WarSclerotic

The Usual Nonsense Offered Up To Explain Muslim Rioters In Sweden > New English Review.

( Coming right on top of the London butchery, it truly amazes me how the press continues to pretend that Islam has nothing to do with the riots in Sweden.  What will it take to wake up the West? – JW )

NBC news misleadingly identifies the Muslims rioting in Sweden and destroying property both of individuals and the state as “immigrants’ or as “youths” but never as Muslims.

But these “youths” are not just any “youths” of all ethnicities and religions. And these  “immigrants” are not a representative sampling of immigrants — there’s not a single Chinese or Hindu among them, but Muslims, Turks, Kurds, Arabs, the same Muslims whose Qur’an teaches them that they are the best of peoples, that they should not take Christians and Jews as friends, that when the holy months pass, they should make war on the Infidels, that the Infidels owe them support — the Jizyah which, in lands where Muslims do not yet rule, should be taken by Muslims in the form of seizure — theft — or inveigling — massive exploitation, through fraud, of whatever benfits the generous states of the Western world so trustingly offer.

What is never asked is: why is it that in every country of Western Europe, no matter that country’s history, or its political regime, that the Muslim immigrants are always unable to integrate, despite the best efforts — and in Sweden the entire country has fallen all over itself not only to offer “asylum” to undeserving Muslims, but to provide them with free or heavily subsidized housing (and the housing, with the nursery schools and kindergartens attached, and the stores, and everything else the Swedish state so unstintingly has provided for so long), and free language-training, and education, and subsidised transportation, and free health care, and all the rest of it, for people who come from Islamic lands of misrule where they get nothing. And instead of overwhelming gratitude toward Sweden and the Swedes, the Muslims demonstrate resentment, and ill-concealed — or sometimes unconcealed — hatred toward the non-Muslims who still insist on treating Sweden as a country where their Infidel laws and customs should prevail, and where Muslims feel they are not given their due – but their due is clearly that of superior status, whiich is their right because, you see, they are Muslims, and any other status — equality or inferiority, in economic or social or political status, to non-Muslims is siimply intolerable, contra naturam, against the Will of Allah. It cannot be accepted.

Look not only at Sweden, but at all the other countries of Western Europe. People of substantially lower I.Q. than the indigenous non-Muslims arrive. Many of them are the products of cousin-marriage, so favored in Muslim socieites because the level of aggression and mistrust is high, so that one favors marriage within families — and that of course has its effects,in the large number of congenital defects, now to be paid for by the non-Muslim taxpayers, and also has effects on I.Q. Education, in the Western sense, about the language, history, literature, and laws of Infidels, is of little or no interest to Muslims, who have everywhere disrupted classrooms and refused to listen, or allow non-Muslims to listen, to those topics that Muslims find offesnive (includiong, of course, any discussion of local kings, or the history of Christianity, or sympathetic study of the artifacts of Western Christendom, or of antisemitism in any of its manifestations, including the industrial-strength murders, by the Nazis and their collaborators all over Europe, of Jews)/ And when it comes to science, which requires training in skepticism and questioning, how can those raised up in a fanatical faith that is based on punishment of any questioning of that faith, and of its central figure, not Allah but, rather, Muhammad — no wonder that despite the trillions of dollars that have flowed to Muslim oil-and-gas countries, the contribution of Muslims to modern science has been negligible, practically invisible, and it is only here and there, and in a very few fields, working in the West, that a handful of Muslim researchers have gone beyond the mediocre.

And the Muslims in Sweden resent this state of affairs. They think they deserve not only whatever they get — and they get so much — from the Swedish taxpayers, but that they deserve more and more. They should not be expected to simply accept their comfortable state-supported conditions which, in fact, are superior to anything they could obtain on their own, or enjoy at home, in their own dreadful and dreadfully-governed countries. They want more, more, more.

But that’s not how the pious reporters of NBC News see it. Just read, below, their report on the sixth day of rioting in Stockholm by “youths” and “immigrants” whom you know, and I know, are nothing but Musliims rioting against the Infidels:

Sweden riots: Cops seek reinforcements, US citizens warned

Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix via Reuters

Firefighters extinguish a row of burning cars in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby Thursday after youths rioted for a fifth night.

STOCKHOLM – Police in the Swedish capital are to seek reinforcements after youths again set cars ablaze and threw stones at police for a fifth night running, officials said on Friday.

The unrest has led the United States embassy to warn U.S. citizens this week not to go to areas hit by rioting.

“I can confirm we have sent out a Warden message,” embassy spokeswoman Danielle Harms said, referring to alerts by the Department of State with safety or travel information.

Around 30 cars were set on fire in poorer neighborhoods in northwestern and southwestern parts of the capital on Thursday night and rioters caused widespread damage to property, including schools, police said.

Despite Sweden’s reputation for equality, the rioting has exposed a fault-line between a well-off majority and a minority, often young people with immigrant backgrounds, who cannot find work, lack education and feel marginalized.

