How The Federal Government Nullified the Second Amendment to 'Ban' Automatic firearms

How The Federal Government Nullified the Second Amendment to 'Ban' Automatic firearms

There are two competing theories being debated today about American individuals’ “right” to gun ownership.

The original theory is that Americans enjoy a fundamental right to self-defense, in order to preserve one’s person and property against any neighbors or government agents who might act against one’s individual liberty.  This is a natural right that predates our government’s formation, and was therefore enshrined in the Constitution by some very forward-thinking liberals of their time.  In the words of the Second Amendment:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

It should not be difficult for anyone with a passing grasp of the English language to understand that it is the “right of the People” that is protected in that sentence, and it is clearly not the expression of a peculiar power owned by the newly-founded centralized government created by our Constitution.  Such straightforward, simple language in our Bill of Rights was actually suggested by Samuel Adams and John Hancock to accommodate the antifederalists at the Massachusetts Convention of 1788 and to avoid confusion about the new government’s limited powers, meant to guarantee that “the Constitution shall never be construed… to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

Adams thought far too much of future generations, clearly, because a second, competing theory has emerged within the last 100 years which suggests that gun ownership is not a right, but a privilege granted by the government, and the kinds of firearms allowed to peaceable citizens depends on what neighbors and government agents would deem allowable at any particular point in time.

The latter is entirely incoherent when contextualized with the words the Second Amendment, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s the position that is broadly recognized as truth for most Americans.  Today, it’s just natural to assume that the federal government has the right to curtail gun ownership of this gun or that one among “peaceable citizens” if the federal government feels that some guns are too dangerous for law-abiding citizens to own.

This is the progressives’ magic trick, and some Americans fall for it due to a simple deficiency in human nature.  For example, Chris Cuomo of CNN recently tweeted that “[t]here was no individual right” in the Second Amendment even “contemplated” until Antonin Scalia inferred the “individual right” in the Heller v. District of Columbia decision.

Winston Churchill once observed the reason why Chris Cuomo would say something so patently stupid, and why such stupidity might so commonly be believed by others.  Churchill said that, for human beings, “five years is a lot.  Twenty years is the horizon for most people.  Fifty years is antiquity.”

In the reality that existed long before Chris Cuomo’s nearly 50 years of life, however, was 146 years of American history between the ratification of the Second Amendment and America’s very first sweeping federal gun law.  In 1934, the National Firearms Act (NFA), was jammed into law by legislators.

The notion that the federal government could “ban” gun ownership was such an anathema to American sensibilities, and so clearly afoul of the Second Amendment’s intent as had been clearly understood up to that point, that the NFA could not be passed as an overt federal restriction upon individual ownership of firearms.  The law was constructed and upheld upon the federal government’s presumed ability to tax, not upon its ability to restrict ownership of firearms.

1941 ad for taxed-but-legal Thompson Submachine Guns (credit)

This was a roundabout infringement upon Second Amendment rights that is somehow still championed by conservatives looking to score sensibility points with the left, and aligning with Cuomo’s position.

“Machine guns were outlawed because there was no need that justified the risk.  Was that wrong, too?” Cuomo asks.

The short answer is, yes, that was wrong, too -- if the Second Amendment is the measure.  And to be clear, the Second Amendment is the only sentence in the Constitution where an individual right to firearms is addressed.

Yet we find several conservatives aligning with Cuomo, in principle, suggesting that automatic weapons, or “machine guns,” have understandably been banned since ancient times (for us), and it was somehow justified as within the government’s right to do so.  For example, Josh Hammer writes at the Daily Wire that, “automatic weapons are already (for all intents and purposes) banned” under the NFA, so new gun control measures on a “cosmetically amorphous” semi-automatic “assault weapons” should not be needed.

That statement not only concedes the left’s position that the federal government had the right to levy such infringements upon the individual right to gun ownership in the first place, but more importantly, it’s not entirely accurate.

