Robert Spencer on Fox and Friends Discusses the Brussels Jihad Massacre, Fox News via You Tube, March 24, 2016
Archive for the ‘Islamic State’ category
Addressing terrorism: what’s the plan?
March 25, 2016Addressing terrorism: what’s the plan? Sharyl Attkisson, March 24, 2016
[W]e’ve been convinced that we’re disallowed from taking most any action that would be logical or effective in protecting ourselves. That’s not to argue that all or even one of these specific measures should be taken. But the fact is, more Americans can probably cite the list of things we won’t do; it would be helpful for us to understand what we will do.
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In early 2014, I was in a small meeting with a high-ranking Obama administration official who was involved in counterterrorism. When asked, he made several candid assertions:
- Al-Qaeda was never on the run. The President’s terrorism experts never told him it was. They were mystified by his 2012 campaign claims that seemed to the contrary.
- Al-Qaeda and related terrorists had vastly expanded to other nations and grown more powerful during President Obama’s tenure.
- The wave of terrorist violence had spread from the Mideast to North Africa and would next hit Europe, then the U.S. The official said this matter-of-factly, with no visible sense of urgency or distress, as if a fait accompli.
- The terrorists, he acknowledged, had a better and more developed strategy than did the U.S. In fact, he said the U.S. did not have a strategy for addressing the terrorist threat.
In the two years since that conversation, the official’s predictions about terror spreading to Europe and then the U.S. have come to pass. ISIS has emerged as a driving force. And most Americans would say there’s still no discernible plan.
The debates over securing the border and tightening the screening of immigrants are an outgrowth of the absence of a national plan. In order to feel a sense of security, Americans need to believe there’s a cohesive strategy with stated goals and explicit tactics. We don’t need to know all the fine points. Sensitive tactical details, for example, should be protected. But we should be able to understand how our leaders are using their authority and our billions of tax dollars to protect us. What’s the plan?
March 2016 Brussels terrorist suspects
n the defense of this (or any) administration, it’s the most difficult plan to devise. It’s hard to imagine a more daunting task than defeating terrorist fighters who play by no rules; while the U.S. is bound by ethics, politics, guidelines and international agreements. And there’s little disincentive for Islamic extremists to join the jihad. After all, what’s the worst that can happen to these barbaric fighters who may come from primitive and destitute circumstances? They get captured by the U.S. and get a better way of life: three meals a day, a roof over their head, a shirt on their back, security, interrogation that promises not to get too tough, free health care and American advocates who will fight to make sure they have recreation, literature and religious expression.
Yet the academic and military discussions about strategy to date have been a source of confusion rather than clarity. The administration may say it’s not changing strategy while the military says it is. At best, the expressed “battle plans” are piecemeal. We’re working to retake cities we already once controlled…but walked away from? Then what? What’s the plan?
President Obama in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF)
The conundrum evokes complaints from Vietnam War-era soldiers who said they never really knew what they were doing. They would battle to the death to take a village or a hill, then be ordered to simply walk away from it a few days later, relinquishing it back to the enemy. What was the plan?
It reminds me of the border. While some politicians claim the southern U.S. border is secure, federal and local law enforcement who are there say that couldn’t be farther from the truth. They insist there’s no will or leadership from Washington to bring the border under control, and no strategy to do so. In fact, the only strategy they can verbalize, when asked, is the one they infer: to be as lax as possible in policing the border and enforcing immigration law. What’s the plan?
We’re left with presidential candidates who have attempted to put plan to paper. Because of her experience and knowledge, Hillary Clinton may seem best positioned to verbalize a clear strategy. Yet as secretary of state, her own miscalculations arguably hastened the rise of ISIS from the ashes of Libya. Her emails from the time confirm that she took the lead in aggressively pursuing the poorly-conceived ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi without foreseeing the vacuum it would create. In its wake: the tragedy of Benghazi, and the transformation of Libya into a new proving ground for Islamic extremists. It doesn’t inspire confidence that a Clinton leadership would competently address what she failed to foresee as a top Obama official. On the other hand, it could be argued that mistakes of the past provide important lessons for those open to learning from them.
