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Intelligence: Broken Arrow

March 11, 2015

Intelligence: Broken Arrow

By G. Murphy Donovan

March 11, 2015

via Articles: Intelligence: Broken Arrow.

Policy is a worldview. Intelligence is the real world, a wilderness of untidy facts that may or may not influence policy. When Intelligence fails to provide a true and defensible estimate, a clear picture of threat, policy becomes a rat’s nest of personal and political agendas where asserted conclusions and political correctness become the loudest voices in the room. The policymaker thinks he knows the answer. The intelligence officer has the much tougher tasks of confirming or changing minds.

American national security analysis has been poisoned by such toxins. An Intelligence report these days might be any estimate that supports the politics of the moment. Truth today is an afterthought at best and an orphan at worst.

Alas, corrupt Intelligence is the midwife of strategic fiasco. Four contemporary failures provide illustrations: revolutionary theocracy, the Islam bomb, imperial Islamism, and the new Cold War.

Back to Theocracy

The Persian revolution of 1979 was arguably the most significant strategic surprise of the last half of the 20^th Century. Yes, more significant than the fall of Soviet Communism. (The precipitous fall of the Soviet Bloc, to be sure, was another bellwether event unanticipated by Intelligence analysis.) The successful religious coup in Iran, heretofore an American client regime, now provides a model for all Muslim states where the default setting among tribal autocracies is now theocracy not democracy. In the wake of the Communist collapse, Francis Fukuyama argued that the democratic ideal was triumphant, an end of history as we knew it, the evolutionary consequence of progressive dialects. Fukuyama was wrong, tragically wrong. History is a two-way street that runs forward as well as backwards.

The fall of the Soviet monolith was not the end of anything. It was the beginning of profound regression, an era of religious irredentism. Worrisome as the Cold War was, the relationship with Moscow was fairly well managed. Who can argue today that East Europe or the Muslim world is more stable or peaceful than it was three decades ago?

The Persian revolution of 1979 not only reversed the vector of Muslim politics, but the triumph of Shia imperialism blew new life into the Shia/Sunni sectarian fire, a conflict that had been smoldering for more than a thousand years. The theocratic victory in Tehran also raised the ante for Israel too, now confronted by state sponsored Shia and Sunni antagonists, Hezb’allah, Fatah, and Hamas.

Shia Hezb’allah calls itself the party of God! Those in the Intelligence Community who continue to insist that religion is not part of the mix have yet to explain why God is part of the conversation only on the Islamic side of the equation.

Global Islamic terror is now metastasizing at an alarming rate. More ominous is the ascent of the Shia clergy, apocalyptic ayatollahs, bringing a lowering of the nuclear threshold in the Middle East. Sunni ISIS by comparison is just another tactical terror symptom on the Sunni side — and yet another strategic warning failure too.

Tehran is in the cat bird’s seat, on the cusp of becoming a nuclear superpower. Nuclear Iran changes every strategic dynamic: with Israel, with Arabia, and also with NATO. A Shia bomb is the shortcut to checkmate the more numerous Sunni. Iran will not be “talked out” of the most potent tool in imperial Shia kit — and the related quest for parity with Arabian apostates.

The Islam Bomb

The Islam bomb has been with us for years, in Sunni Pakistan, although you might never know that if you followed the small wars follies in South Asia. The enemy, as represented by American analysis, is atomized, a cast of bit players on the subcontinent. First, America was fighting a proxy war with the Soviets. When the Russians departed, the enemy became the murderous Taliban followed by al Qaeda. Both now make common cause with almost every stripe of mujahedeen today. In the 25 years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan has been reduced now to a rubble of narco-terror and tribalism. If we can believe bulletins from the Pentagon or the Oval Office, America is headed for the Afghan exit in the next two years — maybe. Throughout, the real threat in South Asia remains unheralded — and unmolested.

Nuclear Pakistan is one car bomb, or one AK-47 clip, away from another Taliban theocracy. This is not the kind of alarm that has been raised by the Intelligence Community. Hindu India probably understands the threat, Shia Persia surely understands the Sunni threat, and just as surely, Israel understands that a Sunni bomb is the raison d’etre for a more proximate Shia bomb. Who would argue that the Sunni Saudis need nuclear “power”? Nonetheless, Riyadh is now in the game too. The most unstable corner of the globe is now host to a nuclear power pull.

The American national security establishment seems to be clueless on all of this. Indeed, when a unique democracy like Israel tries to illuminate a portion of the nuclear threat before the American Congress, the Israeli prime minister is stiff-armed by the Oval Office. If Washington failed with Pakistan and North Korea, why would anyone, let alone the Israelis, believe that Wendy Sherman is a match for the nuclear pipedreams of apocalyptic Shia priests.

Alas, the motive force behind a Shia bomb is not Israeli capabilities or intentions. Israel is a stable democracy where any territorial ambitions are limited to the traditional Jewish homeland. Israel is no threat to Persia or Arabia. Pakistan, in contrast, is like much of the Sunni world today, another internecine tribal or sectarian wildfire waiting for a match.

The advent of the Islam bomb in Asia was not just a strategic surprise, but the step-child of strategic apathy. The folly of taking sides with the Sunni has now come home to roost. Iran is about to go for the atomic brass ring too, with the Saudis in trail, and there’s not much that America can/will do except mutter about secret diplomacy and toothless sanctions. Of course, there’s always the option of blaming Jews when appeasement fails.

Imperial Islam

The Ummah problem, the Muslim world, has now replaced the Soviet empire, as Churchill would have put it, as the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” There are four dimensions to the Islamic conundrum: the Shia/Sunni rift, intramural secular/religious conflicts, kinetic antipathy towards Israel and the West writ large, and the failure of analysis, especially strategic Intelligence, to unwrap the Muslim onion in any useful way. Imperial Islam, dare we say Islamofascism, now threatens secular autocracy and democracy on all points of the compass.

Islam in London

Islamic imperialism is a decentralized global movement. Nonetheless, the various theaters are united by tactics, strategy, ideology, and objectives. The tactics are jihad, small wars, and terror. The strategy is the imposition of Shariah Law. The ideology is the Koran and the Hadith. And the objective is a Shia or Sunni Islamic Caliphate — for infidels, a distinction without difference.

Muslim religious proselytizers and jihad generals in the field make no secret of any of this. The problem isn’t that some Muslims dissent from this agenda, the problem is that the West, especially national security analysts, cannot/will not believe or accept what Islamic imperialists say aloud, about themselves. The enemy is hiding in plain sight, yet the Intelligence Community doesn’t have the integrity or courage to make a clear call.

Noted British criminal psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple captures the bizarre logic of appeasement:

“Racial, religious and cultural identity are morally important in politics, precisely what so many people would like to deny because it can so easily unleash the vilest political passions. Something that is true, say our people of goodwill to themselves, could have nasty consequences; therefore it is not true.”

Propaganda provides many of the strategic “tells” in any conflict. The Nemstov murder in the shadow of the Kremlin provides an example. The knee-jerk reaction of politicians and pundits in America was to implicate Russian culture, the Kremlin, or Vladimir Putin.

Contrast the Nemstov blame game with any or every recent Islamist atrocity and the nuclear race in the Ummah. With these, the knee-jerk reaction is to defend Islam, more concern for Islamism and the religious equivalence shibboleth than the nuclear threat or Jewish, Christian, and apostate heads that are now literally rolling on a global scale. In a recent US State Department brief, we are told by State Department spokesman Marie Harf that Islamic terrorism might be attributed to “unemployment” (sic).

Cold War Redux

The West can no longer take yes for an answer. The deliberate resuscitation of the Cold War amidst a host of tactical defeats in the Ummah is probably one of the worst foreign policy choices on record.

The old Soviet Union: took down the Berlin Wall, relinquished former satellites, dismantled the Warsaw Pact military alliance, and purged East Europe of nuclear weapons. In response, America and the EU dismantled Yugoslavia, taking the Muslim side we might add, and aggressively expanded NATO up to the traditional Russian border. The “End of (totalitarian) History” as we knew it wasn’t enough. Any vestigial associations with Moscow were relentlessly undermined. The American sponsored coup, orchestrated by Victoria Nuland at the US State Department, with likely help from the CIA, in Ukraine is the best and most recent example.

The “regime change” strategy in Europe has degenerated into some petulant version of nuclear chicken with the Russians. The American embassies in Moscow and Kiev regularly host anti-Putin dissidents in Ukraine and Russia

Regime change folly has lowered the nuclear threshold in South Asia, the Mideast, and now East Europe. Sevastopol and Kiev are side shows. The real target for Brussels and Washington is Moscow — and the Putin regime. The idea that the Kremlin or Russians can be undone or manipulated by: black operations, cyber war, sanctions, propaganda, or provocations is naïve and reckless. Putin is not a Pahlavi, Gadhafi, Assad, or Yanukovych.

Russians were very helpful in ridding Syria of chemical weapons and clearing the Ukraine of nuclear weapons. Moscow and Putin have the potential also to be very useful against terror, nuclear proliferation, and resolving the Levant lunacy too.

The House minority leader recently lamented losing the “public relations” war with Russia. The American Secretary of State responded that Russian Television (RT) was responsible (sic). The more believable narrative spun by the Kremlin might be closer to the mark. Truth is a powerful ally, especially when it’s coupled with skillful propaganda.