I’ll assume that Hammer knows his history, and that by “all intents and purposes,” he means that the NFA made it nearly impossible for the common law-abiding citizen to attain an automatic weapon only because the cost was prohibitive for most common Americans due to the heavy tax laid upon the purchase of one.  It was egregious for the federal government to craft such a law, but perhaps the more important distinction is that there was no federal law suggesting that an American citizen couldn’t legally own a properly registered and purchased “machine gun” for more than 50 years after the NFA was passed, because it was clearly understood that a federal “ban” on such weapons was an infringement upon law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment right.

In truth, automatic weapons were not actually “banned” in this country until 1986.

It wasn’t until the farcical passage of the Hughes Amendment as an addendum to the National Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 that ownership of any such firearm was truly “banned” by the federal government.

If you ever imagined that our elected betters are actively working toward the preservation of our constitutionally protected rights, watch this video of Charlie Rangel leading the House in a “voice vote” to allow the Hughes Amendment, and allowing only two minutes of raucous “deliberation.”  It is among the lowest and most ridiculous moments in the history of our American Congress -- and that’s saying something.

It has been reported that President Reagan considered vetoing the FOPA due to the inclusion of the Hughes Amendment, but was convinced by the NRA to not do so, believing that the “Supreme Court would throw that measure out as unconstitutional,” thereby “correcting the defect in new law.”  That challenge to the unlawful “machine gun ban” never came.  And now, thirty-three years later, nothing could be more natural than Americans assuming that the federal government somehow has the right to ban whatever weapons it can successfully ban, even if it does so via legislative subterfuge.

If the “slippery slope” idiom ever has a meaningful application, this might be a good example of it.

In the end, it took 146 years of American history for the government to even make a sweeping effort toward a federal gun law restricting firearms among the law-abiding populace.  It took sly maneuvering to enact the first federal gun control, achieved only under the auspices of the government’s “right to tax” firearms, and an ensuing fifty years of the government purposely avoiding the notion of that government could “ban” any firearm (for fear of running afoul of the Second Amendment), before a Congressional circus in 1986 finally presumed that the government could actually “ban” automatic weapons.

Yet today, Chris Cuomo can confidently suggest that the Second Amendment was never understood by Americans to protect an individual right to gun ownership?  History and logic could not be clearer in proving him either a fool or a liar.

I don’t know who’s worthy of more derision.  Chris Cuomo and his counterparts who are demanding that the federal government nullify the Second Amendment’s original purpose, or the cheering rabble who can’t bring themselves to investigate the easily understood lies that are being presented to them.

William Sullivan

American Apocalypse: The Government’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

American Apocalypse:

 The Government’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out ... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” — H. L. Mencken

The U.S. government is working hard to destabilize the nation.

No, this is not another conspiracy theory.

Although it is certainly not far-fetched to suggest that the government might be engaged in nefarious activities that run counter to the best interests of the American people, doing so will likely brand me a domestic terrorist under the FBI’s new classification system.

Observe for yourself what is happening right before our eyes.

Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. An overt embrace of domestic surveillance tactics if Congress goes along with the Trump Administration’s request to permanently re-authorize the NSA’s de-activated call records program. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

The seeds of chaos are being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.

Mark my words, there’s trouble brewing.

Better yet, take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely ten short years away—but the future is here ahead of schedule.

We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Far from draining the politically corrupt swamps of Washington DC of lobbyists and special interest groups, however, the Trump Administration has further mired us in a sweltering bog of corruption and self-serving tactics.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

The Deep State’s tactics are working.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

Seriously, think about it.

The government claims to be protecting us from cyberterrorism, but who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from weapons of mass destruction, but what country has one the deadliest arsenals of weapons of mass destruction and has a history of using them on the rest of the world? The U.S. government. Indeed, which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from foreign armed threats, but who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government. For that matter, where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting the world from the menace of foreign strongmen, but how did Saddam Hussein build Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980s? With help from the U.S. government. And who gave Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida “access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry”? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from terrorist plots, but what country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

For that matter, the government claims to be protecting us from nuclear threats, but which is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime? The United States.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re already enemies of the state.

