Jerome R. Corsi's Blog, page 306

Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies

NEW YORK – As the U.S. considers a response to what it calls a chemical weapon attack by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime that killed hundreds of civilians, reliable Middle Eastern sources say they have evidence the culprits actually were the rebel forces trying to take over the government.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused the Assad government Monday of covering up the use of chemical weapons in “a cowardly crime” and a “moral obscenity” that shocked the world’s conscience. Kerry claimed the Obama administration had “undeniable” evidence “that the Assad government was culpable in the use of chemical weapons on civilians” in the Aug. 21 attack in Damascus suburbs.

Reports that the Obama administration is considering a military strike against the Assad government continued to circulate Monday. Meanwhile, U.N. weapon inspectors in Syria were fired upon by snipers as they attempted to investigate the site of the Aug. 21 attack.

Assad has rejected charges that his government forces used chemical weapons as “preposterous” and “completely politicized,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

He argues Syrian forces were in the targeted area.

“How is it possible that any country would use chemical weapons, or any weapons of mass destruction, in an area where its own forces are located?” Assad asked in the interview with Izvestia, according to a translation provided by Syria’s official news agency and published by the Los Angeles Times.

“This is preposterous! These accusations are completely politicized and come on the back of the advances made by the Syrian Army against the terrorists.”

Rebel attack?

With the assistance of former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat, WND has assembled evidence from various Middle Eastern sources that cast doubt on Obama administration claims the Assad government is responsible for last week’s attack.

A video posted on YouTube, embedded below, shows Free Syrian Army, or FSA, rebel forces launching a Sarin gas attack on a Syrian village.

Another video posted on YouTube shows what appears to be Syrian rebel forces loading a canister of nerve gas on a rocket to fire presumably at civilians and possibly government forces.

As seen below, a screen capture from the video shows rebel civilian forces placing a suspicious blue canister on top of a rocket-launching device.

A separate YouTube video from Syrian television shows a government-captured arsenal of what appears to be nerve gas weapons seized from a rebel stronghold in Jobar, Syria.

The image below shows canisters in the seized rebel arsenal from Jobar that appear to resemble the canister launched by rebel forces in the first image above.

Syrian TV news report of rebel weapons seized in Jobar, Syria

A close-up from the Syrian television news report, seen below, shows a chemical agent identified as having been made by a “Saudi factory.”

Syrian TV news report showing chemical agents identified as manufactured in Saudi Arabia

A report from the Russian Arabic-language channel RT Arabic shows captured rebel arsenals apparently with chemical agents manufactured in Saudi Arabia and gas masks, supporting Russian claims that the rebels are the culprits in the alleged chemical attack.

On Aug. 23, LiveLeak.com hosted an audio recording of a phone call broadcast on Syrian TV between a terrorist affiliated with the rebel civilian militia “Shuhada al-Bayada Battalion” in Homs, Syria, and his Saudi Arabian boss, identified as “Abulbasit.” The phone call indicates rebel-affiliated terrorists in Syria, not the Assad government, launched the chemical weapons attack in Deir Ballba in the Homs, Syria, countryside.

The terrorist said his group, which comprises 200 terrorists escaped from al-Bayadah to al-Daar al-Kabera through a tunnel, needed to buy weapons to attack Homs.

The Saudi financier, who was in Cairo, asked the Syrian terrorists to give details about his group and how it will receive the money. The Saudi admitted his support to terrorists in Daraa and the Damascus countryside. The Syrian terrorist told him that one of the achievements of his “battalion” was the use of chemical weapons in Deir Ballba.

The recorded phone call disclosed the cooperation between two terrorist groups in Syria to bring two bottles of Sarin Gas from the Barzeh neighborhood in Damascus.

Russian media sources have consistently reported Syrian military have discovered rebel warehouses containing chemical weapons agents and have documented rebel chemical weapons attacks on the Syrian civilians the military.

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Now Egypt looks to 'expose' Obama

The evidence is mounting that the military government currently ruling Egypt has decided to embarrass the Obama administration as part of a strategy to suppress Muslim Brotherhood activity in Egypt.

Last week, WND reported that Tehani al-Gebali, the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, gave a speech and participated in an interview broadcast on Egyptian television that identified Malik Obama, the Kenyan half-brother of President Obama, as “a major architect” managing investments for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

In the speech, Gebali said she would like “open files” to expose nations like the United States that are resisting the current military-controlled government of Egypt by continuing to support “terrorist” groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The Egyptian people are astounded,” wrote Coptic Egyptian author Michael Armanious in an article titled “Egyptians Bewildered Over Support for the Muslim Brotherhood,” published by the Gatestone Institute International Policy Council. “They simply do not understand the Obama Administration’s efforts to bring the Muslim Brotherhood back to power.”

Armanious puzzled over why the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood when the result of the “Arab Spring” was to oust Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and elect Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohamed Morsi as president June 30, 2012.

“In an effort to make some sense of the Obama Administration’s policies, Amr Adeeb, a prominent Egyptian commentator, argues that the U.S. is helping the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve power, in order to turn Egypt into a magnet for jihadist fighters,” Armanious continued. “The goal, Adeeb states, is to turn Egypt into another Syria or Afghanistan and discredit Islamism as a viable political movement.”

Armanious argued the theory helped explain why the Obama administration has continued to side with the Muslim Brotherhood.

“To Westerners, this may seem like a bizarre conspiracy theory, but for Egyptians it helps explain why the U.S. government is supporting an organization that has openly declared jihad against the West, engaged in threats of war with Israel and Ethiopia, demolished dozens of ancient historic churches, set hospitals on fire, and murdered Christians in the streets. The Muslim Brotherhood has no respect for the rule of law, but the Obama Administration treats the Egyptian military that removed the group from power as a threat to democracy itself.”

Armanious charged that Morsi and his supporters utilized undemocratic measures to gain and hold onto power, citing as proof of his claim that on the day of Morsi’s election as president, the Muslim Brotherhood stopped thousands of Coptic Christians from voting.

Armanious wrote:

Morsi also straightforwardly stated that he was recreating an Islamic “Caliphate.” He pardoned and freed hard-line Islamists – including Anwar Sadat’s killers – and allowed them to have an Islamic political party, contrary to the constitution, which bans religious parties. When Morsi spoke to audiences, hard-line Islamists sat in the front row, demonstrating that these people were his political base.

To buttress the support of this base, Morsi released members of Gamaa al-Islamiyya, founded by the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who attempted the first World Trade Center attack. This group, considered a terrorist organization by the United States, killed over 60 tourists in Luxor in 1997. That history did not stop Morsi from appointing one of its members governor of Luxor, over the objection of local residents who are dependent on tourism for their livelihood. Nor did it stop him from assigning another member of this group as Minister of Culture. With these decisions, Morsi delivered a final blow to Egypt’s tourism industry.

Concluding his article, Armonious noted many Egyptians are asking: “Why is the U.S. Administration siding with the forces of oppression in their country and assisting with its transformation into a failed state under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood?”

Egypt cracks down on Muslim Brotherhood

Last week in Cairo, the government arrested Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Ahmad Aref along with some 75 executive members of the group, according to Egypt’s interior ministry.

“Mohamed El-Beltagy, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, was targeted in several provinces, but security forces failed to arrest him,” said sources in Egypt’s judiciary, speaking to the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat on the condition of anonymity.

Sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that the steps come within the framework of the security services’ efforts to pursue the Brotherhood’s executive leaders and organizational offices, as well members who had arrest warrants issued against them.

The English-language Daily News in Cairo independently reported last week that security forces in Egypt arrested a number of senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood in a campaign of arrests that followed the dispersal of sit-ins at Rabaa Al-Adaweya and Nehda Square.

The Daily Times further reported Muslim Brotherhood lawyer Ali Kamal accused supporters of the change of power that unseated Morsi as seeking to “settle accounts” by arresting the supreme guide of the group, Mohamed Badie, and other senior members.

“It is well-known that all the charges brought against the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and … the Freedom and Justice Party … are implausible fabricated charges with no legally acceptable evidence,” he said on the group’s website.

Prominent supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood Safwat Hegazy was arrested early Wednesday morning near Marsa Matrouh. The Ministry of Interior said it apprehended Hegazy, who had changed his appearance, as he attempted to cross into Libya through Egypt’s western border.

According to the Daily Times report, Safwat Hegazy was accused of inciting violence and killing.

The campaign the Egyptian government is waging against the Muslim Brotherhood appears to be effective.

Reuters reported that mass protests called by the Muslim Brotherhood for last Friday failed to materialize as the movement “reeled from a bloody army crackdown on followers of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

Troops and police had taken what Reuters called “low-key security measures” before the “Friends of Martyrs” processions that the Muslim Brotherhood had planned to launch from 28 mosques in the capital after weekly prayers.

But midday prayers were canceled last Friday at some Cairo mosques. and there were few signs of major demonstrations unfolding in the city.

Evidence U.S. bribed Muslim Brotherhood officials

Official Morsi government document: “Direction of Grants and Gifts for 2013,” submitted by Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabor Al Thani, former Qatari prime minister and foreign affairs minister

A  question apparently being raised in next week’s trial in Cairo of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders facing criminal charges is this: Was the Obama administration paying bribes as large as $850,000 a year to the Morsi government that were distributed by top ministerial level officials to Muslim Brotherhood leaders, with the direct involvement of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo?

WND is in possession of an official document from inside the Morsi government that lends credibility to a report published in Arabic by an Egyptian newspaper in Cairo that lists the charges brought by the current military-controlled government against Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

As seen above, WND has obtained official records from the deposed Morsi government in Egypt, with signatures, documenting monthly “gifts” paid to Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt by the former prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani.

The document was seized from Egyptian government offices in Cairo when the Morsi government was deposed by the military July 3.

As translated by former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat, the monthly “gifts” listed in the document amount to bribes paid by the Morsi government to leading Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt, including an annual payment of $750,000 to $850,000 in U.S. dollars.

Shoebat explained to WND the names listed on the Egyptian government document correspond to information the Egyptian newspaper Almesryoon has just published in Egypt reporting that the Cairo district attorney’s office has begun investigating alleged bribes the U.S. has paid through its embassy in Cairo to the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to the newspaper: “A judicial source stated that the Attorney General Hisham Barakat received during the past few days a number of filed complaints accusing the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and leaders of the centrist party of receiving bribes thinly disguised as ‘gifts’ paid through the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.”

The sources of the complaint stated that among those receiving bribes paid in U.S. dollars from the U.S. include:

Mohamed Badie, general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood;
Khairat Al-Shater, deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and businessman;
Mohamed Beltagy, the deputy head of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party in Egypt, and the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood group, Essam el-Erian;
Abu Ela Mady, head of the Wasat Party; and
Essam Sultan, deputy head of the Wasat Party.

“What this document suggests,” Shoebot explained to WND, “is that the report the Egyptian newspaper Almesryoon published in Cairo may be correct in that it appears the U.S. government was paying monthly bribes in U.S. dollars, with payments as large as $85,000 a month, to top Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, with the money being passed from the United States through the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to the Morsi government.”

Shoebat stressed to WND that the signatures seen in the document mean it could be used as evidence in the upcoming trials of key Muslim Brotherhood leaders, slated to begin Aug. 25 in Cairo.

Shoebat also noted that the names listed in the document match the names in the Egyptian newspaper Almesryoon, including Mohamed Beltagy.

Reading closely the Almesryoon report, Shoebat concluded the document is likely to be among the evidence the current government of Egypt plans to introduce in its prosecution of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

The charges being brought in Cairo next week include not only bribes being taken in U.S. dollars from the U.S. Embassy, but also murders and assassinations, prison escapes, sniping at and the indiscriminate killing of demonstrators, and spying or being a double-agent collaborating with foreign governments, including both the U.S. and Qatar.

“The criminal charge being reported against the Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo suggest these are major trials about to start,” Shoebat explained to WND.

“And with government documents entered into evidence, like the one WND is publishing, the criminal charges will likely be construed as capital offenses, with death by hanging the likely sentence.”

Major paper defends 'communist' lawmakers

NEW YORK – After WND published a review of a new book naming two Ohio Democrats as having communist ties, a Washington reporter for a major daily came to the lawmakers’ defense.

Sabrina Eaton of the Cleveland Plain Dealer defended Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who are named in Trevor Loudon’s new book, “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress.”

Eaton writes in a blog post on the paper’s site:

Kaptur spokesman Steve Fought called any allegation that his boss is a radical, leftist, communist “absurd.”

“She is a Polish-American Roman Catholic,” said Fought. “That pretty much proves them wrong, now doesn’t it?”

When we asked whether Sen. Brown thinks Corsi & Co. have been drinking something a bit stronger than tea, his press secretary, Meghan Dubyak, replied:

“Would Mr. Corsi consider Sen. Brown’s bipartisan bill that cracks down on the Chinese communist party for cheating trade laws a communist effort? How about his work to overhaul the corporate tax rate to encourage domestic investment and job creation in the U.S.? Unfortunately we’ll never know because Mr. Corsi eschews substance and resorts to mindless name calling that’s not worthy of discussion on cleveland.com.”

However, Eaton makes no mention of Loudon’s extensive documentation tying the two lawmakers to communists.

Democratic Socialists of America

On March 3, 1990, Yemi Toure, writing in the Los Angeles Times, reported Brown’s office gave a certificate of recognition to Rick Nagin, chairman of the Ohio Communist Party.

The newspaper reported Nagin collected his award in Columbus for registering more than 2,000 voters during his losing campaign for Cleveland City Council the previous fall.

In 2006, Nagin served as staff of the AFL-CIO Labor 2006 campaign for Brown and then for Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland.

Nagin, speaking in New York to the Communist Party USA’s Political Action Committee on June 25, 2007, noted the labor movement “and other progressive forces” are using a ballot referendum to raise Ohio’s minimum wage to reach out to voters in rural and southern Ohio, “a bastion of the Republican Party,”

“The referendum could prove decisive in Rep. Sherrod Brown’s drive to oust Republican Sen. Michael DeWine,” Nagin said.

Brown wrote a commentary for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Dec. 11, 2003, which was reprinted by permission of the author in the Communist Party USA’s People’s World publication of Dec. 19, 2003.

In the commentary, Brown attacked then-Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert and then-Majority Leader Tom Delay supposedly for coercing enough Republicans in the House of Representatives to change their votes in late-night or early-morning voting to pass a series of bills Brown opposed. The bills included Medicare privatization and prescription drugs – tactics Brown characterized as a “subversion of democracy.”

Figure 1 shows the beginning of the Sherrod Brown article published in People’s World, with the newspaper masthead:

Figure 1: Sherrod Brown article published in communist newspaper, 2003

Figure 2 shows the end of the Brown article published in the newspaper, with the paragraph clearly stating the article was reprinted in the Communist Party USA’s People’s World with the permission of the author:

Figure 2: Sherrod Brown, end of article, People's World 2003, with acknowledgment of author's permission to reprint.

The Ohio Democratic Socialists of America campaigned for Brown in his 2006 Senate Race, as documented by an Ohio DSA brochure now removed from the Internet that read:

Former Representative, now Senator Sherrod Brown is the most visible symbol of change … A longtime critic of “free trade” agreements, frequently characterized as far left and out of the mainstream, Brown handily defeated the relatively moderate but free-trade proponent Mike De Wine.

Trade was also an issue in the narrow loss of Mary Jo Kilroy to Deborah Pryce. Local DSAers worked in both the Brown and Kilroy campaigns.

In 2010, WND reported the ties of then-Ohio Democratic Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy to the DSA, citing research Loudon published in his blog in 2012. Loudon documented that Kilroy, a member of the DSA in the 1990s who enjoyed its support in her 2006 and 2008 congressional campaigns, had long tried to hide her ties to the group, representing herself openly in Ohio only as a member of the Democratic Party.

In an essay on the DSA, Loudon emphasizes the impact on U.S. radicals of the late Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci, whose writings from prison declared that the “working class revolution” is a dead end, arguing instead that communism can best be achieved “by infiltrating civil society – political parties, churches, labor unions, universities, the media, community groups, etc., to turn them into revolutionary vehicles.”

Photographs posted on Flickr.com document that on April 21, 2009, Brown spoke alongside DSA affiliates Heidi Hartman and An-Jen Poo, as well as DSA member Barbara Ehrenreich, at a Labor Day for members of the Workers Rights Board of the DSA-infiltrated Jobs with Justice, lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act.

The 21st Century Democrats, a group initiated and led by the Democrat Socialists of America supported Brown in 1992 as one of the group’s first endorsees, when Brown was running for the House of Representatives, and again in 2006, when Brown was running for U.S. Senate.

Brown also has extensive ties with the Institute of Policy Studies, or IPS, in Washington, D.C., a group whose goal to advance radical socialist or communist views under the guise of supporting “progressive liberals” was exposed in S. Steven Powell’s 1988 book “Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies.” The book documents the importance of the Communist Party USA and the KGB to the founding and subsequent direction of the IPS.

In 2006 and 2007, Brown spoke at the “Take Back America” conference organized by the IPS and the DSA, as well as at the re-named 2009 “America’s Future Now” conference.

In 2012, Brown was one of only five U.S. senators the IPS congressional scorecard rated “A+” in a list including Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Al Franken, D-Minn., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.

Lenny Raskin, a Washington, D.C., realtor, and her husband Marcus Raskin, the co-founder of the IPS, contributed to several progressive candidates in tight congressional races in the 2012 election, including Brown.

Enemies within

Loudon’s “The Enemies Within” documents Kaptur’s extensive involvement with the IPS and the DSA opposing U.S. “free trade” agreements, going back to 1993.

In November 1993, the DSA-infiltrated Jobs with Justice and the Cleveland Women Against NAFTA organized an anti-NAFTA rally in the Sheet Metal Workers Local 13 Hall in Cleveland. At the event, Kaptur gave a “ringing indictment” of NAFTA and called for intense last-minute lobbying to defeat the measure, as reported by the People’s Weekly World on page 7 of its Nov. 13, 1993, edition.

In 1995, Kaptur joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus in co-sponsoring a bill to force the U.S. to withdraw from NAFTA, as reported by the People’s Weekly World on page 4 of its Jan. 21, 1995, edition. Then at a DSA-dominated Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, conference, “NAFTA at Seven,” held May 23, 2001 in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., Kaptur was one of seven panelists, including Lisa Fuentes, a board member working on Latin America in the IPS Washington office, calling for an end to NAFTA.

On March 5, 2008, Kaptur spoke at an IPS-sponsored “free trade” conference titled “A Critical Look at NAFTA Past, Present and Future: Linking Agriculture, Development, and Migration.”

A 2012 politically charged and divisive IPS scorecard that emphasized socialist concepts of “social justice” excoriated Republican members of Congress for supposedly serving the interests of the America’s richest “1-percent,” ‎gave Kaptur a grade of “A” for serving the interests of “the 99 percent” in the IPS “Inequality Report Card.”

Kaptur is on the list of members of Congress who have participated in hearings and briefings since 1998 with the leftist Institute for Food and Development Policy, founded by Frances Moore Lappe, with ties to the DSA and the IPS, and Joseph Collins, with ties to the IPS, authors of the 1981 mass market paperback book “Food First.”

After KeyWiki.org publicized that Kaptur was listed on the Food First website, the “staff” listing was scrubbed of her name. Kaptur is currently listed on the Fast Food website as a “Campaign Partner,” defined as individuals and organizations who have supported the Fast Food economic and social human rights program since 1997 and congressional representatives who have participated in Fast Food hearings/briefings since 1997. Also on the same list is the Institute for Policy Studies.

Food First argues for a policy of “food sovereignty” in which food would be declared a “human right.” The organization believes “a world free of hunger is possible if farmers and communities take back control of the food systems presently dominated by transnational agri-foods industries.”

The organization also states a commitment “to dismantling racism in the food system” and a belief “in people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food purchased through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems – at home and abroad.”

Rarely mentioned in Kaptur’s official biography is the strong influence in her career – dating back to her time serving as a member of the Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commission in Ohio from 1969-1974, and then as director of planning for the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs form 1975-1977 –of radical urban planning activist and Catholic priest Msgr. Geno Baroni, the founder of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs.

In a story published on the front page of the Toledo Blade on Feb. 7, 1988, Kaptur was identified as “an idealist” who was then the Ohio co-chairman of the presidential campaign of Democratic Party Sen. Paul Simon.

Chase Clements, a Toledo Blade staff writer authoring the article, continued to comment: “The clergyman (Baroni), since deceased, was an ardent advocate of organizing on the political power of neighborhoods and was Ms. Kaptur’s most influential confident, both spiritual and political.”

When serving as assistant director for urban affairs in President Jimmy Carter’s White House, Kaptur worked with Baroni and his National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs to write the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The measure demanded banks finance high-risk, low-income housing even if the prospective homeowners failed to meet bank-established credit standards for mortgage lending.

The Community Redevelopment Act of 1977 is a key piece of legislation often cited as contributing to the mortgage bubble that burst in 2008, sending the U.S. into a prolonged economic downturn.

An article published by academic researcher Lawrence J. Engel in the academic journal Theological Studies in 1998 identified Baroni as a key activist in the Catholic Church’s $225 million Campaign for Human Development, initiated by the national conference of Catholic bishops.

The article identified the Campaign for Human Development as “the most significant and longest-running experiment of 20th century U.S. Catholic social action.”

Under the auspices of the Campaign for Human Development, Catholic bishops approved “funds for the poor to organize for power, much of which went to the community-organizing projects associated with Saul Alinsky.”

While he personally avoided confrontational politics, Baroni had studied Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” and was fully supportive of Alinsky’s influence on the Catholic clergy involved as urban activists in the Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry organized in the late 1960s.