The origin of the new Cold War may have domestic origins. Neither major American political party has a clue as what to do with the metastasizing Muslim problem. Indeed, both sides gag on words like Islam, Muslim, or Mohammed. As 2016 approaches, both parties desperately need to change the subject and find a foreign policy to run on. Regime change in Russia seems to be the consensus choice for American demagogues, Right and Left.

The idea that domestic “politics stops at the border” was always honored more in the breach than anywhere else. The politics of personal destruction is a time honored tradition in America, especially on the Left. That standard has now been folded into the foreign relations bag of tricks. Henry Kissinger claims that “demonization” is not policy. That may be true in any real politic sense, but the Putin bogyman is an ideal straw man for the next American presidential election. Proxy war abroad seems to be the safe sex of domestic politics.

What Now?

The American Intelligence Community is now the largest (17 agencies and uncountable contractors) and most expensive data collection and processing complex in history. Unfortunately, this gold-plated leviathan is undone by inferior analysis, indeed, estimates and reports that are more political than prudent. Withal, existential functions like strategic warning may be in freefall.

The obvious solution would be to take the strategic warning and national estimative functions out from under the IC, and the Executive Branch, and give those tasks to some apolitical body, assuming of course that an impartial forum might be sustained beyond the control of any branch of government. Realistically, it’s hard to believe that any American political party would sponsor an independent and uncontrollable voice of candor or objectivity.

Nonetheless, there are small things that might be done to make a huge difference. During the Cold War, USAF Intelligence ran a service of common concern for the IC called “Soviet Awareness.” The purpose of that program at Bolling AFB was to educate novice intelligence officers and FBI agents about the Soviet threat. The program included Russian history, the rise and spread of Communism, Marxist ideology, and Soviet military capabilities.

Ironically, the inter-agency program that answered the question “why we fight” was discontinued by James Clapper when he became the USAF Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence.

Clapper is now the Director of National Intelligence. The Soviet Awareness resources were reallocated to the information processing function. Today there is no awareness program of common concern on Russian, Islamist, or any other threats.

Clapper threw the threat baby out with the Soviet bathwater. Indeed, in most service schools, discussing Islamic ideology or religion is off limits. If any soldier or Intelligence officer were to ask: “Why do we fight?” the answer today would have to be, “Trust me.”

The real tragedy of Intelligence failure today is the burden born by American veterans, servicemen and women: the dead, crippled, and maimed. “Why we fight?” is a leadership deficit, the forgotten readiness issue. Troops don’t have a clear picture of the enemy or the ideology in play in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Arabia, the Philippines, and Africa. They will know even less about the rationale for serving in East Europe should another conflict be engineered with Russia.

Indeed, the Pentagon and the Oval Office throw lives at small wars that generals and politicians have no intention of declaring, justifying, or winning — by their own admission. The Commander-in-Chief says the he seeks outcomes where there are no victors or vanquished. Indeed!

Traditionally, we like to think of collection and associated clandestine operations as the sharp end of the Intelligence spear. In fact, analysis is the cutting edge. Unfortunately, that edge is gone today. You could do worse than think of Intelligence analysis as the Broken Arrow in the national security quiver.

We may not know why we fight today, but there is little mystery anymore about why we fail.

The importance of information is seldom self-evident. Even if significance were obvious, information is still not knowledge. And clearly knowledge is not wisdom. Just as surely, only conscience allows an analyst to know the difference. All key judgments must be accompanied by courage and conviction too; courage to communicate to policy mandarins, or voters, with enough force to prompt action. Repetition is often the midwife of acceptance.

Good data and good analysis might be necessary, but never sufficient. Bridging the gap between analysis and acceptance is often a bridge too far for the timid. The national security continuum is a perilous enterprise. The messenger is always in danger of being shot. Alas, truth is an equal opportunity offender. It doesn’t care who gets hurt.

Nonetheless, changing minds is the object of any good Intelligence. Policy and action is only stimulated by an altered consciousness about the subject at hand. Prudent policy is a function of correct data, honest analysis, moral certainty, and rhetorical skill — written or spoken.

Alas, none of these self-evident, common sense observations, with the possible exception of abundant evidence, play much of a role in American threat analysis these days. A very expensive and growing intelligence Community (IC) is now the weak link in the national security chain. Any speculations about the catastrophic failures of American foreign policy in the past fifty years should begin with the “wilderness of mirrors,” James Angleton’s metaphor for Intelligence praxis.

G. Murphy Donovan was the last Director of Research and Russian (nee Soviet) Studies at USAF Intelligence, the directorate that staffed the associated Soviet Awareness Program. He served under General James Clapper.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Egypt, Europe, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jihad, Middle East War, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Syria, Turkey, USA

Comments: 1 Comment

ISIS Burns Iraqis Alive in Message to US – Government Remains Oblivious

February 18, 2015

ISIS Burns Iraqis Alive in Message to US – Government Remains Oblivious, ISIS Study Group, February 18, 2015

(The article states that “Ms. Harf and the rest of the Obama administration doesn’t understand this because they’ve never served a day in the lives in the military.” Obviously, the Dept. of Defense is part of the Obama administration. Unfortunately, it is micromanaged and otherwise generally ignored by others with neither military experience nor understanding. — DM)

Unfortunately, the Obama administration remains oblivious to the threat.

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The Islamic State (IS) burned alive 45 Iraqis in the town of Khan al-Baghdadi on Tuesday. It remains unclear who the victims were, but its likely they were a combination of IA personnel and pro-government tribal fighters who were cut off and isolated when the rest of the town’s garrison fled in panic. We also hear that some of the families of security personnel may be among the victims, although that remains unconfirmed at this time. The location of the executions isn’t a coincidence as Khan al-Baghdadi is only 5 miles from al-Asad Airbase. The message IS sent to the Obama administration is clear: “We’re doing this right in front of your American military and there’s nothing they can do about it. In fact, they’re too scared to do anything.” This act throws more fuel on the propaganda fire and it also fuels the whole “Flames of War” theme they’ve been going with these days.

ISIS militants reportedly burn to death 45 people in western Iraqi town
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/18/isis-reportedly-burns-alive-45-people-in-western-iraqi-town/

Islamic State militants ‘burn to death 45 in Iraq’
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31502863

ISIS Launches First Wave of Attacks Against al-Asad Airbase as Kirkuk Heats Up
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=4779

Islamic state Seizes Town of Khan al-Baghdadi, Threaten US Marins at Ayn al-Asad
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=4755

Pro-Government Tribal Forces in Anbar Running Out of Steam
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=3626

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Source: al-Hayat Media Center

Every six months we’ve seen an exponential growth for IS. We have about two more years of President Obama’s weak responses and complete lack of understanding the problem that could allow IS to grow somewhere between 4-8 times larger than it is now by the time he leaves office. If one were to overlay the areas AQI/IS controlled during OIF the thing that would be noticed is they controlled very little areas in Iraq such as safe-houses and maybe some specific neighborhoods and desert areas in 2008. From late-2010 you’d begin to see the end of IS’ decline (ISI during this time), overlay that around OCT 12, OCT 13 through OCT 14 and you will see the startling growth pattern. In two more years of limited airstrikes it will control a sizable chunk of Libya, parts of Egypt, Most of Syria and the Kurds of Iraq will be hanging by a thread. By then we’ll probably see Western Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan carved up between IS and the Taliban/AQ. In Nigeria, Mali, Morocco, Algeria and other Maghreb nations we may see open conflict by the later part of this time frame. Some of them are already in open conflict and others are seeing latent-incipient stages of conflict. What we do know is that Islamic State has been sending cadre of seasoned commanders to organize groups like Boko Haram, which if you look at their strength and growth you will see it gaining momentum in tandem with the Islamic State over the past 12 months. These cadre from Islamic State are likely natives of the lands they are sent to organize already existing movements. Islamic State has also attracted military professionals from some of the 90 plus countries it has been able to recruit from. Some people will look at this with great skepticism, but 5 years ago the Islamic State was a skeleton compared to what it is now. This is something that we here at the ISIS Study Group have been talking about since we started posting articles about the Islamic State in the summer of 2014. The US needs to begin an aggressive campaign to regain the initiative to include providing more material support to Arab allies such as Egypt and Jordan. The United States and indeed the rest of the world cannot afford to have a President Buchanan type in the White House right now which is exactly what Barack Obama is doing. He is doing the minimum hoping to run out the presidential clock without a major incident and pass this problem off to the next president where it could be exponentially worse as we’ve stated.

