Posts Tagged ‘Fethullah Gulen’

Clinton Foundation Shutting Down Clinton Global Initiative

Sunday, January 15th, 2017

Remember the Clinton Global Initiative, the arm of the Clinton Foundation that Clinton supporters claimed helps solve “the world’s most pressing challenges,” and which detractors noted was yet another handy tool to line the pockets of the Clintons and their permanent traveling army of political toadies?

Well, evidently all the world’s most pressing challenges have been solved, as the Clinton Foundation is shutting down the Clinton Global Initiative:

In a “mass layoff” event reported late last week by the Department of Labor, the Clinton Foundation announced it would lay off some 22 employees at the Clinton Global Initiative, which attained notoriety during the John Podesta leaks, when the various details of the fallout between between CGI head Doug Band and Chelsea Clinton were revealed; it also emerged that long-time Bill Clinton friend Band was soliciting donations for Clinton through his PR firm, Teneo in an sordid example of “pay for play” which most of the mainstream media refused to cover, especially after Band emailed Podesta “If this story gets out, we are screwed.”

Filed as mandated by the Department of Labor’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN notice, on January 12, the Clinton Foundation’s Veronika Shiroka advised the DOL that as part of a “Plant Layoff” it would layoff 22 workers on April 15, with reason for the dislocation stated as “Discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initiative.” The layoffs are part of the Clinton plan put in motion ahead of the presidential election, to offset a storm of criticism regarding pay-to-play allegations during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

For those unable to disentangle CGI from the other money-laundering arms of the Clinton empire, here’s a look back at a few of their greatest hits:

  • CGI was a conduit of donation money from associates of exiled Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gulen.
  • CGI provided $2 million in funding for a private energy company run by personal friends of the Clintons…including Bill Clinton’s alleged mistress, wealthy blonde divorcee Julie Tauber McMahon.
  • One of CGI’s “big things” was putting on an annual conference where donors could rub shoulders with various charitable foundation heads, as well as the likes of Bill Clinton, Ben Affleck, Bono, Jon Bon Jovi, Tina Brown and David Bowie’s supermodel widow Iman.
  • Some of the other names on the 2016 conference list:
    • Former NBA player Jason “famous for being gay” Collins
    • Hernando de Soto, chairman of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru (listed here because he sticks out like a sore thumb among the lefties)
    • David Miliband, former UK Labour MP and brother of former Labour leader Ed Miliband
    • Ben Osborne, the editor-in-chief of slideshow-infested sports site Bleacher Report
    • Nancy E. Pfund, founder and managing partner of DBL Partners, an investor in (among others) Podesta Group client SolarCity
    • Becky Quick, co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box
    • Matteo Renzi, the (then current) Prime Minister of Italy
    • Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood
    • Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia
    • Aleksandar Vucic, the Prime Minister of Serbia
    • Casey Wasserman, the chairman and CEO of “Wasserman, a leading sports, entertainment and lifestyle marketing and management agency”

      (And I compiled that list of names mostly as a bookmark for myself for further research. What the hell is a guy from Bleacher Report doing at a conference with the Prime Minister of Serbia? Could it have something to do with their involvement with Qatar’s Word Cup bid?)

  • Anyway, there was already talk that the Clintons were going to shut down CGI when they expected Hillary to win the presidency. With Clinton Foundation donations taking a nosedive following Hillary’s loss, CGI was just another financial, political and legal liability for them. As one Zero Hedge commenter put it, “I’m sure the shredders are running 24×7 tonight.”

    What is It With the Clintons Hiring Employees With Ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?

    Tuesday, July 26th, 2016

    I can certainly understand the Clinton clan’s self-centered greed and avarice. What I struggle to understand is why they keep repeatedly hiring employees with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Take, for example, former Clinton Foundation employee Gehad El-Haddad, who was just sentenced to life in prison in Egypt for his work as the mouthpiece for Mohamed Morsi’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government.

    Then there are the well documented familial links between perpetual #1 Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood:

    Sheikh Qaradawi is a promoter of jihadist terror. His fatwas endorse terrorist attacks against American personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombing — by both men and women — against Israel. He is a leading supporter of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. He also runs an umbrella organization called the Union for Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union of Good”), which is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. The Union for Good was behind the “Peace Flotilla” that attempted to break our ally Israel’s blockade of the terrorist organization Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) in 2010.

    That’s rather interesting — at least to me, though apparently not to Speaker Boehner — because Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) — an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than . . . Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    The recently declassified 28 pages of the 9/11 report has more to say about it. “The ‘Abedin family business’ is an academic group called the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs that is based in the London offices of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and its parent organization, the Muslim World League.”

    About the World Arab Muslim Youth Association:

    According to the FBI. Abdullah Bin Ladin [Osama bin Laden’s half-brother] has a number of connections to terrorist organizations. He is the President and Director of the World Arab Muslim Youth Association (WAMY) and the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Science in America. Both organizations are local branches of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

    According to the FBI, there is reason to believe that WAMY is “closely associated with the funding and financing of international terrorist activities and in the past has provided logistical support to individuals wishing to to fight in the Afghan War.” In 1998, the CIA published a paper characterizing WAMY as a NGO that provides funding. logistical support and training with possible connections to the Arab Afghans network, Hamas, Algerian extremists and Philippine militants.

