Contributor’s links post for March 26, 2019

Daily Links Post graphic

Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.

This document was written around the time this site was created, for those who wish to understand what this site is about. And while our understanding of the world and events has grown since then, the basic ideas remain sound and true to the purpose.

So please post all links, thoughts and ideas that you feel will benefit the readers of this site to the comments under this post each day. And thank you all for your contributions.

This is the new Samizdat. We muse use it while we can.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

155 Replies to “Contributor’s links post for March 26, 2019”

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aucDmK5E4bU
    If you have 30 minutes this is an interesting discussion with a man that worked for the BBC for 25 years. He discusses Brexit, immigration, the general political climate and why the BBC chooses to report what it does i.e. deciding to report one news story over another.

  2. ISIS Commander Arrested in Hungary Held Refugee Passport Enabling Unrestricted Air Travel

    BUDAPEST, Hungary – The alleged ISIS commander charged here last week with taking part in 20 beheadings obtained a special refugee passport in Greece that gave him air travel access to much of Europe, according to Gyorgy Bakondi, a senior advisor to Hungary’s prime minister’s office.

    The revelation about the bestowal of such refugee benefits on an accused ISIS commander raises questions about terrorist exploitation of the so-called refugee “right to travel” embossed in a 1951 international treaty, allowing those approved for refugee status to move about freely in Europe and elsewhere.

    It remains unclear exactly which refugee passport program might have been used by “F. Hassan,” as the Hungarian government has dubbed the 27-year-old Syrian now under arrest in Budapest. Bakondi wasn’t sure.

    But Hassan likely was a beneficiary of the new “European Qualifications for Passports for Refugees” program, which the United Nations Human Rights Commission and European Union’s Council of Europe implemented in Greece in late 2017 and expanded last year. According to its website, the program enables passport recipients to travel to eight countries in Europe and also Canada; the United States is not among the listed countries.

    Recipients are chosen based on education levels, language proficiency, and work experience as a means to improve chances to match such candidates to specialized employment.

    A Reuters news report quoted Hungarian prosecutors as saying that Hassan traveled to a number of European countries prior to landing in Hungary, although those countries were not identified and his activities in them were not detailed.

    Bakondi told PJ Media the suspect did use his real name to apply for refugee status after traveling to Greece among migrants leaving Turkey. But he almost certainly too would have been required to truthfully state on refugee applications whether he had been involved with terrorist groups or fought in Syria.

    Greek authorities eventually granted Hassan refugee status, which entitles migrants to obtain refugee travel documents. Hassan eventually landed at the airport in Budapest last December with an unidentified woman whom Hungarian authorities found to be carrying a false passport, Bakondi said.

    The woman was deported to Greece because of the false passport, but Hassan was prosecuted and convicted of human smuggling, given a suspended 18-month sentence, and ordered expelled for three years.

    While he was awaiting deportation in a Hungarian center, Belgian intelligence provided Hungary with informant-based information that Hassan had committed atrocities as an “emir” on behalf of ISIS, to include personally cutting off the heads of victims, Bakondi said.

    How did Hassan Evade United States-Assisted Vetting in Greece?

    The arrest of Hassan also raises the question of whether Greece, as a key refugee transit country, is properly vetting higher risk migrants for potential ties to ISIS before granting refugee status and conferring its benefits. The United States has reportedly been assisting Greece, to some extent, in vetting incoming migrants and refugees to determine whether any are terrorists.

    Starting in 2014, hundreds of thousands of migrants from 103 countries began pouring into Greece on their way to more prosperous EU countries, often along the so-called “Balkan Route” that leads from Greece to Hungary. U.S. homeland security agencies, starting in 2018, provided equipment and training to Greek security agencies to begin collecting biometrics information such as fingerprints and retinal scans at at least 30 common points of refugee entry.

    In 2015, Hungary closed its borders and built fencing, prompting other countries in the region to do the same, effectively reducing the overland migration flow along the route to a trickle. But its airports would remain vulnerable to those given lawful refugee status.

    On Global Guard for Escaping ISIS Fighters and Sympathizers

    The global intelligence community and Western law enforcement have been on heightened alert since the collapse of the ISIS quasi-state in Syria and Iraq sent tens of thousands of fighters and sympathizers fleeing, many to Europe, where some have committed a number of terror attacks.