WND has frequently reported on the influence of Alinsky, a radical socialist with a labor union background, on the development of Barack Obama, who moved to Chicago in 1985 to accept a job heading the Developing Communities Project, a Alinsky-styled organization.

Since the 1990s, Kaptur has been accused of being a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a charge she has always vigorously denied.

Obama's brother linked to Muslim Brotherhood

NEW YORK – President Obama’s half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us,” she said. “We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

“The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism,” she continued. “We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us.”

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Shoebat said Gebali explained the news is important to Americans who are concerned about their president’s actions, calling it “is a gift to the American people,” implying there were more revelations to come.

In an interview on Egyptian television, Gebali said the cost to Egypt has been great, and she vowed her country will not allow any conspiracy against its people or the Egyptian state. She insisted that pushing Egypt to bankruptcy is unacceptable, because it would plunge her country into a dire state similar to Iraq and Libya.

Shoebat said that if the reports are correct, Turkey appears to play a central role in the alleged conspiracy. He emphasized that Egypt has asserted to the international community that it will not tolerate any attempt to push the country to bankruptcy.

Shoebat’s blog linked to three “very credible sources” that corroborate the report on Gebali’s comments.

Shoebat reported in May that Malik Obama is the executive secretary of the Islamic Da’wa Organization, or IDO, a group created by the government of Sudan, which is considered by the U.S. State Department to be a terrorist state.

In 2010, Malik Obama attended an IDO conference in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. One of the objectives of the IDO is to spread Wahhabist Islam across the African continent.

Sudan President Omar Al-Bashir supervised the conference. Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on seven counts related to crimes against humanity.

Shoebat asserted the evidence places Malik Obama “in bed with terrorists, working in a terrorist state as an official of an organization created by terrorists.”

Malik’s tax-exempt problems

WND reported in May that funds contributed in the U.S. to a 501(c)3 foundation run by Malik Obama have been diverted to support Malik’s multiple wives in Kenya, an expert on Islamic extremism has charged.

Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS tax-exempt division currently under congressional investigation, signed the letter approving tax-exempt status for the Malik Obama’s Barack H. Obama Foundation.

Lerner, currently on paid executive leave from her IRS supervisory position, took the Fifth Amendment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on May 22 rather than answer questions on inappropriate criteria used by her IRS department to delay or otherwise deny tax-exempt status for tea party and “patriot” groups.

Shoebat has detailed his allegations in a 22-page investigative report titled “New IRS Scandal: Islamic Extremism and Sex Slaves: Report Reveals Obama’s Relatives Run Charities of Deceit,” published on his website

After a thorough examination of available evidence, Shoebat explained to WND his allegations against the Obama family tax-exempt foundations:

When Malik Obama and Sarah Obama raised money in the United States as the respective heads of foundations claiming to be charities, not only did the Internal Revenue Service illegally grant one of them tax-deductible status retroactively, but these foundations have supported – to varying degrees – illegal operations that acquire funding for personal gain, philandering, polygamy and the promotion of Wahhabism, the brand of Islam practiced by Al-Qaeda.

For the past two years, since long before the current IRS scandals became public, WND has been reporting irregularities in two IRS-approved 501(c)3 organizations operated in the U.S. by Obama’s half-brother and step-grandmother in Kenya.

WND reported in September 2011 the Barack H. Obama Foundation apparently received IRS approval one month after an application was submitted in May 2011. The IRS determination letter June 11, 2011, granted a highly irregular retroactive tax-exempt approval only after the group came under fire for operating as a 501(c)3 foundation since 2008 without ever having applied to the IRS.

In October 2012, WND reported a separate foundation, the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation, created on behalf of Obama’s step-grandmother in Kenya, has transferred funds, 90 percent of which are raised from U.S. individuals and corporations, to send Kenyan students to the top three most radical Wahhabist madrassas in Saudi Arabia.

Since its founding in 2008, the Barack H. Obama Foundation, operating out of a commercial mail drop in Arlington, Va., has solicited tax-deductible contributions on the Internet, listing addresses and telephone numbers both in the U.S. and Kenya, without disclosing the group lacked an IRS determination letter.

In September 2011, the IRS confirmed to WND that the Barack H. Obama Foundation had received a determination letter in June 2011, awarding the group tax-exempt 501(c)3 status retro-actively to 2008

Malik Obama, best man at the wedding of Barack H. Obama, Oct. 3, 1992

Tax-exempt polygamy?

On March 3, 2013, Andrew Malone, reporting for the London Daily Mail, documented that Malik’s youngest wife in Kenya, Sheila Anyano, 35 years his junior, had spent the past two years living with three of Malik’s other wives at the “Barack H Obama Foundation rest and relaxation center,” a restaurant complex that profits from visitors drawn by the family’s connection to the American president.

According to the Daily Mail, members of his extended family in Kenya have accused Malik, a practitioner of Islam and a polygamist, of being a wife-beater and philanderer. Malik is accused of seducing Sheila, the newest of his estimated 12 wives when she was a 17-year-old schoolgirl – a crime in Kenya, where the legal age of consent is 18.

Malone tracked down Sheila’s mother, Mary, who explained to the reporter that Malik Obama had “secret trysts” with the girl after spotting her attending prayers at the mosque he has built in Kogelo, the family’s ancestral home.

Sheila, now age 20, told Ambrose that marrying Malik, now age 55, was the “worst decision” of her life and confirmed that she and Malik kept their marriage “a secret,” because she was 17.

“At first he was good, after he started speaking to me at the mosque,” Sheila told the Daily Mail. “But he has changed. Marrying him has been the biggest mistake of my life. He beats me, but mostly he’s just nasty and quarrelsome.”

Shoebot charged that Malik Obama is abusing non-profit funds.

“There is no evidence to suggest that Malik is building any houses in Kogelo for widows and orphans as claimed,” Shoebat said.

Neither is there evidence that the Mama Sarah Foundation has built any homes for widows, orphans and HIV/AIDS victims.

“The only evidence where monies were spent involves the Barack H. Obama Recreation and Rest Center in Kenya, which housed Malik’s 12 wives in a facility that includes a restaurant and a mosque with a madrassa,” he said.

“While building mosques is legally considered charity, evidence shows the entire funding came directly from entities and individuals from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain,” Shoebat said. “There is nothing of charitable nature to show for all the funds Malik raises from the United States. To date, there is no evidence for any accomplishments toward building homes for orphans, widows and AIDS victims in Kogelo or anywhere else in Kenya.”

Limited financial reporting

An IRS Form 990-EZ required for tax-exempt organizations was filed on May 23, 2011, only days before the IRS determination letter was sent.

Barack H. Obama Foundation, Form 990-EZ, filed May 23, 2011, page 1

The Form 990-EZ appears to have been hand-written by Malik Obama himself, complete with an unorthodox page of calculations evidently included to back up the amounts entered into the form.

The Form 990 reported the foundation had received $24,250 total gross income for 2010, derived from contributions, gifts and grants.

“We were not very successful this year because of limited contributions,” Malik reported on the Form 990. “The Foundation sponsored a Youth Tournement (sic) and embarked on construction of community bridges.”

Malik surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign, dressed in African garb and holding a photograph of Barack Obama in African garb.

