Failure of Intelligence: How Liberals Cause ISIS Terror Attacks, Bill Whittle via You Tube, November 20, 2015
Archive for the ‘Islamism’ category
Failure of Intelligence: How Liberals Cause ISIS Terror Attacks
November 21, 2015Muslim cleric: “The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs”
November 21, 2015Muslim cleric: “The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs” Jihad Watch,
[T]he phenomenon known as “ISIS” is not a temporal aberration within Islam but rather a byproduct of what is considered normative thinking for Al Azhar—the Islamic world’s most authoritative university.
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Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr, a scholar of Islamic law and graduate of Egypt’s Al Azhar University—regularly touted as the world’s most prestigious Islamic university—recently exposed his alma mater in a televised interview.
After being asked why Al Azhar, which is in the habit of denouncing secular thinkers as un-Islamic, refuses to denounce the Islamic State as un-Islamic, Sheikh Nasr said:
It can’t [condemn the Islamic State as un-Islamic]. The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic? Al Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim world [to establish it]. Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing the apostate. Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and teaches things like not building churches, etc. Al Azhar upholds the institution of jizya [extracting tribute from religious minorities]. Al Azhar teaches stoning people. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic?
Nasr joins a growing chorus of critics of Al Azhar. Last September, while discussing how the Islamic State burns some of its victims alive—most notoriously, a Jordanian pilot—Egyptian journalist Yusuf al-Husayni remarked on his satellite program that “The Islamic State is only doing what Al Azhar teaches… and the simplest example is Ibn Kathir’s Beginning and End.”
Ibn Kathir is one of Sunni Islam’s most renowned scholars; his Beginning and End is a magisterial history of Islam and a staple at Al Azhar. It is also full of Muslims, beginning with Muhammad, committing the sorts of atrocities that the Islamic State and other Islamic organizations and persons commit.
In February, Egyptian political writer Dr. Khalid al-Montaser revealed that Al Azhar was encouraging enmity for non-Muslims, specifically Coptic Christians, and even inciting for their murder. Marveled Montaser:
Is it possible at this sensitive time — when murderous terrorists rest on texts and understandings of takfir [accusing Muslims of apostasy], murder, slaughter, and beheading — that Al Azhar magazine is offering free of charge a book whose latter half and every page — indeed every few lines — ends with “whoever disbelieves [non-Muslims] strike off his head”?
The prestigious Islamic university—which co-hosted U.S. President Obama’s 2009 “A New Beginning” speech—has even issued a free booklet dedicated to proving that Christianity is a “failed religion.”
In short, the phenomenon known as “ISIS” is not a temporal aberration within Islam but rather a byproduct of what is considered normative thinking for Al Azhar—the Islamic world’s most authoritative university.
The best way to remember the Holocaust is by bringing Muslims to kill American Jews
November 20, 2015The best way to remember the Holocaust is by bringing Muslims to kill American Jews, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, November 20, 2015
Telling Americans they’re supposed to “atone” for the Holocaust by helping Muslims harass and murder Jews is as backward as trying to apologize for slavery with more slavery.
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The dumbest “refugees” meme the left has rolled out to date are the comparisons between the Holocaust refugee policies of FDR that kept out Jews and political leaders today who want to take genuine Christian and Yazidi refugees instead of fake economic Muslim migrants who pose serious terrorism threats.
Living in New York City, I’ve lost count of the number of Muslim terror plots against synagogues since 9/11. The previous Paris attack by Muslims targeted a Jewish supermarket. (Or as Obama put it, “random folks in a deli.”)
Sure it’s #NotAllMuslims. It’s just enough of them that this behavior repeats itself time and time again. Until you end up with European cities like Malmo where there are so many Muslims that the Jews have to flee.
Because Muslims don’t like non-Muslims and really don’t like Jews.
Researchers found that the percentage expressing “favorable views” about Jews was uniformly low: Egypt, 2 percent; Jordan, 2 percent; Pakistan, 2 percent; Lebanon, 3 percent; Palestine, 4 percent; Turkey, 4 percent.
And yes, Muslims in the West also hate Jews.
Belgium: 68 percent of Muslims harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, compared to 21 percent overall;
Spain: 62 percent, compared to 29 percent overall;
Germany: 56 percent, compared to 16 percent overall;
Italy: 56 percent, compared to 29 percent overall;
United Kingdom: 54 percent, compared to 12 percent overall;
France: 49 percent, compared to 17 percent overall.
Theologically, Islam is violently anti-Semitic. Mohammed’s final command was the ethnic cleansing of Jews. The shout Allahu Akbar originated from one of his massacres of Jews.