You want to change things? Start by rejecting the political labels and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to puny, powerless factions.

Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.

Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.

When all is said and done, the solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the government’s authoritarian coup d’etat.

Let the revolution begin.

John Whitehead

The Role of Gun Control in Dictatorship

The Role of Gun Control in Dictatorship

President Trump is accused on a minute-by-minute basis of being a tyrant, but his accusers remain free.  Nothing has been taken from them, not their property nor their personal liberty.  Their rights remain intact in every respect.  They can speak without fear of retribution.  They can assemble without fear of arrest.  They can say and do the most vile and corrupt things, knowing that because the president is not a tyrant, nothing will be done to them for their crusade to erode and destroy our current social and political systems.

While the president correctly identifies the propagandists in the leftist media as philosophical enemies of the people they work every day to conquer, he doesn’t announce any plans to unilaterally cancel or rescind their rights.  He does not threaten to make their words and intentions illegal.  He doesn’t threaten to trample the Bill of Rights because they hate him and the country he works to preserve and protect, often from them.  He has never once hinted at criminalizing their political opposition, or their open warfare on the Constitution and every civil protection enjoyed by Americans who refuse to subscribe to despotism.

On the left, however, the seeds are being sown to create a police state in which the politically compliant and complicit will be safe, but the holdouts will be brutally punished.  The New York Times, it has been revealed, is about to embark on their latest propaganda project, on the heels of their last foray into pervasive disinformation claiming the president was allied with Russia.  Now, the lie will be rampant racism which, if it did exist, wouldn’t need the New York Times telling us about it.  We would see and be alarmed by it on our own.  Preceding this effort has been the lie that virulent white supremacy is everywhere.  The illusion exacerbates the anger and hatred on the left, and solidifies their resolve to marginalize, demonize and attack anyone branded with this fabricated label.  Anyone who does not believe he should be punished for this lie will be branded a supremacist, as he obviously believes his rights entitle him to racism without consequence.  The accusation is all the evidence needed.

The object, of course, is not addressing actual white supremacy.  That is a lie told to dim-witted people who think that “others” whom they are taught to hate and fear are living in an entirely different version of the country than they live in, one they can’t see but believe is there.  The object is polarization and demonization, though not simply to whip up progressive hatred for normal Americans.  The larger purpose is to facilitate the oppression and eventual eradication of normal Americans who refuse to worship the golden calves of socialism and communism.

For years, the Democrats have smiled and told us that they have no intention of infringing rights, or taking anything away, or incarcerating their enemies, and we have known every time that they were lying.  We have watched them redefine the language to change the foundations which we used to share as a country and have known why they are doing it.  We have seen them progressively attack those who obey the laws, protect their families, pay their taxes, and wish to be left in peace.

Overthrowing a society is dirty work, however, and it has become clear that peace will only come with our surrender or their failure, and even then, failure will be temporary.  Eventually, there will be conflict, which brings us to the Second Amendment.  The fate of everything the Left intends depends in the end on whether normal, non-communist Americans have the power to make the price of dictatorship so high that the Left will be unwilling to force it to completion.  If Americans can be disarmed and neutralized, they can be imprisoned without trials.  If they can be made powerless, they can be shot at without fear that they’ll shoot back.  If they can be conquered, they can be subjugated and made to serve their totalitarian masters.

The Second Amendment was always about exactly this scenario.  The Founders did not insist on the Second Amendment so that they could hunt in perpetuity but because they feared a large, authoritarian government controlled by unethical and immoral politicians and their mobs.

Socialist/communist critics ridicule supporters of the Second Amendment, correctly noting that AR15s are no match for the firepower of the U.S. military, so resistance is futile and should be abandoned.  They are correct as to the first part but misdirecting as to the second.  Although the Second Amendment was intended to enable citizens to fight with equal tools against an army of oppression, there is no modern parity.  The AR15 is not a “weapon of war,” as no military in the world issues a semi-automatic-only rifle to their combat troops.  That description is a lie.  However, the second part of the critique, that we would be confronting the U.S. military so should give up now, is not necessarily what will develop.  That is, the socialists/communists will not control the military until they have overthrown the current form of government and seized all power, including law enforcement.

