevent the reactor from producing weapons-grade plutonium, a main fuel of atom bombs. Iran insisted the reactor was being built to produce medical isotopes for disease therapy.

Last year, when the Iranians proposed a way to redesign Arak, the job of assessing the plans fell to Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, one of the world’s most experienced developers of nuclear reactors.

The lab refined the Iranian idea, making sure Arak’s new fuel core would produce no pure bomb-grade plutonium. Eventually, the Iranians signed on. It is one of the few elements of the provisional nuclear deal between Iran, the United States and five other world powers that looks like a permanent fix because in order to produce weapons fuel, the whole reactor would have to undergo an obvious overhaul.

In lauding the deal announced early this month, Mr. Moniz put the redesign of Arak at the top of the achievements list, saying it “shuts down the plutonium pathway.”

At other times, scientists were on tight deadlines to come up with solutions.

Late last year, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was traveling by train to visit his children when a call came in that his team had to immediately reassess Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment plant. There in a vast underground bunker mazes of centrifuges spin around the clock to purify uranium, another bomb fuel.

The question was whether a proposed design of Natanz that allowed more than 6,000 centrifuges to spin would still accomplish the administration’s goal of keeping Iran at least a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. The answer was yes.

William H. Goldstein, the director of the Livermore lab, said the required turnaround for answers “was hours in some cases.”

Fordo, the most troubling of Iran’s many nuclear sites, was another major challenge. The enrichment complex there is buried so far under a mountain that Israel fears it could not wipe out the site and its nearly 3,000 centrifuges with airstrikes. The United States has only one bunker-busting weapon that might accomplish the job.

Over the dinner last summer in Vienna, the scientists and American negotiators discussed how to turn the mountain fortress into a peaceful research center.

The answer lay in the deep-underground nature of the site, which made it excellent for an observatory to track invisible rays from cosmic explosions, opening a new window onto the universe. (The rocky strata of the site would filter out extraneous signals.) Another idea was to use the installed centrifuges for purifying rare forms of elements used in medicine rather than for uranium.

In early March, Oak Ridge in Tennessee got a call from the negotiators. They needed to learn more about the idea of purifying elements, to make sure that it was possible and that the equipment left in the mountain could not be easily turned to producing nuclear fuel.

An Oak Ridge team went into action, working Friday night into Saturday. That afternoon, Mr. Mason, the Oak Ridge director, was able to send a report to Washington, which was then delivered to Mr. Moniz.

“The answer was ‘yes,’ ” Mr. Mason said. “It was feasible.”

In the interview, Mr. Moniz said he spoke to his lab directors last week and asked them to think hard about other uses for the Fordo complex, an issue that will be on the table when negotiators resume their talks this week.

The world of science, Mr. Moniz said, has lots of peaceful projects that would help move the mountainous fortress off the pathway to atomic bombs.

“We’re going to be thinking,” he said, “about other directions.” The question is whether, in the last weeks of the negotiations, the Iranians will go along.

Did Susan Rice Leak Classified Info on Purpose?

Posted on by

There was a profound moment when the Prime Minister of Israel gave a presentation at the United Nations on Iran’s readiness of their break-out period on their nuclear weapon using a cartoon as a prop. The Obama administration later used it as satire against Netanyahu.

Capture

Seems, a year or so later, the White House is agreeing….pigs fly…..

Did Susan Rice Disclose Classified Info on Iran?

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports Tuesday that the Obama administration kept secret until the beginning of April Iran’s two to three month breakout time for a nuclear weapon, saying “the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, speaking to reporters on Monday, said that the administration has held this assessment for “quite some time.” Lake says that Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed Monday “that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.”

However, at least one member of the administration publicly spoke about the two-to-three-month breakout time frame prior to April. On March 2, 2015, National Security Advisor Susan Rice addressed the annual AIPAC meeting and said the following [emphasis added]:

This is my third point—a good deal is one that would verifiably cut off every pathway for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.  Every single one.

Any deal must prevent Iran from developing weapons-grade plutonium at Arak, or anywhere else.

Any deal must prevent Iran from enriching uranium at its nuclear facility at Fordow—a site we uncovered buried deep underground and revealed to the world in 2009.

Any deal must increase the time it takes Iran to reach breakout capacity—the time it would take to produce a single bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium.  Today, experts suggest Iran’s breakout window is just two to three months.  We seek to extend that to at least one year.

