UPDATE 3:30PM
A third person has been taken into custody. No further information on his identity but this is presumably the person that was picked up near the church right after the attack.
Precisions on the informally identified killer:
According to la Tribune de Genève, A.K. the 19 year-old Frenchman involved in the church attack, was arrested at Geneva airport on May 14, 2015, after he was sent back from Turkey. He had made two unsuccessful attempts to reach Syria, first via Munich, then via Geneva. He spent a few days in prison there before being extradited to France.
BACKGROUND
The Interior Ministry is currently embroiled in controversy about security, or its absence, at the site of the July 14th fireworks display in Nice, that ended with the murderous attack by a jihadist at the wheels of a 19-ton truck.
Sandra Bertin, a municipal police officer in charge, that fateful evening, of monitoring CCTV images claims the was pressured by someone from the Interior Ministry to falsify her report, by indicating that the better-trained better-armed national police were guarding the entry to the closed zone of the Promenade des Anglais. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who denies the accusation, is suing her for libel. The policewoman has not backed down. Libération daily published video allegedly showing that no national police were at the entry point, and the police cars that supposedly blocked traffic on the Promenade were in fact lined up along the road, not parked horizontally to physically block traffic.
The municipality refused a demand by government officials to erase all its CCTV images for the 24 hours surrounding the attack. (Copies of those images were already in government hands.)
Calls for stricter measures from the parliamentary opposition, les Républicains, are systematically dismissed by the government as playing politics. Journalists seem to like this scenario because they repeat it constantly to fill in the gaps in new developments and information. The Républicain primary will be held next fall so, wink wink, the various candidates want to show how tough they are.
The Front National curses both houses, blaming them for disastrous policies over the past 30 years.
Former president and future hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy enjoins the government to implement proposals his party has made for improved security. François Hollande says we are at war, Nicolas Sarkozy says we are at war: they don’t mean the same thing and don’t propose the same measures: Hollande raises constitutional arguments to oppose Sarkozy’s demand for administrative detention of flagged terror suspects. The president is convoking representatives of “all” confessions to make an umpteenth show of unity in the face of diversity.
Meanwhile, the annual festive Paris Plages operation is underway on the banks of the Seine. Last year’s invited “beach,” Tel Aviv on the Seine, provoked controversy, placated by authorization of a Gaza beach, animated by the BDS movement, right next to the Tel Aviv sector. This year the guest is Jasmin Beach, and the beachfront city of Sousse is honored. No protests, no complaints. The jihad truck driver came from M’kasen, a hotbed of Islamism a short drive from Sousse where 38 infidels were gunned down on the beach not long ago.
Daesh has threatened the same treatment for French beaches.
French churches had been warned that they were a target.
UPDATE 17:10
One of the nuns that was in the church when the killers arrived testified on BFM TV:
The killers recorded the whole scene. They forced the priest to kneel, they pronounced what seemed like a ceremonial in Arabic. When they started to slit his throat, she escaped, and notified the police.
According to some official sources, they arrived “quickly”…within 20 minutes.
N.B. Hollande says we are at war, meaning in Syria and Iraq. Sarkozy includes France. There’s the difference. The opposition is calling for a quasi-military domestic response to a war that the government is treating as a criminal affair.
One of the proposals made by the opposition and rejected by the governing party last week was to prohibit early release (for good behavior?) or parole of prisoners sentenced for terrorist acts or plots. Prison terms in France are generally reduced by one half. The prisons are overcrowded!
Jihad attack on little French church
Nidra Poller
As jihad attacks strike quick and fast, the otherwise ineffectual French government is at least supplying ample information in record time. Nothing about not knowing the motivations of the killers.
Here, briefly, is what has been reported at this hour:
The killers entered the church, slit the throat of the 84 year-old priest and knifed a second, as yet unidentified person who is fighting for his/her life. The church is in a quiet working class neighborhood that stands next to a not so quiet “diversity” neighborhood. One of the killers has been informally identified as coming from that troubled neighborhood.
And this is what is going to send French society into a spin: the killer from the tough neighborhood tried to join Daesh in Syria. Only made it to Turkey. The Turkish authorities sent him back to France. He spent a brief couple of weeks in jail before being released with an electronic bracelet. The judicial wing contested the liberation but the courts confirmed it. Presumably he was wearing the electronic bracelet when he slit the priest’s throat!
Many have weighed in on whether Donald Trump’s agendas — to the extent that they are different from what are now ratified Republican policies — are crackpot, unworkable, or radical: e.g., building a wall to enhance border enforcement (“And make Mexico pay for it!”), renegotiating trade deals with China, promoting Jacksonian nationalism rather than ecumenical internationalism, suspending immigration from Middle East war zones (after Trump dropped his call for complete Muslim exclusion), and disparaging an Eastern-corridor elite that derives privilege from the intersection of big politics, money, and the media.
