All Hamas is devoted to is death and destruction. If Israel ceased to exist and all the Jews in Israel were murdered, Hamas would die — without anything to destroy and anyone to kill, it would have no reason to exist.
“Hamas announces military training camps for 15 year olds,” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
The Hamas al Qassam Brigades announced that it open up registration for military camps for children aged 15 and up throughout the Gaza strip on January 20.
The camps will be called “Vanguard of the Liberation.”
Hamas doesn’t try to hide that it is training children to be armed terrorists. The announcement states that “the camps will include military drills and skills, shooting live ammunition, scouting skills and sermons, as well as courses in civil defense and first aid.”
Kids can register for the camps “at the nearest mosque or the nearest Qassam Brigades military site.” Since the army sites are sprinkled liberally throughout residential areas, that makes it much easier to find a place to register.
Here’s the flyer announcing the camps:
This is the third year of the camps. Here are some photos from last year’s graduation ceremony (a full video is here.)….
Amidst the rise of ISIS and the jihadi attacks in Europe, the International Criminal Court (ICC) admitted the Hamas-linked Palestinian Authority into its ranks, in effect, welcoming terrorists.
The Palestinians have long sought statehood. The official narrative proclaims a desire for an independent state in the “occupied territories” of Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capitol. But in reality, Palestinians consider all of Israel to be “occupied” and many seek the extermination of the State of Israel entirely.
Israel and Palestine are bound by the Oslo accords to negotiate for peace through bilateral talks. The premise is that Israel will relinquish land in exchange for peace and security. But when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, instead of receiving peace, Israel was bombarded with 10,000 Kassam rockets and Palestinians renamed their streets to “honor” jihadi martyrs.
Over the years, peace talks have failed repeatedly and negotiations have been interrupted by multitudes of Palestinian assaults on the Israeli civilian population. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the only representative of the Palestinians officially recognized by Israel and the U.S., has been unable to halt the terrorism.
To make matters worse, in 2014, the PA and Hamas joined together to form a “unity government” in an effort to reconcile the Fatah-Hamas conflict. This “reconciliation”, in effect, made the PA official collaborators with Hamas, which is a State-designated terrorist organization. Hamas refuses to recognize the State of Israel or to negotiate with her. Its charter spells out its mission to obliterate Israel through violence, and its deeds back up its words.
It is illegal to fund a terrorist organization and there is no exception for the U.S. government. However, the Obama Administration has bent over backwards to find legal loopholes through which it could still funnel financial aid to “Palestine,” to the tune of 400 million dollars annually. In contrast, Israeli officials refuse to negotiate with a terror-affiliated entity.
PA President Abbas publicly proclaimed that the unity government would recognize Israel’s right to exist, be non-violent, and be bound by prior PLO agreements. The Hamas spokesperson, on the other hand, admits that it never did, or would, recognize the State of Israel. Furthermore, Hamas claims that its affiliation with the PA ended after a six month term. Abbas insists to the contrary, that the unity government is still in full force.
Either way, “Palestine” is not a state, and therefore fails to qualify for ICC membership. Never-the-less, in an attempt to make an end-run around bi-lateral negotiations, the Palestinians applied for, and obtained, an upgrade in UN status. In 2012, pursuant to a UN General Assembly vote, Palestine’s status went from “observer entity” to “non-member observer state”. This change in status made admission to the ICC possible.
It is noteworthy that this is the same GA that on a regular and frequent basis, passes anti-Israel resolutions. Indeed, the entire UN apparatus in incredibly biased, holding Israel to a standard to which no other country is held. Resolutions condemning Israel in the GA and the Human Rights Council are numerous, while both bodies turn a blind eye to real human rights abuses in countries like Sudan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Additionally, Palestine has been lobbying countries to provide it with unilateral recognition of statehood. Many states have acquiesced, with a swell in the western ranks during 2014, though sometimes the recognition extended is diplomatic and not legally binding. These states include Sweden, France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, and Iceland, as well as the EU.
Palestine’s goal has been to join the ICC for the purpose of filing claims against Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in an attempt to force unilateral concessions without an exchange of peace. Already, the PA is preparing its paperwork for submission to the ICC. The PA seeks to have Israel prosecuted for its 2014 campaign against Gaza, though it was a response to Palestinian terrorism and the illegal smuggling of weapons through underground tunnels. Additionally, the PA wants Israel prosecuted for her settlements on so-called “occupied territory”, despite the fact that it is quite a stretch to allege that settlement activity constitutes a war crime.
