WW III Didn't Happen, But Something Else Did

Soleimani killed thousands upon thousands, both Americans and others over the years. But secret war is never real until you put a face to it. Soleimani was the man, the Islamic Republic was the regime that no one was supposed to anger lest they turn their baleful glare on us instead of passing by to kill someone else.

That fact can't be hidden anymore, not even by the nuclear deal.

The end of the secret war phase has left Iran with the strategic problem of continuing a campaign it cannot afford to wage openly. But it also left Washington with a situation they can neither continue to deny nor fob off with nonbinding congressional resolutions. We have yet to learn how to survive in our globalized world with the monsters. As Andy McCarthy put it: "25 years ago today we started jury selection in the Blind Sheikh trial against jihadists who were making war on our country. The long war is not over, but our divisions are more threatening than our enemies. I wish I’d understood that better."

Muslim activist berates right-wing Islamophobe white supremacist Chelsea Clinton

Mark Steyn:

All jihad is local, but all "Islamophobia" is global. So, if a Muslim of Afghan origin shoots up a gay nightclub in Florida and kills 49 people, that's just one crazed loner and no broader lessons can be discerned from his act. On the other hand, if a white guy shoots up two mosques in New Zealand and kills 50 people, that indicts us all, and we need to impose worldwide restraints on free speech to make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm ecumenical enough to mourn the dead in both gay clubs and mosques, but I wonder why we are so conditioned to accept Islamic terror as (in the famous words of London mayor Sadiq Khan) "part and parcel of living in a big city" that it is only the exceptions to the rule that prompt industrial-scale moral preening from politicians and media....

One of our Antipodean Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, drew my attention to a fine example of that: After the Islamic terror attack in Melbourne four months ago, Muslim community leaders refused to meet with Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison because of all the systemic Islamophobia. After the Christchurch attack, the same Muslim community leaders are demanding a meeting with Morrison because of all the, er, systemic Islamophobia. To say Terror Attack A is something to do with Islam is totally Islamophobic; to refuse to say Terror Attack B is Islamophobic is even more totally Islamophobic.

Were the Queen or the Governor General to pull an Andrew Scheer and sign on to this somewhat selective view of the world's travails, it would necessarily imply that "Islamophobia" is now beyond and above politics, and in that sense beyond criticism. The use of "Islamophobia" in the Melbourne attack is, in fact, its standard deployment: it is an all-purpose card played to shut down any debate.

Not, of course, that there's much debate as it is. And there's likely to be even less in the future. Facebook, which is unable to devise algorithms preventing a depraved psychopath livestreaming mass slaughter on its platform, is busy fine-tuning its controls to expel the most anodyne dissenters from the social-justice pieties. Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?

Thus the revolution devours its own. It goes without saying that right-wing madmen like Donald Trump and Andrew Scheer are to blame for Christchurch, but did you know that, when you peel back the conspiracy and discover who's really pulling the Trump-Scheer strings, you find Islamophobic white supremacist Chelsea Clinton?

Two Soldiers Stabbed in Brussels By Somalian Shouting "Long Live the Confederacy!"

Just messing with you. He shouted Allahu Akbar.

Two Police Officers Protecting Buckingham Palace Wounded by Man Wielding Knife; No Word Yet on Whether It Is Terror-Related

I'm just it's all a coincidence that Al Qaeda and Hamas and ISIS have been telling their cultists to go on "stabbing intifadas" and stab the infidels wherever they find them and suddenly a whole bunch of infidels are being stabbed.

Bumbling police/politicos search for clues as far away from reality as possible.

More news from multicultural Europe (DRUDGE)

Bomber blows self up at Brussels station...

'ALLAHU AKBAR'...

THE PHOTO...

TROOPS SWARM TERMINAL...

Obama’s streak of perfect timing rolls on

The cringing and craven cowards of the establishment

On the eve of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Mark Steyn notes (The Ghosts of Charlie Hebdo) that the Western press has pissed its pants in fear of Muslims on Jihad. They were all "JeSuisCharlie" - I am Charlie - but are scared shitless of showing the cartoons that caused the Muslim fanatics to massacre a dozen people, including the bulk of the senior editorial staff.

