Posted on 08/03/2017 4:33:09 AM PDT by SJackson
Break out the champagne
The New York Times reported last Friday that “an exodus is underway” in the State Department. The Times didn’t think this was good news; it gave space to one career diplomat who lamented that there was “complete and utter disdain for our expertise.”
This could be the best news to come out of Washington since the Trump administration took office.
We can only hope that with the departure of these failed State Department officials, their failed policies will be swept out along with them. Chief among these is the almost universally held idea that poverty causes terrorism. The United States has wasted uncounted (literally, because a great deal of it was in untraceable bags full of cash) billions of dollars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, and other countries in the wrongheaded assumption that Muslims turn to jihad because they lack economic opportunities and education. American officials built schools and hospitals, thinking that they were winning over the hearts and minds of the locals.
Fifteen years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later, no significant number of hearts and minds have been won. This is partly because the premise is wrong. The New York Times reported in March that “not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.”
CNS News noted in September 2013 that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”
Yet the analysis that poverty causes terrorism has been applied and reapplied and reapplied again. The swamp is in dire need of draining, and in other ways as well. From 2011 on, it was official Obama administration policy to deny any connection between Islam and terrorism. This came as a result of an October 19, 2011 letter from Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates to John Brennan, who was then the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism, and later served in the Obama administration as head of the CIA. The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA; and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
. The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam.” Despite the factual accuracy of the material about which they were complaining, the Muslim groups demanded that the task force “purge all federal government training materials of biased materials”; “implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training”; and more—to ensure that all that law enforcement officials would learn about Islam and jihad would be what the signatories wanted them to learn.
Numerous books and presentations that gave a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad were removed from coounterterror training. Today, even with Trump as President, this entrenched policy of the U.S. government remains, and ensures that all too many jihadists simply cannot be identified as risks, since the officials are bound as a matter of policy to ignore what in saner times would be taken as warning signs. Trump and Tillerson must reverse this. Trump has spoken often about the threat from “radical Islamic terrorism”; he must follow through and remove the prohibitions on allowing agents to study and understand the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat.
The swamp needs draining indeed. This news from the State Department, and the New York Times’ grief over it, are good signs that the U.S. is on its way back on dry land.
If your expertise is founded on contempt for the President and all things conservative, fine, be gone, foul plague. Do not darken our doorstep again.
Or, as my neighbor would say, between puffs on her Marlborough, “And don’t let the screen door hit you on the butt.” (Cough!)
WINNING!!!
More winning!
My first experience with the State Department was back in the 1960’s. It wasn’t a good one either, Arrogant... That’s the best way to describe the people I met and their biggest and most chosen weapon was ‘money’. They threw money at everything and expected it to fix all problems.
All it did was make the ‘people’ they were assisting feel jealous and at worse infuriated with Americans as a whole. Just because of who we had as our representatives. Arrogant, university educated ‘no-nothings’ who thought they knew the answers to ‘everything’ that the people of the country they were in were dealing with.
Good. Condoleeza Rice should have done years ago, then maybe Bush’s second term would not have ended with Hussein in power.
Wow, this IS good news.
State Dept. = Swampy swampness swampers.
“The old order changeth, yielding place to the new”
“The swamp, it draineth”
The state dept is the deepest darkest part of the DC swamp.
Knowledge of hookers and blow is not really expertise. The paradise that is the middle east. Well done department of state.
Where do they think they are going to market their expertise outside the state department? If very many leave then the welfare roles are sure to grow. Trump is making America great again one minute at a time. He appears to be working 18 hours per day while congress can’t seem to get in 18 hours per week.
I doubt these state department experts actually did meaningful work 18 hours per week either.
“Disdain” doesn’t even begin to describe my opinion of State Department swamprats.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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For over 80 years, the State Department has been compromised and actively working against America’s interests.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
It’s so nice to wake up and read HAPPY news. Thanks.
Democrat Congressional staffs and think tanks. At least a few.
TAGLINE!!!
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