Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The brutal persecution of over a quarter-billion Christians around the world is the most horrific crime against humanity ever.  But it has generally gone unreported and uncondemned. Worse yet, it is being enabled by prominent American law firms like Squire Patton Boggs.

Among its clients are four governments that systematically persecute Christians and other religious minorities: Communist China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Palestinian Authority. 

Lobbying on those regimes’ behalf in official Washington translates into protecting them from sanctions or other penalties for their misdeeds. That only encourages persecutors to believe they can oppress people of faith with impunity.

Yesterday, we and 45 other advocates for the victims of such intolerance called on Squire Patton Boggs to drop these odious clients, as it recently did the criminal government of Sudan.

One down, four to go. 

This is Frank Gaffney.  Learn more at SavethePersecutedChristians.org.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

International Communism’s favorite holiday, May Day, will be marked today by two of its last regimes using violence to suppress Venezuela’s proletariat.

It’s not just Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro and his Cuban Praetorian guard who are responsible for  intensifying the starvation, brutalization and even the killing of Venezuelans.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Maduro’s regime persists only because he was persuaded yesterday not to flee the country by another despot with a strong nostalgia for Communism: Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

President Trump and his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, understand the danger that such foreign intervention in our hemisphere poses not only to the long-suffering people of Venezuela, but to the region and our country, as well. They are right to intensify sanctions on Cuba and must do the same to their Russian, Iranian and Chinese partners in crime.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Yesterday, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom released its annual report on the state of respect for this fundamental liberty around the world. It is, in short, not good.

Known as USCIRF, this commission found that Christian and other faith communities are persecuted in many of the countries it examined. Despite commendable Trump administration engagement on this problem, its sheer magnitude has generally defied immediate redress.

USCIRF, however, made a recommendation that President Trump could implement tomorrow: Appoint a Special Adviser for International Religious Freedom on the National Security Council staff and charge that individual with: developing a government-wide strategy for promoting religious freedom abroad; preparing action plans for specific countries; and overseeing their implementation. Imploding Nigeria would be a good place to start.

This step was authorized when USCIRF was established two decades ago. It should be actualized now.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

In June 2015, shortly before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency, he learned at an event we organized in Iowa that federal bureaucrats and electric utility executives were relentlessly impeding progress on protecting the nation’s most critical of critical infrastructures: our electric “grid.”  He was incredulous and expressed his determination, as president, to knock their heads together and secure the grid.

On March 26th, President Trump did just that – issuing an executive order directing action on countering specifically the threat posed to our grid and the society that utterly depends on it from enemy use of electromagnetic pulses or similar effects from intense solar storms. 

Unfortunately, today electric industry obstructionists are unveiling a so-called study by their in-house think tank dismissing such threats. It will be used to defy the President.  He’s right; they’re wrong. Time to really knock heads.

 This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Yesterday, the Chinese Communist Party showcased its so-called Belt and Road Initiative at a forum in Beijing attended by numerous leaders of nations poised to become vassal states of the imperial China this scheme is intended to actualize.

The talk was about construction projects and business opportunities, not the colonizing Beijing is engaged in around the world.

A very different conversation was simultaneously taking place in New York City.  Our new Committee on the Present Danger: China was warning leaders in the U.S. business community against further underwriting China’s ominous ambitions.

One speaker, Steve Bannon, paraphrased Abraham Lincoln by describing “a global house divided, half-free and half-slave” with the Chinese people enslaved by China’s Communist Party – a status made possible by Western financing. We mustn’t enable the Belt and Road Initiative to reduce the rest of the world to servitude, as well. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced yesterday that her government would allow the People’s Liberation Army-tied telecommunications company, Huawei, to operate “some” of the U.K.’s fifth-generation wireless network.

In reaching this decision, Mrs. May reportedly disregarded objections from both her own security services and Britain’s most important ally, the United States.

The reason for such opposition is clear: Where Huawei is present, so is the Chinese Communist Party. A 5G network that they have access to will be: compromised from a security point of view; a vehicle for acquiring and manipulating data and the so-called internet of things it operates; and potentially a weapon in enemy hands. In addition, such penetration will imperil U.S.-U.K. intelligence-sharing and defense cooperation.

Winston Churchill famously called the bond between his country and ours “the special relationship.”  From now on, Britain’s will be with Communist China.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Among Donald Trump’s most important campaign promises was his pledge to end Barack Obama’s policy of appeasing and otherwise enabling a government whose mantra has for forty years been “Death to America.” Thanks to him and other, truly providential developments, the opportunity now looms to end the Iranian regime itself.

First, President Trump delivered by withdrawing from the lunatic nuclear deal with Iran. He reimposed crippling sanctions and has now ended waivers that allowed five nations to continue buying Iranian oil – and propping up the mullahs.

Declaring their principal military force a terrorist organization evidently prompted the defection of a senior IRGC officer and forced a leadership shakeup. Meanwhile, disastrous flooding and a biblical-scale plague of locusts in Iran’s breadbasket bodes hardship and unrest.

The liberation of the people of Iran may result. Thank you, President Trump, for helping them achieve that. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Trump administration yesterday terminated sanctions waivers that had temporarily allowed China, Turkey, India, South Korea and Japan to continue importing oil from Iran.

By purchasing large quantities of the mullahs’ energy flows, these countries had long been complicit not only in extending the Iranian theocracy’s misrule.  They have also thus enabled the ayatollahs to underwrite their oppression at home and jihadist terror abroad.

At least some of these nations will likely choose to defy U.S. sanctions. For its part, Tehran is suggesting that it will retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz – which would make access to other Persian Gulf nations’ oil and gas exports problematic and costly.

The right response will be for the United States to keep ratcheting up the pressure to help the Iranian people rid themselves of the government that tyrannizes them and menaces the rest of us. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Suicide bombers in Sri Lanka took nearly 300 lives and wounded many more in coordinated attacks on churches conducting Easter Sunday services and hotels. A local and heretofore-unknown jihadist group is being blamed. But such a cell would likely have needed help from other Sharia-supremacists to pull off such a complex operation.

The carnage among Christians worshiping on that holy day was particularly horrific – and, therefore, impossible for the international press to ignore. Yet, followers of Jesus worldwide are being killed and otherwise terribly persecuted every day. All too often, their losses go unremarked.

Worse yet, those responsible for such oppression are generally able to engage in it with impunity. In January, we started Save the Persecuted Christians as a grassroots movement to raise awareness about these crimes against humanity and hold the persecutors accountable.

This is Frank Gaffney.  Learn how you can help at SavethePersecutedChristians.org.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report leaves only the most irreconcilable of Democrats still insisting that Team Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. The rest appear at last ready to “move on.”

The ideological fervor of the remaining “Resistance” illuminates, however, two features of what President Trump has derided as the “Russian collusion delusion.”

First, its object was, as Fox News host Tucker Carlson observed last night, to prevent a Trump presidency and, failing that, to destroy it from the get-to-go. In other words, America experienced an attempted coup d’etat.

Second, in her new book, The Red Thread, Diana West identifies the revolutionary motivation behind that “anti-Trump conspiracy”: Its leaders were determined to prevent at all costs a counter-revolutionary Trump from undoing their progress towards dismantling American sovereignty in favor of a radical leftist global order. 

Investigate the investigators, General Barr!

This is Frank Gaffney.