    Kurdish rebels and Iraqi forces have been capturing thousands of ISIS fighters and their families as the caliphate succumbed to brute military encirclements before and since the October 2017 fall of Raqqa, the putative capital. Others are presumed to be holed up in remnant pockets surrounded by hostile paramilitary forces.

    A few senior leaders have been caught in intelligence dragnets or killed in airstrikes; others are presumed to have escaped to places farther away while the getting was still good. Some ISIS commanders were recently caught posing as war refugees about to embark on a rickety boat to Greece.

    https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-commander-arrested-in-hungary-held-refugee-passport-enabling-unrestricted-air-travel/

    • The arrest of Hassan also raises the QUESTION of whether Greece… is properly vetting…

      hah! hah! hah! hah!

  3. Imprisoned Moroccan Salafis Call on Government to ‘Keep its Promises’ (moroccoworldnews, Mar 26, 2019)
    https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/03/268962/moroccan-salafis-government-keep-promises/

    “Representatives of imprisoned Moroccan Salafis have raised concerns about the “failure” of the country’s de-radicalization programs, complaining that “the government has not kept its promises.”

    One argument has become familiar for Morocco experts and observers: Since the Casablanca terror attack in 2003, Morocco has heavily invested in counter-terrorism and de-radicalization programs.

    In addition to its world-renowned anti-terrorism elite police units, Morocco has devised plans to combat extremist discourses via education and rehabilitation. Rabat has since been described in a slew of reports as North Africa’s bastion of counter-extremism and de-radicalization.

    No trust in the new de-radicalization program
    Yesterday, however, members of organizations representing extremism-linked inmates raised their voice about their growing “lack of trust” in the country’s new de-radicalization programs.

    They particularly protested the government’s unwillingness to deliver on a March 2011 agreement with representatives of formerly and currently imprisoned Salafis.

    The agreement, signed on March 25, 2011, entailed promises such as reduced prison terms and improved detention conditions. The deal involved over 1,200 inmates to whom the government promised mitigation of prison sentences and smoother rehabilitation.

    In return, the inmates promised to “fully subscribe” to the government’s de-radicalization vision and ease the task of rehabilitation workers.

    Abderrahim Ghazali, the spokesperson of the Coordination of Salafi Inmates, said the government has failed them. “Eight years later the results are mixed. The government has not kept its promises.”

    Of the 1,200 mainly concerned with the March 2011 agreement, 85 are serving “harsh sentences” for links to the 2003 Casablanca bombings, according to Ghazali.

    Also concerned with the agreement, he explained, are nearly 500 returnees from former ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria as well as members of extremist cells dismantled during DGSN or BCIJ raids across Morocco.

    Having obtained what it wanted, Ghazali elaborated, the government is no longer showing any willingness to have dialogue. He said, “Right now there is no dialogue between the government and Salafi inmates. All they offer us these days is the Moussalaha Program.”

    The Moussalaha reconciliation program is a 2017 initiative launched through collaborative work between security services; extremism experts; the National Council for Human Rights (CNDH); and the Mohammedia League of Scholars or Ulemma, Morocco’s highest body of Islamic clerics.

    According to Moroccan authorities, the program is a “comprehensive de-radicalization plan” with four axes of intervention: Religious re-education, courses on human rights and civic duties, psychological assistance, and socio-economic assistance.

    While authorities describe the program as “incredibly successful,” Ghazali said that Salafi inmates he spoke with “have no faith in Moussalaha and refuse to subscribe to it.”

    The news comes amid concerns over the degree of success of Morocco’s de-radicalization strategy. In February, a study from the US Carnegie Institute Endowment for International Peace established that there is an alarming rate of recidivism among released Moroccan jihadis.

    While Rabat has been successful in dismantling terrorist cells and preventing terror attacks, the same cannot be said of the country’s de-radicalization strategy, the study found.

    It established that “despite Rabat’s sporadic efforts to deradicalize jihadis while they are in prison, the policy remains unable to reintegrate them after they have been released.””

  4. Spain Expels Moroccan Immigrant, Lawyers Cite Human Rights Violation (moroccoworldnews, Mar 26, 2019)
    https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/03/268971/spain-expels-moroccan-immigrant-lawyers-cite-human-rights-violation/

    “The lawyers of Hassan Ennaciri, a Moroccan man living with his family in Spain, have denounced a Spanish court’s decision to expel him for drug dealing.