Should confrontations occur before then, they will not be with the military, and depending on the politics of law enforcement officers, may not be with the police.  Rather, the earliest violent confrontations will be with armed civilian mobs, successors to the ones we see now at the homes of political enemies, calling for their deaths and those of their family members.  This is foreseeable in the growing number of “John Brown Gun Clubs” around the country, which cater to fanatical leftists who learn to shoot, and train to varying degrees to serve as the civilian vigilante arm of the left.  Unlike normal Americans, who are motivated to defend themselves from irrational lunatics, these gun owners are training as an offensive force for the overthrow of capitalism and democratic republicanism.  So, how might this develop?

Democrats will again weaponize information, this time publishing names and addresses of gun owners and urging indoctrinated radicals, backed by complicit politicians, to go to those homes and do whatever they feel is necessary to make the locality “safe.”  This will be intended to cause gun owners to question whether gun ownership, and the assault on them and their families, is worth the terror the fascists will cause.  As the Left stokes the cultivated emotionalism of its unstable followers and urges them to greater acts of unpunished violence against innocents, the threshold will eventually be crossed.  As the propagandists scream then for even more violence, and more “control,” those who own guns will be reminded why they have them, and their resolve will deepen.  The question then will be how far the Left is prepared to go to usher in the next fascist socialist utopia.  They know how much easier this will all be if the guns are taken first.

Authoritarians have always understood that gun control is political control, which is why they don’t practice it against their own supporters.   Gun control is for political enemies, and both precedes and hastens the eventual purge necessary to dictatorship.  It really is that simple.


 Jeffrey T. Brown

How Trump Started a Civil War Between the UN and Hamas

How Trump Started a Civil War Between the UN and Hamas

Even within the United Nations, a sprawling multinational bureaucracy linked by luxury dining, corruption and complicity in terrorism, the UNRWA stands out for waste, corruption and terror.

The UNRWA’s abbreviation leaves out its full title, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and its heavy focus on Gaza. The UNRWA classifies 1.4 million or 73% of the people living in Gaza as “refugees” even though it’s an independent territory run by Hamas.
There are really two UNRWA agencies. One is a UN agency run by a small number of international staffers. Another is an arm of Hamas which employs thousands of “Palestinians”. Many if not most of these are members of Hamas. Some, like Suhail al-Hindi, the former head of the UNRWA union, who was also a member of Hamas’ leadership, serve in the upper echelons of the terror group.

While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA, the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.

Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, "Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”

The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.

The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.

On a Rosh Hashana call, President Trump told Jewish leaders that the free ride for terrorists was over.

“I stopped massive amounts of money that we were paying to the Palestinians," he announced. "The United States was paying them tremendous amounts of money.”

UNRWA leaders had reacted to the cuts by announcing that 250 employees in Gaza would be let go. Hamas UNRWA employees then seized control of UNRWA facilities and banished the international staff.

Mahmoud Zahar, the co-founder of Hamas, who had once declared that the Jews had "legitimized the murder of their own children" and that, "removing the Jews from the land they occupied in 1948 is an immutable principle because it appears in the Book of Allah", visited UNRWA’s Hamas members engaged in what they described as a "peaceful and safe sit-in".

“I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.

Schmale had never actually been the captain. Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.

The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.

But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.

Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.

Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.

The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.

Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a "Palestinian filmmaker", who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it's also the sort of "international diplomacy" that the UN frowns upon.

But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.

The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.

But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.

UNRWA Chief of Staff Hakam Shahwan stepped down over some unstated allegations. Deputy Head of Human Resources Nadine Khaddoura, accused of colluding in nepotism, “had to be escorted from her office under vociferous protest”, according to a report in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, an anti-Israel, pro-terror outlet, founded by the former US Ambassador to Qatar.