Israel is not a member of the ICC, but the ICC asserts jurisdiction over anyone that commits war crimes or crimes against humanity on the territory of its member states. Jurisdictional disputes are determined by the ICC itself, demonstrating one of the many problems with its expansive, unchecked power. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has already promised that Israel will stand by the IDF soldiers as they have defended Israel, but what that means in legal terms is unclear. Israeli citizens are also at risk for potential prosecution if the ICC accepts the PA’s case.
Already there is blowback from the PA’s move to ICC membership, which Israel considers to be a game-changer of escalatory proportion. Accordingly, Israel has frozen 127 million dollars in tax revenue designated for the PA, which the Palestinians direly need, and the peace talks are virtually dead. Additionally, U.S. officials are re-evaluating appropriations and will consider legislation to cease U.S. aid to “Palestine” if it demands the prosecution of Israel.
Still, the PA seeks momentum in the court of public opinion. Its goal on the world stage is to gain international recognition of Palestinian statehood and to delegitimize Israel.
On June 13, 2014, “Palestine” accepted ICC jurisdiction by means of a declaration pursuant to article 12(3) of the Rome Statue (the treaty that provides for the creation and jurisdiction of the ICC). The PA government signed the Rome Statute on December 31, 2014. This was one day subsequent to its failed bid at the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders within the next three years. “The State of Palestine’s” instruments of accession to the ICC were deposited and effected as of January 2, 2015. The PA also signed a multitude of treaties and international conventions shortly thereafter.
The official date on which Palestine will become a full-fledged ICC member is on April 1, 2015, April Fool’s Day. In a world where anti-Semitism and Islamic jihad are on the rise (both stealth and violent), April Fool’s Day will be a grim day indeed. But the joke is not on Palestine. It will be on all those in the West who profess to care about freedom and human rights, but have abandoned their principles in capitulation to Islamist demands and welcomed terrorists into their midst.
It used to be that the media would at least wait a day before sweeping the latest victims of Muslim terrorism into the trash to refocus on the looming “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually comes.
The increase in Muslim terrorism however has made it risky for the media to wait that long. 24 hours after a brutal Muslim terrorist attack, there might be another brutal Muslim terrorist attack which will completely crowd out the stories of Muslims worrying about the backlash to the latest Muslim atrocity.
The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.
With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its “Muslim backlash” stories.
The Voice of America ran its “Muslims fear backlash” piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its “Muslims fear backlash” story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren’t the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.
While Muslim murderers were still prowling France for victims, the media was making the story about the perpetrators, not the victims.
And Muslims around the world lined up to join the “Fear of a Backlash” party like it was an exclusive nightclub. Both Belgian and Swedish Muslims claimed to be afraid of a backlash after the Paris attacks. At least those Swedish Muslims who weren’t calling for Allah to “multiply such attacks.”
Even Detroit Muslims got in on the act. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR in Michigan, claimed, “We are concerned about backlash against Muslims in the west.”
Walid had endorsed the historical Islamic mass murder of Jews on Twitter and stated in a sermon, “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah? They are the Jews, they are the Jews.”
Even while Jews were set to be murdered by a fellow exponent of Walid’s anti-Semitic ideology, the media was pandering to his phony claims of victimization thousands of miles away.
The Muslim backlash narrative insisted that the real victims weren’t Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and Francois-Michel Saada dying in a Kosher supermarket in France, but Dawud Walid, the anti-Semitic spokesman for a hate group closely linked to terrorism over in Michigan.
Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning?
In the rush to make bigots like Walid the victims, instead of the actual men and women being murdered in the name of his violent ideology, the hard questions about the connection between the historical Islamic anti-Semitism bandied about by Dawud Walid and the modern massacres of Jews go unasked.
The murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had its roots in an Islamic political and legal tradition of punishing blasphemy that has continued uninterrupted for over a thousand years. The murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket was part of a great Islamic tradition that began with Mohammed. The defenders of the “Prophet” began by killing blasphemers and then continued his work by killing Jews.
Muslims are not the victims of the Hebdo massacre. They are not the victims of mass murder in a Kosher supermarket. They are not the victims of the Sydney Siege.
They are the perpetrators.