    The Spanish Provincial Court of Teruel in eastern Spain ordered the expulsion of Ennaciri, a Moroccan father of three, after he was sentenced to three years in jail in 2016 on charges of selling cocaine and “endangering public health.”

    In the same year, a court changed the sentence and ordered his expulsion from Spain, which it only implemented on March 9.

    According to one of the lawyers, Antonio Perez, Ennaciri’s family was shocked to learn on Monday that authorities took him from the Foreigners Detention Center (CIE) in Valencia, eastern Spain, toward Algeciras—a city in southern Spain connected to Morocco by passenger ferry.

    Ennaciri was transferred in compliance with an “immediate” expulsion order although he had appealed the earlier 2016 expulsion order.

    Ennaciri’s current whereabouts are not known yet.

    The lawyers deemed the court’s expulsion order abrupt and “illegal” because the court did not expel him within the first two years of making the order and did not review his case.

    Meanwhile, sources in the Valencian government delegation told Spanish news agency EFE that authorities originally made the expulsion order at the request of Ennaciri himself who had chosen to replace the three-year prison sentence with expulsion.

    Born in Morocco, Ennaciri had lived in Alcala de Xivert, a town north of Valencia, since 2004. He is a father to a two-year old and two girls aged 5 and 7, reported the news agency.

    Spain is home to 1 million Moroccans, according to EFE’s recent statistics.

    In 2018, the country issued a total of 220,929 visas for Moroccans, making them the third most likely non-European nationality to obtain a Spanish visa, after Russia and China.

    As for citizenship, Spain is tightening its procedures for Moroccans to get citizenship in the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

    The Spanish left-wing Movement For Dignity and Citizenship (MDyC) party indicated last month that throughout the past 14 years, only 2,300 people were granted citizenship in the enclaves among a total of 1 million foreign residents there.”

  5. Study: Social Media Presents Romanticized Europe to Maghreb Youth (moroccoworldnews, Mar 26, 2019)
    https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/03/268973/study-social-media-europe-maghreb-youth/

    “A recent study from the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) found that social media is contributing to irregular migration from the Maghreb region.

    The European dream has been a goal for many young people living in the Maghreb region, including Moroccans. The study said that Maghreb migrants in European countries often share posts on social media, depicting Europe as a safe place and with better socio-economic opportunities than their home countries.

    “Through daily or weekly video blogs and other social media posts, Maghrebi emigres in Europe offer a mostly romanticised representation of the continent,” said ISS.

    Migrants returning for vacations in their home countries also represent Europe as a dream land. “Through social media this message reaches a bigger pool of youth, including those with little first-hand exposure to the European diaspora,” reads the study.

    ISS shows that access to the internet has become easy in Maghreb countries, especially in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. “Sixty-three percent of Moroccans and Tunisians, and 53% of Algerians are online, with many using inexpensive smartphones to connect.”

    Focusing on internet access in Morocco, the study found that the average Moroccan spends nearly three hours on the internet daily.

    Social media, according to ISS, also offers migrants ways to reach Europe through lists of migration routes, crossing points to avoid, prices for “different forms of crossing, useful cover stories, and information on the degree and form of counter-migration enforcement used by security forces in both the Maghreb and Europe.”

    “Posts also cover strategies on how to regularise one’s legal status – or, at the very least, avoid deportation – once in Europe.”

    The study quoted a Moroccan video, which advised possible irregular migrants to “claim to be underage, claim to be Libyan, claim to be looking for your father” once in Europe.

    “In the videos’ comments sections, the information becomes more specific: phone numbers of smugglers and the specific dates, times and locations of groups planning to cross. This information is generally unfiltered and uncensored, and is continuously updated and corrected,” warned the study.

    ISS called on Maghreb countries to engage and cooperate to solve migration issues in the region.

    “Rather than seeking to stymie social media discussions on migration, governments should see this as a valuable opportunity to understand the factors and frustrations that drive their citizens to depart for Europe.”

    The study confirmed that migration content is “likely to continue to grow rapidly” on social media since the number of Maghreb youth migrating to Europe “continues to increase.”

    “This will create an expanded group of network influencers ready to share their stories and offer advice.””

  6. “Ilhan Omar Spinning Islam, Mocking Citizens”
    Third Rail Talk – Published on March 25, 2019