90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Coincidence? Orlando killer, Syria bomber shared mosque, hometown

FORT PIERCE

A day after the names of the dead in the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub were confirmed, a trucker in a gray ball cap drove past the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce. He blasted the horn and wagged his middle finger out the window in the direction of the mosque, which occupies a former Christian church building that’s had the cross taken off its steeple.

Until now, the small mosque had drawn little attention in this sleepy Florida Treasure Coast town, a mostly working-class place that despite a nice slice of beach and an award-winning restored historic downtown goes largely overlooked by the tourists and retirees who flock Vero Beach and Stuart, its better known neighbors to the north and south.

But this was the mosque where Omar Mateen, the U.S.-born Muslim who shot 100 people and killed 49 of them in a gay nightclub, sometimes worshiped. He was there with his young son on Friday, the day before the massacre, for evening prayers.

In what may be an odd coincidence, the Islamic Center was also attended on occasion by Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who is believed to be the first American suicide bomber in Syria. Abusalha, who joined Islamist militants fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, was in his early 20s when he died in 2014 after driving a truck loaded with explosives into a restaurant in Aleppo where Syrian government troops were stationed, had lived in Fort Pierce and with his parents in Vero Beach, a half hour’s drive north.

He and Mateen also attended, at different times, Indian River State College, a public regional institution with a solid academic reputation.

When the FBI looked into a possible relationship between the two in 2014, it found no more than a casual acquaintance that came from attending the Fort Pierce mosque, bureau director James Comey said on Monday. Abusalha also sometimes attended a smaller mosque in Vero.

But in Fort Pierce, some are shocked and can’t help but wonder: What are the chances that a small city in the quiet Treasure Coast, an area hardly known as a magnet for Muslim immigrants, much less as some hotbed of Islamic radicalism, would produce two mass killers motivated at least in part by their faith?

“You got two incidents coming out of there,” said...

Everything You Need To Know About Orlando Florida Muslim Terrorist Murderer Omar Mateen

He and his family were essentially a sleeper cell.

“Islamic Refugee” With Gas Pipeline Plans Arrested in New Mexico Border County

Police in a U.S. town bordering Mexico have apprehended an undocumented, Middle Eastern woman in possession of the region’s gas pipeline plans, law enforcement sources tell Judicial Watch. Authorities describe the woman as an “Islamic refugee” pulled over during a traffic stop by a deputy sheriff in Luna County, New Mexico which shares a 54-mile border with Mexico. County authorities alerted the U.S. Border Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) has been deployed to the area to investigate, sources with firsthand knowledge of the probe confirm.

The gas pipeline plans in the woman’s possession include the Deming region, law enforcement sources say. Deming is a Luna County city situated about 35 miles north of the Mexican border and 60 miles west of Las Cruces. It has a population of about 15,000. Last year one local publication listed Deming No. 1 on a list of the“ten worst places” to live in New Mexico due to high unemployment, poverty, crime and a horrible public education system. The entire region is a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), according to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center due to the large amounts of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and marijuana smuggled through the state by Mexican traffickers. Specifically, the renowned Juárez and Sinaloa cartels operate in the area, the feds affirm in a report.

Judicial Watch has broken a number of stories in the last few years about Mexican drug traffickers smuggling Islamic terrorists into the United States through the porous southern border. Last summer high-level sources on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border offered alarming details about an operation in which cartels smuggle foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso. Classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the U.S. government, the foreigners get transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs wait for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20.

A few months ago Judicial Watch reported that members of a cell of Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks with the help of Mexican drug traffickers. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named...

I’m not a wishy-washy or indecisive person but jumping aboard the Trump Train has, at times, felt more like riding an emotional roller coaster than an iron horse. One day I’m the person talking others into voting for Donald Trump and then, just when I’m ready to throw my full weight behind him, he’ll say something or I’ll read an article or have a conversation with someone, and I start second-guessing myself.

I am not alone. Millions of conservatives, who supported candidates other than Donald Trump but are committed to vote for the Republican nominee, suffer from this affliction. We understand what Trump is doing and what his appeal is -- and we wholeheartedly concur. But, we question his devotion to conservative principles and have concerns about how he will govern. We want to stand by our conservative convictions but we also want to be pragmatic. We aren’t #nevertrumpers. We will vote for Anyone But Hillary. We do not want to stay home on Election Day. We do not want a third-party candidate -- and we certainly don’t want to vote for Gary Johnson. We do not want this vote to go to the House. We do not want to do anything to hand a victory to Clinton. We want to vote for the most conservative candidate who can win -- and that clearly is Trump -- but we don’t want it on our shoulders if he turns out to be a dud.

The schemes of the #nevertrumpers do not appeal to us nor are they viable. Their never-ending quest for a better, more palatable candidate is at best a pipe dream. Their insistence that Trump will ruin the country, fails to acknowledge that that country is already long gone, has been decimated by eight years of Obama, and will never recover from a Hillary presidency. Their concern that Trump would usher in the death of the GOP is blind to the fact that the GOP is already in a death spiral. And their fantasies about some kind of spoiler candidate who would throw the vote to the House, is guaranteed to sound the death knell for the GOP and ensure that the 2018 elections are a bloodbath.

Even worse, they have put their playground politics ahead of national security by refusing to join forces with the one candidate who isn’t afraid to say Islamic. Radical. Jihad. If they truly believe that a Clinton back in the Oval Office, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a Supreme Court stocked with young, healthy progressives will teach the rest of the GOP a lesson, then they should just buy a pitcher of Kool-Aid pitcher and get it over with: they are not Republicans or conservatives.

There was a time when we might have been...

A man who took two co-workers hostage at an Amarillo, Texas, Walmart Tuesday was a Muslim refugee from Somalia, and that fact came as no surprise to those who track the federal government’s robust refugee resettlement program.

Amarillo is bursting at the seams with foreign refugees, from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and its mayor has pleaded repeatedly with the government to stop sending refugees to his city.

But they keep coming.

The schools are stretched, and the local police department is having a hard time getting a handle on the rising crime.

On Tuesday, it was just another example. Mohammad Moghaddan, a Somali refugee, was shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies after he had taken two Walmart employees hostage.

Moghaddan, 54, was a current employee of the store, and his actions were quickly declared “a case of work place violence” by the sheriff’s office. The hostage taker, armed with a handgun, was shot dead by a SWAT team as terrified shoppers were ushered out of the store.

The city’s mayor has been on a crusade since 2011 to get the U.S. State Department, working with the United Nations, to put a damper on the number of refugees flooding into his city.

So far, Mayor Paul Harpole has had little success.

Whether Tuesday’s event was terrorism or “workplace violence,” Amarillo, a city of 240,000, has had its share of crime. Adding to the problem is the fact that it has the highest per capita ratio of refugees of any city in the world, says Harpole.

“The City of Amarillo gets more refugees per 100,000 population than any city in the world,” Harpole testified....