Putin Urges U.S. To Close Southern Border
By George Rasley
Well, those were not his exact words, but a spokesman for the Russian dictator said on Monday that no country was immune to terrorism when asked if there had been a major failure by security services in preventing Friday’s deadly attack on the Crocus City concert hall, the worst attack inside Russia for two decades.
At least 137 people were killed and 182 injured when four men burst into the Crocus City Hall, spraying people with bullets before setting fire to the 6,200-seat hall.
When asked if such a deadly attack unfolding just outside the Russian capital was a failure for the special services, Reuters reported Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said emotions were running high but that no country was immune.
“Unfortunately, our world shows that no city, no country can be completely immune from the threat of terrorism,” Peskov said. He said the special services worked tirelessly to defend Russia.
“The fight against terrorism is an ongoing process that requires full-scale international cooperation. But you can see that now in this most acute confrontational period, such cooperation is not being fully carried out in any way.”
We will stipulate up front that Putin is a bad guy who will use the Crocus attack for his own domestic political purposes and leave for a future column the investigation of whether – or not – the Russians and the Red Chinese are participating in “full-scale international cooperation” to stop terrorists.
But Putin’s spokesman did make one comment worth highlighting: He said the special services worked tirelessly to defend Russia.
We can’t help but contrast that with how Joe Biden and Democrats use the American Border Patrol and other assets of the Department of Homeland Security.
Democrats use the Border Patrol to usher potential terrorists into the United States, not to keep them out.
Indeed, the Biden Administration has admitted to flying as many as 320,000 illegal immigrants on secret flights into the U.S., in an effort to decrease the number of illegal immigrant encounters at the Southern Border.
That would be in addition to the OVER 7.2 MILLION illegal crossings of our Southern Border, and another 1 million or more via other avenues.
And more to the point, House Republicans reported over 20,000 Communist Chinese nationals have illegally crossed the Southern Border since FY24 began in October. Communist Chinese nationals are exploiting Joe Biden’s failed Far Left open border policies at “record-breaking figures,” becoming “the fastest-growing demographic entering the country illegally.”
The surge in Communist Chinese nationals encountered at our Southern Border has raised serious concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is exploiting the Biden border crisis for nefarious reasons – like inserting Special Operations, intelligence, or terrorist squads into the United States.
And to add a terrifying end note: Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has now admitted that 40 percent of catch-and-release migrants have disappeared.
The terror group ISIS-K (Khorasan) took responsibility for the Crocus attack in a short statement published by ISIS-affiliated news agency Amaq on Telegram on Friday. It did not provide evidence to support the claim.
Khorāsān, a place most Americans have never heard of, let alone place on a map, is a historical region comprising a vast territory now lying in northeastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and northern Afghanistan.
Geographically and ethnically, it forms part of the vast swath of Central Asia and the Caucuses that is Muslim but was absorbed into the Christian Russian Empire and later the atheistic Soviet Union.
Think this has nothing to do with us? Think again.
This region, and the nearby Muslim ethnic enclaves including Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Tajikistan, etc. have spawned many international terrorist attacks – and not just against the Russians.
In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing that killed 3, and injured an estimated 264 others, the perpetrators, Chechen or Dagestani “refugee” brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, should have been on the authorities’ radar because both the FBI and the CIA had been alerted to Tamerlan Tsarnaev by no less an authority on Chechen Muslim terrorism than the Russian security services.
The Russians, who have been fighting the Chechen Muslims since the 19th Century, had separately asked both the FBI (at least twice: during March and November 2011) and the CIA (September 2011) to look carefully into Tamerlan Tsarnaev and provide more information about him back to Russia.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) even secretly recorded phone conversations between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (they vaguely and indirectly discussed jihad) and sent these to the FBI as evidence of possible extremist links within the family.
The March 2011, Russian Federal Security Service alert provided the FBI with information that Tamerlan and his mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva were “adherents of radical Islam and that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was preparing to travel to Russia to join unspecified ‘bandit underground groups’ in Dagestan and Chechnya.
A government report released in April of 2014 detailed the failures of federal law enforcement officials to recognize Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a potential source of terrorism in the years before the Boston Marathon bombing. The document—an unclassified summary report from the Inspectors General of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security—called particular attention to an FBI interview of Tsarnaev in 2011 and the failure of a Boston agent of the Joint Terrorism Task Force to follow up on an automated alert that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was leaving the country for Dagestan.
And that was back in 2013 before Democrats opened the border and dropped all pretense of trying to keep potential terrorists, especially Muslims from terrorist hotspots, out of our country.
Putin’s Russia has a huge internal problem with its Muslim minority populations. Why would we willingly import those problems here? It’s true Putin didn’t say “America close your southern border” but if there’s one lesson for us to take away from the Crocus City terrorist attack that would be it.
George Rasley is vice president of Conservative HQ.
Published with permission of conservativehq.com