Abongo “Roy” Malik Obama displays a 1980s-era photograph of Barack Obama in Kenya

Born in Kenya to Kezia

Born in Kenya, on March 15, 1958, Abongo Malik “Roy” Obama was the first child born to Barack Obama Sr.

The son of Kezia, Obama Sr.’s first wife, Malik was only 18 months old when Barack Obama Sr. arrived in New York Aug. 8, 1959, on a BOAC flight in transit from Kenya to begin his undergraduate studies at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Having abandoned Kezia in Kenya, Obama Sr. subsequently married Stanley Ann Dunham, Barack Obama Jr.’s mother, while in Honolulu, according to the account Obama relates in his autobiography “Dreams from My Father.”

Obama family portrait taken in Kenya. Abongo “Roy” Malik Obama stands to Barack Obama Jr.’s immediate left

American dream dying under Obama?

NEW YORK – Are you better off today economically than you were when President Obama took office in January 2009?

That question remains the litmus test for electoral politics as the U.S. prepares to move into the 2014 mid-term election cycle.

The economic scorecard for President Obama continues to provide reasons for alarm, despite Obama’s renewed attempt to emphasize yet again the plight of the U.S. economy and decline of the middle class.

Amid the most massive welfare state ever created in human history, four of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance for at least part of their lives, according to a recent Associated Press report.

Even Obama-supporting Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has acknowledged that terms such as “modest recovery,” “slow recovery” or even “recession” do not describe the economic malaise experienced under Obama’s presidency.

Arguing that the U.S. is in a “low-grade” depression, the liberal economist wrote July 5 that the U.S. economy may have entered “permanent stagnation,” a situation in which “high unemployment could become accepted as the new normal.”

Economist Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital and author of the 2012 bestseller “The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy – How to Save Yourself and Your Country” is even less sanguine.

Schiff believes it makes no difference whether Obama replaces Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve with Fed vice chair Janet Yellen, who favors continuing the Fed’s quantitative easing policy, or with former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers, who wants to end it.

“I think the U.S. economy is in trouble regardless of who President Obama chooses, because it’s going to be more of the same policies that have brought the country to the brink of economic ruin,” Schiff said this week.

WND’s independent investigation of 10 key economic measures confirms that economic conditions for millions of Americans have deteriorated substantially under the Obama administration.

Consider the following:

Median household incomes decline under Obama

The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2011 that median household income was $50,054 in 2011, a 1.5 percent decline in real terms from 2010, following a decline from 2009. In 2011, real media household income was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession, and was 8.9 percent lower than the median household income peak that occurred in 1999. Real median household incomes have not yet recovered to their pre-2001 recession all-time highs.

Poverty increases as more white families sink into poverty under Obama

Prof. William Julius Wilson at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government explained to NPR that more than half of the 46 million Americans living in poverty in 2011, approximately 15 percent of the U.S. population, were black or Hispanic. While the trend has been long-term, what has changed is that the gap between the affluent and the middle class has widened significantly. A Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau Data published in April showed that from 2009 to 2011, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.

The Census Bureau reported there were 46.2 million Americans living in poverty in the United States in 2011, the largest number of persons counted as poor in the 53 years of poverty measurements. Further, 6.6 percent of the population, or 20.4 million people, lived in deep poverty, defined as living 50 percent below the poverty line. According to the AP report, 19 million whites fell below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for 41 percent of the nation’s poor, nearly twice the number of poor African-Americans. Yet, while African-Americans represent 13.1 percent of the general population, they represent 27.6 percent of the poor.

More white families face economic insecurity

According to the AP, a new economic index to be published in 2014 by Oxford University Press shows 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60 will face economic insecurity, as defined by a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps, or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Food stamp enrollment up 50 percent under Obama

SNAP/Food Stamp participation reached 31.7 million in December 2008 under President George W. Bush, according to data provided by the Food Research and Action Center, or FRAC. SNAP/Food Stamp participation in April 2013 rose to 47.5 million Americans, according to the same source. Data from the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported 47.6 million Americans enrolled in SNAP/Food Stamps in May 2013.

Discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force up more than 100 percent under Obama

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, those who have dropped out of the labor force because they have looked for work and have become discouraged they will ever find a job have increased from an annual total of 462,000 in 2008 to 909,000 in 2012.

The monthly total was 988,000 for July 2013, registering a more than 100 percent increase between 2008 and 2013. The peak was reached in 2010, with 1,173,000 listed as discouraged workers who had dropped out of the labor force. The number of workers listed by the BLS as “not in the labor force” for whatever reason has increased on a straight-line graph from 79.5 million Americans in 2008 to 88.3 million in 2012, with the monthly total at 88.6 million in July 2013.

Seven out of eight jobs created under President Obama are part-time

The House Ways and Means Committee reported Aug. 5 that seven out of eight jobs, approximately 88 percent, created under President Obama have been part-time jobs.

“The reality, as you dig into the latest jobs data, reveals that few are finding the full-time work they want and need, and many are forced to accept part-time employment,” the committee said.

The BLS statistics show that under Obama, 1,882,000 part-time jobs have been created, compared to only 270,000 full-time jobs created between January 2009 and July 2013.

Home ownership under Obama is at an 18-year low

The U.S. home-ownership rate that reached a high of 69.2 percent in 2004 is back to where it was 18 years ago in 1995, at 65 percent in the second quarter of 2013, according to U.S. Census data.

(Source: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, July 30)

The U.S. Census Bureau anticipates that the home ownership rate will hit bottom at about 64 percent in 2014 as families leave foreclosures and enter rental homes. The home ownership rate for African-Americans reached a high of 50 percent in the second quarter of 2004, up from about 43 percent in 1995, only to decline in the second quarter of 2013 to 42.9 percent.

Outstanding student loan debt increased 125 percent under Obama, while student loan default rates have climbed steadily since 2008

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, student debt totaled $994 billion as of June 30, up from $440 billion in 2008, an increase of 125 percent.

The U.S. Department of Education reported the 2010 three-year cohort default rate on student loans, the last year for which this calculation was available, was 9.1 percent, up from 7 percent for the 2008 three-year cohort.

In September 2012, the Institute for College Access & Success reported there is “overwhelming evidence” that some for-profit colleges are keeping their default rates below the threshold for receiving taxpayer funding. Student loan payments are often postponed while loans are in forbearance, but interest continues to accrue and gets added to the loan balance, making repayment even more difficult. Borrowers in forbearance are not reflected in the college’s cohort default rates.

An Education Sector study published in July, “In Debt and in the Dark,” identified 514 colleges where student loan default rates were higher than graduation rates. Cited in the study was financial aid expert Tim Ranzetta, who proposed that the colleges should post the following disclosure: “Warning: This education can be hazardous to your financial health. At this institution, you have a higher probability of defaulting on your student loan than you do of competing this program.”

The price of regular gasoline has soared nearly 100 percent under Obama

According to the Energy Information Agency, on Jan. 19, 2008, the day after President Obama began his first term in office, the price of regular retail gasoline in the U.S. averaged $1.847 a gallon. The EIA reported that on Aug. 12, 2013, the price of regular retail gas averaged $3.561 a gallon.

EIA statistics show that since Dec. 27, 2010, the price of a regular gallon of gasoline has not fallen below $3 a gallon.