Instead of sharing the risk, the bigfoot media behaved exactly as they had ten years earlier. At my old London home The Daily Telegraph some gutless pansies decided that their reporting on the story could only be accompanied by carefully blurred images of the late cartoonists' work in order to avoid giving offense - turning Mohammed into a perpetually pixelated prophet, as if (to reprise a gag I did in 2005) poor ol' Mo's entered the witness protection program. Which is in fact the precise opposite of what's going on: cowardly media pixelate Mohammed as a way of fast-tracking themselves into the witness protection program, or so they hope. On TV, one of the few surviving Charlie Hebdo staffers attempted to hold one of the offending covers on screen, only to have the camera lurch away. Around the world, the dead cartoonists' professional colleagues, almost to a man, agreed that the preferred response was some or other limpid, evasive, self-flattering variant of "the pen is mightier than the sword".

Steyn tells us that in the past year a number of editors and writers who showed the courage of their convictions were attacked and are in hiding. The other Brave Sir Robins in the media - free speech warriors all - decided that they could show their courage on their knees and bravely participate in candlelight vigils and march showing their pencils.

And for the rest of the Establishment?

For wee colonial lads like me who've always been taught that England is the crucible of liberty, it is sobering to contemplate what a lonely champion of free speech Douglas Murray is in his native land, where Parliament will shortly debate whether Donald Trump should be banned from setting foot in the country. More tellingly, a week before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a West Yorkshire man was arrested by Leeds District Police ("Superintendent Mabs Hussein") for tossing a Koran in a toilet and setting it alight. As Australia's Tim Blair noted, in Britain you're free to destroy any book you like. Except one. The state's argument to the Sharia loons is: "You don't need to kill anyone. We'll be your enforcers."

How very culturally polite of them. Because as everyone knows, Muslims are a peaceful people who only have on little quirk, they go absolutely berserk if they see an image of Mohammad. So let's not inflame the peace-loving followers of Islam.  

Oh, and Jews ...

Both Paris and Copenhagen were twofers: the attacks on free speech were followed by attacks on Jews, at a kosher supermarket and a synagogue, respectively. To Obama, this second group of victims were merely a "random" "bunch of folks". Couldda been anyone, but just so happened to be "a bunch of folks" who like kosher food. As I commented:

Bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. In Europe, Islamic supremacists shoot up kosher markets, synagogues, Jewish museums and Jewish schools because that's where the Jews are.

I think most of us understand that a huge percentage of Muslims really hate Jews. I have a high degree of tolerance for hate: I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland during a period when many Catholics and Protestants seriously hated each other, and I came rather to appreciate the way they were entirely upfront about their mutual hatred. The problem here is that in the biggest resurgence of Jew-hate since the Second World War we're not allowed to say who hates Jews.

That's why free speech matters. Without free speech, there are only the official lies - about who's killing Jews in Copenhagen, who's sexually assaulting women in Cologne - and there is nothing to say in response to either except to crank up the old joanna for one more chorus of "Imagine".

What happened on January 7th 2015 was terrible. But our response to it made it more terrible, and emboldened civilization's enemies. With respect to the late Charb, the choice is not between dying standing up or living on our knees - for those who choose to live on their knees will die there, too, cringing and craven.

Steyn: "whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed."

Your Midweek Mohammed: To reprise an old line from America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc):

Not long after September 11th I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed. It was a throwaway line but, if you want to compile chapter and verse, you can add to the list every week.

A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta.

A sniper starts killing gas-station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed.

A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.

Etc. So here we go again. A ninth attacker in the Paris bloodbath has been named:

A 23-year-old man from Strasbourg, eastern France, has been identified as the third attacker involved in the terrorist assault at the Bataclan music hall in Paris, police sources have said.

Foued Mohamed Aggad went to Syria with his brother and a group of friends at the end of 2013, according to a source close to the investigation. Most of the others were arrested in spring last year after returning to France but Aggad stayed on in Syria, the source said.

The news was further confirmation that the deadly Paris attacks were carried out largely, if not entirely, by Europeans trained by Isis in Syria.

Europeans, everywhere. I switched on Fox News in my hotel room this morning to catch Bill Hemmer saying that this means "Seven of the nine terrorists were European." As the Guardian report continues:

The latest information means that all of the assailants identified so far were French or Belgian, all native French speakers, and the attacks increasingly appear to have been part of a homegrown terror plot.

So "Europeans" are the principal security threat. Along with "Americans" like "28-year-old California man Syed Farook".

This is why the public is not joining the media, the Democrats and the GOP establishment in getting the vapors over Donald Trump's comments about Muslim immigration. The men pulling the triggers in Paris and San Bernardino are men with French, Belgian and US passports, but they are not "French", "Belgian" or "American" in any meaningful sense. They regard their primary identity as Muslim - and their citizenship as a mere travel document. So it doesn't require a large leap to wonder whether Islam is, in fact, an issue.