“In terms of extent, it is a little less, a little quieter,” police spokesman Kjell Lindgren said of the disturbances on Thursday night. Eight people, mostly in their early 20s, had been detained during the night.

He said police were planning to request reinforcements from other areas to help deal with the rioting, upcoming football matches and the wedding of Princess Madeleine, third in line to the throne, on June 8.

He said the police needed to be prepared to maintain a heavy presence on the streets. “We will do that for days, weeks, as long as it is necessary,” he said.

The violence of recent days appears to have been sparked by the death in Husby – the centre of the rioting – of a 69-year old, shot by police earlier this month.

One recent government study showed up to a third of young people aged 16 to 29 in some of the most deprived areas of Sweden’s big cities neither study nor have a job.

The gap between rich and poor in Sweden is growing faster than in any other major nation, according to the OECD, though absolute poverty remains uncommon.

Obama’s counter-terrorism speech may alarm Israeli policy makers – West of Eden Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

After 12 years in the trenches of the ‘war on terror’, the American president tells Israel the U.S. is pulling out, symbolically at least. And that he intends to pursue peace with the Palestinians.

President Barack Obama spaeking the National Defense University Photo by AP

1. Israeli intelligence experts, defense mavens and foreign policy gurus should be poring over President Barack Obama’s address to the National Defense University by now. Many of them, one can safely posit, won’t like what they’re reading, in the text and between the lines.

And it’s not only because Obama, contrary to conventional wisdom in Israel, included the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among “the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism from North Africa to South Asia.” Israelis have fought long and hard to counter the assertion that the conflict fuels or sustains Islamic extremism and the Arab Spring has only cemented their conviction.

But it will come as no surprise to most mavens that Obama, along with his vice president and secretaries of state and defense, is convinced that resolving Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians will go a long a way towards soothing Arab and Muslim resentment of, and enmity towards, the U.S. in particular and the West in general.

Rather it is Obama’s declaration of intent to bring the American “war on terror” to an end that may be a source of greater concern for Israeli policy makers, on a philosophical level at least. Obama’s view that there is no single global jihadist campaign that is being waged against America contradicts the prevailing outlook of most Israelis, inside the government and out. His conception that terrorists from Boston to Beirut to Baghdad to Benghazi, even if they are jihadi-inspired, are separate entities, rather than manifestations or even tentacles of a singular ideological central command, flies In the face of most Israelis’ view of the world. As it does for many U.S. Republicans.

“The battlefield is anywhere the enemy chooses to make it,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week. That is the way most Israelis would see it. But for Obama, the enemy was clearly defined and the battlefield was distinctly limited from the outset to Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen and other countries in which “al-Qaeda and its associates” flourished. And the war on those specific battlefields, according to Obama, is about to be won.

2. But it was only last week that in the same Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Congress’ post 9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Sheehan was asked how long he thinks the bill would need to stay in force.

“For at least 10-20 years”, he said, “Until al-Qaida has been consigned to the ash heap of history.”

A short few days later – in statements that his critics will surely associate with Bush’s infamous May 1, 2003 “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq declaration – Obama asserted that al-Qaeda is already “a shell of its former self” and “on a path to defeat.” And that he was willing to start talks with Congress now – and not in 10-20 years – about repealing the AUMF.

This is not simply a matter of U.S. constitutional law, but one of basic weltanschauung. For Israelis, the “war on terror” is the one declared by George Bush on September 20, 2001, in which he said that “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” That is the kind of war, possibly without end, that Israelis believe should be waged, with the U.S. in front and in command. But that is the kind of campaign that Obama told his listeners the U.S. cannot afford to wage very much longer.

Israelis are less interested in the intricacies of the authorization needed to approve targeted drone assassinations or in the pros and cons of closing down Guantanamo. For the past 12 years, Israel and the U.S. have been united by a common enemy and a common purpose. They have served in the trenches together, on the same battlefield. That’s not going to end in practice, of course, but in formal and symbolic terms, at least, Obama has put Israel and the rest of the world on notice that the US was pulling out.

3. Obama’s exchange with his nemesis heckler, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, was no less revealing than the rest of his speech. It clearly flustered him, not only because of the shockingly long time that it took security personnel to remove her from the crowd but also, it seemed, because Benjamin’s Guantanamo heckling appeared to echo Obama’s own misgivings. “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to,” he said, possibly because that is exactly what he has been hearing inside his own head.

Of course, one cannot ignore the fact that the same Code Pink was also responsible for organizing the heckling and disruptions during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans at the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly in 2010. Netanyahu, understandably, did not call on his listeners to appreciate what his hecklers were saying, given that most of them belong to groups that are staunch critics of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians and who advocate a boycott of Israel.

The more worrisome question for Netanyahu supporters, of course, is whether the groups’ position on Israelis and Palestinians is also one of the voices that are being given a fair hearing inside Obama’s head.