UAE Strikes ISIS in Iraq – Jordan Masses Troops to Prevent Retaliatory Attacks
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=4721

Egypt Strikes ISIS Positions in Libya – Moderate Muslims Rise Up Against Terror
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=4889

Jordan Steps Up Airstrikes Against ISIS, Egypt Launches New Sinai Offensive
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=4669

ISIS: Still Going Strong Despite Coalition Efforts
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=3154

Unfortunately, the Obama administration remains oblivious to the threat. Just recently DoS spokeswoman Marie Harf got on TV and said that “we can’t kill our way to victory” and then said that the root cause of the threat is all jihadists really want are “jobs” – just like what the delusional Danish government thinks. Ms. Harf is a reflection of the incompetence that’s endemic throughout the Obama administration’s DoS and National Security Council. Its highly unlikely that she even understands any of the things she gets told to say on TV. Meanwhile, other members of the administration are either downplaying the threat to our 300 Marines stationed at al-Asad Airbase or they’re puffing out their chests claiming how “easy” it will be to “kill more IS fighters because they’ll all be in one place.” However, IS has proven to be extremely resilient and are adapting to US airstrikes and our overly restrictive ROE – which they’re exploiting to the fullest. Yes, al-Asad is a large base and yes, it will take a sizable force – and time – to completely secure it. As the fall of the Syrian Army’s 17th Division and Taqba Airbase have demonstrated, IS has quickly applied lessons learned to refine their TTPs for follow-on operations. The current siege of al-Asad Airbase has already demonstrated several of these lessons. Unless aggressive action is taken now, our troops will be in even greater risk than they are now in the coming days. Ms. Harf and the rest of the Obama administration doesn’t understand this because they’ve never served a day in the lives in the military. If they did, they would know that this enemy can’t be reasoned with, they can’t be bargained with and they absolutely will not stop until they’ve eradicate the world of all “nonbelievers” or “Kufar.” This is how Baghdadi and his followers think – jobs or a free phone is nowhere on their list of priorities. They also only respect strength through instilling fear, which is a common theme with everything they do. Until the Obama administration – and its European counterparts – comes to terms with this, IS will continue to expand and threaten the civilized world.

Harf Truths and Whole Lies
http://www.wsj.com/articles/harf-truths-and-whole-lies-1424207249

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State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf has become the butt of jokes like this one and worse on a near daily basis. This is the only job DoS Spokeswoman Marie Harf is qualified to do
Source: @exjon (twitter)

Other Related Links:

The Main Act: ISIS Tightens its Grip on Anbar Province, Preps to Take al-Asad Airbase
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=4916

Shia Militias Sent to Reinforce al-Asad Airbase: IA on Verge of Collapse
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=2758

Obama’s ISIS Strategy: Failed Before it Started
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=1730

Another Reason Obama’s ISIS Strategy Failed
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=1757

Interview With Surviving Member of Syrian Army 17th Division
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=537

Inside the Islamic State (2nd Installment From Vice News)
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=733

Syrian Army 17th Division Barracks Overrun by Islamic State
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=229

Categories: Africa, Caliphate, Combat troops, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom, Human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Middle East, Obama, Obama administration, Terrorists, Violent extremism
Tags: Africa, Caliphate, Combat troops, Europe, Foreign Policy, Freedom, human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Middle East, Obama Administration, Terrorists, Violent extremism

Comments: 1 Comment

The Jews: Europe’s Canary in the Mine on the Growing Jihadist Threat

February 17, 2015

The Jews: Europe’s Canary in the Mine on the Growing Jihadist Threat, ISIS Study Group, February 17, 2015

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt publicly denied the existence of a terror cell operating in Copenhagen despite the fact that Danish security forces conducted a series of raids on Monday that resulted in the detainment of two known associates of Omar Abdel Hamid al-Hussein, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). Both associates – aged 19 and 22 – are being chafed with being an accessory to murder and five counts of accessory to attempted murder. “Accessory” as in helping the guys (oh yes there were others involved) who carried out the attack? As in a “cell” that might be part of a greater network? We think PM Schmidt doesn’t understand what a cell is or how it works. If she did, she wouldn’t have made the comment since a cell consists of multiple personnel that can range from as few as three individuals to as many as 20 (although with this many we start to enter network territory). A cell has people who provide intelligence support, logistical support, command and of course carrying out the operation. No, PM Schmidt, your security forces are conducting raids on a cell and there are likely still some members at-large. The ugly truth of the matter is the Danish government remains stuck in their mindset of not wanting to “offend” the Muslim community.

2 men arrested over alleged links to Denmark shooter
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/copenhagen-shooting-probe-denmark-police-arrest-2-men-links-gunman/

Denmark terror suspect swore fidelity to ISIS leader on Facebook page
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/16/europe/denmark-shootings/

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Unfortunately Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt views taking a selfie with President Obama as being more important than the defense of her people. Source: LA Times

PM Schmidt also made an appeal to Denmark’s Jewish community in response to Bibi Netanyahu’s call for Jews to leave Europe and migrate to Israel. Schmidt says that “Europe won’t be the same if the Jews leave,” but what has she or the other empty suits occupying the highest political offices in the EU members done to counter the growing threat of jihadists? The Jews are the canaries of Europe’s mines – the fact that they’re starting to leave places like France, Belgium, the UK, Germany and several other European countries in droves is a significant red flag that not even Schmidt and her government can deny. This isn’t a new phenomenon either, as we’ve been seeing a steady increase in Jews leaving Europe over the past year due to the rising anti-semitism plaguing the EU. It should surprise no one that this increase in anti-semitism coincides with the exploding immigrant populations of people from Muslim countries known for their anti-western and anti-Jew sentiments. However, its not just anti-Semitic Muslim groups that Jews are worried about – there’s plenty of homegrown fascist Euro groups who share the jihadist sentiments about the Jewish people.

Netanyahu urges Jews to move to Israel after Copenhagen attacks
http://news.yahoo.com/netanyahu-urges-jews-move-israel-copenhagen-attacks-111012753.html

Exodus: Why Europe’s Jews Are Fleeing Once Again
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/08/exodus-why-europes-jews-are-fleeing-once-again-261854.html

Copenhagen shootings: Israeli PM urges Jews to ‘flee Europe’ in wake of synagogue attack
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/copenhagen-shootings-israeli-pm-urges-5172395

Europe’s Jews ponder: Is it time to flee again?
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/29/254867/europes-jews-ponder-is-it-time.html

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Bibi: Its not safe in Europe for Jews anymore Source: Mirror (UK)

So why would Jews want to leave Europe besides the obvious attacks that occurred in Copenhagen over the weekend and last months attacks in France? For starters, there are Muslim-dominated neighborhoods in Germany that the Police refuse to patrol through because they’re so dangerous. This has allowed for jihadists to install their own “shadow governments” based off Sharia Law – and even have gangs of thugs wearing orange vests operating as the “Sharia Police.” The only reason the Germans did anything about it is because some international news outlets began covering the roving Jihadist patrols in the town of Wuppertal – which is one of several in Germany, France and the UK that we’ve heard about. Our staff doesn’t know what’s more disturbing, the fact that there’s “Sharia Police” or the fact that the German government seemed more concerned about receiving negative press as opposed to the fact that jihadist influences are growing within their own borders. We see the same problems in what’s being allowed to occur in Denmark.

Germany’s “Sharia Police”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4681/germany-sharia-police

Germany shira police

Wuppertal’s Sharia Police before the real German police cracked-down on them – but only did so because of the bad press the government was receiving
Source: The ISIS Study Group

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A lot of European neighborhoods dominated by immigrants from Muslim countries will have guys like this on street corners handing out these unauthorized brochures to any non-Muslim unfortunate enough to take that wrong turn
Source: Hurriyet Daily News

As we stated above, our staff has seen the very same shadow governments established at the local-level in Denmark that we’ve seen elsewhere in Europe – and that the Denmark zones have been operating for several years. Despite the Danish government’s best efforts to maintain the illusion that they’re the one country in the EU that doesn’t have a deteriorating security environment, the truth is they’re not immune. For instance, in 2011 the group known as Call to Islam openly campaign for the abolishment of democracy and calling on people not to vote in the Parliamentary elections held in SEP of that year. As we also stated in our 15 FEB 15 piece titled “Jihadist Infestation: Terrorism Results in Copenhagen Chaos,” IS facilitator Anjem Choudray’s Hizb ut-Tahrir (HUT) has been very active in the country. HUT held a “Proud of Sharia” meeting in Norrebrohallen in DEC 14. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how to counter the Copenhagen city government’s proposed integration plan, which has a stated goal of getting the “number of Copenhageners who support Sharia Law to fall.” HUT’s stance on the city plan was that it was an “attack against Islam and Muslims” (sound familiar?) and held the meeting to demonstrate the support for Sharia Law that exists in the area. The city government plan? They think they can integrate people into Danish society that want to be integrated. This plan would work except for the fact that the people the government is privately concerned about have no desire to integrate and if anything are demanding that Danish society conforms to Sharia Law. In fact, Choudray himself visited Denmark in JUL 14 to set up more HUT offices in the Copenhagen-area and hold lectures on how to travel to Syria and the preach the virtues of Baghdadi’s “Caliphate.” The people who wanted to integrate into the mainstream have already done so and aren’t associated with groups and people like HUT, Choudray, Bilal Philips or the Islamic Society of Denmark – which btw was designated a terror organization by the UAE.

Jihad terror-inciter Anjem Choudary starts new branch in Denmark
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/07/jihad-terror-inciter-anjem-choudary-starts-new-branch-in-denmark

Anger as UAE puts Nordic, UK Muslim groups on terror list
http://www.worldbulletin.net/news/148603/anger-as-uae-puts-nordic-uk-muslim-groups-on-terror-list

Denmark Wants To Rehabilitate Islamic Radicals — But Is It Failing?
http://forward.com/articles/214830/denmark-wants-to-rehabilitate-islamic-radicals-/

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A young Anjem Choudray during his college years Source: The Sun (UK)

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Ever the Pious Muslim, Anjem sampled beer as a young man so that other young Muslims wouldn’t have to and would later advocate “40 lashes to anybody caught drinking alcohol”
Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/WEXhI

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Anjem today as Europe’s “Pied Piper of Jihad” Source: http://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/128280/dsc_0073-635×421.jpg

The video posted above is one of many calling for the establishment of Sharia Law-enforced “zones” in Denmark

The video above is on the calls for the abolishment of democracy in Denmark

Every group associated with IS facilitators such as Bilal Philips and Anjem Choudray have received specific guidance from the two men and their trusted acolytes to snuff out free speech and further the cause of the global jihadist community. This is done through specific Islamic centers directly linked to their organizations that receive money for the purpose of recruitment, radicalization and facilitating travel of personnel to Syria to serve as foreign fighters for IS. We’ve seen this same activity from supporters of these men in Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, France, Germany and the UK (just to name a few). Ten times out of ten if you come across an Islamic center or Mosque tied to either of these two men or their organizations, it means those institutions are being used to facilitate terrorism in some manner. Bibi and the European Jewish community see the writing on the wall and a lot of them don’t plan on sticking around in Europe long enough to see if the EU governments will actually start cracking down on the rising jihadist threat. We don’t blame them because its not safe for Jews or any American living abroad. PM Schmidt and her fellow empty suits better do something soon because the attacks in her country and France are only the beginning…

Additional info on the situation in Denmark can be found here:

Denmark Update

Jihadist Infestation: Terrorism Results in Copenhagen Chaos

Swedish Cartoonist Targeted in Denmark Shooting – Europe in Serious Trouble

Additional info on Philips, Choudray and other organizations linked to the European jihad scene can be found here:

World Trade Center Bombing Co-Conspirator Arrest UPDATE

WTC Attack Co-Conspirator DETAINED in the Philippines

’93 WTC Attack Co-Conspirator to Visit the Philippines

Islamic State Manifesto: Call to America

The Continuing Flow of Foreign Fighters From Australia

US Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS – Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Anjem Choudray the UK’s Pied Piper of Jihad Arrest Along With Eight Others

Japan: ISIS Recruiting Ground?

Categories: Antisemitism, Caliphate, Europe, Foreign policy, Free world, Freedom, Human rights, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Jews, Middle East, Netanyahu, Sharia law, Terrorist training, Terrorists
Tags: Antisemitism, Caliphate, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free world, Freedom, human rights, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Jews, Middle East, Netanyahu, Sharia law, Terrorist training, Terrorists

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Humor: How to deal with enemies, foreign and domestic

February 2, 2015

How to deal with enemies, foreign and domestic, Dan Miller’s Blog, Sen. Ima Librul, February 2, 2015

(The views expressed this article are mine and those of my imaginary guest author. They do not necessarily represent the views of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

Editor’s note: This is a post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Very Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the great State of ~~Confusion~~ Utopia. He is a founding member of CCCEB (Climate Change Causes Everything Bad), a charter member of President Obama’s Go For it Team, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Meretricious Relations Subcommittee. He is also justly proud of his expertise in the care and breeding of unicorns, for which his Save the Unicorns Foundation has received substantial Federal grants. We are honored to have a post of this caliber by a quintessential Librul such as the Senator. Without further delay, here is the Senator’s article.

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As the anointed leader of my Librul kingdom, countless methods for dealing with “enemies” are at my disposal. I, along with my loyal Secretary of Slyness (SOS) Sir Ketchup, bring happiness to all. Many “enemies” of my kingdom have yielded to my wisdom without even knowing that they have. I owe everything to my dear leader Obama, my rock of ages in the past and hope for years to come.

Example One

When my kingdom was threatened by wolves and foxes, which intended to eat all of my free range chickens, I bravely sent Sir Ketchup to deal with the problem. At my direction, he immediately put half of my chickens into secure coops and invited the invaders to do as they desired with the rest. That satisfied them only briefly, so he dispatched half of my remaining chickens to be eaten. The process continued until I had only one chicken left.

Here’s why I can humbly wear the label “The Won,” along with my dear leader Obama. The invaders, stuffed pleasantly full of chicken and amazed at my brilliance, resolved not to attack my kingdom again until my chicken population had been restored and it was once again worthwhile to invade. Unfortunately for them, a single chicken cannot reproduce, so they will never again have any reason to return.

Example Two

A few weeks later, my kingdom was again invaded by “wild and vicious” packs of wolves and foxes. They divided their attentions between slaughtering each other and slaughtering and eating my sheep. I solved the problem by giving ample sheep to both packs and explaining to them that they were neither wild nor vicious, but simply misguided in attacking each other. Their mistake lay in believing that the traditions of their ancestors mandated such activities, even though it is not true. As a widely acknowledged expert on the traditions of wolves and foxes, I understand these matters far better than they do. Hence, I was able to convince them that with reality-based understanding such as I possess, they too would seek the beauties and benefits of unity permitting them to slaughter and eat my sheep peacefully and together.

Some who do not fully understand the inherent beauty and fairness of multiculturalism might contend that my actions were unfair to the sheep. They would be wrong. Sheep are gentle creatures and have been good to me; I have always ensured that they have plenty to eat and I have fleeced them only to provide for their well-being. We are as one and, to the extent that I am able, these benign practices will continue.

However, it is far more important to bring happiness and unity to creatures which have suffered for ages because of their erroneous but stereotypical characterization as evil. There is no evil and there is no good; all is relative. Who are we to declare that sheep are good and that wolves and foxes are evil? Don’t we also kill sheep and eat mutton? Wolves and foxes are neither better nor worse than human carnivores and it is prudent to act only on the basis of what is best for all.

My plan was successful. Happy with their full bellies, the wolves and foxes departed my kingdom in peace, promising to return together and in harmony only when they need my sheep. In the interim, they will devote their attentions to visiting neighboring farms in hopes that the owners will see the justice in my methods and adopt them. I promised to help my neighbors to adopt my enlightened multicultural views and to accord wolves and foxes every courtesy. As wolves and foxes come to understand the beauty and benefits of true multiculturalism, they will cease to be significant threats to anyone. That is a hope for change we can — and must — believe in.

In fairness, I must acknowledge that my dear leader Obama demonstrated the efficacy of this solution several years ago when, with remarkable success, He persuaded diverse groups of Muslims to unite against America to force her to reject her old ways of dealing with what she wrongly characterized, not only as enemies, but even as evil enemies. Since then, we have made great progress in defeating the Non Islamic Islamic State (NIIS) and others allegedly intent upon endangering our national security. The world be a far better place now if President Roosevelt had fully accepted Nazi Germany, not as an evil enemy or even as an enemy, but as a friend and a humanitarian force for peace and enlightenment of civilization. Had my dear leader then been our President, that would have happened and there would have been no more war.

Example Three

This year, representatives of the Non-Islamic Taliban (NIT) sought to use several acres of my kingdom for an insurgent training camp. They explained that since my dear leader Obama has declared that they are not foreign terrorists, I should have no objection. On that basis, I saw no problem in dealing with them. They offered to pay me $5,000 per acre per week and I accepted, subject to the requirement that they wear Girl Scout costumes rather than their traditional attire so that none of my Islamophobic neighbors would be offended irrationally. The deal was struck.

Since they had not stated which part of my kingdom they wanted to use, I provided land on which my free range unicorns frolic. I assumed that they would not notice, and they didn’t. Only truly superior beings, like our own glorious dear leader Obama, myself and unicorns can communicate with unicorns; the NIT members couldn’t even see them.

I promptly advised my dear leader of my findings, and He stated that He will soon dispatch brigades of well trained unicorns, under the command of Brevet General Bowe Bergdahl, to do battle with both NIT insurgents and NIIS terrorists. When the unicorn brigades triumph, dear leader Obama will be able to proclaim yet another grand mission accomplished and demonstrate, once again, that we stand firmly, shoulder to shoulder, behind our gallant friends and allies who have been harmed by our dastardly non-Islamic enemies. No longer will we be viewed as impotent.

It may be true that, until now,

Nothing in all that standing together has been potent enough to stop these barbaric, brutal, heinous beheadings of American and British and Japanese citizens.

Brevet General Bergdahl and his brigades of unicorns will change that!

I have many more inspiring stories to tell, but must leave immediately to chair a meeting of my Meretricious Relations Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Former President Clinton, the principal speaker on “How to lie with impunity,” will be accompanied by his lovely wife and confidant, Saint Hillarion, also a long recognized expert on that topic as well as concerning infamous right-wing conspiracy theories.

Their talents, like those of our current dear leader Obama, are much needed in dealing with our domestic enemies, evil right-wing terrorists all!

I look forward to serving under Saint Hillarion when she becomes our next dear leader, just as I have served under dear leader Obama.

******************

Editor’s comments

Senator Librul words of wisdom will be of great assistance to Obama in His war on non-Islamic terror and insurgency. Ideas such as the Senator’s are badly needed because in the aggregate they are far better, and hence far more likely to bring success, than what Obama has tried thus far.

If the spirits shine brightly and in copious quantities upon us, we may be able to believe that even before Obama’s son Trayvon II becomes our President, our enemies will have ceased to be our enemies and unicorns will again be able to frolic in peace throughout the entire world, Insha’Allah.

Categories: Cognitive dissonance, Europe, Foreign policy, Humor, Islam, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Kerry, Lies, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Nazis, Obama, Taliban, Terrorists
Tags: Cognitive dissonance, Europe, Foreign Policy, Humor, Islam, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Lies, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Nazis, Taliban, Terrorists

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ISIS in full swing under ex-Iraqi general: 70 deaths in a month, on the march in 10 countries

February 1, 2015

ISIS in full swing under ex-Iraqi general: 70 deaths in a month, on the march in 10 countries, DEBKAfile, February 1, 2015

Kenji-Goto_31.1.15

Kenji Goto in ISIS hands

ISIS strategists, not content with these “successes,” are still in full thrust and believed to be planning to expand their operations and hit Israel – whether from the south or the north.

*********************

Saturday night, January 31, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant capped a month of atrocities by beheading its second Japanese hostage, Kenjo Goto, a 47-year old journalist. Jordan vows to do everything its power to save the Jordanian pilot Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, but it may be too late.

In March alone, the Islamists are known to have killed at least 70 people in 10 targeted European and Middle East countries. This is a modest estimate since exact figures are not available everywhere – like in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. ISIS terrorists trailed their horror that month through France, Spain, Belgium, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Libya.

US President Barack Obama, who heads a 20-state coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq, strongly condemned the Goto murder. Secretary of State John Kerry, trying to sound positive, commended the recovery of the Syrian town of Kobani by Kurdish forces as “a big deal.”

ISIS was indeed forced to concede defeat in battle under US air strikes. But Kerry forgot to mention that the battle is far from over: the Islamists pulled back from Kobani’s districts, but are still pressing hard on the walls of the town and heavy fighting for its control continues.

If Kobani is the only military gain achieved by US-backed forces in months of coalition effort, who will be able to stop the brutal ISIS offensive going forward in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East?

The British government keeps on warning that an Islamist attack is coming soon. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Sunday that this was a “generational struggle that must be fought in other parts of the world in addition to the Middle East.”

It was obvious from these lame comments that the West is totally at a loss for ways to pre-empt the thrusting danger.

Some Western intelligence agencies have sought cold comfort by pointing to the Islamists’ willingness to negotiate the release of the Jordanian pilot held hostage since his capture in Syria in December as a symptom of weakness, signaling its readiness to part with its murderous image. Others judged the latest video clips unprofessional and a sign that ISIS leadership was in disarray.

Neither of these judgments is supported by the facts.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terrorism and intelligence sources report that the high command of the Islamic State functions at present with machinelike efficiency in pursuit of its goals. The name of Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi has been circulated widely as ruler of the Islamic “caliphate” he founded in parts of Syria and Iraq. But behind the scenes, he is assisted by a tight inner group of 12-15 former high officers from the Baath army which served the Saddam Hussein up until the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Members of this group ranged in rank from lieutenant-colonel to general.

Ex-Maj. Gen. Abu Ali al-Anbari, its outstanding figure, acts as Al Baghdadi senior lieutenant.

He also appears to be the brain that has charted ISIS’s current military strategy which, our sources learn, focuses on three major thrusts: the activation of sleeper cells in Europe for coordinated terrorist operations: multiple, synchronized attacks in the Middle East along a line running from Tripoli, Libya, through Egyptian Suez Canal cities and encompassing the Sinai Peninsula; and the full-dress Iraqi-Syrian warfront, with the accent currently on the major offensive launched Thursday, March 29, to capture the big Iraq oil town of Kirkuk.

DEBKAfile was first to report the arrival in Sinai during the first week of December of a group of ISIS officers from Iraq to take command of their latest convert, Ansar Beit Al-Miqdas.

Another former Iraqi army officer was entrusted with coordinating ISIS operations between the East Libyan Islamist contingent and the Sinai movement. Their mission is to topple the rule of President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi.

The imported Iraqi command made its presence felt in Libya Tuesday, Jan. 27 with the seizure of the luxury Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli and execution of the foreigners taken there, including an American and a British man. Two days later, ISIS terrorists fanned out across Sinai for their most devastating attack ever on Egyptian military and security forces. They launched simultaneous attacks in five towns, Rafah on the border of the Gaza Strip, El Arish and Sheikh Suweid in the north and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez to the west – killing some 50 Egyptian personnel and injuring more than double that figure.

ISIS strategists, not content with these “successes,” are still in full thrust and believed to be planning to expand their operations and hit Israel – whether from the south or the north.

Categories: Combat troops, Europe, Foreign policy, Hamas, Hezbollah, IDF, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Kerry, Obama, Syria, Terrorism, Terrorists
Tags: Combat troops, Europe, Foreign Policy, Hamas, Hezbollah, IDF, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Syria, Terrorism, Terrorists

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How to lose friends and empower radicals: the peace prize president’s more dangerous world

January 29, 2015

How to lose friends and empower radicals: the peace prize president’s more dangerous world, Breitbart, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, January 29, 2015

(Please see the video at the link. — DM)

obama-binoculars-AP-640x480

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Since 2008, the world has become a significantly more dangerous place. In every region, new threats have emerged or old ones have reasserted them. The scorecard is clear: the bad guys are winning and America’s interests are being undermined daily.

As a nation, America has yet to recover from the experience of September 11th, 2001. Public opinion on our national response to the attacks against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 is today divided. On one side we have the “Bush lied, People Died!” crowd who portray President George W. Bush’s response in terms of a conspiracy, despite the fact that we now know Saddam Hussein indeed possessed thousands of WMD warheads (and had used them in the past).

On the other, we have conservatives who are themselves split between the unsophisticated isolationists/non-interventionists who believe that an American withdrawal from the world will make us safe, and the quietly resurgent neoconservatives who see in the rise of ISIS/The Islamic State a justification for more foreign engagements.

For a moment, let us put Operations Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), and Operations Iraqi Freedom (OIF), to one side. Instead, let us take an unemotional snap-shot of the global geostrategic situation to see whether the administration whose head was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in office has indeed make the world a safer and more peaceful place.

Europe: During most of the last century, American security was tied directly to the continent of Europe. Whether is was the generational genocide of World War One, the racial genocide of WWII, or the class-based totalitarianism of the Cold War, Europe was the source of strategic, and at times existential, threats to America.

During the first Obama Administration, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton declared a “Pivot to Asia” which would deemphasize Europe’s importance and see Washington focus more on our Pacific partners than on old Atlantic Allies.

Since that announcement, an emboldened Vladimir Putin has seen fit to break an almost 70-year-old international taboo by using force to redraw national borders with his annexation of Crimea. This includes, incredibly, the shooting down of a civilian jet-liner by forces armed by Moscow.

At the same time, we have seen the European Union become evermore centralizing and undemocratic as untenable economic and fiscal policies are propped up by a Brussels bureaucracy in the name of “broader and deeper union.” This has naturally led to two types of responses: the unprecedented success of a paleo-conservative backlash,f best typified by the insurgent victories of UKIP in Great Britain, as well the reverse: Utopian socialist populists such as the victorious Syriza party of Greece.

Then there are Europe’s ties to the Global Jihadist Movement. The recent slaughter in Paris, the beheading of a British serviceman on the streets of the UK, and Spanish and Belgian terror-related arrests all attest to the failure of the current international campaign against Islamist terrorism.

The flawed immigration policies of many EU nations have also facilitated the establishment of literally hundreds of ethnic and religious enclaves across the continent where integration is seen as a bad thing and where radical talent spotters for groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS/IS identify, indoctrinate and recruit murderers such as the Charlie Hebdo killers, as well as thousands of fighters for The Islamic State.

This has led to a grass-roots response from Europeans afraid of the future survival of their countries embodied in the ever-broadening PEGIDA movement that Breitbart London has covered in great detail. The failure of multiculturalist immigration policies has not only encouraged the enclave phenomenon, but is also clearly linked to the disturbing rise of anti-Semitism on the continent which has led to unprecedented numbers of European jews deciding to leave the nations of their birth for good.

If we include Turkey in our European snapshot, the situation is even worse, as we have seen the one viable example of a secular Muslim state slip even deeper into the corruption-ridden maelstrom of Islamic fundamentalism under the Erdogan government which is either incapable or unwilling to prevent Turkey becoming a pre-deployment site for jihadist fighters traveling into Syria and Iraq. All this from a formal NATO ally of the US.

Asia: The much-vaunted Pivot to Asia has clearly not worked. China has, over the last several years, openly challenged the post-Cold War peace in the region with a commitment to its own military build-up coupled with a concerted campaign of intimidation against its smaller and weaker neighbors.

While challenging and intimidating our regional partners, China has continued to grow economically at such a rate that the nation which was once universally ridiculed as the maker of plastic toys for McDonalds Happy Meals has now surpassed the US economy in terms of gross output. At the same time, China is waging a covert war against America in the cyber domain, stealing not only state secrets for use in developing its new weapons systems, but also billions of dollars worth of intellectual property and commercial secrets from American businesses. See the remarkable report from Mandiant on scale of the threat.

North Korea has also used the internet to assault American interests as the Sony hacking attack attests, while Washington has proven totally ineffective in undermining the world’s last truly fully-fledged Stalinist regime, or its regionally destabilizing nuclear weapons capabilities.

Africa: A giant continent, with threats as bad as they were in 2008, or in several cases much worse. The Global Jihadist Movement continues to consolidate its control in Nigeria through the horrific attacks of Boko Haram, the group made famous for the kidnapping of the girls from Chibok, an attack which is just one part of a vast campaign targeting Christians and anyone who does not want to live under a theocratically run system based upon sharia and 7th century interpretation of the Koran.

In addition to the insurgent-like threat of Boko Haram, we have also witnessed horrific hit and run terrorist tactics used by other African jihadists, as in the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi by Al Shabaab. At the same time, China proceeds to build its vast network of economic interests in the continent in ways that far outstrip American geostrategic investment in Africa.

Australasia: Of course, the Pivot to Asia should have pleased our Antipodean allies. But the concrete consequences of the declarations and speeches by Secretary Clinton and the White House have amounted to little more than the deployment of a handful of US Marines from Camp Pendleton to Australia. Instead of the security situation improving, Australia faced its own Jihadist attack just before Christmas last year as a self-styled imam took hostages and brought the violent jihad so familiar to New York, London, Madrid, and Paris, to the streets of Sydney.

The Americas: Canada likewise became a direct victim of the Global Jihadist Movement after a spate of attacks against its armed forces and even its parliament which was only stopped when a brave sergeant-at-arms applied deadly force in the face of a rampaging jihadi.

Those who like illicit quality cigars may be celebrating the White House’s “normalization” of relations with Communist Cuba, but if statements by the Castro regime are to be credited as expressing Havana’s true intentions, then the deal was good for the dictatorship and bad for America. And despite the US government’s historic decision, conditions inside Cuba have remained the same, or in many case deteriorated, with last year seeing record-breaking numbers of political arrests on the island nation. And Cuba’s anti-democratic influence is a problem for the region, not just its wretched population, with Raul Castro’s secret police providing aid and expertise in the oppression of dissidentsto the government of Venezuela.

The Middle East and North Africa: Leaving the worst for last we have, of course, the Middle East, and North Africa. The highs hopes for the Arab Spring turned very rapidly into a “Christian Winter” and a victory for the fundamentalist and anti-Democratic forces of the Muslim Brotherhood. One after another, one-man authoritarian regimes fell to Islamist MB governments, or collapsed into deadly civil wars which are still being fought in places like Syria and Libya. Throughout the region, proto-democrats and vulnerable minorities, especially ancient Christian communities, have been targeted for death or persecution, or have been forced to flee.

The one ray of hope, the people’s revolt in Egypt against the Brotherhood government of Mohammad Morsi, which led to his being ousted by a secular military, was rejected by the US administration as a coup, despite the fact that General, now President, Sisi, has been fighting his own war against Jihadi fundamentalists since he was the Chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces.

And now Yemen, which was lauded just a few months ago by President Obama as the poster-child of his successful counterterrorism strategy, has collapsed under insurgent attacks and the resignation of the government in Sanaa.

Then there is Iran, which, much like Cuba, has squeezed concession after concession out of the administration without either stopping its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, or curtailing its support of Shiite terrorist fighters in either Iraq or Syria.

I said I would leave Afghanistan and Iraq of our the equation, but nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this is a new jihadist threat that is even more dangerous than Al Qaeda. ISIS, the Islamic State, is today a full-fledged insurgency, one that in four dimensions is much more of a threat that [Sic] Al Qaeda ever was.

The Islamic State is more than a terrorist group, it now functions as a quasi-state and controls territory equivalent to the size of the UK. It is the richest non-state threat group in human history. It has an incredibly sophisticated understanding of information warfare and how to use social media as a propaganda platform, and lastly – and relatedly – it has recruited ten of thousands of young Muslim men from around the world, including Europe and the US, to fight for the new Caliphate of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Bin Laden dreamt of being this powerful. The Islamic State has turned his dream into a horrific reality.

There is not one area of the world of import to America in which we have either not lost friends, or failed to help our allies to defend themselves against the common enemies that threaten us all. Whatever your politics, or whomever you favor for the next Commander-in-Chief of the United States, one thing is certain: without resolute American leadership the world can become, and now is, a much more dangerous place.

Categories: Caliphate, Europe, European Union, Foreign policy, Free world, Freedom, Human rights, International Community, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic State, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Sisi, Turkey
Tags: America, Caliphate, Europe, European Union, Foreign Policy, Free world, Freedom, human rights, International Community, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic State, Nukes, Saddam Hussein, Sisi, Turkey

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Pat Condell: A special kind of hate – Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe

January 27, 2015

A special kind of hate, Pat Condell via You Tube, January 27, 2015

( IMPORTANT ! PLEASE watch this video… – JW )

Categories: Antisemitism, Europe, Islam, Israel, Jews, Pat Condell
Tags: Antisemitism, Europe, Islam, Israel, Jews, Pat Condell

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What Bobby Jindal Gets about Islam — and Most People Still Don’t

January 24, 2015

What Bobby Jindal Gets about Islam — and Most People Still Don’t, National Review on line, Andrew C. McCarthy, January 24, 2015

(This is the best post I have read thus far on “no go zones” and their significance to civilized societies. — DM)

With Western Europe still reeling from the jihadist mass-murders in Paris at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Hyper Kacher Jewish market, Governor Jindal outlined a bold, Reaganesque vision of American foreign policy guided by three imperatives — freedom, security, and truth. It is on the last one, truth, that our capacity to ensure freedom and security hinges. “You cannot remedy a problem,” Jindal explained, “if you will not name it and define it.”

The world’s most influential Islamic supremacists have told us in no uncertain terms that they see Muslim immigration in the West as part of a conquest strategy.

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pic_giant_012415_SM_Muslims-France

Footballs are deflating, the president is detached from reality, the Saudi king is deceased, and the sharia state next door, Yemen, is descending into bloody chaos. With mere anarchy loosed upon the world, it would be easy to miss the fact that, in England this week, Bobby Jindal gave as important and compelling a speech as has been delivered in years about America — our leadership role on the world stage, our preservation as a beacon of liberty.

In the birthplace of the Magna Carta, it has nonetheless become legally risky to speak with candor (even when quoting Churchill). Yet Louisiana’s Republican governor became that rarest of modern Anglo or American statesmen. Bobby Jindal told the truth about Islam, specifically about its large radical subset that attacks the West by violent jihad from without and sharia-supremacist subversion from within.

With Western Europe still reeling from the jihadist mass-murders in Paris at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Hyper Kacher Jewish market, Governor Jindal outlined a bold, Reaganesque vision of American foreign policy guided by three imperatives — freedom, security, and truth. It is on the last one, truth, that our capacity to ensure freedom and security hinges. “You cannot remedy a problem,” Jindal explained, “if you will not name it and define it.”

And so he did: Our immediate security problem today “is ISIS and all forms of radical Islam.” That is, the challenge is not limited to violent jihadists who commit barbaric atrocities. Jindal elaborated: “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home.”

The campaign to implement and spread sharia is antithetical to Western liberty. Freedom, Jindal said, means “the ability to conduct commerce both inside and outside your borders; it means the right to speak freely, to publish any cartoons you want. It means the right to worship freely. It means the right to self-determination.” By contrast, “radical Islamists do not believe in freedom or common decency, nor are they willing to accommodate them in any way and anywhere.” Moreover, the version of sharia law to which they adhere

is not just different than our law, it’s not just a cultural difference, it is oppression and it is wrong. It subjugates women and treats them as property, and it is antithetical to valuing all of human life equally. It is the very definition of oppression. We must stop pretending otherwise.

It cannot credibly be denied that this is so, as I have documented — using not only notorious examples of how sharia is applied in countries like Saudi Arabia (where it is the law of the land), but also Reliance of the Traveller, a classic sharia manual certified as accurate by prominent Islamic scholars, including at both al-AzharUniversity (the seat of Sunni jurisprudence since the tenth century) and at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (an influential Muslim Brotherhood think tank).

Still, Governor Jindal has been pilloried since his courageous speech by tendentious critics across the spectrum, from the usual Islamist grievance chorus to Fox News commentators and British prime minister David Cameron.

Why? Because he dared notice what ought to be an inarguable fact: The non-assimilationist Muslim campaign has resulted in the rise throughout Western Europe of what Jindal described as “unofficial” “so-called” “no-go zones.”

Jindal was clearly right about this. His timing, however, was wrong: He had the misfortune to dilate on “no-go zones” at the same time that Steven Emerson, the usually astute terrorism analyst, made a no-go gaffe. Steve erroneously claimed that the entire British city of Birmingham is “totally Muslim” and has become a “no-go zone” where “non-Muslims simply don’t go in.”

Emerson has since apologized profusely. The damage, however, was done. Fox News is evidently so embarrassed at having been the forum for his faux pas (and at having been threatened with legal action by the city of Paris, which was the main target of Steve’s commentary), that the network is over-correcting. This helps stoke the Islamist meme that no-go zones are a hysterical figment of the “Islamophobic” imagination.

That is absurd, but follows naturally from two things: a common misunderstanding about sharia, and a misrepresentation that describing the incontestable fact that sharia is being applied de facto in Europe is the same as falsely claiming that sharia is now the de jure writ of Europe.

Dreamy Islamophiles like Mr. Cameron and many of his like-minded progressives in bipartisan Beltway circles have a sputtering snit anytime a commentator associates Islam with anything other than “peace.” Consequently, the doctrine of Islam (which actually means submission) remains taboo and poorly understood in the West. One major misconception is that Islamists (i.e., Islamic supremacists or Muslims who want sharia implemented) demand that all non-Muslims convert to Islam. A no-go zone is thus incorrectly assumed by many to be a place that Muslims forbid non-Muslims to enter.

In reality, sharia explicitly invites the presence of non-Muslims provided that they submit to the authority of Islamic rule. Indeed historically, as I related in The Grand Jihad, my book about the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist ideology, because sharia calls on these submissive non-Muslims (dhimmis) to pay a poll tax (jizya), their continued presence was of economic importance in lands conquered by Islamic rulers.

It is therefore easy for Islamists and their apologists to knock down their strawman depiction of no-go zones as places where non-Muslims are not allowed. That is not what no-go zones are — neither as they exist in fact nor as they are contemplated by sharia. The point of imposing sharia — the reason it is the necessary precondition for building an Islamic society — is to make Islam the dominant social system, not the exclusive faith. The idea is that once sharia’s systematic discrimination against non-Muslims is in place, non-Muslims will see the good sense of becoming Muslims. Over time, every one will convert “without coercion.” The game is to set up an extortionate incentive for conversion while maintaining the smiley-face assurance that no one is being forced to convert at the point of a sword.

So radical Muslims will be welcoming to any ordinary non-Muslims who are willing to defer to their mores. What they are hostile to are officials of the host state: police, firefighters, building inspectors, emergency medical personnel, and anything associated with the armed forces. That is because the presence of those forces symbolizes the authority — the non-submission — of the state.

Notice, however, that no sensible person is saying that state authorities are prohibited from entering no-go zones as a matter of law. The point is that they are severely discouraged from entering as a matter of fact — and the degree of discouragement varies directly with the density of the Muslim population and its radical component. Ditto for non-Muslim lay people: It is not that they are not permitted to enter these enclaves; it is that they avoid entering because doing so is dangerous if they are flaunting Western modes of dress and conduct.

There is a reason that Governor Jindal qualified his invocation of the term no-go zones, modifying it with “so-called” and noting that the term is used “unofficially.” His speech was about reality, particularly where it stressed the need for truthfulness in forming policy. If our premise is reality, it is not no-go zones that are imaginary; it is the suggestion that no-go zones do not exist simply because non-Muslim entry is not literally prohibited by law. As the Gatestone Institute’s Soeren Kern painstakingly demonstrates, “Muslim no-go zones are a well-known fact of life in many parts of Europe.” It has been amply acknowledged not only in press reports and academic analyses but by governments that must deal with them.

Have a look, for example, at the French government’s official listing of 750 Zones Urbaines Sensibiles — “sensitive urban zones.” France’s “ZUS” designation is significant. As the estimable scholar Daniel Pipes recounted in a column at NRO this week, when he coined the term “no-go zone” in 2006 it was intended as “a non-euphemistic equivalent” of ZUS. If that is how the term “no-go zone” is understood — as an enclave deferential to Islamic sensibilities rather than exclusionary of non-Muslims — the contention that no-go zones do not exist is plainly frivolous. This is so even if, as Pipes maintains, the term “no-go zone” itself was an overstatement. The term “semi-autonomous sectors,” he says, would more accurately convey the historical anomaly the West has created: “a majority population [that] accepts the customs and even the criminality or a poorer and weaker community,” and in a manner that involves far more than control over physical territory.

Nevertheless, the problem with all this semantic nattering is its intimation that we can only infer the existence of no-go zones, and of the Islamist subversion they signal, by drawing inferences from what we see happening on the ground.

Nonsense. The world’s most influential Islamic supremacists have told us in no uncertain terms that they see Muslim immigration in the West as part of a conquest strategy.

As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, the strategy is often referred to as “voluntary apartheid.” One of its leading advocates is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood icon who is probably the world’s most revered sharia jurist. SheikhQaradawi, who vows that Islam will conquer America and Europe, and who has been crystal clear on the incompatibility of sharia and Western democracy, elaborates:

Were we to convince Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and ethically — without imposing our views or inflicting harm upon them, we would have traversed an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state.

Translation: To establish Islamic domination in the West, we do not need to resort to terrorism or to force non-Muslims to convert; we need merely a recognized right to resist assimilation, to regard sharia as superseding Western law and custom when the two conflict, as they do in fundamental ways.

This is precisely why the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — the bloc of 56 Muslim countries (plus the Palestinian Authority) — warned in a 2010 report on “Islamophobia” that “Muslims should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but should be accommodated.” (Here, at p. 30.) It is why Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist president of Turkey who has systematically dismantled that country’s secular, pro-Western system, pronounces that pressuring Muslims to assimilate “is a crime against humanity.”

At Oxford, Bobby Jindal bluntly asserted that the ideology of our enemy, radical Islam,

holds the view that it is wrong to expect assimilation, that assimilation is colonialist, assimilation is backward, and assimilation is in fact evidence of cultural bigotry and insensitivity. They think it is wrong to expect that people who chose to immigrate to your country should be expected to endorse and abide by your laws. They think it is unenlightened, discriminatory, and even racist to expect immigrants to endorse and assimilate into the culture in their new country. This is complete rubbish.

That is the truth. The United States will not get national-security policy right, nor reestablish our credentials as leader of the free world, until we accept that truth. Accept it and resolve, as Governor Jindal has resolved, to tell it boldly.

Categories: Bobby Jindal, Caliphate, Europe, Foreign policy, France, Freedom, Human rights, Islam, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, No go zones, Obama, Political correctness, Sharia law
Tags: Bobby Jindal, Caliphate, Europe, France, Freedom, human rights, Islam, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Muslim Brotherhood, No go zones, Political correctness, Sharia law

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Op-Ed: Is the Middle East on the Verge of Exploding?

January 22, 2015

Op-Ed: Is the Middle East on the Verge of Exploding? Israel National News, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, January 21, 2015

The potential for destruction posed by all these disputes is enormous, and the explosion may shake Europe and even cross the Atlantic when Islamic extremists blow their minds at the deep crisis affecting the entire Middle East.

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Five separate sets of potential fireworks have been igniting simultaneously in the Middle East for the last few weeks, each of them adding fuel to the fires caused by the others. If and when these developments reach the kindling point, the entire region may go up in uncontrollable flames.

These are the sources of the fires:

a. the rivalry between Al Qaeda and ISIS

b. the intensifying struggle between the Sunni Jabhat al Nusra and the Shiite Hezbollah.

c. the successes of the Houthis in Yemen

d. Islamic fury at what is happening in Egypt

e. the struggle between Islamic extremists and European regimes

Here are the details::

a. In the militant Sunni arena there is a fierce struggle going on between organizations that identify with Al Qaeda’s ideology, headed by Jabhat al Nusra – and ISIS, which is in control over large swathes of Syria and Iraq and has established the most stringent form of Sharia law in those areas. The rivalry has caused Al Qaeda to increase its attacks on the Yemeni government, abort an American attempt to rescue two hostages from Yemen last December, accept responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris and announce that the brothers who perpetrate the murders received their training in an Al Qaeda camp in Yemen.

b. The war between the Shiite Assad regime and Hezbollah on the one hand and Sunni Jabhat al Nusra on the other is getting more fierce. Jabhat al Nusra managed to cause Hezbollah painful losses recently, near the Hermon Mountain range and in a daring infiltration into the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, by way of the city of Arsal. Hezbollah is feeling pressured, leading the Iranian revolutionary guards to send some top officers to help the organization plan its next operation and improve its results.

c. In Yemen, the Shiite Houthi militias have succeeded in taking over the capital city of Sana’a and appear as the winning side in the long, drawn out war the Houthis have been waging against that nation. Iran is backing the Houthis, the US is helping the regime, both against al Qaeda and the Houthis. Without doubt, Yemen is a battlefield where Iran is forcing its enemies to follow its agenda, including nearby Saudi Arabia, which sees the Houthis as a direct threat to its security. Several years ago, the Saudis built a separation fence all along their border with Yemen, in an attempt to keep out Al Qaeda and Houthi militants.

d. There is a fierce struggle in Egypt between the Muslim Brotherhood – the mother of all Sunni Jihad organizations – and the regime of Al Sisi. As far as this struggle goes, Sisi is reinstating the government of Gamal abdel Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, all of whom waged relentless and bloody war against the “Brothers”. As of now, Sisi has succeeded in pushing the “Brothers” from positions of rule into jail cells and from the streets to the cemetery. His successes are infuriating his detractors. The fight is to the finish, and it is also being waged in the Sinai Desert between the government and the militias of Anṣār Bayt al-Maqdis, who recently switched its loyalties from al Qaeda to ISIS.

Europe is a relatively new battleground, but the last few weeks showed mounting escalation, both in jihadist activities against governments (see France) and in governmental activity against jihad cells (Belgium, Germany). Jihad activities in Europe are encouraged by ISIS as well as Al Qaeda, both sides of the rivalry mentioned above. People who return from Jihad in Syria, Iraq and Libya – but not just they – are participating in the heated struggle for Europe’s image.

These struggles are synergetic, they influence one another because an Islamic militant sees what is happening in one area and decides to take revenge for Allah in another. This sinking into chaos can lead to large number of large scale conflicts, with many more participants and deaths, especially if these organizations succeed in drawing Israel and the US into the fray. We have already heard of ground troups from the West fighting ISIS.

Israel must understand the dangers now permeating the atmosphere of the MIddle East with oil vapors that any spark can set on fire and that no one will be able to put out before the entire region is ablaze. The potential for destruction posed by all these disputes is enormous, and the explosion may shake Europe and even cross the Atlantic when Islamic extremists blow their minds at the deep crisis affecting the entire Middle East.

The massive Islamic immigration to Europe turned that continent into a branch of the Middle East’s disputes, so that Europe will not be immune to the many deep seated and broad Middle Eastern problems. And America is on the same planet, so that the Middle East disasters will find their way to its shores as well.

Categories: Europe, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Middle East, Terrorism
Tags: Europe, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Middle East, Terrorism

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“Unity”? About What Exactly?