It’s that simple. Muslims hate Jews. Bringing more Muslims to America makes the country more anti-Semitic. It promotes violence against Jews and harassment of Jews.
The numbers are in… [NOTE: clicking on the link returns “blank.” — DM)
In France, 73 percent of Jews surveyed said that they had witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism from someone with “Muslim extremist views.”
Why do liberals want to bring this same horrible reality to America?
Telling Americans they’re supposed to “atone” for the Holocaust by helping Muslims harass and murder Jews is as backward as trying to apologize for slavery with more slavery.
The worst possible way to respond to the Holocaust is by promoting the Muslim persecution of Jews in America.
If we want to take the kinds of refugees who are like the Jews in WW2, we should take stateless persecuted minorities, Christians and Yazidis.
Syrian Muslims are not stateless and they are not a minority. They are a supremacist group whose own intolerance of religious differences tore Syria apart. If we bring that intolerance to America, we will all suffer.
Syrian Muslim migrants are already attacking Syrian Christian refugees in Europe.
Said went across Turkey on foot. He never thought that his problems would only be starting once he made it to Germany.
“In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have arrested my brother in a house church. I fled the Iranian secret police, because I thought in Germany I can finally freely live by my religion,” says Said. “But in the home for asylum seekers, I can’t even openly admit that I am a Christian.”
Mainly Syrian refugees, mostly devout Sunni Muslims, live in the home. “They wake me before dawn during Ramadan and say that I should eat before the sun comes up. If I refuse, they say, I’m a, kuffar ‘, an unbeliever. They spit at me,” says Said. “They treat me like an animal. And threaten to kill me.”
Why do liberals want to bring this to America? If they don’t care about Syrian Christian refugees, what about gay Syrian refugees?
Rami Ktifan made a snap decision to come out. A fellow Syrian had spotted a rainbow flag lying near the 23-year-old university student’s belongings inside a packed refugee center. The curious man, Ktifan recalled, picked it up before casually asking, “What is this?”
“I decided to tell the truth, that it is the flag for gay people like me,” Ktifan said. “I thought, I am in Europe now. In Germany, I should not have to hide anymore.”
What followed over the next several weeks, though, was abuse — both verbal and physical — from other refugees, including an attempt to burn Ktifan’s feet in the middle of the night.
Bringing these people to America is like bringing Nazis here during the Holocaust to attack minorities here. It’s just evil and wrong.
Is defeating the Islamic State impossible?
November 20, 2015Is defeating the Islamic State impossible? Al-Monitor, Ali Hashem, November 19, 2015
(Pretending that the Islamic State is not Islamic won’t defeat it. Neither will pretending that it is “radical” and therefore not representative of “mainstream” Islam. –DM)
While working on a documentary about Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, I had the chance to meet Abu Omar, a former IS operative who was once an inmate in the infamous Camp Bucca facility that brought together all those who later became the ruling elite of the most notorious terrorist group in modern history. I asked Abu Omar whether there was any recipe to defeat IS, which seemed unbeatable. In response, he smiled and said, “First, the world will have to really believe it exists — that it’s not an American conspiracy, nor a Turkish secret project, nor an Iranian-Syrian backed organization — that it’s simply the most advanced edition of global jihad resulting from 30 years of experience. It also must not be conceded that no one can win this war.”
Since the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, the dream of reviving the caliphate has been alive in the souls of those adopting political Islam as a doctrine. Ordinary Muslims’ feelings of weakness and a sense of disconnection with and lack of support from the regimes that have ruled the Arab and Muslim world grew over time and was inherited by members of the Muslim millennial generation who wanted to belong to an entity that blends power, religion and modernity. IS came with the three together. While many might debate the last point, IS is using cutting-edge technologies in many of their activities, including in the professional use of media tools that fulfill a feeling of superiority through well-crafted videos and clips. As for power, IS was able to prove its strength by creating a de facto state within the borders of Syria and Iraq, challenging the world powers and showing a high level of discipline in the areas under their control. The other element, religion, is the magnet that directly or indirectly attracts people to IS, for the group introduces itself as the guarantor for the application of God’s rule on Earth, and that the caliph is a continuation of the Prophet Muhammad’s legacy.
The fact is that the Islamic State, as a doctrine and practice, has been an unbeatable model in the Sunni Muslim world to those seeking this blend of religion, power and modernity. Sunni and Shiite Islamists shared many similar aspirations until the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran succeeded in toppling the Shah; at the time, Sunni Islamists such as Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the co-founder of al-Qaeda with Osama bin Laden, celebrated Imam Ruhollah Khomeini’s victory in one of Amman’s mosques. Later it became clear that the revolution was more an answer to the aspirations of Shiite Islamists than Sunnis; therefore, the next stop for Azzam and his comrades was Afghanistan, and they later became what were called the Afghan Arabs.
When the creation of the Islamic State was announced, one of the main strategies adopted by its leadership was social engagement. The de facto, self-styled state opened its doors to jihadi foreigners, and thousands came with their families and settled in cities under IS control; according to a UN report, more than 25,000 from over 100 nations have made it to IS territory. Some of them get married to women from tribes in the areas in order to strengthen ties and complicate any attempts to oust IS. The foreign jihadis are persona non grata in their home countries, and if IS falls, their lives and future may be endangered wherever they may be; they have no safe haven but the Islamic State and therefore will fight to the last man standing to keep it alive.
Part of its social and economic strategy was to engage the main tribes in control of the oil business; this helps not only in providing profits but also in strengthening ties with local tribes.
The thinking is that IS tied several knots around its core to make it extremely difficult for enemies to target it effectively. This apparently meant that three years of ground and air operations, international and regional attempts to counter IS and direct media and public campaigns did not effectively harm the group, and now it is able to function in several countries in several continents and is capable of carrying out its tactics with effective command and control, with the multiple attacks in Paris being a strong example.
To defeat IS, the world needs to hit the core of the group, and this means untying the shroud of knots surrounding it and cutting blood off from IS’ heart. A counter model is needed to fight the IS model, a model that is powerful, modern and shows real respect and appreciation for Islam. With such a model it would be easier to deprive the terrorist entity of sympathizers who might become future operatives. As former IS operative Abu Omar told me, “IS is very clever and smart in attracting people with potential; they know how to talk to them and how to address their ambitions. They are also very smart in exploiting mistakes committed by their enemies, and use these mistakes to prove to their supporters why they are the right choice.” He said, “I was behind their walls; therefore, I understand the mentality. If you really want to finish IS, you need to address people’s concerns, let the sheikhs talk to youths and stop making big mistakes. IS is surviving as the result of the dire mistakes committed by governments of the region.”
Defeating IS should not be impossible if the above is addressed and serious military and economic steps are taken to prevent the group from expanding both financially and geographically. This means doing battle on the war fronts and imposing sanctions on countries and individuals financing the group or allowing money to flow to it or buying goods, mainly oil, from territories under its control. Long-term strategic steps must be taken or IS will be here to stay and expand.
Radical Islam: The invisible Enemy
November 20, 2015Radical Islam: The invisible Enemy, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, November 19, 2015
(Islam has long sought to dominate civilization by establishing a caliphate. Why then, is trying to accomplish that goal considered “radical?” Please see also, Beware of Islamic terrorism. — DM)
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
Radical Islam is an ideology that serves both as an organizing principle for civil societies and a military doctrine. By ignoring it, the US and the rest of the free nations of the world have made it impossible to conceptualize or implement a strategy for either discrediting it or defeating its adherents.
On the one hand, there is the Sunni version of radical Islam propounded by the Muslim Brotherhood.
They want the Islamic empire to be an Islamic caliphate. On the other hand, you have the Shi’ite version of radical Islam propounded by the Iranian regime in Tehran. Its adherents want the Islamic empire to be ruled by an ayatollah in Tehran.
Every day the US and its allies maintain their refusal to acknowledge that radical Islam exists and that the regime in Tehran, al-Qaida, IS, Hamas and all the rest are mere expressions of this larger ideology, the danger radical Islam poses to the survival of free societies will continue to mount and grow.
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As the cleaning crews were mopping the dried blood from the stage and the seats of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, a depressing act appeared on stage in distant Iowa.
Saturday night the three contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination took to the stage in Iowa for a debate. The moderator asked them whether they would be willing to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the ideology motivating Islamic terrorists to massacre innocents. All refused.
Like her former boss, US President Barack Obama, former secretary of state and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton not only refused to accept the relevance of the term. Clinton refused to acknowledge what radical Islam stands for.
She merely noted some of what it rejects.
In her words, “I think this kind of barbarism and nihilism, it’s very hard to understand, other than the lust for power, the rejection of modernity, the total disregard for human rights, freedom, or any other value that we know and respect.”
Her opponents agreed with her.
But of course, it is easy to understand what motivates Islamic terrorists. They tell us all the time.
They want the world to be run by an Islamic empire.
When they are in charge, they will kill, subjugate, convert or enslave all non-Muslims, except Jews.
The Jews will be obliterated.
The attacks they carry out in the Western world are viewed both as battles for the soul of Muslims worldwide and as a means to terrorize non-Muslims into accepting subjugation.
True, there are competing schools inside of the world of radical Islam.
On the one hand, there is the Sunni version of radical Islam propounded by the Muslim Brotherhood.
They want the Islamic empire to be an Islamic caliphate. On the other hand, you have the Shi’ite version of radical Islam propounded by the Iranian regime in Tehran. Its adherents want the Islamic empire to be ruled by an ayatollah in Tehran.
For Americans and the rest of the free world though, this is a distinction without any real meaning.
The radical Islamic goal of destroying America – and the rest of the world – is the same regardless of who ends up winning the intramural jihad contest.
And as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, the sides are happy to come together to achieve their common goal of killing us and destroying our societies.
The Americans’ avoidance of reality is not unique.
The Europeans also refuse to see it.
Following the jihadist massacres at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in Paris in January, French President Francois Hollande insisted that the attackers who killed in the name of Islam had nothing to do with Islam.
After jihadists in London beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby outside his barracks in 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that the attack, carried out in the name of Islam, had nothing to do with Islam.
The operational consequences of the West’s refusal to acknowledge the nature of the forces waging war against it have been disastrous.
Radical Islam is an ideology that serves both as an organizing principle for civil societies and a military doctrine. By ignoring it, the US and the rest of the free nations of the world have made it impossible to conceptualize or implement a strategy for either discrediting it or defeating its adherents.
Rather than develop comprehensive plans for dealing with this enemy, the Americans, the Europeans and others have opted for a mix of policies running the spectrum from appeasement to whack-a-mole operations.
Abroad, appeasement has taken its most significant form in the US-led nuclear deal with Iran. As the largest state sponsor of terrorism and the most active radical Islamic imperialist force in the Middle East, Iran is the ground zero of radical Islam. It not only oversees and directs the operations of its puppets, like Syrian President Bashar Assad, and its foreign legions, like Hezbollah. The Iranian regime has also played a key role in developing Muslim Brotherhood offshoots like al-Qaida, which received, and likely continues to receive training and direction from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. As for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, if Iran had been interested in preventing its rise, IS would never have taken over any territory in either country.
At home, appeasement of radical Islamic forces has involved embracing Muslim Brotherhood front groups and insisting that radical Islamic clerics are moderates because they aren’t pulling any triggers.
The West’s whack-a-mole war against radical Islam at home and abroad has meant that even as one group – like core al-Qaida – is cut down, it is swiftly replaced by other groups, like Islamic State. And if IS is eventually cut down, it too will be replaced by another group, and then reconstitute itself as IS when the West’s attention is taken up by the next major group.
Obama has enabled this state of affairs by defining the enemy as narrowly as possible, reducing the whole sphere of radical Islam to a few discrete groups – like al-Qaeda and IS – that he seeks to defeat or contain.
It is not simply that the whack-a-mole strategy doesn’t work. It is self-defeating. Since the radical Islamic trigger pullers in the West are usually no more than a few people who get together to murder people, insisting that someone has to be a card carrying member of a recognized terrorist group before authorities will go after him makes it almost impossible to find operatives and prevent attacks.
The murderers Friday may well never have received formal orders to commit their attacks from a central jihadist headquarters. They may have met at a mosque in Paris or Brussels and decided to do it.
Certainly they needed no advanced training to mow down people eating dinner or watching a rock concert. They didn’t even really need to know how to shoot straight.
As for their explosives vests, all they needed was a guy with a working knowledge of explosives to set them up with the means to turn themselves into human bombs. Maybe he trained in Syria. Maybe he has a degree in chemistry from the Sorbonne.
Maybe he is just good at following YouTube videos.
The most important component of Friday night’s massacre was the terrorists’ radical Islamic motivation.
Their belief in their ideology motivated them to die killing innocent people. Everything else was secondary. They may have been inspired and loosely directed by the heads of IS. But if Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed six months ago, they would have found another source of inspiration.
And that’s the main point. While Friday’s killers may have given their allegiance to IS, they were operationally and ideologically all but indistinguishable from their predecessors in the London subways in 2005 and the Madrid commuter rails in 2004 who hailed from al-Qaida. Likewise, while the US may have seriously degraded core al-Qaida in the Middle East over the past seven years, IS in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya is an organic extension of al-Qaida.
To defeat these groups, the US and its allies need to adopt a strategy that is rooted in an acknowledgment of the nature of our true enemy: radical Islam.
Armed with this recognition, the nations of the free world can determine operational guidelines for combating not only specific, discrete groupings of adherents to this ideology, they can develop overall strategies for combating it at home and in the Middle East.
At home, such strategies require Western governments to penetrate, disrupt and destroy radical Islamic networks on the ground in a sustained, concentrated manner. In the Middle East, they require the free world to stop seeking to appease leaders, regimes and militias that support and ascribe to radical Islam.
Sunday night, a group of Parisians stood outside one of the sites of Friday night’s massacre and sang “La Marseilles.” Without fear, a woman garbed in the black robes of radical Islam stepped into the crowd and began bellowing out “Allahu Akbar.” She probably isn’t a card carrying member of IS. Rather, in all likelihood she is just someone who ascribes to radical Islam and so sees France as her enemy.
Assuming the women doesn’t belong to a terrorist group, French officials will not monitor her or her relatives. If she or any of her relatives murder their fellow citizens of France, authorities will probably say they were lone wolves.
Every day the US and its allies maintain their refusal to acknowledge that radical Islam exists and that the regime in Tehran, al-Qaida, IS, Hamas and all the rest are mere expressions of this larger ideology, the danger radical Islam poses to the survival of free societies will continue to mount and grow. Saturday night’s Democratic debate was a depressing reminder how low we have fallen.
The City of Light Goes Dark
November 20, 2015The City of Light Goes Dark, The Gatestone Institute, Denis MacEoin, November 20, 2015
(Please see also, Beware of Islamic terrorism. — DM)
- The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.
- Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.
- Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.
- This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.
Who does not love Paris? Puritans do not love Paris. Puritans hate, music, song, dance, poetry, fun and love. Today, such people are represented above all by extremist Muslim doctrinaire fundamentalists. They seem to despise women without veils; call music Satanic; regard painted images as an insult to an angry God; consider football a sin, and a restaurant serving wine as the embodiment of evil. They do not respond to a life-affirming bustle and the ideals an open, tolerant, democratic, liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian West.
When Sir Karl Popper wrote, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, his two-volume classic, The Open Society and its Enemies, he laid bare the evils of totalitarian systems, both left and right — Communism and Fascism. He would never have guessed that soon a Third World War would be taking place between radical Islam and the West.
Last week, the City of Light went dark. In January of this year, some Islamist gunmen had attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and another had gunned down shoppers in a kosher supermarket. U.S. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Matt Yglesias, commenting on the supermarket attack, glossed over the motives behind it: “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” [Emphasis added]
Two days after last week’s attacks, when reporters asked Obama if he would consider additional action against The Islamic State (IS), he declined to give a straight answer. The killings, he said, were “based on a twisted ideology.” As so many times before, Obama would not define what ideology — the belief system of radical Islam, based on violent passages from the Qur’an and Hadith, and modelled on the jihadist actions of generations of Muslims, beginning with Muhammad himself.
This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe. At least one of last Friday’s killers in Paris appears to have travelled from Syria and entered Europe through Greece.
The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.
Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.
Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.
The kosher supermarket attack was clearly anti-Semitic. Like the multitude of such attacks on Jewish schools, museums, synagogues, and individuals, it celebrated the rise of a new anti-Semitism in Europe, an anti-Semitism (often expressed through anti-Zionism) that has been carried out by the political left, hand-in-hand with Muslim radical groups.
Jews on European streets are the one people most intensely hated by many Muslims (again, not just radicals). The freedom French Jews have for a long time enjoyed (despite high levels of indigenous anti-Semitism) is an affront to Islam, in which Jews especially must be converted, rendered submissive, or killed. Unfortunately, many Europeans have gone out of their way to be helpful. Just the day before the Paris attacks, the EU had singled out Israel, as usual, to label goods to help anti-Semitic, racist Europeans hurt Palestinians and Israelis with an unjust, sanctimonious boycott.
A leader of a British Islamic educational institute writes that, “One should abstain from evil audacities such as listening to music.” Another graduate speaks of the “evils of music;” calls London’s Royal College of Music “satanic,” and claims that music is the way in which Jews spread “the Satanic web” to corrupt young Muslims. Is it, then, surprising that a handful of fanatics gunned down more than 80 innocent young people who had gone to enjoy a rock concert in the Bataclan Theatre?
As sports (apart from archery and horseback riding) are also activities much disliked by fundamentalist imams, three jihadis, in an apparent rebuke to such games and frivolity, went to a football stadium in Paris last Friday night and, although they could not get in, they blew themselves up outside it.[1]
The Nazis hated jazz and modern art (even as they stole it), but not even they rejected all music and all art. Hitler luxuriated in the operas of Wagner and fancied himself no mean painter, even if the art world may not have agreed with him. But today’s fascists care for nothing but their own increasingly expansionist beliefs.
As Hamas members have said more than once to Israelis, with whom the Europeans have more in common now than they would like to admit, the extremist Muslims will conquer in the end because “we love death more than you love life.” Nothing could better sum up the bitter reality of the Paris attacks.
In a television interview on BBC News at Ten on Sunday night, a singer, Maude Hacheb, expressed her response to the killings: “If they want to break the country, they have to break young people. I think for them, music is no good, fun is no good, love is no good. So I guess it was really significant they go to the Bataclan.”
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[1] Cricket has been condemned by a Pakistani imam as a sacrilegious “waste of time,” playing chess has been compared to dipping one’s hands in the blood of pigs, and ultra-conservative Muslim clerics have condemned football as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic culture. Saudi Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Barrak has warned in a fatwa that football “played according to [accepted international rules] has caused Muslims to adopt some of the customs of the enemies of Islam, who are [preoccupied with] games and frivolity.”
The Real Containment
November 19, 2015The Real Containment, Steyn on Line, Mark Steyn, November 19, 2015
It works for Barry Manilow concerts, so why not against ISIS?
[T]he biggest obstacle to a vigorous ideological pushback is the west’s politico-media class – Obama, Kerry, Merkel, Cameron, Justin Trudeau, etc – who insist that Islam and immigration can never be a part of the discussion, and seem genuinely to believe that, say, more niqabs on the streets of western cities is a heartwarming testament to the vibrancy of our diversity, rather than a grim marker of our descent into a brutal and segregated society in which half the population will be chattels forbidden by their owners from feeling sunlight on their faces.
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Because (per Obama’s latest complaint) of “how decentralized power is in this system”, over 30 American governors have told the President they don’t want him shipping battalions of “Syrian” “refugees” to their states. He, in turn, has sneered that his critics are scared of “widows and orphans”. With his usual brilliant comic timing, he said this a couple of hours before a female suicide bomber self-detonated in St Denis.
Nonetheless, the presidential-gubernatorial split is an interesting development. Obama has responded with a brand new hashtag: #RefugeesWelcome. If you live in Hashtagistan, this is another great hashtag to add to such invincible hashtags as #PeaceForParis, #JeSuisCharlie, #UnitedForUkraine and, of course, #BringBackOurGirls. If you live in the real world, the magic hashtags don’t seem to work so well, and these governors seem to think #RefugeesWelcome will perform no better for New Mexico and New Hampshire than the others have worked out for Paris, Ukraine and Boko Haram-infested West Africa.
So reality is not yet entirely irrelevant – and reality is on the march:
An Italian priest is fighting for his life in northern Bangladesh after being shot and seriously wounded by unidentified gunmen.
The attack on Wednesday is the latest in a series targeting foreigners in the country, which have been blamed on Islamic militant groups including Islamic State.
A Jewish teacher has reportedly been stabbed in Marseille by three people claiming to be ISIS supporters… The suspects, who were reportedly wearing ISIS badges, made anti-semitic comments before stabbing the teacher.
A married couple plotted an Isil suicide bombing of the London Underground or Westfield shopping centre around the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 suicide attacks, a court heard on Tuesday.
Mohammed Rehman, 25, and his wife Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, had enough bomb material to “cause multiple fatalities”…
Honduras Detains Five Syrians Said Headed To U.S. With Stolen Greek Passports
The man arrested Tuesday trying to enter Parliament carrying a hidden meat cleaver probably has mental illness and isn’t a terrorist, the head of the RCMP said Wednesday.
Toronto man Yasin Mohamed Ali, 56, was arrested outside the Centre Block of Parliament in Ottawa and appeared in court Wednesday.
Hmm. “Mentally ill” “Toronto man”… But then, as John Kerry has assured us, all of the above is nothing to do with Islam. Objecting to mass murder in your country of nominal citizenship is also nothing to do with Islam:
France: Only 30 Muslims Show Up For Rally Against Paris Jihad Attacks
What’s the punchline? “…and seven of those were wearing suicide belts”?
ISIS is not itself the cause of the problem. What ISIS is is the most effective vehicle for the cause – which is Islamic imperialist conquest. What ISIS did in the Paris attacks was bring many disparate elements together – Muslims born and bred in France, Muslim immigrants to other European countries, recently arrived Muslim “refugees”… An organization that can command numerous assets of different status – holders of 11 different passports – and tie them all together is a formidable enemy. Playing whack-a-mole on that scale will ensure we lose, and bankrupt ourselves in the process.
Meanwhile, the caliphate is coining it: ISIS is the wealthiest terrorist organization in history, making billions of dollars a year from oil sales, bank raids, human smuggling, extortion and much else. So they have a ton of money with which to fund their ideological goals.
And yet, as I say, ISIS is merely the vehicle for the ideology, which in the end can only be defeated by taking it on. You can’t drone the animating ideas away. And the biggest obstacle to a vigorous ideological pushback is the west’s politico-media class – Obama, Kerry, Merkel, Cameron, Justin Trudeau, etc – who insist that Islam and immigration can never be a part of the discussion, and seem genuinely to believe that, say, more niqabs on the streets of western cities is a heartwarming testament to the vibrancy of our diversity, rather than a grim marker of our descent into a brutal and segregated society in which half the population will be chattels forbidden by their owners from feeling sunlight on their faces.
But best not to bring that up. So the attackers got suicide bombs to within a few yards of the French president. And a football match intended to show that European life goes on ended in cancellation, security lockdowns and the German chancellor being hustled away to safety. And the Belgian government has admitted it can no longer enforce its jurisdiction in parts of its own capital city within five miles of Nato headquarters… And yet, for all that, the European papers are surprisingly light on analyses of what’s going on. The multiculti diversity omertà is ruthlessly enforced, and few commentators (and even fewer editors and publishers) want to suffer the taint of “Islamophobe!” or “Racist!” Easier just to run another piece on how heartwarming that Eiffel peace symbol is – as even my old friends at the Telegraph, a supposedly “right-wing” paper, did.
Responding to Steve Sailer’s column “Four Ways To Save Europe”, Kathy Shaidle comments:
Sailer assumes Europe wants to be saved.
Whereas Europe is like, “What black eye? No, I ran into a door. Everything’s cool. You must be weird or something…”
Europe as a battered wife in denial – just like Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s all-American hometown girl.
Meanwhile, during the moment of silence for the dead of Paris, Turkish soccer fans aren’t shy about yelling “Allahu Akbar!”. It was, in fact, the least silent “moment of silence” of all time. Euphemism, circumspection and self-censorship are strictly for the infidels.
So is the gubernatorial pushback (against a president who calls them bigots and racists) a sign that the sappy hashtags are having a harder time post-Paris? Or is it just a passing phase in the immediate aftermath of mass slaughter?
Donald Trump had a good line at his Massachusetts rally on Wednesday night:
ISIS is ‘contained’? The only thing that’s contained is us.
Whether that’s true in America, it’s certainly true of the European political discourse. And, unless that changes, in Sweden, Belgium, Austria and elsewhere, we are approaching a point of no return.
~On Thursday evening, I’ll be checking in with Sean Hannity coast to coast on Fox News at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific.
Op-Ed: The US president’s migrant darlings
November 19, 2015Op-Ed: The US president’s migrant darlings, Israel National News, Jack Engelhard, November 19, 2015
(Please see also, Attkisson: Obama won’t read intelligence on groups he doesn’t consider terrorists. — DM)
There is no accounting for the suicidal stupidity that afflicts our leaders whose enlightenment is bringing us all down together in one heap. Obama did nothing for Christians who were being beheaded by ISIS but he is all in for Muslims. People are starting to ask whose side is he on? Does he care about us, or does he care mostly about them?
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Incoming migrants mean incoming anti-Semites, but Obama’s migrant darlings imperil all Americans.
The man on CNN (or maybe Fox?) says that we should welcome Obama’s 10,000 Syrian migrants. They’re harmless.
After all, there’ve been no signs of terrorism from the thousands, Syrians and otherwise, who have already encamped within the United States over the years, meaning that aside from the Fort Hood slaughter, the Boston Marathon massacre and other such displays of affection – heck, what’s the problem?
The problem is — what do we mean by terrorism?
Islamic terrorism (just about the only flavor we’ve got nowadays) does not always go boom, as it did in Paris and as it does so often in Israel.
Every time a Jewish kid or speaker gets bullied on campus by Islamic delinquents who’ve infiltrated our schools – that’s terrorism.
I hate to be so blunt about this, but 10,000 new Islamic Syrian migrants automatically means 10,000 new anti-Semites. You read it here first. Nobody else says this because saying something so brutally obvious is politically incorrect and impolite. But that’s the math.
On what day did the plight of the hordes come before the safety of dutiful tax-paying citizens? Hollande is still inviting them in, 30,000 over the next two years, and when it happens again he’ll wonder again why…and why French Jews are packing fast for Israel.
Ditto Merkel, who started it all – and we shall see what her politeness soon brings to Germany and throughout rape-capital Europe.
There is no accounting for the suicidal stupidity that afflicts our leaders whose enlightenment is bringing us all down together in one heap. Obama did nothing for Christians who were being beheaded by ISIS but he is all in for Muslims. People are starting to ask whose side is he on? Does he care about us, or does he care mostly about them?
He has it that we must be true to our values. That’s who we are, he says. We are also dead ducks.
His lame response to Paris — you expected Churchill? You were expecting “we shall fight on the beaches?”
Instead, a confederacy of nomad towel-heads has the entire Western World in fear and trembling.
Our politicians. Our leaders. Their choices are failing us. Their stupid mistakes are killing us.
On stupidity, can anyone beat John Kerry? This fool, just yesterday he explained that the Paris bloodbath was inexcusable.
But of the Charlie Hebdo butchery – well, of that, he, John Kerry can find justification, “rationale.”
That was real blood, John. Not ketchup. Married into the Heinz fortune, he can’t be that stupid.
Defeat ISIS with this leadership?
As if once we bomb them to smithereens we can go back to worrying about the Kardashians again.
Sorry, not so simple. The pestilence we face may live next door without an ISIS shingle or dashboard ID. We don’t know what they’re thinking. Sometimes we do. Last week here in Manhattan a Pakistani cabbie beat up a passenger for being Jewish. That too is ISIS and that too is terrorism.
As I’ve said before, people who don’t know Sinatra are taking over the town…town by town…and as a majority of governors say no to the migrants, de Blasio has already raised his hand to bring in more. He wants the 10,000, or as many as Obama is willing to ship and import of these “widows and orphans,” to quote the president.
The facts and the pictures show otherwise. Most are big strong able-bodied men who ran from the fight – deserters.
I’ve been saying this clearly in my columns and in this book, and finally even uber-leftist Chris Matthews agrees that Obama has it wrong.
Our Liberal Leftists, leaders and followers, are not merely an inconvenient irritation. They are imperiling our kids and our grandkids.
Post Paris: Liberals Can’t Blame Terror Attack on Muslims
November 19, 2015Obama: Federal law is un-American!
November 19, 2015Obama: Federal law is un-American! Power Line, Jonn Hinderaker, November 18, 2015
On Monday, President Obama denounced Republicans, including Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, who suggested that the U.S. should admit Christian refugees fleeing persecution in Syria, but not Muslims from the same country. Obama called such a “religious test” “shameful” and “not American.” Today he doubled down, asserting that Republicans who object to resettling tens or hundreds of thousands of Islamic refugees from Syria in the U.S. are helping ISIS.
President Obama apparently is unaware of the controlling federal law, or maybe he just doesn’t care what the law says. It wouldn’t be the first time. Andy McCarthy tries to set Obama straight:
In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed:
When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.
Really? Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code), an alien applying for admission
must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.
Moreover, to qualify for asylum in the United States, the applicant must be a “refugee” as defined by federal law. That definition (set forth in Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title , U.S. Code) also requires the executive branch to take account of the alien’s religion:
The term “refugee” means (A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality … and who is unable or unwilling to return to … that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of … religion [among other things] …[.]
The law requires a “religious test.” And the reason for that is obvious. Asylum law is not a reflection of the incumbent president’s personal (and rather eccentric) sense of compassion. Asylum is a discretionary national act of compassion that is directed, by law not whim, to address persecution.
There is no right to emigrate to the United States. And the fact that one comes from a country or territory ravaged by war does not, by itself, make one an asylum candidate. …
In the case of this war, the Islamic State is undeniably persecuting Christians. It is doing so, moreover, as a matter of doctrine. Even those Christians the Islamic State does not kill, it otherwise persecutes as called for by its construction of sharia (observe, for example, the ongoing rape jihad and sexual slavery). To the contrary, the Islamic State seeks to rule Muslims, not kill or persecute them. …
And it is downright dishonest to claim that taking such religious distinctions into account is “not American,” let alone “shameful.” How can somethingAmerican law requires be “not American”?
There are strong practical as well as legal reasons for distinguishing between Islamic applicants for asylum and similar applications by Christians or others. We know that ISIS is trying to infiltrate terrorists into groups of migrants leaving Syria; there is some evidence that they have succeeded. As McCarthy says, no one has a right to emigrate to the U.S. The government’s first duty is to protect the American people, not to extend favors to foreigners. Moreover, Obama’s “compassion” argument falls flat. A recent Center for Immigration Studies report found that, for the cost of resettling one refugee in the United States, we could instead care for 12 refugees overseas. That is a much more cost-effective approach, and one that will not impose needless dislocation either on us, or on the refugees.
JOE adds: I have to say that by far the most disconcerting thing about Barack Obama as a man is–and this is a matter of objective observation, not of interpretation–that the only thing that really gets him emotionally fired up is his own conservative countrymen. The South China Sea, Ukraine, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea–nothing seems to faze this guy quite like Americans who read Burke.
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