As I said to Sean Hannity on Monday night, one reason why Trump's "outrageous" remarks never dent his numbers a whit is because to significant numbers of people he sounds far less insane than the mainstream consensus - now insisting that all these psycho "American" and "European" terrorists demonstrate why we'd be much better off letting in millions of "refugees".

~The latest brain-dead euphemism is "radicalized". As in: Oh, did you hear about poor Mohammed? He became radicalized. Don't know how it happened. He went out for a stroll in the park, and somehow came back "radicalized". This morning FBI Director Comey, in a fine demonstration of what a money-no-object bureaucracy can buy, announced that Syed Farook and his lovely bride had become "radicalized" even before they began (in Comey's delightful formulation) "courting".

Ah, the courtship rituals of the radicalized: Single Radicalized Female seeks young bearded man. Must have great sense of jihad.

I’m More Hateful Than Pamela Geller

But first, a confession. I’m far more hateful than Pamela Geller. In fact, I’d argue there’s no way that she could hate jihad more than I do. I’ve seen jihad up-close, in an Iraqi province where jihadists raped women to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, where they put bombs in little boys’ backpacks then remotely detonated them at family gatherings, where they beheaded innocent civilians while cheering wildly like they were at a soccer match, and where they shot babies in the face to “send a message” to their parents. I’ve seen the despair in the eyes of the innocent victims of jihad, and — believe me — that despair is infinitely greater than the alleged “anguish” caused by a few cartoons.

Simply put, to know jihad is to hate jihad. And if you hate jihad, you will likely do more to help actual Muslims — to save them from death and misery — than the most politically-correct newspaper editor or the most hand-wringing academic.

Muslim who encouraged attack in Garland worked for Amnesty International

He also shared tweets by others encouraging an attack similar to the massacre at the office of Paris-based Charlie Hebdo magazine, including calls for "brothers in Texas" to go to the event "with your weapons, bombs or with knifes", News Corp Australia reported.

He also shared a map of the building where the cartoon event was held and tweets by others encouraging an attack similar to the massacre at the office of Paris-based Charlie Hebdo magazine, including calls for "brothers in Texas" to go to the event "with your weapons, bombs or with knifes", News Corp Australia also reported.

Fairfax Media conducted an interview with him through Twitter. While his identity cannot be verified, Fairfax Media has no reason to doubt he is the same person who posted the previous statements that appear to encourage the Texas attacks.

He refused to give details about himself, but said he was aged in his 20s, lived in Perth and regularly attended a mosque. He said he previously worked at Amnesty International Australia.

He lives in Australia, of Lebanese descent, was raised a Muslim and is part of a loose network of terrorists. 

The Obama attempt to deny that Islamists are behind this attack is absurd. It's a worldwide phenomenon that isn't handing out membership cards or badges to prove membership. Anyone who's willing to engage in violence and kill in the name of Allah can join.  And NGOs are  a perfect place for them to gather followers.

What Didn’t Happen Next (After the Muslim attack in Texas)

A couple of ISIS wannabes tried to shoot up an exhibition of cartoons in Garland, Texas, and the police put them down before the civilians could get to them: a triumph for duty and marksmanship.

What didn’t happen next?

There is a mosque in Garland, Texas. It was there yesterday, it’s there today, and it will be there tomorrow. After two radical Muslims attempted to massacre some infidels down the road a bit, there was no angry mob of Texans storming the place with F-350s and rifles. If any vehicle full of armed men rushed to the Muslims’ place of worship, you can be sure that it was the local police exercising an abundance of caution and nothing more.

It’s easy to be snarky–”Oh, yay for us! No massacre, give Texas a cookie!” But only those parochial minds with the narrowest of experience could fail to appreciate how unusual that is in the world. Instead of retaliation, we have open-handed toleration that verges on the destructive.

Pamela Geller seems to me like she might be a very nasty piece of business indeed, but you know who I don’t want to hear about it from? CAIR and the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood fan club. “Oh, but she was trying to inflame the Muslims!” protest the usual assortment of bed-wetters. Yeah? So, what? Time to put on your big-boy First Amendment pants and buck up, little campers.

Reading this is like driving down a pretty country road and suddenly hitting a huge pot-hole.  The struck-out part reminded me why I am not a big fan of Kevin Williamson.  Inside the conservative carapace is the quivering jelly of the country-club republican.  I don't want to go all Jihad  on Williamson, but I can count on Pamela Geller to have my back and join me in my foxhole when it comes to real fighting.  I can count on Williamson to pen a letter to the editor explaining why I should not have been shot despite my bad manners.  