Rice’s disclosure suggests that either DNI spokesman Brian Hale is incorrect in his assertion that the assessment was declassified on April 1, or Rice revealed classified information.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Rice’s March disclosure.

From HotAir:

Only a few short weeks later, that framework nuclear deal appears increasingly dubious. Iran has demanded that it sunset after only five rather than ten years. The Islamic Republic also wants to operate twice the number of centrifuges agreed to in Switzerland. The administration insists that it will provide sanctions relief to Iran in stages, but Tehran contends that it will have total relief right up front. According to The Wall Street Journal, the mullahs learned on Friday that they will receive billions in unfrozen funds once a deal is signed even as American and Iranian warships engage in a tense standoff off the coast of Yemen.

Few believe that the complex international sanctions regime in place today, a web of commitments that took years to assemble, could “snap back” in the event that Iran failed to live up to its end of the deal. “[O]nly a credulous sixth-grader could imagine that in the event that there is some evidence of Iranian cheating (and the evidence inevitably will be murky, incomplete, and subject to debate) that countries such as France and Germany, which are eager to do business with Tehran, much less countries such as China and Russia, which are not only cozy with Tehran but hostile to Western interests in general, will agree to reimpose sanctions,” Commentary Magazine’s Max Boot observed.

While Netanyahu might not have accurately assessed Iran’s nuclear capabilities in 2012, he was apparently correct when he insisted earlier this month that “Iran’s breakout time from start of deal will be near zero.” Today, Americans are learning that the administration knew Netanyahu was telling the truth about Iranian breakout times even as it was mocking him before an audience of the president’s sycophantic and naïve Twitter fans. As The Daily Beat’s Eli Lake wrote on Tuesday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and a spokesman with the Director of National Intelligence’s office both confirmed that Iran could have the materials necessary to construct a fissionable device before the autumn.

“Here is the puzzling thing,” Lake wrote, “When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune.”

He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement.

Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama told Israel’s Channel Two, “Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close.”

On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian breakout with that of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability. Obama told the Associated Press, “Our assessment continues to be a year or more away. And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services.”

So, why mislead as this White House has misled when it invites an embarrassing rebuke like this? Because the lie is heard by all the right audiences, whereas the correction will languish in the obscure corners of the country where honesty remains a virtue.

Despite its mounting failures, the administration maintains its legitimacy by providing the smug and complacent reasons that justify their self-approbation. For many, the facts are fungible. So long as they believe in their hearts the president is brighter and more capable than his political opponents, no amount of demonstrable mendacity from the White House could shatter that belief. Even amid increasing evidence that this article of faith might not be true, the faithful will accept anything – even hastily constructed Twitter memes – so long as it affirms their creed.

“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said in a pivotal 1964 speech, “it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” And this White House hopes to keep it that way.

 

Iranian Hackers Eye U.S. Grid

Posted on by

iranhack4Cyber-savvy agents are stepping up their efforts to ID critical infrastructure that may compromise national security.

Iranian hackers are trying to identify computer systems that control infrastructure in the United States, such as the electrical grid, presumably with an eye towards damaging those systems, according to a new report from a cyber security firm and a think tank in Washington, D.C.

The researchers from Norse, a cyber security company, and the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that has been skeptical of the Iranian nuclear agreement, found that Iranian hacking against the U.S. is increasing and that the lifting of economic sanctions as part of an international agreement over Iran’s nuclear program “will dramatically increase the resources Iran can put toward expanding its cyberattack infrastructure.”

What’s more, the current sanctions regime, which has helped to depress Iran’s economy, has not blunted the expansion of its cyber spying and warfare capabilities, the researchers conclude.

The technical data underlying the report’s conclusions, while voluminous, aren’t definitive, and they don’t answer a central question of whether Iran intends to attack the U.S. Using data collected from a network of Norse “sensors” around the world made to look like vulnerable computers, the researchers tracked what they say is a dramatic escalation in spying and attacks on the U.S. from hackers in Iran, including within the Iranian military. The researchers also traced hacking back to a technical university in Iran, as well as other institutions either run or heavily influenced by the Iranian regime.

“Iran is emerging as a significant cyber threat to the U.S. and its allies,” the report’s authors say. “The size and sophistication of the nation’s hacking capabilities have grown markedly over the last few years, and Iran has already penetrated well-defended networks in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and seized and destroyed sensitive data.”

