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FBI: Jews need not apply for Arabic linguist jobs
WorldnetDaily.com ^ | 10/9/2003 | Paul Sperry

Posted on 10/09/2003 9:12:03 PM PDT by EUPHORIC

By Paul Sperry © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

Despite a shortage of Arabic translators, the FBI turned down applications for linguist jobs from nearly 100 Arabic-speaking Jews in New York following the World Trade Center attacks, WorldNetDaily has learned.

The FBI's New York office in October 2001 asked a local charity that works with Arab Jews to submit applications for the linguist jobs, which are crucial to anti-terrorism investigations.

But not one of the more than 90 applicants was hired, even though some had helped translate Arabic for Israeli radio and TV news stations and the Israeli army before coming to America, the charity's director says.

''We sent them a lot of people, and nobody made it to the finish line. Not one person was found eligible for these jobs, which is outrageous,'' said Doug Balin, director of the Sephardic Bikur Holim, a Jewish social-services agency in Brooklyn, N.Y.

A spokesman for the FBI's New York office says headquarters made the final cuts.

''Applicants have to go through a series of steps, including thorough background checks, especially those who have lived abroad,'' says FBI spokesman Jim Margolin. ''That's all coordinated centrally.''

Many of the Jewish applicants lived in Mideast countries, including Israel, Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

Were the Sephardim applicants denied because they're Jewish? ''Not that I'm aware of,'' Margolin said.

Balin is not so sure.

''Maybe the FBI is not hiring Jewish people that often, I don't know,'' he said, suggesting the FBI fears offending the Muslim community.

Another source familiar with the interviewing process says the FBI was concerned that many of the applicants were ''too close to Israel,'' and might lack the objectivity to accurately translate the Arabic recordings and writings of Muslim terrorist suspects under investigation. Indeed, some worked for the Israeli military.

However, the head of the New York office recently invited a Muslim cleric to preach to New York agents about Islam’s alleged peaceful attributes as part of a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program. FBI Director Robert Mueller has reached out to several Muslim-rights groups since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Balin's assistant, Yola Haber, said that many of the Jewish applicants were ''highly qualified'' and had passed the bureau's language-proficiency tests. Some had been asked back for second and even third interviews, she says. As Jews who lived in Arab nations, she adds, they understood the idioms and expressions that might escape other translators who aren't from the region.

Haber told WorldNetDaily that she met with two agents from the FBI's Manhattan office, Carol Motyka and Marsha K. Parrish, who she says approached her about recruiting Arabic-speaking Jews within weeks of the terrorist attacks.

''I'm not making any comment,'' Motyka said. Parrish was unavailable for comment.

Margolin noted that the hiring process is not easy, even though translators don't have to go through the rigorous agent-training program.

''The recruitment and hiring process entails a number of steps and is more involved than the applicants might have anticipated,'' he said in a WorldNetDaily interview.

Still, the FBI has been hard-pressed to clear a large backlog of untranslated documents and recorded dialogue in Arabic, information that could produce clues to terrorist plots in the U.S.

And like the U.S. Army, it's had to deal with loyalty issues. Many of the translators that both the FBI and military have hired are Arab Muslims. The Army is investigating two Muslim linguists for possible spying at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where captured members of al-Qaida and the Taliban are being held and interrogated.

The major security breach at Gitmo comes on the heels of the FBI's own investigation of some of its Muslim agents.

Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, an immigrant Muslim, twice refused on religious grounds to tape-record Muslim terrorist suspects, hindering investigations of a bin Laden family-financed bank in New Jersey and Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, recently indicted for his ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

A fellow FBI agent, Robert Wright, said Abdel-Hafiz finally explained to him that ''a Muslim does not record another Muslim,'' after first claiming he feared for his life. Other agents said he contacted Arab subjects under investigation without disclosing the contacts to the agents running the cases.

Despite his divided loyalties, the FBI subsequently promoted Abdel-Hafiz by assigning him to the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia, a critical post for intelligence-gathering. Three-fourths of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis.

After Wright and another agent blew the whistle in the media, however, Adel-Hafiz was put on administrative leave.

Then there's the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator hired by the FBI last November.

In screening her for a clearance, the FBI missed her ties to a Turkish organization under investigation by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit, according to another whistle-blower. The bureau even let her translate the tapes of conversations with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of the probe.

Sibel Edmonds, a co-worker who reviewed Dickerson's translations, said Dickerson left out information crucial to the investigation, such as discussion of methods to obtain U.S. military and intelligence secrets. She had marked it as ''not important to be translated.'' Dickerson recently left the FBI and now lives overseas.

Balin argues that the Arab Jews it sent to the FBI to apply for translator jobs ''would be more likely to be loyal to the United States.''

''They were against terrorists and against being attacked on these shores [on Sept. 11],'' he said, ''because they were people who had suffered those kinds of things overseas and were familiar with them, and saw the freedom that America brought to people.''

''So it's crazy that no one was hired,'' Balin added.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: exclusion; fbi; fedgov; islam; jews; muslims; racism
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Nothing crazy about it. Just a quite well planned and executed infiltration of critical branches of Government by Socialists and their friends. They've done it before and will do it again. Read the Communist Manifesto and Marx and it is all plainly spelled out and they ARE doing it today.

McCarthy was RIGHT.

1 posted on 10/09/2003 9:12:04 PM PDT by EUPHORIC
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2 posted on 10/09/2003 9:14:00 PM PDT by Support Free Republic (Your support keeps Free Republic going strong!)
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To: EUPHORIC
This makes me FURIOUS!!!! This is OUR safety and security they're messing around with, for some stupid PC notion.

To whom can we complain?
3 posted on 10/09/2003 9:17:04 PM PDT by Choose Ye This Day (Moving to Turkmenistan, where all the jobs are.)
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To: EUPHORIC
Read later.


4 posted on 10/09/2003 9:21:12 PM PDT by rdb3 (Whoever said progress is a slow process wasn't talking about me. I'm an N-U-P-E.)
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To: EUPHORIC
Thus we now see the legacy of Queen Cankle and her "husband", IMPOTUS X-42...

"F***ING JEW BA$TARD$ need not apply"...

After all, the FBI is an Irish Catholic Good-Ol'-Boy's club where mebership comes from Jesuit schools and BC in Boston!

And being a TRAITOROUS ISLAMAZI gets you a promotion!

5 posted on 10/09/2003 9:26:38 PM PDT by Itzlzha (The avalanche has already started...it is too late for the pebbles to vote!)
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To: EUPHORIC
You know, I'm starting to believe it's a toss up... Who's the greatest threat the the United States... Al Queda, the US State Department, or now, the FBI...

Mark
6 posted on 10/09/2003 9:38:32 PM PDT by MarkL (KC Chiefs: 5 - 0 !!! Dante Hall ties NFL record... 4 returns for TDs in a single season!)
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Comment #7 Removed by Moderator

To: Itzlzha
After all, the FBI is an Irish Catholic Good-Ol'-Boy's club where mebership comes from Jesuit schools and BC in Boston!

This could be a tremendously serious problem. Do you have any backup data to support this contention.

8 posted on 10/09/2003 9:58:05 PM PDT by kimosabe31
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Comment #9 Removed by Moderator

To: EUPHORIC
If they take in Jewish translators, the Muslim translators will become unhappy. That's my guess.
10 posted on 10/09/2003 10:02:59 PM PDT by xm177e2 (Stalinists, Maoists, Ba'athists, Pacifists: Why are they always on the same side?)
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To: EUPHORIC
However, the head of the New York office recently invited a Muslim cleric to preach to New York agents about Islam’s alleged peaceful attributes as part of a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program. FBI Director Robert Mueller has reached out to several Muslim-rights groups since the Sept. 11 attacks.

This is so incredibly stupid that I believe every word. Heaven help our country with these people in charge of national security.

11 posted on 10/09/2003 10:03:05 PM PDT by kimosabe31
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To: EUPHORIC
Not a great surprise. The CIA has a building devoted to Middle East intelligence ... and no Jews are allowed to enter, regardless of their history, rank or office.

You would think, since these translators are wanted because the FBI is concerned about Arabic terrorists, they'd want translators who are more likely to be unsympathetic to Arabs than the Moslems that they've been using. At they could use the Jews to do duplicate translations for reliability checking.

On the other hand, according to a British newspaper account of a few years back, the US Air Force base in Saudi Arabia has been supplying the Saudis with high-tech eavesdropping on Israeli military communications. US jets fly at sufficient altitude to pick up signals from Israeli walkie-talkies, wireless phones, and the like, and US airman (who are positively not Jewish or else they wouldn't have been allowed in Saudi Arabia) specially trained by the USAF to be fluent in Hebrew (in classes that the USAF coyly titled "Special Arabic") translate the chatter for their Saudi hosts. Since this was published in a London newspaper, the Israelis are aware of this and probably not very happy about it.

12 posted on 10/09/2003 10:08:31 PM PDT by DonQ
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Comment #13 Removed by Moderator

To: MNLDS
To whom can we complain?

President Bush said he'd be mad if one his Secret Service agents who'd arrogantly delayed an airliner over his undeclared gun, and who'd been reading Islamist literature on the plane, had been ethnically profiled to instigate that episode.

I'm sure he'd listen.

14 posted on 10/09/2003 10:15:24 PM PDT by onedoug
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To: EUPHORIC
I wonder if the FBI also turned down applications from Arab Christians, there's a pretty sizable Christian Lebanese and Iraqi population in the US. My bet is yes: better to compromize national security than learn the truth about Arab state thuggery.
15 posted on 10/09/2003 10:17:57 PM PDT by ChicagoHebrew
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To: MNLDS
I would go a little easy on this story for a bit. Fox News aired a three part piece on active Israeli intelligence operations targeting military bases in 2000 and 2001. They were sending art students to sell paintings to military bases. The paintings had listening devices in them.

They were also selling these toy helicopters in shopping malls as a cover for being in the US.

There is an ongoing investigation as to what Israel knew leading up to the attack on the WTC. The warnings were too vague to act specifically on, and when pressed for more information, they wouldn't as it would expose an sources and methods.

I can see 90 Jewish arab speakers failing either the NAC or the BI portion of their FBI app very easily.

I'm more apt to give the FBI credit here than blame.
16 posted on 10/09/2003 10:23:53 PM PDT by RinaseaofDs
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To: RinaseaofDs
The art student story is antiwar.com bs written by justin raimondo.

Here is some good background

http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2002_05_15.html#000654

17 posted on 10/09/2003 10:32:02 PM PDT by adam_az
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To: EUPHORIC
If this is true, it is a sign that something really wrong going on.
18 posted on 10/09/2003 10:42:57 PM PDT by tkathy (The islamofascists and the democrats are trying to destroy this country)
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To: EUPHORIC
Another source familiar with the interviewing process says the FBI was concerned that many of the applicants were ''too close to Israel,'' and might lack the objectivity to accurately translate the Arabic recordings and writings of Muslim terrorist suspects under investigation. Indeed, some worked for the Israeli military.

And the problem with that is....?

So the morons hire madrassas graduates instead?

Sheeeesh!

19 posted on 10/09/2003 10:50:32 PM PDT by Publius6961 (40% of Californians are as dumb as a sack of rocks.)
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To: EUPHORIC
Totally sick. There have been so many incidents that we've heard of (imagine ones we haven't yet) of Muslim guys in the military or other sensitive positions that were really spies and enemies. I hate it that the Bush administration isn't cleaning up this crap. It is going to bite us if it isn't.
20 posted on 10/09/2003 11:24:38 PM PDT by First Amendment
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