Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

A long-running and increasingly genocidal campaign to kill and drive out Christians is underway in Nigeria – with grave implications for Africa, Europe and our own country. 

A recent ruling by the Economic Council of West Africa confirmed what has long been evident, yet not acknowledged: It’s not just jihadists like Boko Haram and Fulani tribesmen responsible for persecuting Christians. Islamists in the Nigerian government at the federal, state and local levels are complicit, as well.  

Today, this deadly cancer is metastasizing. The Islamic State is relocating from its vanquished Middle East Caliphate to a potentially far more powerful and dangerous one in Nigeria.

The Trump administration has been very robust concerning the duty of every nation to protect religious freedom. It must now hold accountable persecutors in Nigeria and the Lake Chad region and create real costs for their crimes against humanity.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

On Sunday, Turkish voters handed President Erdogan his first, stinging rebuke in the sixteen years since he began transforming his country into a Sharia-supremacist Caliphate.

In local elections across the country, opposition candidates ran against Erdogan’s economic and political policies, winning key positions – including the mayor’s job in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, and possibly in Istanbul, its largest city. If not stolen by the regime, these victories offer an opening for a much-needed national course-correction.

The stakes are high, not least for the United States. For decades, Turkey’s been a reliable NATO ally in a dangerous part of the world, but no more. Successive U.S. administrations have ignored at our peril Erdogan’s embrace of Iran, Russia, China, the Muslim Brotherhood and its jihadist ilk.

Maybe, just maybe, though, Turkey will now begin freeing itself from Erdogan’s misrule, and fully rejoin our team. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Among the most ominous features of the Chinese Communist Party’s intensifying totalitarianism is the advent of its so-called “social credit score.” Think George Orwell on steroids.

By using a combination of tens of millions of surveillance cameras, artificial intelligence to mine the cameras’ data streams and advances in the ability to recognize individuals by their faces or even how they walk, China’s regime seeks to monitor literally everyone in the country. Those who don’t conform to its dictates get a bad social credit score and can be denied travel, education, jobs, housing, etc. – or imprisoned. A particular target are religious minorities.

The Financial Times reported last week that Chinese companies involved in this appalling abuse of technology – and intent on exporting it elsewhere – are tapping U.S. capital markets and indexes to get funding from American institutional and other investors. That must stop.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Last night, President Trump declared that, “The collusion delusion is over.” He also upped the ante on the most urgent issue in the wake of the Mueller report’s conclusion that the Trump team didn’t collude with the Russians.

The President called for accountability for number of individuals he holds responsible for that “elaborate hoax.” 

Such accountability, however, must go beyond investigating and prosecuting the perpetrators of illegal activities that interfered with the 2016 election and sought to destroy the winner’s presidency.  The rule of law requires no less.

We must also answer an even more momentous question: Why did the perps engage in such criminal activity?  Diana West concludes in her shocking new book, The Red Thread: Searching for Ideological Drivers in the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, they were motivated by ominous, revolutionary and anti-American convictions.

This is Frank Gaffney. Read The Red Thread for free at SecureFreedom.org.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Today, a majority of Members of Congress will take the first in a series of reckless votes harmful to the national security.

They’ll do so – this time in a non-binding resolution, but soon in compulsory legislative language – by asserting, as President Obama did, that transgender individuals have a right to serve in the U.S. armed services.

No one is entitled to be in the military.

What transgenders actually have is an illness, usually diagnosed as “gender dysphoria,” a condition long recognized as incompatible with the duty to be deployable and an asset, not a liability, for the armed forces.

To his great credit, current Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump restored this commonsensical and necessary rule, thus sparing our men and women in uniform needless burdens and costs to the readiness, morale and cohesion of their units and to the common defense.

Hold that line.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Donald Trump issued yesterday what may be the most important executive order of his presidency. It addresses the potential nation-ending threat posed by electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) to our critical infrastructure – whether enemy-induced or naturally occurring.

The very good news is the order draws heavily on the work of the Congressional EMP Commission. It has long warned of such threats and provided detailed recommendations for mitigating them.  

The bad news is that, previous failures to act as Mr. Trump has now done have left us dangerously at risk. And the order’s timelines for corrective action and the inevitable reliance for their implementation on agencies resistant to such initiatives means that exposure will continue for years.

Thankfully, the President has made National Security Advisor John Bolton responsible for getting the job done. We must pray he will do so – in time.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The United States has formally recognized Israel’s sovereign control over the Golan Heights. In a White House ceremony today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump once again aligned American policy with reality – and the geostrategic interests of the United States.

After all, having the high ground and aquifers of the Golan firmly in Israel’s hands means that such assets cannot be weaponized by her Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah enemies – and ours. Doing otherwise would be a sure-fire formula for regional war, or worse.

So, will President Trump apply the same logic to the West Bank, another territory with high ground and water resources vital to Israel’s survival?  His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly is recommending a so-called “peace plan” that would recklessly require the surrender of much of that area to Palestinians seeking Israel’s destruction.

Don’t go there, Mr. President.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Now that President Trump has effectively been exonerated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of the charge that he and/or his campaign “colluded” with Russia, our national attention must turn to another, far more dangerous and increasingly aggressive enemy: Communist China.

To encourage and inform the needed, focused effort to understand – and counter – the myriad threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party and the country it misrules, several dozen national security practitioners, China experts, business leaders and human rights and religious freedom activists have come together to form the Committee on the Present Danger: China. 

Four decades ago, another such committee helped Ronald Reagan defeat the previous totalitarian Communist government that sought our destruction: the Soviet Union. Ours launches today determined to help President Trump do the same with respect to the present, Chinese danger of our time.

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

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

President Trump just took another courageous and strategically astute step to align U.S. policy with reality in the Middle East, rather than with diplomatic delusions that have, for decades, caused disputes to fester and embolden our enemies, and Israel’s.

As with Mr. Trump’s previous actions relocating the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital and withdrawing us from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights puts America first.  

After all, it is in our vital interest to prevent outcomes that would actually have the effect of destabilizing the region, rather than promoting peace – whether in Jerusalem, in Tehran or on this strategic high ground that protects Israel from the chaos in Syria and Iranian forces now being deployed there.

The same is true of Israel’s control over the equally strategic high ground known as the West Bank. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

There’s been much talk lately about a looming trade deal with China. Negotiators are said to be making great progress and that more talks are going to happen next week. Other reports say serious disagreements persist.

Then, there’s the question of whether and when President Trump might meet with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Initially, it was planned to occur by this month’s end.  Now, it’s been put off, perhaps indefinitely. 

Unfortunately, the problem is not just the timing, but the content, of such a deal. There’s also the matter of   Beijing’s virtually unbroken record of dishonoring its commitments.

 

Fortunately,  Mr. Trump declared yesterday that, “We’re talking about leaving tariffs on Chinese goods for a substantial period of time, because we have to make sure that if we do the deal with China, that China lives by the deal.”

 

Amen.

This is Frank Gaffney.