Hillary Clinton as secretary of state
There’s little doubt that, left its own devices, the world’s strongest military and best intelligence structure could do much better. But they’re hampered by the growing list of what we won’t do.
We won’t secure our southern border that FBI and Homeland Security officials have warned terrorists seek to exploit.
We won’t tighten up visa and immigration security because of the special interests who would cry racism.
We won’t send more terrorists captured in the field to Guantanamo Bay, lest we be criticized.
We won’t question detainees harshly to get information; that’s viewed as inhumane.
We won’t bomb targets in a way that may hurt a civilian or destroy assets. Obviously, the enemy has thus learned to live and work among civilians.
We’re told to report suspicions by the same authorities that view suspicion as racist.
In short, we’ve been convinced that we’re disallowed from taking most any action that would be logical or effective in protecting ourselves. That’s not to argue that all or even one of these specific measures should be taken. But the fact is, more Americans can probably cite the list of things we won’t do; it would be helpful for us to understand what we will do.
It’s an arduous question. But answering it is under the purview of our chosen leaders. What’s the plan?
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Despite reports, Syria’s Palmyra and Iraq’s Mosul not on verge of liberation
March 24, 2016Despite reports, Syria’s Palmyra and Iraq’s Mosul not on verge of liberation, DEBKAfile, March 24, 2016
In complete contrast with media reports issued on Thursday morning, the Iraqi army is not preparing to liberate Mosul, the country’s second largest city, and the Syrian army is not on the verge of capturing Palmyra.
DEBKAfile‘s intelligence and military sources report that the Syrian army is not capable of taking over the historic city without support from the Russian air force. On President Vladimir Putin’s orders, the Russian military has recently reduced its support of the Syrian army to a minimum until Damascus agrees to negotiate with the opposition regarding the country’s future.
The sources add that the Iraqi army does not intend to attack ISIS-held Mosul at any time in the near future, and has even reduced its forces near the city by sending a number of battalions to Baghdad to protect the capital from attacks by the terrorist organization.
An Islamic Apocalypse in Brussels
March 24, 2016An Islamic Apocalypse in Brussels, Front Page Magazine, Raymond Ibrahim, March 24, 2016
[The] spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated.
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Islamic jihad struck Brussels Tuesday morning—first at Brussels Airport and then at a metro station 400 meters from EU headquarters—leaving at least 34 people dead and 230 injured.
It was an apocalyptic scene according to survivors, “with blood and dismembered bodies everywhere,” even “thrown in to the air.” One man recalled the “horror. I saw at least seven people dead. There was blood. People had lost legs. You could see their bodies but no legs.”
Witnesses heard the attackers yelling in Arabic moments before the bombs—one of which contained nails—detonated. Other jihadi trademarks—including an unexploded suicide vest and a Kalashnikov rifle beside the body of a slain terrorist—were found. Islam’s ancient war tactic of blending in with non-Muslims was also implemented.
Horrific as the attack is, its inspiration and Western responses to it are all too typical—meaning, as I opined last year after the Paris massacre, “many more such attacks and worse will continue. Count on it.”
First, as happened on 9/11, Muslims around the world—those unnamed millions the media refer to as “ISIS supporters”—celebrated, including by once again handing out candy and shouting Islam’s victory war cry, “Allahu Akbar.” Yes, that ancient Islamic hate was back in the air and rampant on social media. “We are not just clapping, but we are happy again. We are smiling, we are laughing and we are joyful like it’s a day of celebration,” tweeted one ISIS sympathizer. Another wrote: “#Brussels, if you continue your war against the religion of Allah then this is our response.” Another wrote: “What a beautiful day today. F*** Belgium.” Yet another wrote, “A lot of duas [Muslim prayers] were answered today.”