When the media rushes to print interviews with Muslims claiming to suddenly be terrified of an imaginary backlash, it is marginalizing and silencing the real victims of Muslim violence who have been the subjects of a Muslim assault for over a thousand years complete with literal lashings.
Not every Muslim supports what happened, but the history and theology of Islam support the ends of silencing blasphemers and killing Jews, if not necessarily the provocative individual means.
The root cause of Islamic violence is Islam. Everything else, from poverty to YouTube videos, is subsidiary at best.
The cries of “Islamophobia” and the claims of a backlash silence the victims of Muslim terror and encourage social blindness to the next Muslim attack against Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists and countless others.
The Muslim backlash story is a great media tradition that dates back to at least September 11. While the streets of downtown Manhattan were still streaked with the ashes of the dead, the media began running stories about Muslims who were changing their clothes and putting up American flags out of fear that the maddened patriotic rabble would shortly begin massacring Muslims.
The mass anti-Muslim riots after September 11 never materialized; just as they never materialized after the Sydney Siege in Australia or the latest Muslim massacres in France.
The worst thing the media came up with in Australia, after touting its phony #Illridewithyou hashtag warning that Muslims were being persecuted, was three men and one woman holding up a sign reading, “Death to ISIS; Get Out You Rag-Headed F___s.”
They were immediately interviewed by police on possible charges of Isisphobia.
If the police had been as assertive in going after every Muslim in Australia waving a “Behead all those who insult the Prophet” sign, Australia would have been a lot safer.
And if the Australian media had been as aggressive in going after Sheikh Monis, as it did after a few young men waving Australian flags on a shopping center roof, the murder of two Australians in a café might not have happened.
But instead of fighting Jihadists, the media and politicians are determined to fight the threat of a backlash to Muslim terrorism. The obsession with the backlash however implicitly admits the existence of Islamic terror and sidelines it to instead focus on the reaction to it as the greater threat.
On one side are bodies heaped across Europe and America. On the other is the occasional slice of pork on a mosque door, a little graffiti scrawled on a wall or a dirty look on public transportation.
One is genocide and the other is petty vandalism.
We don’t need any more earnest interviews in which Muslims claim that they are the real victims of Muslim terrorism because they now feel “unwelcome” when the bodies of non-Muslims still lie in the morgue.
Try comparing an “unwelcome” feeling to being dead.
It is that sense of self-pitying Muslim victimization that leads easily to Muslim violence. Violence is often sanctioned by victimhood. That Muslims believe themselves to be the victims is nothing new. The Nazis also believed that they were the victims. So did the Muslim killer in a Kosher supermarket who claimed that ISIS, with its mass rapes and genocidal campaign, was the victim of French intervention.
If European Muslims really want to end atrocities like the ones that took place in Paris, instead of making themselves into the victims, they should examine the complicity of their religion, their politics and their sense of victimization in perpetrating them.
Posted By Patrick Poole On January 12, 2015 @ 2:09 pm
Last week’s terror attack targeting French magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s office in Paris has sparked a global conversation about the nature of free speech, with the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag in support of the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff going viral and becoming the most used hashtag in the history of Twitter.
But this afternoon, the UN representative for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ufuk Gokcen, was expressing another view with respect to free speech.
The OIC is comprised of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and the Palestinian Authority. They are the largest bloc at the UN, and when they meet on the head-of-state level, they literally speak for the Muslim world.
The timing of Gokcen’s call couldn’t be more perfect.
Today, University of Tennessee law professor Robert Blitt (a colleague of our own Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds) had an oped published in USA Today calling out the OIC for its retrograde views on free speech and how they fuel Islamic extremism:
The OIC, whose member states range from moderate U.S. allies such as Jordan to adversaries such as Iran, describes itself as the world’s largest international body after the United Nations. For more than a decade, “the collective voice of the Muslim world” has spread the belief that any insult directed against the Muslim faith or its prophet demands absolute suppression. Quashing “defamation of Islam” is enshrined as a chief objective in the organization’s charter.
With countless internal resolutions, relentless lobbying of the international community and block voting on resolutions advocating a prohibition on defamation of religion at the U.N., the OIC continuously pushes to silence criticism of Islam.
Translated into practice inside Islamic nations and increasingly elsewhere, this toxic vision breeds contempt for freedom of religion and expression, justifies the killing of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and casts a pall of self-censorship over academia and the arts.