    Who else calls attention to the World Arab Muslim Youth Association’s ties to terrorism? Would you believe Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

    Saudi Arabia has enacted important reforms to criminalize terrorist financing and restrict the overseas flow of funds from Saudi-based charities. However, these restrictions fail to include multilateral organizations such as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY.) Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas.

    Despite all this, Saudi pressure has helped keep the International Islamic Relief Organization and World Arab Muslim Youth Association off the official list of groups with terrorist ties.

    And as long as we’re discussing Hillary’s ties to terrorism, we should probably mention “numerous ties between Hillary Clinton and members of the shadowy network surrounding Fethullah Gulen, the controversial Muslim cleric who has been called ‘the Turkish Khomeini,’ and whom the Erdogan regime is accusing of instigating the coup that nearly toppled it.” (Just because I don’t think Gulen had any significant role in the coup doesn’t mean he’s not an Islamist scumbag.)

    According to the Caller, the Gulen camp has been one of Hillary’s numerous sources of cash, in exchange for which she gave access to the President: “a Gulen follower named Gokhan Ozkok asked Clinton deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin for help in connecting one of his allies to President Obama….Ozkok served as national finance co-chair of the pro-Clinton Ready PAC. He gave $10,000 to the committee in 2014 and $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign last year. He is also listed on the Turkish Cultural Center’s website as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the non-profit arms of the Clinton Foundation. He’s given between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton charity.”

    Ah, money for access. Now the Clinton ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are starting to make more sense. Maybe they helped the Clinton Foundation bring in money from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi, Nasser Al-Rashid, etc. Indeed, counting speaking fees and money for “walking away” from an investment partnership with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, the Clintons have collectively pocketed $100 million from Persian Gulf rulers.

    There’s are other angles to the story I haven’t had time to track down yet. Like why did Hillary Clinton’s new VP pick Tim Kaine appoint the President of the Muslim Brotherhood-tied Muslim American Society, Esam Omeish, to Virginia’s state’s Immigration Commission?

    But I’ll have to leave those for another time.

    Faster, Erdogan! Purge! Purge!

    Thursday, July 21st, 2016

    Evidently Erdogan’s previous purges were just the beginning. Now he’s declared a three month state of emergency and really cranked up the purge machinery.

    He fired all university deans and suspended 21,000 private school teachers in yet another reaction to an ever-more-suspicious coup.

    And he was just getting warmed up:

    A total of 50,000 civil service employees have been fired in the purges, which have reached Turkey’s national intelligence service and the prime minister’s office.

    The government has also revoked the press credentials of 34 journalists because of alleged ties to Gulen’s movement, Turkish media reported.

    Authorities have rounded up about 9,000 people — including 115 generals, 350 officers, 4,800 other military personnel and 60 military high school students — for alleged involvement in the coup attempt. Turkey’s defense ministry has also sacked at least 262 military court judges and prosecutors, according to Turkish media reports.

    There are even calls to kick Turkey out of NATO, given the severity of the purge. Hell, even John Kerry is saying it, and he’s no Colin Powell.

    Claire Berlinski says that things in Turkey are getting bad:

    It’s hard to overstate how sinister this turn of events is for Turkey. Mass trials are already underway. Defendants have been escorted by men brandishing weapons. They are not soldiers, nor are they wearing police uniforms. While Islamists weren’t the only faction of Turkish society opposed to the coup, the coup has unleashed all of Turkey’s Islamist psychopaths, sociopaths, criminals, and thugs; they have been verbally authorized to walk the streets and defend the nation against coup plots. The government has suggested it should be easier for people to acquire guns so they can defend the nation against coups. (It was not difficult to begin with.) Just as nationalists and police from Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party were recently unleashed against the Kurdish population in the southeast, they have now been emboldened to pursue any and all dissenters in Turkey.

    So far, Turkey’s 15 million Alevis, the country’s largest minority, have been a target of the surge in Sunni Muslim excitement. AKP mobs have reportedly entered Alevi districts and suburbs chanting “Allahu ekbir,” and, “The AKP has come—where are the Alevis?” A memorial to the largely left-wing and Kurdish victims of ISIS’s October 10 bombing in Ankara has been attacked, as have Syrian shops and the offices of the Kurdish-focused HDP. Until now, many Turks have tacitly assumed the military to be the guarantor of last resort against the prospect of spiraling violence, but the military is now too discredited to play that role. Turks are frightened, and with good reason.

    Berlinski also voices an ideas I’ve heard kicking about: That the coup might have been so badly bungled because coup plotters were forced to launch it early:

    According to Ahmet Sık, a journalist who was arrested after writing a book that charged the Gülenists with extensive infiltration of the Turkish state, the weekend coup was indeed headed by Gülenist officers who had been planning to stage it before a promotions meeting in August, when they were due to be dismissed. Their plans were discovered, he writes, and they knew they were to be arrested at 4am on Saturday morning. He believes the officers, aware they had been rumbled, decided to attempt the coup early on Friday night. This would explain why the coup was so poorly planned. Consistent with this, Erdoğan has acknowledged he knew of “military activity” at least seven-to-ten hours before the coup.

    This is not incompatible with my theory that Erdogan had advanced knowledge of the coup and let it happen to consolidate his own power.

    Remember: Erdogan said that all he wanted was the same powers as Hitler. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Instapundit Glenn Reynolds says that what Erdogan is really doing is “eradicating the last remnants of the secular Turkish state, as he proceeds to turn Turkey into, instead, an Islamic State. As he builds an enormous palace, consolidates power, and elevates Islamists over secular types, it almost looks as if he’s trying to restore the Ottoman Empire with himself in the role of Sultan. In fact, Erdogan has made that comparison himself.”

    It looks like, thanks to the coup, He’s already a good way there.

    An Alternate Conspiracy Theory About the Turkish Coup

    Saturday, July 16th, 2016

    The Turkish coup appears to have collapsed almost as quickly as it began, with government forces backing Turkish President (and Islamist scumbag) Tayyip Erdogan in the process of mopping up the last coup forces.

    There’s a conspiracy theory floating around that Erdogan staged the coup for his own benefit so he could consolidate his grip on power. This I don’t believe, because the sort of effort required to carry this off (multiple military movements in both Ankara and Istanbul, control of tanks, helicopter and fighter aircraft units, coordination of seizing bridges, airports, TV stations, etc.), plus the significant amount of bloodshed involved, all strongly suggest that it wasn’t staged.

    However, the speed with which is was carried out, and the even more rapid way in which it collapsed, suggests a more plausible conspiracy theory: It was a real coup carried out by elements of the Turkish military, but one that was compromised almost from the beginning from Erdogan sympathizers. Erdogan let the coup happen so he could consolidate his grip on power in the aftermath, which is precisely what happened, with purges of the military and judiciary (which doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the coup).

    Some puzzles:

  • Why bomb the parliament building, a target of no military significance with great negative connotations? (See also: Reichstag fire.)
  • How did the military censor FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube? I can’t imagine that there’s a giant switch in Ankara that says “Censor Social Media.” That’s more a National Intelligence (MIT) function, and presumably Erdogan has a had a chance to install his own people there. So how would the coup plotters infiltrate that, or the telecoms?
  • For that matter, who are the coup plotters? Except for the Emmanuel Goldstein-like character of Fethullah Gulen (who condemned the coup), none have been named. (Supposedly seven have escaped to Greece, AKA Turkey’s traditional enemy. How convenient.)
  • Why was there evidently no attempt made to kill Erdogen? If you have even partial control of the air force (which the coup apparently did), why not shoot him down as he’s flying back? Taking out the head of state is one of the biggest goals of a successful coup, and it doesn’t even seem to have been attempted here.
  • It’s entirely possibly that the failed coup is just what it appeared to be as it unraveled: an attempt by a faction of the military that fell just short of seizing control which was underdone by Erdogan’s remaining popularity among the general populace. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions…

    Turkish Coup Over? Coup Forces on Bosphorus Bridge Surrender

    Friday, July 15th, 2016

    After lots of government claims they were winning against the coup, we now have some hard evidence of pro-coup forces surrendering on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul, as shown in this video:

    While the situation in Ankara may very well be different, this is pretty direct evidence that government forces are winning and that the coup has failed in Istanbul.

    Strange that we still haven’t heard anything about who the plotters were, except Erdogan’s assertion that Fethullah Gulen is involved, something Gulen himself (who denounced the coup) has strongly denied…

    The Unexpected Return of This Week in Jihad

    Friday, June 10th, 2011

    I stopped doing This Week in Jihad because it was eating up too much of my time. But this week there were enough big Jihad-related stories to justify putting one up:

  • Michael Totten has an interesting interview with Claire Berlinski on the situation in Turkey. If Turkey put up a status update, it would read “Mood: Delusional.” Also, is it just me, or does Berlinski look an awful lot like Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House?
  • Rep. Peter King to hold a hearing on Muslim radicalization in U.S. prisons.
  • Extensive New York Times piece on the Cosmos Foundation, Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, Atlas Construction, and charter schools in Texas. NYT calls Gulen a moderate. JihadWatch disagrees. Also, Gulen has hired George W. Bush’s PR rep Karen Hughes.
  • You know that “unarmed peace flotilla”? Yeah, not so much.
  • Female Kuwaiti “activist” calls for the return of sexual slavery to keep rich Muslim men from committing adultery. Sisters are doing it to themselves. And somewhere, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is kicking himself.
  • Strafor analyzes the latest al Qaeda video and sees a message of defeat. “The very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat and an indication that the jihadists might not be receiving the divine blessing they claim.” The also show how al Qaeda ignorance of American gun control laws (no, you can’t buy automatic weapons at a gun show, since you need to fill out a form, undergo a background check that can take up to 90 days, and have a local law enforcement “chief” authorize your form (among other requirements), and that assumes you live in a state they haven’t been outlawed in) has lead to the arrests of several Jihadests looking to purchase them.