Jihad vs. Crusades

Identity of ISIS terrorist known as 'Jihadi John' reportedly revealed

Someone tell Team Obama that terrorism is not caused by poverty and lack of jobs.

The true identity of the ISIS terrorist known as "Jihadi John," who has appeared in several videos showing the beheading of hostages, reportedly has been revealed.

The Washington Post first reported Thursday, citing friends and human rights workers familiar with the case, that the man's real name is Mohammed Emwazi, a west London man who had been detained by counterterror officials in Britain at least once, in 2010. The paper also reported that Emwazi was born in Kuwait, is from a well-to-do family, graduated from college with a degree in computer programming and is thought to have traveled to Syria sometime in or around 2012.

Sanitizing terror: Has the press distorted Islamic radical’s crusade against gay men?

Brown killed two gay men in Washington, and a third man in New Jersey. He used a gay website to lure his victims and then shot them.

Brown’s homicides made news in June, but his story fell off the radar until Wednesday when King County prosecutors charged him with murder. Brown’s prosecutors made it clear that the accused killer’s motives were to terrorize, though he did appear to operate according to a perverse code of conduct:

This is the FOX News report. The rest of the media, silence.

Sex jihad

OK, you may ask: what is sex jihad? 

Last Thursday, during an address to the National Constituent Assembly, Tunisian Interior Minister Lotfi Bin Jeddo announced that Tunisian girls who had traveled to Syria to perform “sex jihad” had returned after being sexually “swapped between 20, 30, and 100 rebels and they come back bearing the fruit of sexual contacts [from pregnancies to diseases] in the name of sexual jihad and we are silent doing nothing and standing idle.”

But isn't this kind of sex forbidden to Muslims? Well, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends.

... the overarching rule of [Islamic] jurisprudence asserts that “necessity makes permissible the prohibited.” And if obligatory matters can only be achieved by performing the prohibited, then it becomes obligatory to perform the prohibited, and there is no greater duty than jihad.

In other words:

Two important points emerge here: first, jihad is the “pinnacle” of Islam—for it makes Islam supreme; and second, the idea that “necessity makes permissible the prohibited.” Thus, because making Islam supreme through jihad is the greatest priority, anything and everything that is otherwise banned becomes permissible.

So you see, all that straight-laced imagery we get about Muslim women with they heads covered with shawls so that their hair does not incite men to acts of sexual immorality, like these shown in the Virginian Pilot putting on a cooking demonstration is but one of the manifestations of Islam.  The women, by the way are not in Saudi Arabia but are students at ODU in Norfolk, Virginia.

 

But there is a higher duty, like this:

Other interviewed women have told of how they were “fooled,” or how their husbands (they being one of four wives) divorced and sent them to Syria for the sex jihad, with assurances that they would be guaranteed paradise in the afterlife. One 16-year-old explained how her father ordered her to have sex with several jihadi “liberators.”

 

As time passes and people open up, we learn a lot.  And some of it if still surprises us. 

Ted Cruz on Benghazi: "Truth is not partisan"

Why might Boxer object to an investigation that might damage Hillary Clinton in the long run up to the 2016 election?

I'm a ‘Counterjihadist’

Bruce Bawer reminds us that the bien pensant types have always had contempt for their own country. Patriotism is gauche and opposition to Jihad, like opposition to Communism is, in their view, the province of the knuckle dragging peasants.

So with the new term "counterjihadist" they attempt to demonize people who believe that the 9/11 hijackers were followers of Islam rather than some kooky lunatic fringe.

But then these are strange times. On the evening of September 11, 2001, you might’ve expected responsible-minded, in-the-know public servants, journalists, and academic Islam experts throughout the Western world to start giving their respective publics a crash course (as it were) in Islamic jihad, so as to ensure that absolutely everybody understood exactly why those men wanted to take down those buildings. Instead, the President of the United States, the Karen Armstrongs and John Espositos, and virtually the entire Western media were quick to begin issuing fervent assurances that the terrorists were a fanatical minority who’d hijacked not only airplanes but Islam itself. Similar assurances followed hard upon every major terrorist act in the succeeding years. Those of us who knew better – who recognized that the terrorists were doing exactly what the Koran ordered them to do, and who believed that it was vitally important for everyone in the West to understand this – began to see our names yanked to a term that identified us not as people who were seeking to educate and inform but as antagonists of something to which every one of us, after all, should be opposed.

