Obama’s freed terrorist to be honored in New York City Parade and Celebration

Full disclosure: The writer, Jim Kouri, worked as a plainclothes officer on assignment during the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist group’s reign of terror in New York City in 1977. Kouri’s mother was born in Salinas, Puerto Rico.

President Barack Obama and his administration implemented their own scorched earth policy as they headed out into the sunset thanks to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton for 45th President. That policy included the commuting of the prison sentence of a terrorist bomber named Oscar Lopez Rivera, whose group, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional  (FALN) — translated: Armed Forces of National Liberation —  bombed its way into the history books in the 1970s.

Rivera was selected to be the de facto grand marshal of the 2017 Puerto Rican Day Parade scheduled for June 11. The selection has infuriated police officers throughout the nation including the NYPD Hispanic Society.

The violence-prone FALN used terrorist tactics in the hopes of making Puerto Rico — a U.S. territory — a free nation so they could set up their own Marxist government. It’s believed the Democratic Party’s affection for the FALN has more to do with its ideology than with poverty or civil-rights on that Caribbean Island.

FALN’s bombings in New York’s Manhattan left five Americans dead and a police officer was left with one-eye and a lifetime without being able to work in the job he loved. “I guess to Obama and his people, what’s one cop when you can stick it to the American people by releasing terrorists from Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay) and criminals from federal prisons,” said political strategist Michael C. Baker.

Exactly one week before the Inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the soon-to-be ex-President Barack Obama and his Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, decided to release a report on the excessive violence in Chicago. But unlike Trump, who complained about uncontrolled crime and corruption, Lynch spewed the usual anti-police rhetoric commonly used by Democratic Party candidates to avoid actually doing something to help inner-city residents.

In 1999, Eric Holder helped arrange Bill Clinton pardons for 16 unrepentant members of FALN who had been convicted of “a variety of charges that included conspiracy, sedition, violation of the Hobbes Act (extortion by force, violence or fear), armed robbery and illegal possession of weapons and explosives — including large quantities of C-4 plastic explosive, dynamite and huge caches of ammunition.”

But even Clinton could not bring himself to release FALN leader Oscar Lopez Rivera. Obama corrected that just before the Trump arrival in the White House.

“My read of [Attorney General] Holder and his boss Obama is that they [were] perfectly comfortable befriending and defending terrorists. Obama’s close friend — and ghostwriter — William Ayers was a bomb-maker for the fanatical Weather Underground. And Holder possesses a history of beneficence to terror organizations such as when he brokered a deal for releasing FALN bombers in New York just as Hillary Clinton began her campaign for that state’s US Senate seat,” claims former NYPD detective and US Marine Sidney Frances.

The New York City Police Benevolent Association president Patrick J. Lynch said: “New York City police officers risk their lives daily to protect all the people of New York City from the very acts of terrorism perpetrated by Oscar Lopez Rivera and the FALN.  The annual Puerto Rican Day Parade is a magnificent celebration of a proud heritage shared by New Yorkers and police officers alike.  Honoring a remorseless terrorist who refuses to condemn acts of violence effectively steals the parade from the good and honorable people who are proud of their Puerto Rican heritage.  We must remember the terrible injuries sustained by police officers Angel Poggi and Rocco Pascarello and detectives Richard Pastorella and Anthony Seft.  It is simply wrong to honor a man who is responsible for so much death, destruction and injury.  The NYC PBA supports the decision of the NYPD Hispanic Society and its President, Jenimarie Garcia Cruz, to boycott this year’s parade.”

University researchers funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security discovered that New York City’s borough of Manhattan was the target of terrorists more often than any other U.S. city.

The study was conducted by terrorism experts at the University of Maryland and the University of Massachusetts-Boston, who included criminal acts committed to achieve political, social, religious and economic goals in their definition of a “terrorist plot or act.”

Researchers discovered 343 incidents of terrorism documented in Manhattan between 1970 and 2008, a span of 38 years. Meanwhile, Los Angeles — the study’s number two target — had 155 incidents during the same period.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of terrorist acts were committed by leftists, such as the Weather Underground, or nationalists, such as the Puerto Rican independence group FALN who were followers of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

In the 1990s and beyond, the perpetrators of terrorist plots and acts were and are radical Islamists, both foreign and homegrown, according to the study. One-third of all reported attacks in the United States — a 780 total — occurred in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco and Washington, DC.