Still, most Muslim sympathizers were quick to portray their bloodlust as a product of grievances against the West: “the most common remark under the hashtag was ‘You declared war against us and bombed us, and we attack you inside your homeland.’ Another popular reaction from ISIS supports on Twitter was that the Brussels attacks were intended to avenge the Muslims’ blood that was spilled in Mosul in a series of airstrikes by the Western coalition over the weekend.”
Meanwhile, and as usual, in its communiques to fellow Muslims, ISIS articulated the attack through a distinctly Islamic paradigm. It even signaled the attack with the words, “We have come to you with slaughter”—an assertion based on the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s words to a non-Muslim tribe that refused to submit to Islam: “I have come to you with slaughter.”
If this assertion is not clear enough concerning the intent and mission of Muhammad—and those who seek to follow him—another canonical assertion attributed to him and regularly quoted by jihadis, including over a decade ago in the opening paragraph of al-Qaeda’s “Declaration of War against Americans,” has the prophet saying:
I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped—Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my commandments (The Al Qaeda Reader, p.12).
Unfortunately, this one aspect—that Islamic scripture clearly, plainly, and unequivocally promotes violence against all who refuse to submit to Allah—is the very same aspect most vehemently denied by Western elites. Already, as always happens after an Islamic terror attack in the West, the talking heads are warning against “rampant Islamophobia” and abacklash against Muslims. Media are hosting professional liars, like Ramadan Foundation’s Muhammad Shafiq, who insists that “terrorism is forbidden in Islam” (even though the Koran calls on Muslims to terrorize those who resist Islam, e.g., 3:151 and 8:12).
Still, due to these growing numbers of jihadi attacks on Western soil, increasing numbers of politicians are responding with tough—but ultimately meaningless—words: “We are at war,” responded French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.”
This is true. But just like George W. Bush’s famous “war on terrorism”—a war on a method not its motivation—Valls doesn’t indicate who “we are at war” with, even though the most elemental step in winning a war is to “know your enemy.”
One of the few American political aspirants who need not revise his tone in light of this attack is Donald Trump. Over two months ago, he said “Go to Brussels. Go to Paris. Go to different places. There is something going on and it’s not good, where they want Shariah law.… You go to Brussels — I was in Brussels a long time ago, 20 years ago, so beautiful, everything is so beautiful — it’s like living in a hellhole right now.”
This latest terror strike in Europe will likely reignite the refugee debate, which, while important, also minimizes the significance of the issue. The common denominator between all these recent terror strikes throughout the West is not that the culprits were all refugees but rather that they were all Muslim. Many terror attacks were homegrown. Muslim citizens of America were responsible for Fort Hood (13 murdered), Boston Marathon (four murdered), Chattanooga (four murdered), and most recently San Bernardino (14 murdered).
Of course, Europe could have spared itself if only it would’ve looked to the plight of non-Muslim minorities living in Muslim majority nations. As far back as 2012, after Western supported jihadi/freedom fighters were unleashed on Assad’s formerly stable Syria, intentionally displacing hundreds of thousands of Christians, the Syrian Christian archbishop correctly predicted “the jihadis will not stop here [Middle East], the war will spread to Europe.” Four years later and the war has certainly begun.
Consider the 2010 massacre at the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad. Armed jihadis stormed the church during Sunday worship service, opened fire indiscriminately at the Christian worshipers, before detonating their suicide vests. At least fifty-eight Christian worshippers, including many women and children, were murdered, and nearly 100 wounded—many, like in Brussels, losing their arms or legs (see here for GRAPHIC pictures). If the Brussel jihadis used nails in their bombs, the Baghdad church jihadis wore vests “filled with ball bearings to kill as many people as possible.”
Now, if Brussels—or New York, or London, or Madrid, ad infinitum—was really “intended to avenge the Muslims’ blood that was spilled in Mosul in a series of airstrikes,” as aggrieved Muslims regularly claim—then one must ask: why are immensely weak, outnumbered, ostracized, and politically disenfranchised Christian minorities living in the Muslim world, who are wholly incapable of hurting any Muslim, also being terrorized and slaughtered, to the point of genocide?