January 22, 2015

“Unity”? About What Exactly? The Gatestone Institute, Jeremy Havardi, January 22, 2015

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia tried to fool the world by joining France’s “Unity March” for free speech just two days after a young Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, received the first installment of 50 lashes — out of the 1000 he is to get — “very severely,” the lashing order says. Badawi still has 950 lashes to complete.

Mahmoud Abbas, whose genocidal, jihadi partner, Hamas, was just declared not a terrorist group by the European Union, joined the forefront of the “Unity March” at the same time as a Palestinian human rights groups published a report accusing the Palestinian Authority of “waging war” against university students in the West Bank.

What “Islamophobia” motivated the killing of Jewish customers in a kosher supermarket? What had those victims done to deserve that?

We may like to imagine that this is not Islam, and that the faith promotes peace and nothing else. But the murderers say it is Islam, and they act accordingly.

Much of the media has offered up a context for these killings that is false.

The real story is that despite a few sporadic incidents, there has been no backlash against the Muslim community.

The recent rally for free speech and against the terrorism in Paris initially appeared to have generated a surge of defiance and resolve, not just in France but around the world. People were actually talking about a turning point in the battle against terrorism and radical Islam.

If only it were true.

The reality is that much of the political class and media remain in denial about the events in Paris.

Ban Ki Moon explained that the tragic events had nothing to do with religion. Signing a condolence book for the victims of the attacks, he said: “This is not a country, a war against religion or between religions… This is a purely unacceptable terrorist attack – criminality.”

France’s President François Hollande said that the Charlie Hebdo fanatics had “nothing to do with Islam,” and he was joined in this view by commentators on France24, as well as the German Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland condemned the actions of a “handful of wicked fanatics against the rest of us.” The implication was that they merely acted in the name of Islam — purely coincidentally, as it were.

In the Daily Mail, Piers Morgan wrote that the perpetrators were “not ‘real’ Muslims” and that this was “not a religious war.” Why he thought he could act as the arbiter on that question is still unclear.

As for President Obama, he has effectively outlawed the term “Islamic terror.”

The United States, in what was widely seen as a snub, was only represented at the rally by the U.S. Ambassador to France, Jane Hartley. Since the President had declared in 2012 that “[t]he future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” — the implication was that they were not acting purely coincidentally.

There is in those comments a mixture of political correctness, wishful thinking and staggering ignorance. It is understandable and commendable not to lump a majority of law-abiding, patriotic and peaceful Muslims together with their violent counterparts. But calling for “unity” in a march leaves one asking: Unity about what exactly?

To pretend that there is a complete disconnect between Islam and terror is to ignore reality. Jihadis are gaining ideological succour from the tenets of their faith, drawing upon teachings promulgated by imams, including the late Anwar al Awlaki. We may like to imagine that this is not Islam, and that the faith promotes peace and nothing else. But the murderers say it is Islam, and they act accordingly.

To confront this problem properly, the ideological underpinnings of jihad need to be tackled comprehensively at source.

It is not enough to unite against terrorism, as every community must. We need to know what we are uniting for — free speech. And we need to know what we are uniting against — namely the militant war of extremist Islamism.

It is equally inaccurate to describe these jihadis as “lone wolves.” They will have spent time gaining combat experience abroad, perhaps in Yemen, Syria or Iraq, and will have received ideological indoctrination and funding from a network of other jihadis. They are recruits in a theocratic, totalitarian death-cult spread across the planet. It comes in different forms: Boko Haram, which slaughtered 2,000 people in Nigeria the weekend before last; the Taliban, which murdered schoolchildren in Pakistan; Hamas with its genocidal doctrine and many years of bombings, and the Islamic State, which seems busy ethnically cleansing nearly everyone in Syria and Iraq.

The murders in Paris, therefore, were merely the latest salvo in a global confrontation between jihadist Islam and its declared enemies, this time in the West.

Much of the media has offered up a context for these killings that is false. Within hours of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the Telegraph led with a feature on the growing problem of “Islamophobia” in France. The Guardian, too, weighed in; one story headlined: “Muslims fear backlash after Charlie Hebdo deaths as Islamic sites attacked”. The Spectator spoke of the killings as an “attack on Islam;” and Robert Fisk in the UK Independent referred to the legacy of the Algerian war as a motive for the attackers. Other news outlets voiced fears of a “backlash” against Muslims in France and elsewhere.

But the real story is that while there have been some sporadic incidents against mosques and Muslim owned businesses in France following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, there has been no backlash against the Muslim community. Muslims across France even joined in the unity rally, an act that would have been impossible were there a climate of widespread public hostility.

The majority of hate crimes in France, as in a number of other countries, affects the Jewish community. It was a Jewish supermarket that was attacked. This does not mean that there will not be attacks — all of them naturally deplorable — against Muslim innocents, only that fears of a major widespread assault seem highly exaggerated. The same fears of widespread attacks against the Muslim community also proved unfounded after the 7/7 London bomb attacks.

Lumping terrorism and “Islamophobia” together ignores the real motivation of the latest killers in France. One of them, Amedy Coulibaly, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a video address prior to the supermarket attack. This hardly suggests a rant against perceived intolerance or racism. Invoking racism here also suggests, in a shifting of blame, that we in the West are somehow at fault for the violent behaviour of these Islamist terrorists. What “Islamophobia” motivated the killing of Jewish customers in a kosher supermarket? What had those victims done to deserve that?

Another reason this is no turning point is that the press continues to engage in self-righteous self-censorship. Not one broadcaster — including the BBC, Fox, NBC and CNN — showed any of the Charlie Hebdo images that had been deemed provocative. Those outlets were joined by the Associated Press, which deliberately cropped a photograph of the magazine’s now-dead editor to avoid showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad. In a cringe replicated across almost all of Europe, not one major British newspaper published any of Charlie Hebdo’s satirical images of Islam, and only The Guardian showed the full front cover of the edition that the survivors published after the attack.

Big mistake. These newspapers and broadcasters are denying the public a dispassionate view of what the killers themselves say is causing them to kill. Worse again, by drawing a line against possibly offending Muslims — many of whom seem to have no problem offending Jews and Christians, among others, if not killing them — the media have acted as if there is already in place an unofficial blasphemy law: the terrorists’ key demand.

A violent mob, disastrously undermining Western values, is effectively dictating the boundaries of free speech.

It is all very well to praise Charlie Hebdo as an icon of free speech, but after the riots that followed the publishing of Muhammad cartoons in Denmark’s Jyllands Posten in 2006, Charlie Hebdo was virtually alone in reprinting them, and it was condemned widely for doing so.[1]

Time magazine, in 2011, likened Charlie Hebdo’s reprinting the cartoons as “the right to scream ‘fire’ in an increasingly over-heated theater.” In other words, the “Islamophobic” cartoonists were to blame for their own misfortune. There is a notion permeating Europe, that if you speak out, not only can you can be put on trial — as is the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders[2] — but that it will also, in an Orwellian twist, be your own fault; if you had just kept quiet, nothing unpleasant would be happening to you. Try telling that to the four Jews lying murdered on the floor of the French supermarket. What did they ever say?

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia tried to fool the world by joining France’s “Unity March” for free speech just two days after a young Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, received the first installment of 50 lashes — out of the 1000 he is to get — “very severely,” the lashing order says. He was taken after Friday prayers to a public square outside a mosque in Jeddah. His declared “crime” is “insulting Islam,” for writing thoughts such as, “My commitment is to reject any repression in the name of religion… a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” Badawi still has 950 lashes to complete. If he lives. There is no medical help.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — whose genocidal, jihadi partner, Hamas, was, in a burst of surrealism, declared not a terrorist group by the European Union — joined the forefront of the Unity March in Paris at the same time as a report was published by a Palestinian human rights group, accusing the Palestinian Authority of “waging war” against university students in the West Bank.

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World leaders link arms at the Paris anti-terror rally on January 11, 2014. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stands at the far right of the front row. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

Turkey, “named the world’s biggest jailor of journalists in 2012 and 2013” according to theWashington Post, was also there. Turkey “ended 2014 by detaining a number of journalists … including Ekrem Dumanli, editor in chief of Zaman, a leading newspaper” with links to an opposition movement.

Meanwhile, between January 8 and January 14, as over three million copies of Charlie Hebdowere selling out and four million more being printed, there was already talk in France of hardening its laws against free speech. So this may not be a turning point either for free speech or against radical Islam. So it may be a while before we can truly say, “Nous sommes Charlie.”

Jeremy Havardi is a historian and journalist based in London. His books include The Greatest Briton, analytical essays on Churchill.

[1] Ezra Levant, who reprinted the cartoons in Canada, was then compelled to appear before the Alberta Human Rights Commission to defend their publication, because of a complaint lodged by Syed Soharwardy of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities.

[2] As also was Lars Hedegaard (for speaking in his own drawing room), Suzanne Winters, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, or at the very east need round-the-clock-bodyguards, such asFrench journalist Eric Zemmour, for saying that France might be facing a virtual civil war.

Categories: Abbas, Antisemitism, Ban Ki-Moon, Charlie Hedbo, Europe, Foreign policy, France, Freedom, Hamas, Human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Obama, Political correctness, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Nations
Tags: Abbas, Antisemitism, Ban Ki-Moon, Charlie Hebdo, Charlie Hedbo, Europe, Foreign Policy, France, Freedom, Hamas, human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamophobia, Multiculturalim, Palestinian Authority, Political correctness, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Nations

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