Monday, February 11, 2019

Against The Evidence, Media Keeps Insisting Terrorists Aren’t Crossing The Southern Border

Much of the noise accompanying President Trump’s partial justification for a wall concerns the veracity of a general threat: that Islamist terror travelers in the flow of “special interest aliens” (SIAs) might easier breach the southern border without one.
Critics in the media vehemently argue that the administration is trafficking in ridiculous, baseless fearmongering. After President Trump said Muslim prayer rugs were intercepted at the border, one Vox article said migration from Muslim-majority countries only happened at “vanishingly small rates.” Another, in The Washington Post, called southern border migration from Muslim countries a “conspiracy theory.”
But perhaps the most influentially misleading article on the subject came from The New York Times. On January 18, The Times published a “Fact Check” column by Linda Qiu titled “Trump’s Baseless Claim About Prayer Rugs Found at the Border.” It essentially concluded that migration from Muslim-majority countries is an unproven conspiracy theory and, even if it did happen, no one could consider it a security threat.
The column contained numerous errors and inaccurately cited two government reports to support the story’s weak contentions. This sort of recurring problem in the media must finally be called out.
Thousands of migrants from countries of terrorism concern do reach the southern border every year; whether they leave prayer rugs behind is irrelevant. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) professionals have, for many years, regarded this migrant traffic as a higher threat, so much so that public funds have long been earmarked for special vetting, investigation, and intelligence work.
The first error from Qiu comes when she states: “Nowhere in the White House’s 25-page counterterrorism policy, released in October, was the threat of terrorists infiltrating the nation’s southwest border raised.” In fact, the White House’s “National Strategy for Counterterrorism” includes pointed information on the threat of terrorists infiltrating the border.
Read the rest from Todd Bensman HERE and follow link below to a related story:

Border officials warn lawmakers of terrorist threats in classified briefing

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.


No comments: