Dr. Jasser discusses Donald Trump’s call for “extreme vetting” as part of plan to stop ISIS, Fox News via YouTube, August 16, 2016
(Please see also, Donald Trump’s Outreach to Moderate Muslim Leaders Highlights Clinton Failure in Egypt. — DM)
Archive for the ‘Islamic terror groups’ category
Dr. Jasser discusses Donald Trump’s call for “extreme vetting” as part of plan to stop ISIS
August 17, 2016Ten Most Troubling Finds Inside House Probe of Pentagon’s ‘Distorted’ Intel on Islamic State
August 13, 2016Ten Most Troubling Finds Inside House Probe of Pentagon’s ‘Distorted’ Intel on Islamic State, Breitbart, Aaron Klein, August 13, 2016
(Please see also, The Trickle-Down Erosion of Honesty in Obama’s White House. — DM)
TEL AVIV – A damning investigation by House Republicans released on Wednesday has found that the intelligence arm of the U.S. Military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) routinely produced intelligence that “distorted, suppressed, or substantially altered” the results of the campaign against the Islamic State.
Breitbart Jerusalem reviewed the House report and herein presents the ten most troubling finds, in no particular order.
1 – Top CENTCOM leaders modified intelligence assessments to present an “unduly positive” assessment of combating the Islamic State and training the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF).
The complaint alleges that senior leaders within the CENTCOM Intelligence Directorate and JIC, including the Director of Intelligence and other senior intelligence staff, violated regulations, tradecraft standards, and professional ethics by modifying intelligence assessments to present an unduly positive outlook on CENTCOM efforts to train the ISF and combat ISIL.
Media outlets have also raised allegations of possible reprisals against individuals within the CENTCOM Intelligence Directorate. …
According to multiple interviewees, operational reporting was used as a justification to alter or “soften” an analytic product so it would cast U.S. efforts in a more positive light. No interview provided any instances where operational reporting was used as a justification to come to a more pessimistic conclusion. Additionally, numerous interviewees indicated that analytical products which conflicted with operational reporting were routinely subject to more stringent scrutiny than those that did not.
2 – Intelligence analysts declined to be interviewed, possibly out of fear of reprisals from CENTCOM leadership, while the interviews that did take place were under the watchful eyes of DOD officials.
Additionally, the Joint Task Force requested interviews with four more analysts whose positions provided them with visibility into the allegations. These analysts declined to be interviewed. Although they did not express their reasons for declining, the Joint Task Force is concerned that some of the analysts may have done so out of fear of potential reprisals for their testimony.
For example, as the Joint Task Force’s interviews were commencing, the Director of the DIA publicly characterized reports of the whistleblower’s allegations as exaggerations.
It must also be noted that, pursuant to longstanding arrangements between DOD and the Armed Services Committee, DOD insisted on having department officials present during Joint Task Force interviews.
3 – CENTCOM intel agents operated within a ‘toxic’ leadership environment.
The Republican lawmakers fingered CENTCOM leaders, and noted the intelligence process was cleaner under previous officials and Lloyd Austin III, who served as commander from 2013 to 2016. Dozens of analysts viewed the “subsequent leadership environment as toxic”:
Survey results provided to the Joint Task Force demonstrated that dozens of analysts viewed the subsequent leadership environment as toxic, with 40% of analysts responding that they had experienced an attempt to distort or suppress intelligence in the past year.
4 – General Austin’s claim to Congress that IS was in a “defensive crouch” did not reflect the data possessed at the time by CENTCOM senior leaders.
Although no interviewee remembered the process of preparing the specific press releases and congressional testimony highlighted here, interviewees described a process in which congressional testimony and public affairs statements did not necessarily reflect contemporaneous intelligence assessments. In particular, the Joint Task Force was dismayed to learn that Intelligence Directorate senior leaders seemed unfamiliar with General Austin’s statements to Congress that ISIL was in a “defensive crouch” and indicated this characterization did not reflect their best assessments at the time.
5 – CENTCOM established an intelligence “fusion center” for IS-related intel, but kept out analysts whose views conflicted with senior intelligence leaders.
In June 2014, with the ISIL threat apparent, CENTCOM established an intelligence “fusion center,” a specially equipped JIC facility staffed around-the-clock, to serve as a “focal point” for ISIL-related intelligence. Interviewees recalled only informal communications noting the center’s establishment, and some were also uncertain about the center’s organizational structure, responsibilities, and how it was determined which JIC analysts would participate. The establishment of the Intelligence Fusion Center also removed some analysts who had the most experience with respect to ISIL and Iraq, including those whose analytic views often conflicted with those of CENTCOM’s senior intelligence leaders, from the production of daily intelligence products. This impact was especially significant given the critical analytic tasks of the Intelligence Fusion Center at this time of paramount importance in the theater.
6 – Restrictions were implemented for analysts whose views dissented from the mainstream inside CENTCOM.
Public statements by CENTCOM representatives emphasized close collaboration with other elements of the IC, but many interviewees indicated that in late 2014, senior CENTCOM Intelligence Directorate leaders instructed analysts to cease all external coordination with other IC analysts. The authority to coordinate was restricted to senior officials only, including to leaders of the Fusion Center. Other special arrangements were also put into place to notify the Director of Intelligence in the event that analysts sought to formally “dissent” from analysis produced elsewhere. The restrictions on collaboration have since been partially rescinded.
7 – Analysis was minimized in favor of details from coalition forces while intelligence was skewed to be ‘optimistic.’
Furthermore, senior leaders also relied on details reported from coalition forces rather than more objective and better documented intelligence reporting. The Joint Task Force can find no justifiable reason why operational reporting was repeatedly used as a rationale to change the analytic product, particularly when the changes only appeared to be made in a more optimistic direction. By supplanting analytic tradecraft with unpublished and ad hoc operational reporting, Joint Intelligence Center (JIC) leadership circumvented important processes that are intended to protect the integrity of intelligence analysis.
8 – Shocking survey results showed analysts believed data was “distorted, suppressed, or substantially altered” by their supervisors.
The annual Analytic Objectivity and Process Survey, directed by the ODNI, was conducted from August through October 2015, and included responses from 125 analysts and managers within CENTCOM. The survey results were significantly worse than those of other IC agencies or COCOMs, and showed that a substantial number of CENTCOM respondents felt their supervisors distorted, suppressed, or substantially altered analytic products.
Over 50% of analysts responded that CENTCOM procedures, practices, processes, and organizational structures hampered objective analysis, and 40% responded that they had experienced an attempt to distort or suppress intelligence in the past year. Yet despite receiving these results in December 2015, CENTCOM and IC leaders did not take corrective actions to address many of the issues identified in the survey results.
9 – Even after whistleblower complaints and the “alarming” internal survey last year, the Pentagon took no steps to correct its allegedly distorted intelligence process.
The Joint Task Force is troubled that despite receiving the whistleblower complaint in May 2015 and receiving alarming survey results in December 2015, neither CENTCOM, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) took any demonstrable steps to improve the analytic climate within CENTCOM. The survey results alone should have prompted CENTCOM and IC leaders to take corrective action without other inducements.
10 – Mirroring the Benghazi House Committee’s complaints against the State Department, the Joint Task Force here writes it “did not receive access to all the materials it requested” and details a process of denying information and records.
Ex-CIA Chief’s Comments Reflect ‘What US is Secretly Doing in Syria’
August 11, 2016Ex-CIA Chief’s Comments Reflect ‘What the US is Secretly Doing in Syria , from Sputnik News, August 10, 2016
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Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who has recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, has caused a firestorm when he said that the United States should covertly kill Russians and Iranians in Syria, with Russian lawmakers denouncing the remarks as “monstrous” and experts saying that he merely confirmed what Washington has secretly been doing.
Vladimir Vasilyev, a senior research fellow at the Moscow-based Institute of US and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, maintained that Morell’s comments should be taken at face value.
This is “what the United States has secretly and surreptitiously been doing and most importantly what Washington will do if Hillary wins presidential election,” he told RIA Novosti. “Russia should understand who it is dealing with. In fact, Moscow could thank Morell for leaking important informationon Washington’s true goals in Syria.”
“Monstrous remarks”
Russian MP Irina Yarovaya, the head of the State Duma Committee for Security, echoed these sentiments, saying that Morell made “monstrous remarks.” He essentially confirmed that Washington is capable of carrying out “covert killings … to pursue its own devastating plans.”
Yarovaya also noted that Morell’s comments point to a hidden agenda in Washington’s counterterrorism activities. “The US State Department must issue a clear statement on the issue. Otherwise, there are grounds to assume that the former CIA deputy director inadvertently revealed an existing top secret CIA plan.”
Morell’s remarks are meant to “fuel tensions between Russia and the US,” Dmitry Gorovtsov, the deputy chairman of the State Duma’s Committee for Security, told RIA Novosti, adding that such rhetoric is unacceptable. He also called Morell’s plan “extremist” and “akin to fascist ideology.”
Morell “does not understand what he is talking about”
First deputy chairman of the defense and security committee in the Federation Council of Russia Franz Klintsevich referred to Morell’s remarks as “absurd.”
“I think that Michael Morell does not understand what he is talking about. Modern surveillance equipment that covers all Syria renders any ‘covert’ killings impossible,” he said. Russia’s cutting edge technologies allow Moscow to determine the name, the date, the place and the goal of any such activity if it took place.
Moreover, Morell’s advice “would automatically lead to an open confrontation between Russia and the US, which the Americans, as far as I understand, do not need,” Klintsevich added.
On Monday, Michael Morell, who served as CIA’s acting director twice, told talk show host Charlie Rose that the US “must make” Russia and Iran “pay a price” in Syria by “covertly” killing their nationals. “You don’t tell the world about it, right? You don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say, ‘we did this.’ Right? But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran,” he added.
Morell also suggested “scaring” Bashar al-Assad by bombing government offices and presidential guard positions, but added that he did not urge to assassinate the Syrian president.
Journalist and political commentator Murtaza Hussain pointed out that the former CIA deputy director championed “efforts that later helped incubate al-Qaeda,” referring to a strategy that the United States employed in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
He also warned that if Morell’s plan is given the green light, it “would entail a massive escalation of American covert military involvement in Syria that would bring the United States much closer to direct confrontation with Russia and Iran.”
The Palestinians: Refugee Camps or Terrorist Bases?
July 21, 2016The Palestinians: Refugee Camps or Terrorist Bases? Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, July 21, 2016
♦ The 450,000 Palestinians in Lebanon are still banned from several professions, especially in the fields of medicine and law. They refer to these restrictions as apartheid measures. The Lebanese apartheid measures against Palestinians are rarely mentioned in the Western media and international human rights groups. The UN does not seem overly concerned about this discrimination.
♦ Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become in the past few decades bases for various innumerable militias and terrorist groups.
♦ The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, is formally in charge of the refugee camps in Lebanon, including those that are now providing shelter to Islamist terrorists.
♦ The Lebanese authorities are increasingly running out of patience with the growing Islamist threat.
ISIS is on the mind of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership. Top PA officials have expressed concern that jihadi groups, including ISIS, have managed to infiltrate Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
Lebanese authorities are also worried — so worried that they have issued a stiff warning to the Palestinians: Stop the terrorists or else we will take security into our own hands.
According to Lebanese security sources, more and more Palestinians in Lebanon have joined ISIS and the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, a Sunni Islamist militia fighting against Syrian government forces. In response, the Lebanese security forces have taken a series of measures in a bid to contain the problem and prevent the two Islamist terror groups from establishing bases of power in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
According to some reports, dozens of Palestinians from Lebanon who joined ISIS and Al-Nusra Front have been killed or wounded in Syria in recent months. Most of those who were killed have been buried in Syria, the reports said.
Alarmed by the success of ISIS and Al-Nusra Front in recruiting dozens of Palestinians to their ranks, the Palestinian Authority leadership this week sent Azzam Al-Ahmed, a senior advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas, to Beirut for urgent talks with Lebanese government officials on ways of containing the escalation. The PA leadership fears that the heightened activities of the two terrorist groups in the refugee camps will force the Lebanese army to launch a massive military operation to get rid of the terrorists, who pose an immediate threat to Lebanese national security.
Al-Ahmed, who is in charge of the Lebanon Portfolio in the Palestinian Authority, held a series of meetings with Lebanese government officials in a bid to avoid a security showdown between the Lebanese army and the Palestinians living in the country’s refugee camps. Following a meeting with Lebanese Interior Minister Nihad Al-Mashnouk, the Palestinian envoy said that the talks focused on the need to take “joint steps to ensure security stability in the Palestinian refugee camps.” According to Al-Ahmed, the talks also dealt with ways to prevent certain parties, especially ISIS and Al-Nusra Front, from exploiting the Palestinian refugee camps to threaten Lebanon’s security interests.
Lebanese security officials have reported direct contacts between ISIS leaders in Syria and some senior Islamist figures in the Ain Al-Hilweh refugee camp, the largest camp in Lebanon, with a population of more of than 120,000 — half of them refugees who fled Syria since 2011. The officials said that one of the commanders of ISIS in Syria, Abu Khaled Al-Iraqi, has stepped up his contacts with Palestinians in Ain Al-Hilweh in recent weeks, in preparation for launching terrorist attacks against Lebanese targets. The Lebanese have named a number of Palestinians from Ain Al-Hilweh evidently serving as ISIS representatives in Lebanon: Emad Yasmin, Helal Helal, Abed Fadda, Nayef Abdullah and Abu Hamzeh Mubarak.
Last week, Palestinian sources revealed that one of the jihadi leaders in Ain Al-Hilweh, Omar Abu Kharoub, nicknamed Abu Muhtaseb Al-Maqdisi, was killed while fighting alongside ISIS in Syria. The sources said that he is only one of hundreds of Palestinians from Lebanon who have joined ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front.
The Lebanese government has informed the Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah that at least 300 jihadi terrorists are now barricaded inside Ain Al-Hilweh. “The situation has become intolerable and we can no longer turn a blind eye to this threat,” the Lebanese warned the PA.
The Islamist terrorists who have found shelter inside Ain Al-Hilweh have repeatedly warned the Lebanese authorities against launching a military attack against the refugee camp.
In a recent sermon for Friday prayers, Sheikh Abu Yusef Aqel condemned Lebanon’s mistreatment of its Palestinian population. He pointed out that under Lebanese law, Palestinians are banned from working in 72 professions. Referring to reports in the Lebanese media about the threats emerging from the Palestinian camps, Sheikh Aqel said:
“If these (Lebanese) media outlets were really affiliated with the resistance, as they claim, they would have focused on the suffering of a people that was displaced from its homeland more than 70 years ago. They would also have focused on the fact that Lebanon bans this people from working in 72 professions.”
Aqel is referring to the circumstance that until a decade ago, a total of seventy-two professions were restricted to Lebanese only. The Lebanese government issued a memorandum on June 7, 2005 permitting Palestinians refugees to work in fifty of these seventy-two professions. However, Palestinians in Lebanon are still banned from several types of jobs, especially in the fields of medicine and law. The 450,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon refer to these restrictions as apartheid measures.
The Lebanese apartheid measures against Palestinians are rarely mentioned in the Western media and international human rights groups. The United Nations does not seem overly concerned about this discrimination, apparently because it is practiced by an Arab country against Arabs.
Lebanon has never been comfortable with the presence of the Palestinians on its soil. That is precisely why the authorities have turned the twelve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon into ghettos. These ghettos are off-limits to the Lebanese security forces. As a result, these camps have become in the past few decades bases for various innumerable militias and terrorist groups. Until a few years ago, the major Palestinian Fatah faction was the dominant group controlling the refugee camps in Lebanon. No longer. Today, it has become evident that many other groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, ISIS and Al-Qaeda have established bases of power inside the camps.
It is worth mentioning that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) is formally in charge of the refugee camps in Lebanon, including those that are now providing shelter to Islamist terrorists.
The Wavel refugee camp for Palestinians, near Baalbek in Lebanon, which is administered by UNRWA. (Image credit: European Commission DG ECHO)
Back to PA anxiety. Undoubtedly, the Palestinian Authority leadership is concerned that many of its erstwhile loyalists in Fatah have defected to the various jihadi terror groups. These groups are now posing a major threat not only to Lebanon’s security and stability, but also to the PA and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, who feel helpless in the face of the Islamist tsunami sweeping the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
Abbas and his PA have clearly lost control over the millions of Palestinians living in the neighboring Arab countries, including Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. This is in addition to the fact that Abbas and the PA have nearly no control over Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where various jihadi groups and other secular militias and gangs are now in control.
The hands of the Palestinian Authority leadership are now tied: the PA cannot regain control over the refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Arab countries. There is also nothing that Abbas can do to stop the residents of these camps from joining ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
All what is left for Abbas to do is to try and prevent a catastrophe from falling on the heads of the Palestinians in these camps, especially Lebanon, where the Lebanese authorities are increasingly running out of patience with the growing Islamist threat.
“The Lebanese army will not allow terrorism to find a safe place in Ain Al-Hilweh or any other part of Lebanon,” cautioned a Lebanese security source. “We will not allow Ain Al-Hilweh to become a hotbed for terrorism and be used as a launching pad to explode the situation in Lebanon. We will face any such attempt with force and firmness.”
The Palestinians’ biggest fear now is that Ain Al-Hilweh will meet the same fate as the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, which was almost entirely destroyed by the Lebanese army in 2007. Then, the presence of Islamist terrorists belonging to the Fatah Al-Islam group inside Nahr Al-Bared triggered heavy clashes during which the Lebanese army used artillery and helicopter gunships to attack the camp, home to some 40,000 Palestinians. At least 158 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the fighting, which also left many families homeless.
Busy with more pressing issues, Abbas was unable to make the trip to Lebanon himself. What is the urgent business that prevented him from showing up in person to try to prevent catastrophe for his people in Lebanon? His grand tour, an end-game bid to win support for an international Middle East peace conference that would choke Israel into submission.
Abbas is next slated for Paris, where on July 22 he is scheduled to meet with President François Hollande to discuss the latest French initiative to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hollande might do better to turn inward to consider how his own country will manage the latest wave of Islamist terrorism. Abbas, for his part, is unlikely to broach with Hollande the incendiary situation in the Palestinian refugee camps, where ISIS and Al-Qaeda are gaining the upper hand.
Jihadi Terrorism: You Think It’s Just the Jews? Think Again.
July 15, 2016Jihadi Terrorism: You Think It’s Just the Jews? Think Again, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, July 15, 2016
♦ Last night, at least 84 people were murdered in the French city of Nice by a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist.
♦ Whether you are pacifists or warmongers, gays or heterosexuals, atheists or Christians, blasphemers or devout, French or Iraqis, jihadi terrorism does not discriminate. Every one of us is a target: Islamist terrorism is genocidal.
♦ When Islamist terrorists target Muslim dissident bloggers, faraway Yazidi women or Israeli girls, it should concern us in the West. Islamists are just sharpening their knives on them before coming for us.
♦ If we do not speak out today, we will be punished for our indolence tomorrow.
Last night, at least 84 people were murdered in the French city of Nice by a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist, with dozens more victims wounded. The attacker drove a 19-ton truck into a large crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day, France’s national holiday, running down men, women and children over a 2km stretch of road and sidewalk.
The bullet-riddled truck that was used by a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist to murder 84 people in Nice, France on July 14, 2016. (Image source: France24 video screenshot)
On July 2, nine Italian citizens were butchered by Islamists in the assault at a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They were tortured and killed with “very sharp blades” wielded by smiling terrorists who spared the life of those who knew the Quran. For almost a year already, poor Bangladeshis have been experiencing similar shocking massacres. But those victims were not wealthy non-Muslim foreigners — they were anonymous Muslim bloggers, accused of “blasphemy” and murdered out with “sharp blades” — five victims in 2015 and a law student in 2016, as well as a Hindu priest hacked to death.
The same cycle took place in Syria and Iraq, where the beheaders of the Islamic State first targeted many Western journalists, then expelled and killed Christians in Mosul, and then landed in Paris to exterminate Western civilians.
Two weeks ago, a 13-year-old Israeli girl was stabbed to death while sleeping in her bed. As in Bangladesh, the Palestinian Arab terrorist used a knife to kill Hallel Yaffa Ariel. That is not a simple act of murder; it is a slaughter that wrongly equates building a home with murdering a child. Italian newspapers even deprived her of identity. Il Corriere della Sera, Italy’s second largest newspaper, wrote: “West Bank: 13-year-old American killed“.
When four Israelis were murdered last month in Tel Aviv’s Max Brenner restaurant, the whole foreign media again had “mistaken” headlines. From Le Monde to Libération, the French press used the word “shooting” instead of terrorism. CNN reported about the “terrorists” in quotation marks. La Repubblica, Italy’s largest newspaper, called the Palestinian Arab terrorists “aggressors”.
What do these distorted headlines mean? That we in the West naively believe that there are two kinds of terror: “international terror” that targets Westerners in Nice, Paris, Dhaka, Raqqa or Tunisia; and “national” terror, between the Arabs and Israel, in the face of which the Israeli Jews must retreat and surrender. There is also “faceless terror,” as in Orlando, where an Afghan-American Muslim massacred 50 Americans and everybody, as usual in America, refused to name “Islam.”
It is the reaction of the appeaser, “one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last” according to Winston Churchill. The problem is that whether you are pacifists or warmongers, gays or heterosexuals, atheists or Christians, wealthy or poor, blasphemers or devout, French or Iraqis, jihadi terrorism does not discriminate. Every one of us is a target: Islamist terrorism is genocidal.
Despite easy slogans such as “Je Suis Charlie”, very few in the West showed solidarity with the French cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. Most Europeans thought those journalists were looking for trouble and found it. Or worse, as the Financial Times’ editor said, that they were “stupid“. But after January 7 came November 13. By then, no one still blamed cartoons of Mohammed for the terrorist attacks in Paris.
While the Islamic State was enslaving and raping hundreds of Yazidi girls, our intrepid feminists in the West were very busy fighting for an Irish referendum on gay marriage. They clearly did not care about the fate of their Yazidi and Kurdish “sisters”. Those victims were hidden away in the remote and exotic East, as were the murdered secular Muslim bloggers in Bangladesh.
It is time to remember the famous poem by Martin Niemöller, a German Christian pastor who was imprisoned in a concentration camp for 7 years by the German Nazi regime:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Similarly, when Islamist terrorists target Muslim dissident bloggers, faraway Yazidi women or Israeli girls — and they are enslaved, flogged, raped or murdered — it should concern us in the West. Islamists are just sharpening their knives on them before coming for us.
If we do not speak out today, we will be punished for our indolence tomorrow.
Muslims Celebrate Bastille Day: 80 Dead, 68 Injured
July 15, 2016Muslims Celebrate Bastille Day: 80 Dead, 68 Injured, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, July 15, 2016
The response should not be to cower in fear, but to recognize that this is a war and act accordingly. France has just suffered a fresh attack in a war that is being fought by people in service of an ideology that France, like other Western countries, refuses to acknowledge even exists.
The reason why Obama offers these condemnations now after each jihad massacre is because he treats each as if it were an isolated incident, not as if it were one more battle in a long war. And he offers help in an investigation for the same reason: if U.S. officials do end up helping the French with an investigation of this latest jihad massacre, they will like come back with a characteristically Obamoid conclusion: they’re unable to determine the motive of the perpetrator.
**********************
The truck was loaded with explosives and hand grenades as it plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France, Thursday night. It was no accident: Nice authorities emphasized that it was a terror attack, which was fairly clear already from the fact that the driver exchanged gunfire with police after he rammed into the crowd.
At least eighty people are dead and 68 wounded, and Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi calls it “the worst tragedy in the history of Nice.” But given the harsh realities of the contemporary world, it probably won’t be the worst for long.
Jihadis have had their eyes on France for quite some time. The Islamic State issued this call in September 2014:
So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….
Yes, “run him over with your car.”
Then again from the Islamic State in May 2016:
“The French must die by the thousands…. Towards paradise, that is the path….Come, brother, let’s go to paradise, our women are waiting for us there, with angels as servants. You will have a palace, a winged horse of gold and rubies….With a little rocket-launcher, you can easily get one of them… you do something like that in the name of Dawla (Islamic State), and France will be traumatised for a century.”
The French are already traumatized. The BBC reported last week that “more than 5,000 French police will be deployed at key venues in and around Paris ahead of the Euro 2016 football final between France and Portugal,” and that “there will be no victory parade if France wins.” Why not? For fear of jihad terror attacks.
The Bastille Day jihad massacre demonstrates that the answer to jihad attacks is not to curtail one’s activities and cower in fear. Even if free people do that, the jihadis will strike anyway. Even without a victory parade, the jihadis struck yet again in France. The response should not be to cower in fear, but to recognize that this is a war and act accordingly. France has just suffered a fresh attack in a war that is being fought by people in service of an ideology that France, like other Western countries, refuses to acknowledge even exists.
France, even as it is under serious attack by the warriors of jihad, continues to pursue policies that will only result in the arrival of still more Muslims to France – and with them will come jihad terrorists, and many, many more jihad massacres like the one on Bastille Day in Nice. French curtailing their activities for fear of being struck by jihadis did not save them. The Bastille Day jihad attack should be the last to take place under the regime of politically correct fantasy that forces law enforcement and intelligence officials to pretend that the threat is other than what it is, and that the remedy is to apply, one more time, policies that have failed again and again and again.
Bastille Day should be a day for the releasing of prisoners. In the war against the global jihad, the truth has been prisoner for too long. It is time to set it free – before it, too, becomes irrevocably a casualty of this war against an enemy no one dares name.
“On behalf of the American people, I condemn in the strongest terms what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack in Nice, France, which killed and wounded dozens of innocent civilians,” Obama said.
Question: did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on behalf of the American people, condemn in the strongest terms every German and Japanese strike during World War II? Did he add that the U.S. administration was in touch with Hawaiian or Polish or French or Midway etc. officials and was ready to offer any assistance in the investigation?
The answer is no, because there was no need to offer such condemnations. The world was at war, and the world knew it was at war. The fact was obvious, as was which side each combatant was on. Nor was there any need for an investigation after each battle. Everyone knew what was going on, and why.
The reason why Obama offers these condemnations now after each jihad massacre is because he treats each as if it were an isolated incident, not as if it were one more battle in a long war. And he offers help in an investigation for the same reason: if U.S. officials do end up helping the French with an investigation of this latest jihad massacre, they will like come back with a characteristically Obamoid conclusion: they’re unable to determine the motive of the perpetrator.
In reality, there is no need for an investigation, because the jihadi’s motive is obvious. There needs to be an admission that we are in a full-scale war — not just lip-service as French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve offers, but a genuine acknowledgment, followed by a genuine war footing, and an end to the weepy memorials, empty condemnations, and po-faced get-nowhere investigations. This is not crime. This is war.
U.S. still gets it wrong on Islamic State
July 1, 2016U.S. still gets it wrong on Islamic State, Japan Today, Peter Van Buren, July 1, 2016
(An interesting and rather perceptive analysis, quite contrary to Kerry’s position that the suicide attack at the Turkish airport was a sign of desperation. — DM
WASHINGTON — Tuesday’s attacks at Istanbul’s main airport, which appear at this time to be the work of Islamic State, are the latest reminder that the United States should not downplay the group’s rudimentary – yet effective – tactics.
Since the wave of Islamic State suicide bombings in May – killing 522 people inside Baghdad, and 148 people inside Syria – American officials have downplayed the strategy as defensive. Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy in the fight against Islamic State, said the group “returned to suicide bombing” as the area under its control shrank. The American strategy of focusing primarily on the “big picture” recapture of territory seems to push the suicide bombings to the side. “It’s their last card,” stated an Iraqi spokesperson in response to the attacks.
The reality is just the opposite.
A day after the June 26 liberation of Fallujah, car bombs exploded in eastern and southern Baghdad. Two other suicide bombers were killed outside the city. An improvised explosive device exploded in southwest Baghdad a day earlier.
Washington should know better than to underestimate the power of small weapons to shape large events. After Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled Iraqi insurgents as “dead enders” in 2003, they began taking a deadly toll of American forces via suicide bombs. It was the 2006 bombing of the Shi’ite al-Askari Golden Mosque that kicked the Iraqi civil war into high gear. It was improvised explosive devices and car bombs that kept American forces on the defensive through 2011.
To believe suicide bombings represent a weakening of Islamic State is a near-total misunderstanding of the hybrid nature of the group; Islamic State melds elements of a conventional army and an insurgency. To “win,” one must defeat both versions.
Islamic State differs from a traditional insurgency in that it seeks to hold territory. This separates it from al-Qaida, and most other radical groups, and falsely leads the United States to believe that retaking strategic cities like Fallujah from Islamic State is akin to “defeating” it, as if it is World War Two again and we are watching blue arrows move across the map toward Berlin. Envoy McGurk, following Fallujah, even held a press conference announcing Islamic State has now lost 47 percent of its territory.
However, simultaneously with holding and losing territory, Islamic State uses terror and violence to achieve political ends.
Islamic State has no aircraft and no significant long-range weapons, making it a very weak conventional army when facing down the combined forces of the United States, Iran and Iraq in set piece battles. It can, however, use suicide bombs to strike into the very heart of Shiite Baghdad (and Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and Turkey – as Tuesday’s bombing reminds us), acting as a strong transnational insurgency.
Why does such strength matter in the face of large-scale losses such as Fallujah?
Violence in the heart of Iraqi Shiite neighborhoods empowers hardliners to seek revenge. Core Sunni support for Islamic State grows out of the need for protection from a Shi’ite dominated military, which seeks to marginalize if not destroy the Sunnis. Reports of Shi’ite atrocities leaking out of the ruins of Sunni Fallujah are thus significant. Fallujah was largely destroyed in order to “save” it, generating some 85,000 displaced persons, mirroring what happened in Ramadi. Those actions remind many Sunnis of why they supported Islamic State (and al-Qaida before them) in the first place.
Suicide strikes reduce the confidence of the people in their government’s ability to protect them. In Iraq, that sends Shiite militias into the streets, and raises questions about the value of civil institutions like the Iraqi National Police. Victories such as the retaking of Ramadi and Fallujah, and a promised assault on Mosul, mean little to people living at risk inside the nation’s capital.
American commanders have already had to talk the Iraqi government out of pulling troops from the field to defend Baghdad, even as roughly half of all Iraqi security forces are already deployed there. This almost guarantees more American soldiers will be needed to take up the slack.
Anything that pulls more American troops into Iraq fits well with the anti-American Islamic State narrative. Few Iraqis are left who imagine the United States can be an honest broker in their country. A State Department report found that one-third of all Iraqis believe the Americans are actually supporting Islamic State, while 40 percent are convinced that the United States is trying to destabilize Iraq for its own purposes.
In a country like Turkey, suicide bombings play out in a more complex political environment. Turkey has effectively supported Islamic State with porous borders for transit in and out of Syria, and has facilitated the flow of oil out of Syria and Iraq that ultimately benefits the group. At the same time, however, Turkey opened its territory to American aircraft conducting bombing runs against Islamic State. Attacks in Turkey may be in response to pressure on the nation to shift its strategy more in line with Western demands. Russia (no friend of Islamic State) and Turkey have also recently improved relations; the attack in Istanbul may have been a warning shot reminding Turkey not to get too close.
The suicide bombings – in Turkey and elsewhere – are not desperate or defensive moves. They are not inconsequential, even if their actual numbers decline. They are careful strategy, the well-thought out application of violence by Islamic State. The United States downplays them at great risk.
How US gave Fallujah’s Sunnis into Iranian hands
June 20, 2016How the US gave Fallujah’s Sunnis into Iranian hands, DEBKAfile, June 20, 2016
Sunni refugees
In the last few days, the Western press has been full of harrowing reports on the death and destruction wrought by the Islamic State in Fallujah, western Iraq. But no media outlet is covering the still ongoing human disaster in which tens of thousands of the city’s Sunni residents are fleeing for their lives, including many elderly people, women and children. Some are escaping the intense fighting or because their homes were destroyed. But many Sunnis are fleeing in dread of their ‘liberators,” the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite militias that captured the eastern and central parts of Fallujah.
These militias, the Popular Mobilization Forces and the Badar Forces, take their orders from Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Al Qods Brigades, and Brig. Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps ground forces.
There is not much difference between the barbarous acts perpetrated by ISIS and the savagery of Shiite militiamen against the Sunni dwellers of the Iraqi city. In many cases it is even worse. The pro-Iranian fighters are burning down and blowing up houses, murdering and raping women, and executing children and the elderly with bayonets or gunfire.
The Iraqi Special Republican Guard, also called the Golden Division, which participated in the capture of the city center, withdrew from the parts of Fallujah that the pro-Iranian fighters entered. They did so even though Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi had promised the US via Douglas Ollivant, White House aide in charge of Iraq, that the SRG would protect the city’s Sunni population from the Shiite militias. What happened in fact was that the Iraqi soldiers opened the door for the atrocities.
American sources in Washington and Baghdad reported on Monday, June 20, that President Barack Obama and his top aides are furious with Al-Abadi for not keeping his promise. But DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources point out that none of this would not have happened were it not for US military involvement in the war on the side of the Iranians.
The pro-Iranian militias were enabled to reach central Fallujah and overwhelm ISIS by the massive bombing raids carried out by US AV-8B Harrier II jets, which flew in from bases in the Persian Gulf, and F/A-18 Hornets from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean.
Even the urgent American calls on Prime Minister Al-Abadi over the last few days to halt the murders and other outrages against the Sunnis population were pointless. Washington knows that he has no authority over the Iranian generals or commanders of the Shiite militias for halting the slaughter.
DEBKAfile’s military and counterterrorism sources point to an especially grave repercussion coming as a direct result of the war crimes allowed to occur in Fallujah. Washington will be hard put to enlist any local Sunni allies for the capture of the two main ISIS strongholds, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.
Some of the American field commanders may believe they can dispense with Sunni support and rely on other local forces, such as the Kurds, to step forward. But they must take into account that many young Sunnis, after witnessing pro-Iranian atrocities in Fallujah may well opt to side with ISIS as the lesser evil.
Why Speaking the Truth About Islamic Terrorism Matters
June 17, 2016Why Speaking the Truth About Islamic Terrorism Matters, PJ Media, Roger Kimball, June 15, 2016
Barack Obama Lectures the Nation About Islam
Barack Obama has consistently failed to deal with the “Islamic” part of the reality of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, his administration has prevented the military, law enforcement, and intelligence services from engaging forthrightly with the threat of Islamic terrorism. They have insisted, for example, that briefing materials be purged of any reference to the real source of the terrorist animus: the passion for jihad fired by allegiance to the fundamental law of Islam, sharia.
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I had planned to weigh in on the slaughter in Orlando right after it happened, but a sense of nausea intervened.
There was plenty of nausea to go around. You might think that the chief catalyst would be the scene of slaughter itself: the nearly fifty revelers at a gay nightclub dead, and scores more wounded by a single jihadist.
In a normal world, the spectacle of that carnage would have been the focus of revulsion. I confess, however, that the repetition of such acts of theocratic barbarism these past few decades has left me somewhat anesthetized.
The long, long list of “Islamist terrorist attacks” that Wikipedia maintains comes with this mournful advisory:
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.
Indeed, and alas. Take a look at that list: one thing you will note — apart from the fact that the terrorist attacks are correctly denominated as “Islamist” terrorist attacks — is that most years include more attacks than the years before.
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