No doubt, some of Trump’s flamboyant invective is isolationist, nativist, and protectionist. Certainly, we are in the strangest campaign of the last half-century, in which members of Trump’s own party are among his fiercest critics. In contrast, the ABC/NBC/CBS Sunday-morning liberal pundits feel no need to adopt NeverHillary advocacy. They apparently share little “Not in my name” compunction over “owning” her two decades of serial lying, her violations of basic ethical and legal protocols as secretary of state, her investment in what can be fairly termed a vast Clinton pay-to-play influence-peddling syndicate, and the general corruption of the Democratic primary process.
Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.
To understand the sheer scale of the Democratic national-security collapse, ponder this horrible fact: In the 2012 presidential election, for two months the key debate was whether the murder of four Americans in Benghazi meant that President Obama was exaggerating his success against al Qaeda. In 2016, the news cycle has already moved on from the murder of 49 Americans in Orlando six weeks ago.
It’s moved on in part because of terror attacks that have killed more than 100 men, women, and children in France, Germany, and Turkey. In the last two months, terrorists have used guns, axes, knives, bombs, and even a truck to snuff out the lives of innocents in great cities on three continents. In the last year, jihadists have killed or injured Americans in Tennessee, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Terror has become the new normal. We can’t dwell on the Chattanooga shootings because San Bernardino happened. We can’t dwell on San Bernardino because Orlando happened. In Europe, we can’t dwell on Paris because Brussels happened. We can’t dwell on Brussels because Istanbul happened. We can’t dwell on Istanbul because Nice happened. We can’t dwell on Nice because Munich happened.
And to think, last week the media actually mocked Republicans for emphasizing the terror threat. Yet the media is only following President Obama’s lead. This is a man, after all, who minimizes terrorism so much that he’s fond of describing bathtubs as a greater threat than ISIS.
Meanwhile, Jihadists are laughing all the way to the bloody bank. Grant them safe havens, and they’ll use their resources to recruit, train, and inspire the next wave of jihadists. Open borders to migrants, and they’ll infiltrate the ranks of refugees. Treat any concern about terror as “Islamophobia,” and they’ll exploit the resulting complacency and political correctness.
The Presbyterian Church USA (PC-USA) assembled in Portland, Oregon for its 222 General Assembly, lasting from June 18-25. Once again, latent anti-Semitism in the form of controversial resolutions on divestment from Israel became a major issue in the proceedings. Delegates from 171 PCUSA presbyteries, representing the 1.57 million members, along with other participants and observers from around the world, gathered in Portland for the biennial General Assembly (GA).
Elements from within the PCUSA displayed their unrestrained prejudice against the Jewish state when according to the former Vice President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Alan Wisdom, only one resolution about the Middle East entailed “anything besides the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” He described the PCUSA GA as an “onslaught of anti-Israel legislation.”
Wisdom further explained that “of the six items placed before the assembly’s Middle East Issues Committee, five aimed harsh criticism at Israel.” Only one issue raised gently concerned itself with the threats to Middle Eastern Christians. That resolution does not even bother to identify the threat as being Islam and Muslim radicalism and jihadism. Instead, it qualified the threat coming from “unnamed religiously based actors in the region.”
The multiple anti-Israel resolutions proposed divesting from companies doing business in the Jewish state, with one specifically called the PCUSA, to prayerfully consider Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the State of Israel. Israel alone was singled out. The only vibrant democracy in the Middle East where religious freedom exists and is flourishing, where human and civil rights are sacrosanct, was vilified. Yet, Arab Palestinian Muslim terrorism, authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, incitement against Israelis and Jews, and denial of human rights and religious freedom has been ignored.
There were no “overtures,” i.e. resolutions against the most notorious dictatorships in the Middle East including the Islamic Republic of Iran, which tramples on basic human rights, denies religious freedom to Christians, Jews, or Baha’is, hangs youthful dissidents, gays and lesbians, and oppresses its minority Kurdish, Baluchi, and Ahwazi people. The hypocrisy and glaring bias displayed by the PCUSA General Assembly was obvious when the worst human rights offenders in the Middle East including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Assad of Syria, and a host of other Middle East Muslim states did not get mentioned, let alone subjected to BDS.
The German people are suffering the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reckless open door “refugee” policy. Merkel laid down the welcome mat for around a million migrants last year, many of them from troubled areas of the Middle East and South Asia, including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been four violent attacks in Germany within just the past week. Two of them were committed by Syrian migrants. A third was committed by an Afghan asylum seeker. The fourth, a mass shooting in Munich, was committed by the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers.
ISIS had forewarned that attacks in Germany were coming. Shortly after the Brussels airport attack, ISIS sent out a call for an attack on Germany’s Cologne airport. An ISIS video threatened to turn Germany into a “battle field” and targeted Chancellor Merkel for murder. After the attack in Nice, ISIS supporters celebrated on social media and said that Germany was next.
Now that the attacks have started, German government officials are trying to calm peoples’ fears, minimizing as much as possible any connection to ISIS. Chancellor Merkel’s Chief of Staff Peter Altmaier actually claimed early last week, after the first attack, that terrorist acts committed by refugees are “not larger or smaller than that in the rest of the population.”
However, the official explanations, including claims as to the mental instability of the perpetrators, ignore the reality that the attackers find legitimacy for acting on their hatred from the “new normal” of violence created by the successful actions of ISIS.