The U.S. national debt has increased more than 50 percent under Obama

Obama’s continued series of annual federal budget deficits in the range of $1 trillion has increased the national debt more than 50 percent since he has been office, from a total of $11.9 trillion in fiscal 2009 to a current estimated total of $18.2 trillion in fiscal 2014.

"Gross Federal Debt" is the total debt owed by the federal government. It comprises "Debt Held by Public," including foreign governments, debt held by federal government accounts such as IOUs owed to the Social Security trust fund, and "Debt held by Federal Reserve," debt bought by the Federal Reserve System as part of the monetary base. (Source: usgovernmentspending.com)

The amount of federal debt held by the Federal Reserve has doubled under Obama, as the Fed has engaged in a continuing policy of “quantitative easing” under which it has purchased billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury debt, plus agency debt, including mortgage-backed securities.

Communists in Congress? Just count 'em

NEW YORK – New Zealander Trevor Loudon has just published an encyclopedic new 689-page volume, “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress,” to accompany his 668-page 2011 book, “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within.”

In both volumes, Loudon has proved himself to be among the foremost experts in the world investigating and reporting the penetration of communists, socialists and the current group of “progressives” affiliated with Democratic Party politics who portray themselves as liberals.

In his 2011 book, Loudon presented documented evidence that Barack Obama’s rise in politics was not an accident, but a conscious, decade-long effort by the radical left to promote a candidate with African roots. Obama, he said, was packaged as an engaging and seemingly harmless Trojan Horse radical, sent to Chicago to refine his skills running for office as a Democratic Party politician.

It is impossible to read “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within” without being convinced that Obama’s education in communist ideology stretches from the extracurricular education he received from Communist Party mentor Frank Marshall Davis in Honolulu to his recruitment as a New Party candidate in Chicago, with strong ties to the Democratic Socialists of America.

Loudon continues naming names in his current volume, “The Enemies Within,” which documents how extensively communists, socialists and progressives have penetrated the U.S. Congress, running on the Democratic Party ticket.

The goal of these radicals in Congress, Loudon demonstrates, is the same goal Obama announced when running for president in 2008, to transform the United States from the constitutional republic established by its Founding Fathers into a radical socialist state. The aim is to be achieved through passing extensive social welfare legislation designed to bankrupt a government adhering to concepts of private property and private enterprise.

In an insightful essay on the Democratic Socialists of America, Loudon emphasizes the impact on U.S. radicals of the late Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci, whose writings from prison declared that the “working class revolution” is a dead end, arguing instead that communism can best be achieved “by infiltrating civil society – political parties, churches, labor unions, universities, the media, community groups, etc., to turn them into revolutionary vehicles.”

Similarly, Loudon documents how the Communist Party of the USA itself has adopted a stealth plan to achieve revolutionary goals by decisions made in the 1970s to infiltrate and manipulate the Democratic Party. The plan is to form alliances with the radical elements in organized labor in conjunction with radicals in the African-American community and the feminist movement to establish a progressive coalition on the left that could dominate the national political agenda for decades to come.

His essay on the Institute for Policy Studies provides extensive evidence that the IPS, operating today with the distinction of being oldest – founded in 1963 – and most influential of the far left “think tanks” in Washington, D.C., “works closely with several U.S. Marxist groups, but is particularly close to the Democratic Socialists of America.”

The congressional profiles of current members of Congress provides extensive evidence of radical leftist ties in the backgrounds of top Democratic Party legislators, including Democratic Party Sens. Barbara Boxer, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Debbie Stabenow, Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray and Tammy Baldwin.

In the House of Representatives, Loudon profiles the radical left background of Democratic Party Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Louis Gutierrez, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Marcy Kaptur, Peter DeFazio, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jim McDermott and dozens more.

Loudon’s profiles of the radical lawmakers is extensively footnoted, complete with photos, news clips, website screen captures and quotations from published sources that leave no doubt as to the authenticity and accuracy of his allegations.

In documenting the success with which the radical left has captured the politically correct core of Democratic Party politics since the 1970s and the end of the Vietnam War, Loudon joins bestselling author Paul Kengor, who published in 2010 “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Conservatives for a Century,” followed in 2012 by “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.”

What authors Loudon and Kengor show is that communism in America did not die with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is alive and well, with ties that run deep today with Barack Obama in the White House and the radical leftist Democrats serving in the halls of Congress.

Loudon will be in Washington, D.C., at the National Press Club Aug. 20 to participate in the all day conference “The Crisis in American Journalism and the Conservative Response,” hosted by the public policy group America’s Survival Inc.

Joining Loudon, who is listed on the program to speak about his book “The Enemies Within,” will be Kengor, presenting his new book, “All the Dupes Fit to Print: Journalists Who Have Served as Tools of Communist Propaganda.”

Yes, you can buy a house in U.S. for $1

NEW YORK – Can you buy a house almost anywhere in the United States for $1 through HUD?

Since the program is a federal government program, the answer, perhaps not unexpectedly, turns out to be “Yes” and “No.”

HUD, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has a website devoted to “About Dollar Homes.”  The agency explains how its Dollar Homes initiative helps local governments offer housing opportunities to low- to moderate-income families.

However, as the HUD Resource Center explained to WND, homes for $1 are only to be sold to local governments and community, or faith-based, non-profit organizations helping to place low-income families in abandoned homes that HUD cannot sell through foreclosure auctions.

HUD Dollar Homes are single-family dwellings that the Federal Housing Administration, a division of HUD, acquired as a result of foreclosure.

Whenever the FHA is unable to sell a single-family house for six months, the property is placed in the Dollar Homes program.

“By selling vacant homes for $1 after six months on the market, HUD makes it possible for communities to fix up the homes and put them to good use at a considerable savings,” the HUD.gov website proclaims.

“The newly occupied homes can then act as catalysts for neighborhood revitalization, attracting new residents and businesses to an area. Local governments can partner with local non-profit homeownership organizations or tap into existing local programs to resell the homes to low- and moderate-income residents of the community.”

The HUD program attests to the reality that Detroit is not the only urban area in America where persistent high unemployment and long-term poverty have led to neighborhoods blighted by abandoned homes and deserted properties.

Now, five years into the Obama administration, economists say the U.S. has a “weak economy,” at best, in which government Bureau of Labor statistics, adjusted to account for long-term discouraged workers and others, puts unemployment at over 20 percent.

To find properties for sale, HUD provides a “HUD Homes” website that lists available foreclosure properties by state.

However, individuals cannot purchase the $1 homes directly. Only houses up for auction can be purchased, through bidding.

Moreover, only a few states have $1 homes available, even for local governments and non-profit organizations.

Individuals seeking to participate in the HUD $1 Dollar Home program, therefore, must contact local government agencies and non-profit organizations participating in the program.

Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana …

A New York Times story this week said as many as one third of the homes in Gary, Indiana, a once-thriving industrial city, are unoccupied, and the city is considering selling the homes for $1.

However, the opportunity to buy an abandoned home in Gary is limited to those who apply through the city government and meet the following requirements: 1) a minimum income of $35,250 a year for one person; 2) can demonstrate the financial ability to bring the distressed property up to code standards within six months after purchase; and 3) agree to live in the home for five years before receiving full ownership.

The Times reported that nearly 400 people picked up applications on the first day the program was offered, and the city hopes to choose 12 of the 25 finalists in a lottery next month.

“My target would be to sell 50 homes a year,” Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson told the newspaper. “We’re getting these people to contribute as taxpayers. They can be part of the group that moves out, or they can be part of the group that invests.”