The answer should be clear. So long as Islam calls for jihad against those who reject Allah and his prophet, so long will attacks like Brussels (and the countless before it) continue. Before the age of political correctness, the Encyclopaedia of Islam put it this way:
[The] spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated.
This is the one ugly fact that few want to accept, much less act on—and understandably so, for the ramifications are immense.
Yazidi Teen Who Escaped from ISIS Captivity Recounts Her Harrowing Experiences
March 24, 2016Yazidi Teen Who Escaped from ISIS Captivity Recounts Her Harrowing Experiences, MEMRI TV via You Tube, March 24, 2016
(“Nothing to do with Islam.” — DM)
ISIS Takes the Capital of the European Union
March 23, 2016ISIS Takes the Capital of the European Union, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 23, 2016
The European Union was first brought into being to “safeguard” world peace. Today, the employees of the EU in Brussels were told to cower in fear in their government buildings while Islamic Jihadists once again terrorized this city whose population is already nearly a quarter Muslim.
Practicing Muslims outnumber practicing Christians in Brussels. After a search for Islamic terrorists had shut down the city, its Socialist mayor complained, “We will not live under the Islamic regime.”
But it’s too late for that. He already is. There are 300,000 Muslims in the capital of the European Union. It’s estimated that they will become the majority of the population in 14 years.
Brussels is the first outpost of ISIS in Europe. It is a doomed city that will be lost to Islam within our lifetimes. A Muslim terrorist attack in Brussels is as surprising as a car bombing in Baghdad.
Belgium’s home affairs minister announced last year that the government does not “have control of the situation in Molenbeek.” Jihadists rule in this Muslim neighborhood, which is just as much of an outpost of ISIS as anywhere in Syria or Iraq, just 12 minutes away from the European Parliament, 15 minutes away from the European Commission, 23 minutes away from NATO HQ and 22 minutes away from Brussels Airport; today’s target. ISIS doesn’t have to invade Brussels. It just has to take a short drive.
Last year during the European Parliament elections, Brussels became the site of the first terrorist attack by a returning ISIS fighter. The target was the Jewish Museum of Belgium. The Mayor of Brussels said that more diversity was the answer. Next year, Jihadists operating partly out of Brussels carried out a massacre of 130 people in Paris while shouting “Allahu Akbar” at each killing spree.
The dead included French, Belgians, Mexicans, Germans, Portuguese, Romanians and Chileans. The killers were all Muslims.
That is what diversity looks like now.
Over 500 Jihadis from Belgium are fighting with ISIS. There are nearly a hundred Jihadists back from the unholy wars in Syria living in Molenbeek in Brussels. They should be deported, but the EU would object. And so instead, the European Union and all of Europe remain under siege by the Jihadist next door.
The “organized and living Europe” of the EU’s founding Schuman Declaration isn’t aiding “civilization.” The EU is neither organized nor living. Instead it’s killing Europe and civilization. The dream of uniting Europe isn’t just dead. It’s a virulent cancer that routes hordes of angry young Muslim men from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Eritrea to loot, rape and murder their way across Europe.
At the heart of the EU’s rot in Brussels are No-Go Zones controlled by Jihadists. Despite all of Belgium’s gun laws, in Molenbeek, Jihadists buy and sell at the Great Bazaar of Kalashshnikovs. The bazaar is stocked and the terrorists move in and out of Brussels thanks to the open borders of the EU.
While the EU claims to control Europe, there is no safety, security or control even in its own capital.
Brussels’ Islam Party has elected two Muslim politicians on a platform of creating an Islamic State in Belgium. Advocates for an Islamic State that would enforce Sharia law hold elected office in Belgium.
Even if the rest of the world only pays attention when the bombs go off and knives come out in Brussels.
When the European Union was created, the foreign-born population of Belgium consisted of some 300,000 people, most of them Italians and Greeks, in a country of over eight million. Today the foreign-born population stands at 1.4 million, much of it Muslim, with a large additional population of Muslim settlers born in Belgium. Belgium once colonized. Now it is being colonized.
The capital of the European Union will be one of the first cities in Europe to fall to the invaders.
We already know how the next part goes. The broken glass will be cleaned away. The bloody wounded will be removed out of sight. The dead will be buried. An Imam will be invited to the memorial service. Everyone will wear t-shirts printed with the latest terrorist tragedy meme. The cafes will reopen. The music will play again. Couples will forget and stroll the streets.
Bureaucrats will sit down in their glass towers and draw up plans for the future of the EU in a city that will be lost in a decade. Then they will try to ignore all the heavily armed soldiers in the streets.
Islamic terrorism is not the ultimate threat. It is the real world intruding on the progressive fantasy.
16% of young Muslim men in Belgium are willing to say that they believe that terrorism is justified. But they are only the tip of the iceberg. Support for Sharia law hovers around the 60 percent mark. The former may bomb airports or shoot up museums, but it’s the latter who will destroy the country.
On the television screens, the politicians come and go talking of “youthful despair”. But the Muslim terrorists with their guns and bombs haven’t given up. It’s the Europeans who gave up.
This is not a crisis of “hopelessness”, “integration” or any of the other excuses that politicians use to explain Islamic terrorism without dropping the dreaded I-word that invokes the fearful charge of Islamophobia. The Greeks and Italians who used to do the dirty work in Belgium were not bombing subways and museums no matter how bad the “overcrowding” and “joblessness” might be.
This is not a social problem. It is a supremacist problem.
Muslim terrorism is not caused by despair, but by hope. A Muslim suicide bomber does not die out of hopelessness, but because he hopes to impose Islam and earn 72 virgins in paradise. He shouts “Allahu Akbar”, proclaiming the supremacy of his Islamic religion over Christianity, Judaism and all the rest, as he kills his victims because he believes that a different Europe is possible. An Islamic Europe.
The latest terror attack in Brussels has been called “an attack on all of Europe.” But it’s Brussels, with the insistence on open borders and open migrant policies, that is the real attack on all of Europe.
Muslim immigration is its outcome. Muslim terrorism is the outcome of Muslim immigration.
The European Union was born out of despair. Europeans lost confidence in their own nations. They opened their borders and sat on the beach while the migrant waves washed away their future.
Brussels is where Europe’s future died. It is the first real outpost of the Islamic State in Europe. It shows us Europe’s terrible future if the invasion does not end.
There are three visions in Brussels. The vision of an eternal European Union in a doomed city that will be lost sooner than Venice sinks beneath the waves. The Islamic vision of a Caliphate rising minutes away from the ponderous headquarters of the multinational European project and the vision of independent nations and peoples protecting their own borders from the invaders for the future of their children.
Take in the sight of broken glass and bloodied bodies, frightened families fleeing through the smoke, faces covered in ash, and remember that this is the outcome of the progressive vision for Europe.
This is reality intruding into the fantasies of immigration and integration where a new multicultural Europe shines forth as a beacon from Brussels to show us a better world. These people died so that you would know the truth. They were not the first and they will not be the last.
If we do not want to end up the same way, we must end Islamic immigration before it ends us.
Op-Ed: After Brussels, is it time to deport Merkel?
March 23, 2016Op-Ed: After Brussels, is it time to deport Merkel? Israel National News, Jack Engelhard, March 23, 2016
Authorities need look no further than Angela Merkel as the prime suspect for the latest carnage in Brussels.
More than anyone, it was Merkel who opened the floodgates to the migrants — armies of men without women posing as refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan found trampling throughout Europe. When they are caught misbehaving, they smirk and say, “I am here as a guest of Angela Merkel,” and they are correct and nearly untouchable.
Merkel stands by her open borders policy, the safety of her people be damned.