By building the expectation that dissent or insult merits suppression, groups such as the OIC and the Arab League have emboldened extremists to take protection of Islam to the next level. With the most authoritative Muslim voices prepared to denounce violence but not to combat the idea that Islam should be immune from criticism, a meaningful response to counteract the resulting violence continues to be glaringly absent.
An OIC statement released after a 2011 Charlie Hebdo issue “guest-edited” by the prophet Mohammed typifies this troubling position: “Publication of the insulting cartoon … was an outrageous act of incitement and hatred and abuse of freedom of expression. … The publishers and editors of the Charlie Hebdo magazine must assume full responsibility for their … incitement of religious intolerance.”
As Professor Blitt notes in his oped, the OIC has been the international driving force behind the passage of Resolution 16/18, which was co-sponsored by Pakistan and the United States and passed in December 2011.
When passed, Resolution 16/18 was billed by the Obama administration as an improvement over previous “defamation of religion” resolutions. But the effort immediately came under fire from religious liberties and free speech experts:
In the view of veteran international religious liberty analyst and advocate Elizabeth Kendal resolution 16/18, “far from being a breakthrough for free speech … is actually more dangerous than” the religious defamation resolutions.
“Indeed, the strategic shift from defamation to incitement actually advances the OIC’s primary goal: the criminalization of criticism of Islam,” she wrote.
The OIC’s push to criminalize “defamation of Islam” goes back to the OIC’s 10 Year Plan of Action adopted in 2005. Under the section “Countering Islamophobia” (VII), the plan says:
3. Endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments.
In their published implementation plan for their 10 Year Plan of Action, they are more clear that combating “defamation of religion” is not what they were after, but rather criminalizing “Islamophobia”:
Which is effectively what they’ve accomplished with the generous assistance of the Obama administration. Just two months before the passage of Resolution 16/18, senior Justice Department officials were meeting with U.S. Islamic groups discussing that very thing.
And in November 2012, when I reported here that U.S. Embassy in Jeddah Consul General Anne Casper was going to be addressing the OIC’s symposium on “defamation of Islam,” the OIC quickly scrubbed any reference to her appearance.
My colleague Stephen Coughlin has posted a video lecture outlining how the OIC’s efforts with respect to Resolution 16/18 are really rooted in Islamic law’s codes prohibiting blasphemy:
It’s hardly surprising that even after the Charlie Hebdo attack the OIC is not content to abandon their decade-long effort to criminalize “Islamophobia.” But, much as Professor Blitt has warned in his oped today, by doing so they are pushing the global Islamic community further away from the rest of the world.
[T]he Islamists will have won on many accounts. The fact that leaders of the Western world have demurred to differentiate between Islam and Islamism (the implementation of Islam on a political level, including the instituting of sharia law) due to desire not to offend Muslims or be labelled racists means that they will not implement the measures needed to stamp out the Islamist ideology and its resulting violence.
**************
By refusing to censor themselves and bow to the requests of sharia law, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo refused to be part of this sabotage.The Western world needs to take up their gauntlet.
World leaders joined a march of one and a half million people today in Paris in a show of unity to the 17 slain in the Islamist terrorist attacks across France last week.
“Unity against extremism” was the theme in Paris’ Republique plaza, as reflected in the words of France Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said Saturday, “We are all Charlie, we are all police, we are all Jews of France.”
The French prime minister was referring to the attacks on theCharlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday that left 10 journalists and 2 policemen dead, another policewoman dead in a separate attack on Thursday and four hostages killed in a take-over of a kosher mini-market on Friday.
Two brothers armed with AK-47s along with another gunmen stormed the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s offices after deeming cartoons they had published offensive to Islam. The magazine’s headquarters had been firebombed in 2011 for the same “offense.” The magazine had police protection and its editor, who was killed in the attack, employed a policeman as a personal bodyguard.
In a video of the attack as it played out afterwards on the street taken by a Parisian who had escaped to the roof of a neighboring building, the attackers could be heard shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“God is Great” in Arabic) as they shot a policeman on the street, then finishing him off at point blank while he lay wounded.
As explained by British Islamist Anjem Choudary – and as well understood by the French president as well as every other world leader who will be attending Sunday’s rally — insulting the prophet of Islam is a crime punishable by the death penalty according to sharia(Islamic) law.
Which make it even more surprising that, in one of Francois Hollande’ s first statements following the attack on the magazine, the French president said, “These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.”
The White House press secretary Josh Earnest, took the obfuscation one step further when he kept referring to the attack as “violence,” prompting his CNN interviewer to pin him down saying, “Josh, when you talk about countering the message, you keep using the word violence. I mean, this is an act of terrorism, that’s what the president of France called it — an act of terrorism … Do you see this as an act of terrorism, and is this something that has to be condemned on that level?”
To which Earnest replied obscurely, “Based on what we know right now, it does seem that’s what we’re confronting here. And this is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn, and if based on this investigation it turns out to be an act of terrorism, then we would condemn that in the strongest possible terms, too.”
After the beheading of journalist James Foley, U.S. President Barack Obama declare that the Islamic State “is not Islamic.” Following this stance, Obama initially released a statement which read, “I strongly condemn the horrific shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris that has reportedly killed 12 people.”
Later, he managed to refer to the attack simply as “terrorism.”
For their part, many media outlets were busy scrubbing the frames of the video where “Allahu Akhbar” could be heard. The New York Times originally reported a quote from a survivor of the magazine attack, Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who was at the magazine’s office that morning and later spoke to French media.
Relating how she thought she would be killed when one of the attackers put a gun to her head, Vinson reported that the gunman said instead, “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman. We don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself.”
The quote was short-lived on the Times, who later edited Vinson’s quote from the attacker to read, “Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you. You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.”
CNN, for their part, managed to question whether the kosher store was chosen by the Islamist attacker for anti-Semitic reasons since “many Muslims shopped there” and because there were a “variety of shops” in the non-Jewish neighborhood. The network chose to ignore a widely circulated report by a French reporter who spoke to the terrorist by phone. “He said he did it to defend oppressed Muslims, especially in Palestine, and he chose a kosher supermarket because it served Jews,” said the French reporter.
Amid the reporting was the recurring question asked by the media, “What can be done?” as well as the implied answer given by the French president when he said, “France has not seen the end of the threats it faces” – an answer unfortunately relevant to the rest of the Western world.
Hollande’s response will, regrettably, be the correct assessment if those in charge refuse to face the reality of the threat: Failure to address the “Islamist” component of the terrorism that is striking the West is not only disingenuous but erects an impenetrable barrier to overcoming it.
And so, the Islamists will have won on many accounts. The fact that leaders of the Western world have demurred to differentiate between Islam and Islamism (the implementation of Islam on a political level, including the instituting of sharia law) due to desire not to offend Muslims or be labelled racists means that they will not implement the measures needed to stamp out the Islamist ideology and its resulting violence.
“Everyone is focusing on the fact that that the jihadists went after cartoonists,“ said Clarion Project’s national security analyst Ryan Mauro in an interview on national news (see below for full interview). Yet, “there is always going to be a target [emanating] from this ideology that says that ‘Things like this are so illegal undersharia that they must be retaliated against violently in order to make societies conform to our belief system of sharia.’”
Our leaders must realize that speaking about terror motivated by Islamist ideology does not connote anti-Muslim sentiment.
“The issue we face is not, as Islamist groups falsely claim in the United States – ironically the very ones invited to the White House, Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and State Department — that using the term Islamic terrorism connotes a generalization that all Muslims are terrorists any more than using the term “Hispanic drug cartels” means that all Hispanics are druggies or that the term “Italian mafia” means that all Italians are mobsters or that the term “German Nazis” mean that all Germans were Nazis, “ writes Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
“The term Islamic terrorism means just that: terrorist attacks with an Islamic motivation — whether they attempts to silence critics of Islam, impose Sharia, punish Western ‘crusaders,’ commit genocide of non-Muslims, establish Islamic supremacy (or a Caliphate), or destroy any non Muslim peoples (e.g. the Jews and Christians) that are ‘occupying Muslim lands,’” says Emerson.
Failure to identify the Islamist ideology driving terrorism necessarily means we will not succeed in our battle against it. Moreover, we will be willingly complicit in our demise.
If we don’t want to be part of that, the events in France teach us, “Don’t censor yourself,” says Mauro. “Recognize that this attack is a means to an end. Victory for them isn’t the attack itself, the victory comes when we censor ourselves. Because they are not powerful enough to enforce their form of sharia governance upon us, what they can do is to intimidate us into implementing it on ourselves.”
In a document recovered from a 1991 meeting which outlines the Muslim Brotherhood‘s strategic goals for North America, the founders of the Islamist movement in America wrote, “The Ikhwan[Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”
By refusing to censor themselves and bow to the requests of sharialaw, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo refused to be part of this sabotage.