For those who blame George Bush, I totally agree. Keep in mind that the Bush family is part of the "respectable" country club and upper-class Republican establishment with a world view that closely matches the mainstream Democrats of the twentieth century. Remember the "thousand points of light" or a "kindler, gentler" Republican? That was a way of distancing themselves from the conservative Ronald Reagan who as definitely not the scion of privilege and who Bush Senior ran against in the Republican primary.

The stance of the chattering classes vis a vis Jihad and Islam closely parallels that of their attitude toward Communism.

Back in the day, anti-Communists had a similar problem. I’m old enough to recall the obloquy heaped upon them by bien pensant types – professors and high-toned journalists who considered active, vocal opposition to Communism the most lowbrow of pastimes. Yes, whereas today’s counter-counterjihadists act as if jihad is a figment of counterjihadists’ fevered imaginations, the anti-anti-Communists (a label they wore with pride) at least acknowledged – albeit in a bland, bored way – that Communism existed. Sometimes they even admitted that it wasn’t all that terrific. But by focusing their animus on anti-Communism, and remaining all but silent about the evils of Communism itself – indeed, by insisting that the very application of words like “evil” to Communism (à la Ronald Reagan) was infantile and hyberbolic – they drove home the idea that overt anti-Communism was worse – by which they meant less intelligent, less sophisticated, less worldly – than Communism itself. Indeed, even as self-identified Communists in America and throughout the West held positions of trust in the academy, government, the arts, and elsewhere, anti-Communists came to be viewed as fanatical, paranoid conspiracy theorists who, in the phrase of the day, saw “a Communist under every bed.”

Read the whole thing.

"He who must not be named."

Richard Fernandez says it's like a scene from Marvel comics.  Actually it's like a scene from Harry Potter where it's forbidden to actually refer to Lord Voldemort by name.

We have the President of France tell us that we should not jump to conclusions about who stabbed a French soldier.

“The lone attacker was described as a young man wearing a Muslim prayer cap and a North African-style robe called a jellabah. According to a police account, he was monitored on security cameras and seen shedding his robe and fleeing in European clothes before disappearing into the crowd in a subway and suburban train entrance.”

Who could this be? the French leader is baffled.  In Sweden the police have adopted a policy of passive bystanding, except if some Swedes try to protect their property, then they swing into action with clubs and riot gear.

The same kind of bizarre game is being played by the press in the coverage of the riots in Stockholm, now going for almost a week. The Washington Post sets out five charts to explain Sweden’s “youth riots.” “The violent youth riots that spread across Stockholm’s suburbs this week seem at odds with the public perception of Sweden as one of the world’s most liberal and tolerant countries.” We are told the “youth riots” are due to the relative underprivilege of the “foreign born.” But does the Post mean Chinese immigrants then? No they don’t. The Washington Post knows what it means and we are supposed to know what it means, but we are not supposed to admit that we know what it means.

One can only conclude that the authorities themselves jumped to conclusions before anyone else. That they were sure from the first instant what they were dealing with since they knew exactly what words or phrases nobody could refer to. And you can’t do that unless you yourself have jumped to the same conclusions nobody else should jump to.

Thus, references to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, or Mexicans appeared little censored. Why, you can chaff these people with no consequence. But words referring to certain identities we are not supposed to associate with the news stories are quickly punished such that the UK authorities, who lack the manpower to monitor individuals with terror files at MI5 as long as one’s arm, can still find an ample number of policemen to track down on Facebook and Twitter.

What is it that these lying weasels who head the West's democracies fear? Are they prisoners of their own delusions?

In some paradoxical way, the enemies of the West are now freer than their targets; free, by virtue of their defiance, from the mind-boggling hypocrisy and doublethink that encumber anyone who still subscribes to conventional wisdom. If radical Islamism has any merit at all, it lies in seeing a supine and defenseless culture for what it really is: a fat, idiotic target waiting to be plundered.

They don’t want to integrate’: Fifth night of youth rioting rocks Stockholm

So how is that tolerance working out for you?

Religion of Peace at work

'You and your children will be next': Islamic fanatics wielding meat cleavers butcher and try to behead a British soldier, taking their war on the West to a new level of horror

One of the men arrested is believed to be Michael Adebolajo

Two men repeatedly stab and tried to behead off-duty soldier in SE London

They shouted 'Allah Akbar' attack and told witnesses to film them

Charged at police officers with rusty revolver, knives and meat cleavers

Killing took place 200 yards from barracks and close to primary school

Both men placed under arrest after being treated for gunshot wounds

PM: Killing is 'sickening' and Britain will 'never buckle' in face of terror