The Times further reported Indiana is one of 21 states that does not allow its cities to file for bankruptcy protection, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Gary’s liabilities amount to around $8.4 million, an order of magnitude lower than Detroit’s estimated $18 billion short-fall.

“Just 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, Gary was once a vibrant steel town with close to 180,000 residents in the 1960s,” Steven Yaccino reported for the newspaper. “It is now home to less than 80,000 people and battered by decades of industry layoffs and racial friction that caused waves of suburban flight, shrinking city coffers drastically.”

Yaccino noted that Gary, which is 85 percent black, has since struggled with high rates of unemployment, crime and fleeing businesses.

Clearly, selling some 50 homes to new owners for $1 per home in a federal government-sponsored HUD program will hardly make a dent in Gary’s inventory of 10,000 abandoned homes.

Foreclosure auctions, in which properties are sold on the private market for pennies on the dollar, are an alternative, but inexperienced buyers need to beware.

Foreclosure auctions tend to be dominated by savvy buyers, many of whom pool their money and have ties to the construction market, the New York Times warned in a separate article published in 2006.

The sad reality for many deteriorating inner cities is that abandoned homes become neighborhood blights whose ultimate destiny in the vast majority of cases is simply to be torn down, with the land left to return to nature.

Chinese buying up Detroit property?

It’s not likely that Chinese nationals who are flooding the U.S. housing market and paying top dollar are among the buyers of distressed U.S. properties at the cost of $1, because their net worth disqualifies them.

However, the private real estate market, including privately conducted foreclosure auctions, is a different story. In the private market, Chinese nationals with cash can buy what appears to them as bargain U.S. real estate, because of the relative weakness of the U.S. dollar under the Obama administration.

CNN reported Chinese buyers accounted for 18 percent of the $68.2 billion that foreigners spent on homes during the 12 months ending March 31, according to the National Association of Realtors.

At a median price of $425,000, the Chinese are buying more expensive homes than other foreign buyers, and they are paying all-cash in 70 percent of the deals.

In California, where more than half of the homes sold to foreign buyers have gone to Chinese nationals.

Fox News reported that after Detroit filed for bankruptcy July 18, Chinese nationals contacted Detroit-area real estate brokers, wanting to buy 100 or more properties at a time.

Fox News further reported the buyers in China were seeking to purchase the properties as investment opportunities, not residences.

What appears to be a craze among Chinese nationals to acquire distressed U.S. real estate is reminiscent of the move by Japanese investors in the 1980s to invest wildly in the U.S. real estate market.

At the peak of the 1980s real estate hysteria, Japanese investors bought landmark U.S. property, including investing in both the Rockefeller Center in New York City and Pebble Beach Golf Course in California.

Separately, the New York Times reported that Zhang Xin, one of the largest Chinese commercial real estate developers in Beijing, has joined with the Safra family of Brazil to buy a large piece of the General Motors Building in Detroit.

The newspaper also reported that Chinese investors or firms have purchased large hotels in California, including the Sheraton Universal in Universal City, and the Crown Plaza in Burlingame, near the San Francisco airport.

“Across the country, Chinese purchasers bought over $10 billion in U.S. real estate,” wrote Andrew Taylor, the co-founder of Juwai.com, the top Chinese real estate portal for U.S. real estate available for purchase. “They [the Chinese] make up 9 percent of foreign U.S. house buyers, second only to Canadians. Chinese buy more U.S. homes than do Indians, Mexicans, or the British.”

Taylor notes the mainland Chinese rank among the top five foreign nationals buying real estate in 44 U.S. states. The Chinese are the biggest foreign buyers in West Virginia and Massachusetts, and No. 2 in New York, Maine, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Wyoming and Hawaii.

Juwai.com displays more than 1 million property listings form 80,000 agents and developers in the U.S. and in 28 other countries. The website includes extensive Chinese-language editorial content, buying guides, market analysis and estimates of all costs involved with buying any particular property.

The website CreditSesame.com includes an interactive page, “The Foreign Faction,” that permits users to see the percentages of foreign buyers purchasing real estate in each of the 50 states.

Muslims use schools to secure foothold in Europe

NEW YORK – Islamic education is penetrating the public schools and universities of the European Union with little concern to separate mosque and state, providing evidence of the growing religious and cultural impact that steadily increasing Muslim populations are having on the continent.

The decision of the Catholic University of Leuven – the oldest university in Belgium and a major contributor to the development of Roman Catholic theology for more than 500 years – to offer a degree in Islamic theology beginning in 2014 caught the attention of Soeren Kern, a senior fellow with the New York-based Gatestone Institute as well as a senior fellow at the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group.

“The proliferation of degree programs in Islamic theology is being justified by European governments – which are subsidizing the teaching of Islam in European universities with taxpayer money – as a way to ‘professionalize’ the training of Muslim imams, or religious teachers, many of whom do not even speak the language of their European host countries,” Kern wrote in an article titled “Islam Conquering Higher European Education,” published this week by the Gatestone Institute International Policy Council.

“Some European governments believe that by controlling the religious education of imams, they can promote the establishment of a ‘European Islam,’ one that combines Islamic principles and duties with European values and traditions such as the rule of law, democracy, human rights and gender equality, Kern noted.

“But critics say such efforts to create a ‘European Islam’ are naïve and misguided, and will serve only to contribute to the ‘mainstreaming’ of a religious and political ideology that is intrinsically opposed to all aspects of the European way of life.”

University Islam courses in Belgium

The Catholic University of Leuven degree in Islamic theology will be offered in the department of World Religions, Interreligious Dialogue, and Religious study. The Islamic courses, to be taught in Dutch only, are intended for those who have a bachelor’s degree, a restriction that will eliminate from participation the vast majority of imams currently in Belgium and elsewhere in the EU.

To earn the degree, students will have to complete an internship as an Islamic counselor in public institutions, such as hospitals, youth programs and prisons, as well as prepare and defend a thesis.

Soret reported that Flemish Education Minister Pascal Smet, who has headed a steering committee of representatives from universities and local Muslim leaders, has been instrumental in getting allocated 100,000 euros, approximately $135,000, of public funds to compensate the Catholic University of Leuven for teaching the courses on Islam during 2014 and 2015.

An 80-page study – “Imams and Islamic Consultants in Flanders: How are they organized?” – argues that Muslim leaders in Belgium suffer from being mostly unfamiliar with Flemish language and culture, making them ill-equipped to advise the younger generations of Muslims in Belgium who are looking for guidance in their attempt to integrate into Belgian society and the EU.

Kern noted two additional programs in Islamic instruction funded by the Dutch government.

The first government-sponsored program in Islamic theology was a 2 million euro, or $2.7 million, grant to teach Islam at Holland’s largest Protestant Christian university, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where students can earn bachelors and master’s degrees by taking courses in Islamic theology, Arabic language and religious studies with a focus on Islam in the Netherlands and pastoral care.

The Dutch government also awarded a 2.4 million euro, or $3.1 million, grant to the University of Leiden to launch an Islamic theology program there.

“Both of these programs have suffered from an inherent disconnect between the demands of Dutch politicians to promote a ‘moderate’ form state-sponsored Islam, and the demands of local Muslim leaders to teach the authentic and true Islam,” Kern wrote.