The Swiss and the Dutch have announced that they’re cutting off funds to UNRWA until it’s determined just who had an affair with whom, and who got whose husband a top job at a UN human rights agency used as a pass-through to an Islamic terrorist group dedicated to killing Jews.

This will mean even less money going to UNRWA and fewer Hamas employees in Gaza.

But Hamas has deep-pocketed backers in Qatar. The power struggle is about establishing once and for all that the Muslim Brotherhood terror group is the dog and the 17 international staffers are the tail.

Suicide bombing a bunch of European and North African lefties who got into this to eat at 5-star restaurants would be counterproductive. Taking away their jobs with a smear campaign is far more effective. And that’s what Qatar and the Brotherhood, which excel at influence operations, are doing.

The power struggle will likely end with Hamas fully in charge of UNRWA while its international staff will learn to run all their decisions past the Hamas employees who are actually running the agency.

When I wrote, “Defund the UNRWA” in 2014, it was attacked as counterproductive by establishment figures. I was urged to withdraw it and stop proposing unrealistic and destructive policies. Then, four years later, President Trump went ahead and cut payments to UNRWA from $360 million to nothing.

The cuts have revealed what we knew all along, that UNRWA is really a Hamas front.

Hamas responded to the cutoff in US aid by trying to cannibalize the UN agency. As the money gets tighter, the Islamic terror group wants to make sure that more of it goes to it, and not to the Europeans who pretend to run UNRWA while discussing the evils of Israel over expensed lunches at steakhouses.

As the wall of separation between UNRWA and Hamas comes down, international donors will have to face the fact that they’re not funding a “modern, secular” humanitarian agency, as one laughable report by the Brookings Institute, a Democrat think-tank dominated by Qatar, claimed, but Hamas.

By cutting off UNRWA, Trump set off a clash between Hamas and the UN that is revealing the truth.








Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Israel Is Not A U.S. Ally

Israel Is Not A U.S. Ally

By If Americans Knew

Constantly referring to Israel as our “most cherished ally” promotes an illusion of common interest that does not actually exist. 

Andrew Sullivan comments on the U.S.-Israel relationship and the role of “pro-Israel” lobbying groups in our politics in a new essay. There are several things that I think Sullivan gets wrong, but perhaps the most significant and pervasive error in the piece is his repeated description of the relationship an “alliance.” He notes that the U.S. gets nothing in return for the extensive military and diplomatic support that it provides, he acknowledges that the U.S. “suffers internationally” on account of its close relationship with Israel, and he marvels at how badly its government under Netanyahu has behaved towards the U.S. Nonetheless, he writes, “I would defend the alliance despite this, because of my core belief in a Jewish state.”
The trouble with all this is that there is no alliance and Israel is not our ally. Its government does not behave as an ally does, it has never fought alongside U.S. forces in any of our foreign wars, and its interests are not aligned with ours as an ally’s should be. There is no formal treaty and no binding obligations that require our governments to do anything for the other.
The exaggeration in Israel’s case is greatest of all because it is routinely called our “most important ally” in the region, or even our “most cherished ally” in all the world. These are ideological assertions that are not grounded in any observable reality. Dozens of other states all over the world are better allies to the United States than the “most cherished ally” is, and they don’t preside over an illegal occupation that implicates the U.S. in decades of abuses and crimes against the Palestinian people living under that occupation, but none of them enjoys the lockstep, uncritical backing that this one state does.There are few words in U.S. foreign policy debates used more frequently and with less precision than ally and alliance. Our politicians and pundits use these terms to refer to almost every state with which the U.S. has some kind of security relationship, and it always grossly exaggerates the nature and extent of the ties between our governments.
The effect of this constant repetition is to make the U.S.-Israel relationship seem extremely important to U.S. interests when it is not, and that serves to promote the “illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.” It is this illusion as much as anything else that prevents a serious reassessment of the relationship….
An excerpt from an article by Daniel Larison published by the American Conservative

This article was originally published by "If Americans Knew" - -