That assessment tracks with the view of U.S. intelligence officials, who’ve been alarmed by how quickly Iran has developed the capability to wreak havoc in cyberspace. In 2012, officials say that Iranian hackers were responsible for erasing information from 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil and gas production facility, as well as a denial-of-service attack that forced the websites of major U.S. banks to shut down under a deluge of electronic traffic. Earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that Iran was responsible for an attack on the Sands casino company in 2014, in which intruders stole and destroyed data from the company’s computers.

The Norse and AEI researchers found that Iran’s cyber capabilities, which U.S. officials and experts say have been growing rapidly since around 2009, have accelerated in the past year. Attacks launched from Iranian Internet addresses rose 128 percent between January 2013 and mid-March 2015, the researchers found. And the number of individual Norse sensors “hit” by Iranian Internet addresses increased 229 percent. All told, the researchers conclude that hackers using Iranian Internet addresses have “expended their attack infrastructure more than fivefold over the course of just 13 months.”

There’s little debate about among U.S. officials and experts that Iran poses a credible and growing danger online. But the technical data underlying Norse and AEI’s conclusions came into question when the report was released on Thursday.

The researchers relied on “scans” of Norse sensors that may indicate some interest by an Iranian hacker, but don’t prove his intent or that he was planning to damage a particular computer.

 

“They talk about ‘attacks,’ but what they really mean are ‘scans,” which is more ambiguous, Robert M. Lee, a PhD candidate at King’s College London who is researching industrial control systems, told The Daily Beast. Industrial control systems are the computers that help run critical infrastructure.

Essentially, Iranian hackers are casing a neighborhood, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to rob houses. Lee, who is also an active duty Air Force cyber warfare operations officer, said he agreed with the report’s assessment that Iran is building up its cyber forces and poses a threat. But the underlying technical data in the report doesn’t directly support that claim, he said. “They reached the right conclusions but for the wrong reasons,” Lee said.

The researchers didn’t find that Iran had successfully penetrated any industrial control systems and caused machinery to break down.

While the report concludes that Iran will use the sanctions relief to fuel its growing cyber warfare program, other researchers have suggested that Iran is likely to back off its most aggressive operations—like those against the Saudi oil company and U.S. banks—and will instead focus on cyber espionage that doesn’t cause physical damage.

“They’ll be far more targeted and careful,” Stuart McClure, the CEO and president of cybersecurity company Cylance, told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. Since the U.S. and its international partners reached a tentative agreement with Iran on its nuclear program earlier this month, Cylance hasn’t tracked any attacks by an Iranian hacker group that it has been monitoring and documented in an earlier report (PDF).

But Norse’s conclusions are generally supported by Cylance’s research, which found that Iran had actually penetrated systems controlling a range of critical infrastructure in the U.S., including oil and gas, energy and utilities, transportation, airlines, airports, hospitals, telecommunications, and aerospace companies. The company’s report on those intrusions, which it said was based on two years of research, also didn’t attribute any failures of critical infrastructure to those Iranian intrusions.

“A lot of the work [the Iranians] were doing was quite sloppy, almost to the point that they wanted to get caught,” McClure said. He speculated that the Iranians may have been trying to send a signal to the U.S. and their partners in the nuclear negotiations that they were capable of inflicting harm if they didn’t get a favorable deal. “Coming to the table and knowing your adversary is in your house influences the negotiation.”

Iran still has a way to go to join the ranks of the cyber superpowers. Its “cyberwarfare capabilities do not yet seem to rival those of Russia in skill, or ofChina in scale,” the Norse and AEI report finds. There is still a relatively small community of high-end hackers in the country, and the regime hasn’t been able to build as robust a tech infrastructure for launching attacks as other nations whose capabilities are more advanced, the researchers found.

The report identifies the Iranian government as responsible for the malicious activity, concluding that the traffic originated from organizations “controlled or influenced by the government” or moved over equipment that is known to be monitored and manipulated by Iran’s security services.

That claim is also likely to raise objection from technical experts, who generally demand more precise evidence to attribute a cyber operation to a specific actor.

“We are emphatically not suggesting that all malicious traffic emanating from Iran is government initiated or government-approved,” the researchers said. However, they argue “that the typical standards of proof for attributing malicious traffic to a specific source are unnecessarily high” in this case, given that so much of the traffic they observed traversed systems either owned, controlled, or spied on by the Iranian government.

That’s ironic: Earlier this year, when Obama administration officials declared publicly that North Korea was responsible for hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norse was one of the most prominent skeptics, arguing that the government was relying on imprecise technical data and leaping to conclusions.

Norse said its own research suggested that a group of six individuals, including at least one disgruntled ex-Sony employee, was behind the assault, which humiliated Sony executives and led to threats of terrorist attacks over the release of The Interview.

But that theory was undermined in January when FBI Director James Comey took the unusual step of publicly declassifying information that, he said, definitively linked North Korea to the attack. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials also told The Daily Beast that they’d been tracking the hackers behind the Sony operation long before it was ever launched.

On College Campuses…Really?

Posted on by

Islamic jihad comes to campus
Anti-Semitism under the guise of social justice is seeping into the college scene

By David Horowitz – – Thursday, April 16, 2015

The world is witnessing a resurgence of global anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s and the “Final Solution.” In the Middle East, Hitler-admiring regimes like Iran, and Hitler-admiring parties like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, are openly planning to finish the job the Nazis started. Even in America, until now the most hospitable place outside of Israel for Jews, the atmosphere is more hostile than at any time in the last 70 years.

According to the FBI, three-fifths of all religious hate crimes in America are now committed against Jews, while a recent Pew poll revealed that 54 percent of Jewish students have either been the subject of an anti-Semitic attack or witnessed one. The frequency of these attacks among college-aged students, moreover, is five times that of any other age group. The reason for this is obvious: Across the United States student groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, specifically Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association, are engaged in a vitriolic campaign against Israel and those students who support its right to exist. These organizations promote the propaganda of the terrorist organization Hamas, and call for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Students for Justice in Palestine, the more active of the two groups, claims to support a left-wing agenda of “social justice,” and “universal human rights.” Like the left itself, though, Students for Justice in Palestine doesn’t stand for the rights of Palestinians in the territories controlled by Palestinians, including the rights of Palestinians to disagree with each other without being targeted by their terrorist rulers. Instead, SJP’s sole agenda is the destruction of the Jewish state.

While SJP’s self-professed purpose is “to promote self-determination for the Palestinian people,” the organization defines the boundaries of this liberation as extending “from the river to the sea,” i.e., from the Jordan River on Israel’s eastern border to its western border on the Mediterranean. To advance this genocidal agenda, SJP endorses the lie that Israel was created on territory stolen from the Palestinians and, therefore, Jews illegally occupy Arab lands from which they must be purged.

In fact, Israel was created on land that had belonged to the Turks, who are not Arabs, for 400 years previously. In 1948 when Israel was created, there was no Palestinian political entity, no movement for a Palestinian state, and no people calling itself Palestinian. These core genocidal lies make up the primary agenda of SJP and its anti-Jewish allies, and are crowned by the ludicrous claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” with policies worthy of the “Nazis.” In fact, Israel is the only democratic and ethnically tolerant state in the Middle East, the only place where gays, Christians and women are safe. The real Nazis in the Middle East are the Arabs who openly call for the extermination of the Jews.

Despite its anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agendas, SJP is funded by university fees. University administrations officially recognize the organization and grant it the privilege of erecting walls of hate, and conducting “die-ins” and other propaganda stunts in campus centers where other students can’t avoid being assaulted by their noxious accusations.

University administrators who refuse to rein in this hatred operate under pressure from faculty and student activists of the anti-Israel “social justice” left. These include the self-hating Jews of J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, who join hands with their mortal enemies to condemn anyone who confronts SJP and the malignant forces it represents as “Islamophobes.”

As it happens, “Islamophobe” is a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood to demonize its opponents, and the center of a campaign seeking a universal ban on critics as religious blasphemers. The campaign’s success can be seen in President Obama’s refusal to call the terrorist Islamic State “Islamic,” or to describe the war waged by the Islamic State, al Qaeda and other Islamic terror organizations as a religious crusade.

Thanks to the savageries of the Islamic State, however, Americans have begun to wake up and to see Jews as canaries in the mine, and to understand that what is happening to Jews is also happening to Christians and others in the way of Islamic Nazis. Nonetheless, the continuing successes of front organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine are ominous indicators of the dangers that confront us, and should be a wake-up call, too.