In addition to the Islamic theological offerings at VU and Leiden, the Dutch Ministry of Education has also awarded public funds to the Amsterdam-based Hogeschool InHolland, a practical training university that prepares Islamic educators for work in Dutch secondary schools.

Islamic education and the EU

“The growth of immigrant Muslim communities and the concern for the spread of extremism amongst Muslim youth has provided impetus for standardized education programs in Islam across nearly all of Western Europe,” begins an extensive essay not attributed to any designated author titled “Islamic Education in Europe.” It’s published on the website of Euro-Islam.info, a network of researchers and scholars sponsored by CSRL Paris/CNRS France and Harvard University.

“This need is currently being addressed through policies that reflect the unique political and cultural contexts currently surrounding Islam in each nation,” the essay says. “While some countries make room for state-regulated Islamic programs alongside Christian, Catholic, and other religious education programs in public school settings, others opt instead to support private Islamic institutions in varying political and financial capacities. To support either approach, university programs for the training of imams and Islamic teachers has also become necessary.”

The essay notes laws regarding religious courses in Islam vary country-by-country in the EU.

For instance, Islamic instruction has been offered in Austrian public schools since 1983, with some 37,000 children participating in Islamic education programs at 2,700 public schools across the country, taught by 350 teachers.

In public schools in France, chaplains are permitted to teach religious courses provided religious instruction is structured outside the school timetable.

As of 2004, however, no Islamic chaplain operated in any French public secondary school. Additionally, the banning of the hijab in public schools has prompted the establishment of independent Islamic schools in France.

In Germany, various federal states have offered Islamic instruction in the public schools on a voluntary basis. Islamic instruction in the public schools is being tested in North-Rhine/Westphalia, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, Lower Saxony, Bavaria and Rhineland-Palatinate.

Yet, in Germany, Islamic theology courses are widely taught at the university level.

Soren reported The Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen – the first taxpayer-funded department of Islamic theology in Germany – was inaugurated in January 2012 and is the first of four Islamic university centers in the country.

In addition to the center in Tübingen, Islamic theology departments have also recently opened at universities in Erlangen/Nürnberg (September 2012), Münster/Osnabrück (October 2012) and Frankfurt/Gießen (June 2013).

“The German government will pay the salaries for professors and other staff at all four Islamic centers for the next five years, at a total cost of 20 million euros, or $25 million,” Soren wrote.

“According to the German Ministry of Education, Germany has a demand for more than 2,000 Islam teachers, who are needed to instruct more than 700,000 Muslim children. The German government claims that by controlling the curriculum, the school, which is to train Muslim imams and Islamic religion teachers, will function as an antidote to ‘hate preachers.’”

As Soren pointed out, imams currently in Germany are from Turkey and many of them do not speak German.

German Education Minister Annette Schavan has claimed the Islamic centers are a “milestone for integration” for the 4.3 million Muslims who now live in Germany.

Soren stressed that Schavan’s assistant at the Ministry of Education, Thomas Rachel, has further claimed the rise of taxpayer-funded Islamic centers in Germany is a “historic development, comparable to the rise of protestant Christian theology after the Reformation 500 years ago.”

According to Rachel, “Muslim theology will be firmly established in German universities, and thus also in German society.”

Pope vows to clean up or close Vatican Bank

Pope Francis has announced he will intensify his fight against corruption at the Vatican by strengthening supervision of the Vatican Bank through a special commission of inquiry to investigate and oversee the Institute for the Works of Religion, or IOR, the formal name of the Vatican Bank.

Using a “Motu Proprio,” a decree issued at his own initiative, Francis announced Aug. 8 he was authorizing the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority to have increased supervisory powers over the Vatican Bank and other Vatican departments involved in financial activities.

The move followed a decision announced Aug. 2 by HSBC bank in London to close the Vatican Bank’s account along with the accounts of dozens of diplomatic accounts.

International media speculated HSBC was reluctant to handle the large volume of cash frequently transacted in diplomatic accounts in the wake of paying with a record fine of $1.9 billion last year to U.S. government authorities. HSBC made the deal to avoid prosecution for having engaging in massive money laundering to facilitate transactions by terrorists and drug cartels.

Is Pope Francis history’s  final pontiff? See what you think after viewing “The Last Pope?” — available now at WND’s Superstore!

WND, in a series of exposé articles beginning in February 2012, was the first to report on billions of dollars in money laundering activities being run through HSBC bank. The fraud was documented by more than 1,000 pages of HSBC bank records turned over to WND by whistleblower John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president and relationship manager for HSBC’s southern New York region.

Still, the question remained: Why would HSBC close the Vatican Bank’s account unless the Hong Kong-headquartered bank had reason to suspect the Vatican was engaged in money-laundering activities?

Vatican money-laundering scandals continue

On June 26, the pope set up a special five-member panel that includes four prelates and a female law professor to investigate the Vatican Bank, bypassing the Vatican bureaucracy.

Reuters reported the new commission would have full powers to obtain all documentation and data necessary to their investigation and would be able to bypass usual rules that oblige officials to respect the secrecy of the office. Reuters further reported the pope’s decree establishing the new commission ordered the commission to give its conclusions and findings directly to him.

The back story explaining why Francis set up the special commission of inquiry involves the arrest of a Vatican prelate accused of international money laundering.

In June, just before the new commission of inquiry was constituted, Italian police arrested Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an accountant in a Vatican department known as APSA, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, a top Vatican financial office that overseas Catholic Church real estate holdings.

Scarano, along with Giovani Carenzio, a financial broker, and Giovanni Maria Zito, described as a military police agent deployed to the Italian Secret Service, were implicated in a scheme to sneak the equivalent of about $26 million in cash into Italy, evading international financial controls by hiring a private plane to bring the cash into Italy from Locarno, Switzerland.

The New York Times reported that prior to his arrest in June, Scarano was under investigation for illegally moving approximately $730,000 in cash from his account in the Vatican Bank to Italian banks.

According to a BBC report in June, Scarano, a priest from Salerno in southern Italy who has served a long-time tenure at the Vatican, has also been under investigation by Italian police for a series of suspicious transactions involving the recycling through the Vatican Bank of a series of checks described as church donations.

Francis determined to clean up Vatican Bank

The Christian Science Monitor reported last week the decision by Pope Francis to clean up the Vatican’s financial affairs is one of his central goals since his election in March.

Vatican observers note an official decision to investigate money-laundering activities at the Vatican Bank can be a risky enterprise.

Pope John Paul I, who died in his sleep Sept. 28, 1978, only 33 days into his papacy, was believed at the time of his death to be getting ready to launch a major investigation into Vatican Bank corruption.

The Institute for the Works of Religion was a major shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano, a major Italian bank that collapsed in 1982 with losses of more than $3 billion.

On June 18, 1982, the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi, a banker with close ties to the Vatican Bank, was found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge in London in what was widely suspected as a murder disguised as a suicide.

At time of Calvi’s death, the Mafia was believed to have been using Banco Ambrosiano for money laundering purposes.

Calvi was known as “God’s Banker” because of his close ties to the Vatican.

Founded in 1942 as the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican Bank is one of the most secretive banks in the world, operating with 114 employees and over $7 billion in assets.

Traditionally, the Vatican Bank has refused to cooperate with Italian banking authorities and international monetary authorities on the basis that the Vatican is a sovereign state that is not subject to the control of foreign governmental authorities.