It’s been almost a year since Donald Trump emerged from an election campaign of threats, lies and vitriol as the future president of the United States of America.
His victory speech on Nov. 9, 2016, sparked cautious optimism that perhaps his presidency would not be quite as hate-filled as his campaign.
“We will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations,” Trump vowed. “We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”
But within weeks, he had unleashed the first of a seemingly endless stream of Twitter tirades from his new bully pulpit. He lambasted the “failing” New York Times, the “highly overrated” Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the “unwatchable” “Saturday Night Live” and, of course, the “crooked” media, to name a few.
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John MacDougall/Pool/Reuters
Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May wait at the start of the first working session of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7.
Nine days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared during an address to a joint session of Congress that every nation now “has a decision to make,” that “either you are with us or with the terrorists.” Jihadists saw his statement as a gift from God. They argued that with this line drawn in the sand, members of the Muslim community now had a clear view of the parade of sellouts, hypocrites and “white-washed” Muslims among them. It would be obvious who was on the side of the Muslim community and who, as ISIS wrote in the seventh issue of its English-language magazine Dabiq, would rush “to serve the crusaders led by Bush in the war against Islam.”
According to jihadists, this opportunity to unearth the true Muslims, those who had the community’s back and those who didn’t, was a gift from above. As Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden claimed at the time in an interview, which was also later reproduced in the same Dabiq article, this line in the sand basically meant that “either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam.”
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The president has given terrorist groups a propaganda victory beyond their wildest dreams.
As a team of elite U.S. commandos found themselves under unexpectedly heavy fire in a remote Yemeni village last month, eight time zones away, their commander in chief was not in the Situation Room.
It’s unclear what he, personally, was doing. But his Twitter account was busy promoting an upcoming appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“I will be interviewed by @TheBrodyFile on @CBNNews tonight at 11pm. Enjoy!” read a tweet from President Donald Trump’s personal account on Saturday, Jan. 28.
Whether it was Trump himself or an aide who sent out that tweet at 5:50 p.m. ― about half an hour into a firefight that cost a Navy SEAL his life ― cannot be determined from the actual tweets, and the White House isn’t saying. Likewise, it’s not clear who deleted the tweet some 20 minutes later, or why the new president, just a week on the job, chose not to directly monitor the first high-risk military operation on his watch.
One of the terrorists who slaughtered 14 people at a California office’s holiday party was furious that her Muslim husband had to attend the festive luncheon, which was studded with Christmas decorations, police said.
Days before San Bernardino health inspector Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, launched their grisly terror attack on the county health department’s holiday celebration, Malik wrote online that she didn’t feel it was appropriate to mix work and holidays.
“She didn’t think that a Muslim should have to participate in a non-Muslim holiday or event,” San Bernardino police chief Jarrod Burguan told ABC News of Malik’s online terror prelude.
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Tashfeen Malik (l.) and Syed Farook shot and killed 14 people at an office holiday party last year.
Islamic militants stormed a university in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least 20 people and triggering an hours-long gunbattle with security forces in an attack that echoed a horrifying assault by the Taliban a little over a year ago on a nearby army-run school.
The attack began shortly after classes started at the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, a town 35 kilometers (21 miles) outside Peshawar, said Deputy Commissioner Tahir Zafar. The school may have been targeted because it is named for a late secular icon.
The attackers climbed over the back walls of the university and shot at a security guard before making their way to the administration building and the male students’ dorms, police official Saeed Khan Wazir said.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS Pakistani troops enter the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda town, some 35 kilometers (21 miles) outside the city of Peshawar, Pakistan, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016.
A clip of Donald Trump is featured in a purported new recruitment video released by Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group based in Somalia.
The GOP presidential candidate is shown discussing his plan to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Before Trump’s appearance in the nearly 52-minute video, the al Qaeda-linked Islamic extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, is shown lecturing: “Muslims of the West, take heed and learn from the lessons of history. There are ominous clouds gathering in your horizon. Yesterday, America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching and Ku Klux Klan. And tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps.”
Weeks before she stepped down as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton wrote a memo urging President Barack Obama to step up his administration’s efforts to close the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay in his second term. In the confidential January 2013 memo obtained by The Huffington Post, Clinton told Obama she worried that support for closing Guantanamo would further erode unless the administration took action.
“We must signal to our old and emerging allies alike that we remain serious about turning the page of GTMO and the practices of the prior decade,” Clinton wrote in the document, using the military abbreviation for the U.S. naval base. “The revitalization of transfers, efforts to prosecute some detainees in federal courts, a longer-term approach to the return of Yemeni detainees, and credible periodic reviews would send the signal and renew a credible detention policy.”
She also encouraged Obama to consider moving Guantanamo detainees into the country. “If the law permits, I recommend that you consider transfers to the United States for pre-trial detention, trial, and sentences,” Clinton wrote.
Belgium put the capital Brussels on maximum security alert on Saturday, shutting the metro and warning people to avoid crowds because of a “serious and imminent” threat of coordinated, multiple attacks by militants.
A week after the Paris bombings and shootings carried out by Islamic State militants, of whom one suspect from Brussels is at large and said by police to be highly dangerous, Brussels was placed on the top level “four” in the government’s threat scale after a meeting of top ministers, police and security services.
Soldiers were on guard in parts of Brussels, including at the institutions of the European Union headquartered in the city. Brussels is also home to the headquarters of NATO.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Islamic State warned in a new video on Monday that countries taking part in air strikes against Syria would suffer the same fate as France, and threatened to attack in Washington.
The video, which appeared on a site used by Islamic State to post its messages, begins with news footage of the aftermath of Friday’s Paris shootings in which at least 129 people were killed.
The message to countries involved in what it called the “crusader campaign” was delivered by a man dressed in fatigues and a turban, and identified in subtitles as Al Ghareeb the Algerian.
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Hillary Clinton’s Secret Gitmo Memo To Obama
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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