Over the past 12 months, more then a million of them have already crossed into Germany alone; 300,000 have been given asylum.
Of Brussels at this hour, all Western Europe leadership is guilty with Merkel sharing the largest part of the blame. These are her pets.
“Don’t go out unless you have to” is the hot new message circulating throughout Europe now that the “refugees” have arrived. You could get raped.
You could also get killed, and that’s what happened when the citizens of Brussels dared to go out Tuesday morning during rush hour. Scores were slain and wounded from yet another Islamic terror attack and people all over want to know how to make this stop.
Stop the influx. How’s that for an idea that needs no Einstein? Deport them instead. Maybe starting with Merkel, who invited the stampede.
The Saudis and the princes from the other Gulf States have it neatly figured out.
(So does Trump who wants to stop it and saw it coming as did this must-read thriller.)
Those titled Arabs don’t want that crowd within 100 miles even though they are fellow Muslims. But they do not want that type entering their borders, bringing with them their license to rape, their rivalries and tribal feuds, hell no, so why not Europe, and Europe says, sure, why not? Bring them on!
How clueless!
This is how. Only a few days ago, there they sat around a big table in Brussels, the smooth rulers of the EU, congratulating themselves on the capture of the final “mastermind” behind the November attack in Paris that killed 130. The French president was there, the Belgium prime minister was there and all the rest together expressed joy to the world that Salah Abdeslam had been caught.
Merkel sent in her gratitude for the superb police work.
At the moment they were hi-fiving the one success, 10,000 more “refugees” streamed in, plenty of them likewise “masterminds.”
Can no one do the math?
We pass the point of absurdity when “open borders” imperils us all throughout the world. There is no stopping the mad dash across continents.
Nor can we stop the madness that afflicts the world’s leaders.
Merkel and the rest of you clueless rulers of Europe, your misguided liberal sympathies and migrant leniencies are killing us.
Hence, Obama has chimed in his condolences for the pain in Brussels. “The entire world must unite,” he said. Yeah, sure, thanks. Will do.
Now back to the game, Mr. President.
Employing European wisdom, he wants to bring more of them into the United States. Thanks again.
Likewise Hillary and Trudeau. First the condolences followed by “we must resist Islamophobia” and keep the influx coming.
Hillary demands that we bring in 65,000 of them. Trudeau is ahead of her. He’s already got them in Canada.
It takes no prophet to know what’s coming for Canada and what’s next for the United States.
Don’t blame the terrorists, only. They are murderers but they know what they are doing.
The same cannot be said for the men and women who run our world.
Abdelsalem capture laid red herring for double terror attack in Brussels
March 23, 2016Abdelsalem capture laid red herring for double terror attack in Brussels, DEBKAfile, March 22, 2016
The capture of the ISIS Paris master planner Salah Abdelsalem by Belgian anti-terror police, after four months on the run, was initially hailed as an enormous stroke of luck – that is until Tuesday, March 22. The high-profile Islamic State terrorist, who planned the triple attacks on a Paris stadium, bistro and concert hall, that left 130 people dead last November, had instructed jihadist bombers under his command to carry out deadly explosions at Brussels airport and subway on that day, while he was in custody.
He staged his capture as a trick to misdirect Belgian and French intelligence and anti-terror agencies and lull them into a state of false security.
Abdelsalem, 26, a French citizen of Moroccan origin, was the only survivor of the Paris attack five months ago. The other seven terrorists were killed, including his brother. He was finally run to ground on March 18 at his safe house in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, a notorious hotbed of jihads ideology, and taken in after a shootout with the police. The master terrorist had evaded capture by skipping across European borders, which proves little challenge for ISIS operatives on the move.
Three other suspects were also arrested in the Molenbeek raid.
French President Francois Hollande and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel took turns congratulating each other at a joint press conference which they called immediately after the Abdelselam capture. They were certain that his interrogation would yield valuable information about the arcane workings of the ISIS web across Europe and bring to light future terror plots in good time.
But DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources believe that Abdelsalem let himself be nabbed as part of a larger plot. Before he was captured, he had left instructions with a team of bombers for the attacks on Brussels international airport and the Maelbeek subway station near the European Union’s headquarters, with possibly more to come, on lines similar lines to the multiple assaults in Paris.
He relied on the French and Belgian leaders and their anti-terrorist advisers resting on their laurels, the while letting down their guard and missing the trap, before it snapped back in their faces four days later.
After the attacks, the Belgian prime minister realized that more terror might still be in store.
The Brussels twin terrorist hit was planned in detail. DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources report that the two explosions at Brussels airport were caused by suicide bombers. The discovery later of an unexploded bomb belt indicated a terror team of three (see picture).
What happened to the third bomber?
Belgian authorities are trying to disguise the fact that, while one explosion was caused by a suicide bomber in the departure hall, a second terrorist was able to reached the tarmac and detonate his bomb belt near the airliners.
They may have beaten security by using an airport staff employee to smuggle the three bomb belts into the targeted areas and conceal them, allowing the terrorists to come out clean from security checks. The third bomb belt may have been abandoned – either because the third terrorist failed to turn up, or he changed his mind at the last minute and and ran, after dropping it.
By Tuesday afternoon the death toll from the two attacks had climbed to 34 – 20 dead at the Metro station and 14 at Brussels airport, with scores of people injured, including reportedly two Israel passengers.
The scenes in the Belgian airport capital were chaotic. Terrified passengers fled in every direction in the absence of anyone in charge to provide information or guidance. Police tried to tell them to drop their hand luggage before escaping, but no one heeded them. Hundreds waited on the tarmac hopelessly for instructions until they were eventually bussed to a village outside the capital. They were stranded there, after all incoming and outgoing flights were cancelled and all public transport suspended.
Brussels, in a state of shock and confusion, found itself unwillingly dubbed the front line of Europe’s war on terror.
The Democrats’ Soft Spot for Islam
March 21, 2016The Democrats’ Soft Spot for Islam, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, March 21, 2016
The hard-Left online organ Salon has discovered the secret of Donald Trump’s success: “Islamophobia.” Citing theAmerican National Election Studies 2016 pilot survey, Salon solemnly intones that “Trump supporters are far more likely to express Islamophobic attitudes than other respondents, even other Republicans.” A “stunning 60 percent of Trump supporters” expressed the “Islamophobic” idea that “the word ‘violent’ describes Muslims ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ well.” Salon cannot fathom how anyone could possibly have gotten the idea that Muslims are violent (even including “a bit more than a quarter of Democrats”), and neither can the dominant voices in the Democratic Party. This blind spot regarding jihad terror is nothing less than Democratic Party policy.
Salon demonstrates its myopia about the problem of jihad terror when it notes that “for comparison, only 7 percent of Trump supporters said that the word ‘violent’ describes white people extremely or very well.” “White people”? What about Islamic jihad terrorists who are “white people,” such as al-Qaeda’s late sometime spokesman Adam Gadahn, the Boston Marathon jihad bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, would-be Wichita airport jihad bomber Terry Lee Loewen, and so many others? Salon doesn’t consider them: for the Left, and for the Democratic Party in particular, concern about jihad terror is just another form of racism, and that’s that. White Muslim jihad terrorists simply don’t exist.
They don’t exist for Bernie Sanders, either. Last October, a Muslim student, Remaz Abdelgader, referred to Ben Carson’s statements about not wanting a Muslim President and said to Sanders: “Being an American is such a strong part of my identity, but I want to create a change in this society. I’m so tired of listening to this rhetoric saying I can’t be president one day, that I should not be in office. It makes me so angry and upset. This is my country.” Sanders replied: “If we stand for anything we have to stand together and end all forms of racism in this country. I will lead that effort as president.”