The Western world needs to take up their gauntlet.
As the massive march unfolded in Paris, it served to remind us why everyone showed up in the first place: because some fanatical, determined assholes murdered a bunch of innocent citizens.
It serves to remind us of this simple fact, as this initial outrage gets lost among other phony concerns, desires and political wishes.
The march is no longer a simple, defiant repudiation of radical Islamic assholes. No – it’s now against other things – including racism, backlash, and so on. Instead of learning a lesson about evil, the media return to wimpy, vacant pronouncements of tolerance – like an amnesiac dog devouring its own vomit. That’s the cartoon I keep seeing.
While we watched the march, over in Nigeria fiends attached explosives to young girls and sent them off on dual suicide missions. Six people were killed in a market, that mid-afternoon – the second attack to use young girls as death-delivery systems. Ten years old or so – all that’s left are parts of their torso and hair. This, occurring on the heels of Boku Harem’s latest and deadliest attack – one that killed up to 2,000 women, children, and elderly civilians. It’s a monstrous ugly thing that got lost in the Paris shuffle. And no arm-linking chant of famous names and famous faces is going to stop that.
So forgive me if a march for unity leaves me cold. It should be a march for war.
I pray one day everyone will wake up, and realize this is not a time for a call for unity under the guise of tolerance, but for a unity of will – a collective fortitude necessary to destroy a movement that wants to destroy us. Most people get this. The media, not so much.
What are the barriers to this? To me, it’s pretty simple.
We are dealing with a death cult that’s aided and abetted by two different fifth columns, both of which are cults in themselves.
If you’re new to the phrase, “fifth column,” it describes any group of people who act to undermine their own country from within. What makes these two fifth columns different is their actions are almost entirely performed out in the open, egged on and saluted by the rich, the educated, the upwardly able, the elites.
The first fifth column is the academic media complex that previously deemed the War On Terror Islamophobic, unnecessary and laughable. These are those cretins who spent more time obsessing over our response to 9/11, than 9/11 itself. They are the same cretins who see in every terror attack our culpability, and therefore an avenue for dismissing any legitimate response. This is not just stupidity, it’s worse: it’s a calculated movement to undermine the west from within. The accusation of “Islamophobia” is nothing more than a movable shrub camouflaging an eradication of will, rendering us incapable of fighting an ever growing, and ever more vicious threat.
The second fifth column is the academic media complex that deems the War on Terror intrusive to your privacy, as if the NSA really is interested in reading your stupid emails. You need intelligence to engage in espionage, one must track evil to catch it, and covert eavesdropping is a must – but it’s oh so unfair and mean-spirited! How dare you spy! That’s so deeply offensive to my pocket constitution! Sure, Snowden adulation was active and easy when threats were dormant. But now that the needles in the haystack are starting to stab – the Greenwald groupies and Snowden suck-ups are as quiet as a mime fart.
(It is interesting to note that those in that first fifth column have migrated into the second fifth column, blending in with naïve conservatives and their talk radio taskmasters.)
As I watch the news now, I hear one anchor wondering if we’re doing enough to track global terror. Is there “not enough coordination?”
Only years ago, perhaps to this person – such tracking of “global jihad” seemed overblown. At the march, there were something like 40 heads of state including Angela Merkel and David Cameron (no Obama). So, just like that, we’re back to a global war on terror? Anyone want to send a bouquet of flowers to Dick Cheney? Can we stop whipping ourselves over torture? Has Dianne Feinstein changed her mind, again, about spilling our methods?
Anchors now spend their time in air conditioned studios wondering about this new competitiveness between ISIS and al Qaeda – a line of thought that allows one to avoid admitting that “lone wolves” are actually a well-trained pack.
And as some others point fingers at a country like France for not “assimilating” its new immigrants enough – which leads to alienation, then terror – its observable that terror still occurs in areas where assimilation is not an issue at all. Muslims are blowing up Muslims in Muslim places. And besides, it’s usually the responsibility of the immigrant to assimilate to the country, not the reverse. But academics tell us that’s racist. All cultures are equal, and expecting someone to leave barbaric practices back home is bullying.
Worse, as one CNN hack already labeled terrorists “activists,” and another identified a black French terrorist as an African American, still another wonders if the Paris demonstration might strengthen the radical’s defiance.