4. A direct line connects Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and his address to the National Defense University on Thursday. In his Oslo speech, Obama laid out the foundations of his view of the “just war”, a concept expounded by Christian Realist theologian Ronald Niebuhr, whose name was much in vogue in the 2008 election campaign. In Washington on Thursday, Obama said that even a “just war”, such as the one against al-Qaeda, needs to be ended.

In 2009, the then-untested Obama set out to move his image from the far left to the center, to correct the impression that he is a war-averse liberal who is ideologically opposed to the use of force under any and all circumstances. In Washington on Thursday, he reversed course and tried to recapture the moral high ground that he feels he may have lost – not only in the eyes of his supporters but when he looks in the mirror as well.

Thus, the speech may mark the beginning of Obama’s efforts to forge his own legacy on national security. He wants to make good on his promise to “bring the troops home” not only from Iraq and Afghanistan but from the war on al-Qaida as well. He does not want to be remembered as the founder of drone assassination warfare or as the politician who repeatedly promised to close down Guantanamo “immediately”, but failed to make good on his promise five years later.

Thus, in the coming three years, Obama will strive to reconcile the inherent contradictions that were so glaringly obvious during his tenure, between rhetoric and practice, between theory and reality, between ideals and imperatives – between “what you see from here,” as Ariel Sharon used to say, to “what you see from there.”.

5. One other campaign promise that Obama has failed to keep was the pledge he made during his visit to Israel in July, 2008, to “not waste a minute in brokering Middle East peace.” According to most observers, he has wasted many minutes – more than four years’ worth, to be exact.

Nonetheless, Obama found it appropriate to include the search for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a significant element in America’s counter-terrorism policy. By doing so, Obama showed his support for Secretary of State John Kerry’s indefatigable efforts to rekindle peace talks, because any omission would have been viewed as a snub.

But it may also signal that Obama views progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as yet another element of his legacy that he still intends to fulfill. That, of course, would also worry many Israelis, especially in the government, but it would also encourage many others, including this one.

Report: US traces cyber attack wave to Iran – Israel News, Ynetnews.

New York Times reports attacks targetted US oil, gas, electricity firms for months; officials say goal isn’t espionage, but sabotage

Ynet

American officials and corporate security experts examining a new wave of potentially destructive computer attacks striking American corporations, especially energy firms, say they have tracked the attacks back to Iran, the New York Times reported on Friday.

According to the report, the targets have included several American oil, gas and electricity companies, which government officials have refused to identify.

The goal is not espionage, they say, but sabotage. Government officials describe the attacks as probes looking for ways to seize control of critical processing systems.

Investigators began looking at the attacks several months ago, and when the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning this month, a government official told The New York Times that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.”

Government officials and outside experts on Friday confirmed a report in The Wall Street Journal that the source of the attacks had been narrowed to Iran.

They said the evidence was not specific enough to conclude with confidence that the attacks were state-sponsored, but control over the Internet is so centralized in Iran that they said it was hard to imagine the attacks being done without government knowledge.

According to the New York Times, while the attackers have been unsuccessful to date, they have made enough progress to prompt the Homeland Security warning, which compared the latest threat to the computer virus that hit Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, last year.

After investigations, American officials concluded that the Aramco attack, and a subsequent one at RasGas, the Qatari energy company, were the work of Iran.

Taken together, officials say, the attacks suggest that Iran’s hacking skills have improved over the past 18 months. The Obama administration has been focused on Iran because the attacks have given the Iranian government a way to retaliate for tightened economic sanctions against it, and for the American and Israeli program that aimed similar attacks, using a virus known as Stuxnet, on the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.

President Obama (Photo: MCT)

That effort, code-named Olympic Games, slowed Iran’s progress for months, but also prompted it to create what Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps calls a cyber corps to defend the country.

This week Iran denied being the source of any attacks, and said it had been a victim of American sabotage. In a letter to the editor of The Times, responding to a May 12 article that reported on the new attacks’ similarity to the Saudi Aramco episode, Alireza Miryousefi, the head of the press office of the Iranian mission to the United Nations, wrote that Iran “never engaged in such attacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors, with which Iran has maintained good neighborly relations.”

“Unfortunately, wrongful acts such as authorizing the 2010 Stuxnet attack against Iran have set a bad, and dangerous, precedent in breach of certain principles of international law,” he wrote.

The New York Times said that American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their assertions of Iranian authorship of the latest attacks, but they describe the recent campaign as different from most attacks against American companies – particularly those from China – which quietly siphon off intellectual property for competitive purposes.

The new attacks, officials say, were devised to destroy data and manipulate the machinery that operates critical control systems, like oil pipelines. One official described them as “probes that suggest someone is looking at how to take control of these systems.”

According to the report, the White House would not confirm that Iran was the source, but Laura Lucas, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that “mitigating threats in cyberspace, whether theft of intellectual property or intrusions against our critical infrastructure” was a government wide initiative and that the United States would consider “all of the measures at its disposal – from diplomatic to law enforcement to economic – when determining how to protect our nation, allies, partners, and interests in cyberspace.”