What race is Islam again? What race is Sharia oppression of women, non-Muslims, gays again? That was what the controversy over Carson’s remarks was really about: he raised a legitimate question about the compatibility of Sharia and the U.S. Constitution. Sharia denies the freedom of speech and the equality of rights of women and non-Muslims before the law, and contravenes the Constitution in other ways as well. In 1960, John Kennedy was subjected to baseless prejudice as a Roman Catholic, and today Sanders and others consigns concerns about a Muslim President to an analogous baseless prejudice. But Kennedy actually addressed concerns, and assured Americans that he would obey and enforce the Constitution and no other law. Nowadays, asking a hypothetical Muslim candidate if he would obey and enforce the Constitution and not Sharia, as far as the leading lights in the Democratic Party are concerned, is “racism.”
So what would happen if a Sharia-compliant Muslim candidate did become President, and began working against the freedoms that the Constitution allows but Sharia does not? Would all those who voted for him simply congratulate themselves on their resistance to “racism” as their freedoms were eroded away?
The likely nominee is no better. Last November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” How will President Hillary Clinton have the slightest chance of defeating the Islamic State when she is so divorced from reality as to say something like this? Obviously an uncomfortable number of Muslims do in fact have something to do with terrorism, and the fact that many do not says nothing whatsoever about whether or not Islam contains teachings and exhortations that make all too many Muslims believe that it is actually our adversary.
Both Sanders and Clinton were just playing to the Democratic Party base – the base that is sure that “white people” are just as violent or even more violent than Muslims, and that concern about jihad terror is “racism.” The aptly-named Party of Treason’s refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the challenge of jihad terror only ensures that, whoever becomes President on January 20, 2017, there will be in the U.S. in the coming years much, much more jihad terror.
Op-Ed: At the UN, ISIS and Israel are equal
March 17, 2016Op-Ed: At the UN, ISIS and Israel are equal, Israel National News, Giulio Meotti, March 17, 2016
Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London, Penny Green, is the first candidate for the role of the UN envoy to Israel and the Palestinian territories, a position that the Human Rights Council in Geneva will soon fill.
Ms. Green would be a truly “impartial” choice. She accuses Israel of being a “criminal state”, of being guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” and she even compares Israel to the Islamic State. Green has also complained that the US and the UK have not yet begun to bomb Israel for its “massacres”. The other “impartial” candidate, Canadian Professor Michael Lynk, is a bit more decent as he only signed anti-Israel petitions.
Considering that without the US veto Israel would have already been blacklisted by the UN Security Council; considering that Israel is treated worse than North Korea and Nigeria at the Human Rights Council; considering that at UN schools in Gaza Hamas stocks missiles to be launched against Israel; considering that the UN court in The Hague treats Israeli officials as Nazi war criminals, why is it so outrageous naming as UN bureaucrats those who compare Caliph Al Baghdad to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
The UN envoy for Children and Armed Conflict, Leila Zerrougui, suggested including the Israeli army in the black list of countries and organizations that regularly cause harm to children along with Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Taliban, and countries such as the Congo and the Central African Republic, infamous for their armies of children.
The culture of human rights, created by Jewish jurists after the Holocaust, is now being used by anti-Semites to foment a war against the State of Israel. Mr. Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations’ Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, blamed last year’s Paris attacks on the U.S., Western colonialism, capitalism, and “Israeli settlers”, implicitly justifying them as “a response to grave injustices and ongoing abuses perpetrated by the dominant, primarily developed countries, against populations of less developed countries”.
Instead of equating Hamas with ISIS and ISIS with Iran, the UN officials ponder whether to include the IDF on the same lepers’ list as Islamic State. Whether they succeed or not doesn’t matter: they very presence pollutes the political atmosphere and destroys the reputation of the Jewish State.
Israel’s biggest enemy today is not Jihadism, but the UN, which entrusted the defense of human rights to China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia, among other liberal bastions, and to paranoid “experts” whose anti-Semitism resembles that of Doktor Joseph Goebbels.
WarSclerotic 
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