What is she suggesting then, exactly? Go home and hope this shit blows over?
After I posted a monologue on the Paris attacks, a Muslim girl tweeted at me, demanding I stop interchanging Islam with terror (which I hadn’t, but she really didn’t care). I asked her, then and there, if she would condemn terror with me, and the horrific acts of radical islam. She didn’t – instead she went after Israel.
I gave her another chance – pointing out that she’s accused me of conflating Islam and terror – yet she, as a Muslim would not condemn terror. SO isn’t she conflating the two? Like a pre-programmed robot, she stuck to her script of Islamophobia – and it became clear (as it always does), that we’ve created these idiots, by indulging their phony victimhood.
The first step in any problem is admitting you have one. But we have already given in to the mindset of that girl above – worried more about backlash than the “frontlash,” – that Charlie Hebdo will happen again, and again.
But, as always, I propose a deal. It is one I made on The Five a few days ago, and it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
If you believe that terror is not a religious issue, and I agree with you – then what does that mean, exactly?
It means that if I don’t “see” Islam, when I fight terror, then you cannot “see” Islamophobia when I fight it.
On the contrary, as a Muslim you should join me in championing the elimination of such heathens – since after all, it has NOTHING to do with religion. We can fight this together, if we look at our enemies through the same lens: seeing as they are murderous scum who should die.
However, if you have a problem making that step – like that moronic girl who tweeted me – then perhaps it is you who has the problem separating religion from terror.
It’s a problem you should solve. Soon.
Because we aren’t waiting for you.
And then we become that ACME safe that lands on the Wile E. Coyote that is radical Islam. I love that cartoon.
DOHA, Qatar — Qatar’s top diplomat on Monday dismissed as “just rumors” an Israeli claim that the tiny Gulf nation agreed to expel a leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, saying he is a “dear guest” of the energy-rich country.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry last week issued a statement saying it welcomed Qatar’s decision to expel Hamas political bureau head Khaled Mashaal to Turkey. It said the Qatari decision came after heavy diplomatic pressure from Israel.
Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah denied there were any such plans.
“These are just rumors that are targeted at changing Qatar’s policies toward the Palestinian people. Khaled Meshaal is a dear guest in Qatar and he is in his country,” he told reporters in response to a question during a news conference with his visiting Venezuelan counterpart, Delcy Rodriguez.
Hamas officials in both Qatar and Gaza earlier rejected the claim that Mashaal planned to leave Qatar, a member of OPEC that will host the 2022 World Cup.
“The motivation for these rumors,” al-Attiyah added, “is to put pressure on Qatar to change its position on this issue. This is impossible because the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the principles of the country’s foreign policy.”
An Israeli official last week said his government had received word from “official channels” that Qatar had ordered Mashaal’s expulsion.
Israel used to have a trade office in Qatar — effectively a diplomatic outpost — but that was ordered closed following the 2008 Israeli conflict with Hamas. It still maintains low-level relations with the country.
Qatar’s former emir, the father of the current ruler, in 2012 became the first head of state to visit Gaza since Hamas militants seized control in 2007.
The Gulf state has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the seaside territory. Al-Attiyah has previously said his country’s support is not for Hamas but for the Palestinian people.
In his yearly address to the Vatican Diplomatic Corps on Monday, Pope Francis decried the breakdown of society “spawning violence and death.” Referencing the “tragic slayings which took place in Paris,” Francis blamed enslavement to “deviant forms of religion.” This fundamentalism, Francis said, which uses religion as a pretext for evil, is “born of a corrupt heart, a heart incapable of recognizing and doing good, of pursuing peace.”
One sees the “tragic consequences” of this mentality “in the never-ending spread of conflicts,” Francis said. “Like a true world war fought piecemeal, they affect, albeit in different forms and degrees of intensity, a number of areas in our world.”
Francis said that his thoughts “turn above all to the Middle East, beginning with the beloved land of Jesus which I had the joy of visiting last May, and for whose peace we constantly pray.”
“The Middle East,” the Pope said, is tragically embroiled in “conflicts which have lasted far too long, with chilling repercussions, due also to the spread of fundamentalist terrorism in Syria and in Iraq.”
He said that this form of terrorism is based on a throwaway culture that starts by eliminating God. “Religious fundamentalism,” he said “even before it eliminates human beings by perpetrating horrendous killings, eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext.”
Francis said that in the face of this unjust aggression, which strikes Christians and other groups in the region, “a unanimous response is needed.”
“Here, in your presence,” Francis continued, “I appeal to the entire international community, as I do to the respective governments involved, to take concrete steps to bring about peace and to protect all those who are victims of war and persecution, driven from their homes and their homeland.”
The Pope once again spoke of the importance of the Christian communities of the Middle East, praising their “precious testimony of faith and courage,” and declaring that a “Middle East without Christians would be a marred and mutilated Middle East!” The Pope also expressed his hope that “religious, political and intellectual leaders, especially those of the Muslim community, will condemn all fundamentalist and extremist interpretations of religion which attempt to justify such acts of violence.”
The Pope expressed his concern for the situation in Nigeria as well, “where acts of violence continue to strike indiscriminately and there is a constant increase in the tragic phenomenon of kidnappings, often of young girls carried off to be made objects of trafficking.” Francis called this “an abominable trade which must not continue!” and also “a scourge which needs to be eradicated.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome
The Islamic State is moving in on Lebanon. I wonder if they used American-made weaponry. Obama thinks he’s safe because he stood with jihadists in their cartoon jihad and refused to attend the anti-terror rally in France. He wouldn’t even let Holder go and he was in Paris.
But Obama’s sniveling only makes him appear weak and decaying. Easy prey. That means you and me, kids.
“Lebanon interior minister: IS group may have been behind deadly cafe bombing”, January 11, 2015, Associated Press
Men carry an Alawite woman, center, after she fainted during the funeral procession of her relative who was killed at a coffee shop where a suicide bombing struck it Saturday night, in a predominantly Alawite neighborhood of the northern port city of Tripoli, Lebanon, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2015.
BEIRUT – Lebanese media is quoting the interior minister as saying that “preliminary information” suggests that the militant Islamic State group was behind a suicide bombing in the northern city of Tripoli that killed nine people.
They quoted Nouhad Machnouk as telling reporters after a security meeting on Sunday that “preliminary information indicates that (the Islamic State) is behind the explosion.”
The suicide bomber struck a coffee shop in Tripoli’s predominantly Alawite neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, killing nine people and wounding over 30 on Saturday evening.
Syria’s al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front initially claimed responsibility on Twitter for the blast.
Lebanon has seen a series of attacks and suicide bombings since the conflict in Syria, which has killed more than 200,000 people, began nearly four years ago
High Taliban officers in Pakistan and Afghanistan made a vow of allegiance Sunday, Jan. 12 to the Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi – initiating concord among key groups of the Islamist terror movement in defiance of the values that brought millions out in a mammoth rally of Western unity against terror that day.
The Taliban cemented this unity pact by demonstratively beheading a Pakistani soldier they held prisoner.
This gesture came in rapid sequence after Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who on Jan. 9, broke into a kosher supermarket in Paris and murdered four Jews, avowed his adherence to ISIS.
Abu Bakr’s group this month therefore branched out from its Syrian-Iraqi “caliphate” not only into Europe but also into South Asia and across the Middle East.
In the week that Islamist terrorists carried out bloody atrocities in Paris, his jihad of terror was on the offensive and making strategic gains elsewhere:
1. The Islamic State was directly challenging the United States in new arenas – Europe, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
2. Monday, Jan 5, ISIS sent a force to cross into northern Saudi Arabia from Iraq. Three Saudi border guards including Gen. Odah al-Balawi, commander of the regional guard unit, were killed in the clash which took place in the Suwayf region of the Arar district. debkafile’s counter-terror sources draw two disturbing conclusions from these bloody incidents:
Like the Paris attack, which saw Frenchmen attacking Frenchmen, the operation against the oil kingdom was carried out by Saudi nationals who had rallied to the Islamic State’s flag.
Abu Bakr has therefore captured an additional foothold in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula.
Secondly, as was also evident in Paris, ISIS, i.e. Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant, and AQAP, i.e. Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula, are operating in harness. This was also evident from the claim by the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo that they acted in the name of AQAP, in contrast to their associate, Coulibaly.
This cross-alliance, now joined by Taliban, represents an ominous escalation and expansion of the global jihad terror movement and the threat it poses to the United States, the West as a whole, the rest of the Middle East and Israel.
3. Abu Bakr al Baghdad, by his multi-branched terror spectaculars, has managed to seize the primacy of world Al Qaeda, pushing its formal leader Ayman al Zuwahri to the sidelines.
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