At least two of the most recent attacks in Germany have been directly linked to ISIS.
A Syrian asylum seeker, whom had pledged his allegiance to ISIS, blew himself up last Sunday and injured twelve other people, outside of a wine bar in the town of Ansbach. It could have been far worse. His original target appeared to have been a music festival, but fortunately he was turned away because he did not have a ticket to the event. ISIS claimed that the suicide bomber “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”
The Afghan refugee who attacked train passengers in Germany early last week, injuring four people, two of them critically, was found to have had an ISIS flag in his room. He is reported to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) several times. A news agency linked to ISIS claimed the assailant “carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State.”
A machete-wielding Syrian asylum-seeker, who killed a pregnant woman in Germany, was arrested on Sunday. The police claim that, based on the current evidence, “there is no indication that this was a terrorist attack.” Nevertheless, ISIS exploited the incident to urge more so-called “lone wolf” attacks.
In a celebratory infographic posted online, the Islamic State is claiming major victory in killing and injuring up to 5,200 people over the holy month of Ramadan.
The infographic, lauding the “results” of a bloodthirsty Ramadan, published by ISIS’ Al Naba weekly magazine notes the 14 terror attacks around the globe attributed to ISIS including the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida and the Dhaka, Bangladesh bakery attack.
They also mention the Magnanville, France stabbing of a police officer and his wife and a suicide bomb attack that killed 14 Nepalese soldiers who worked at the Canadian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Recent attacks against Nigerian, Jordanian and Somali troops as well as the downing of six drones and demolition of 440 tanks are also among their listed successes.
The infographic also gives a breakdown of the 5,200 victims with 1,988 Shiites, 965 Kurdish soldiers, 752 Libyan militiamen, 580 Syrian Alawites, 285 Christians who are labeled ‘Crusaders,’ 100 Yemeni soldiers, 50 Egyptian troops, 74 Pakistani and Afghani soldiers and 50 Iraqi military men.
Despite recent reports of the Islamic State’s significant loss of territory, attacks around the world were meant by the terror groups as a wake-up-call demonstrating their intended growth and reach.
When it comes to the connection between Islam and violence against non-Muslims, one fact must be embraced: the majority of those in positions of leadership and authority in the West are either liars or fools, or both.
No other alternative exists.
The reason for this uncharitable assertion is simple: If Islam was once a faraway, exotic religion, today we hear calls for, and see acts of, violence committed in its name—or the name of its deity “Allahu Akbar!”—practically every day. And many of us still have “ears that hear and eyes that see.”
It’s no secret: Muslims from all around the world and from all walks of life—not just “terrorists” or “ISIS”—unequivocally and unapologetically proclaim that Islam commands them to hate, subjugate or kill all who resist it, including all non-Muslim “infidels.”
This is the official position of several Muslim governments, including America’s closest “friends and allies,” like Saudi Arabia and Qatar; it’s the official position of Islamic institutions of lower and higher learning—from Bangladeshi high schools to Egypt’s Al Azhar, the world’s most prestigious Islamic university; and it’s the official position broadcast in numerous languages on Islamic satellite stations that air into Muslim homes around the world.
In short, there’s no excuse today for ignorance about Islam—especially for those in positions of leadership or authority. Yet it is precisely they who most vehemently deny any connection between Islam and violence.
Why?
The most recent example (as of this writing, that is) took place on July 18 in Germany. An axe-waving Muslim refugee attacked a number of train passengers and critically injured three. Although an ISIS flag was found in his room, although he called for the slaughter of any Muslim who dares leave Islam, although he yelled “Allahu Akbar”—Islam’s unequivocal war cry—authorities claimed “it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker.”
Catholic Bishop Friedhelm Hofmann of Wuerzburg, where the axe attack took place, was bewildered: “One is speechless at such a moment. This fact can not be understood.” Instead of being vigilant around Muslim migrants, he suggested “Maybe we need to help the unaccompanied young refugees even more and help them to overcome their own traumas.”
About a month earlier in Germany, this same scene played itself over: while screaming “Allahu Akbar” and “infidels must die,” another Muslim man in another train station stabbed to death one man and injured three others. Still, German authorities “found no evidence of Islamist motive.”
In neighboring France—which has “Europe’s largest Muslim minority” and is also (coincidentally?) the “most threatened country”—this sequence of events (a Muslim attacks in the name of Islam, authorities claim difficulty in finding “motive”) is becoming endemic. On July 19, a Muslim man vacationing with his pregnant wife and children stabbed a neighboring woman and her three daughters for being “scantily dressed.” The youngest girl, 8, was in critical condition with a punctured lung.
Deeply divided Democrats spent the first day of their unruly convention here desperately trying to reassure everyone that their fractured, out-of-touch party is united heading into the November election.
The chaotic convention begins after a hotly contested primary season and as signs emerge that Republican Donald Trump could be cruising to victory in November. Famed statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said if the election had been held yesterday, Trump would have had a 57.5 percent chance of winning the presidency versus Clinton’s 42.5 percent. According to Silver’s “Now-cast” model, Trump would win the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
“Don’t think people are really grasping how plausible it is that Trump could become president. It’s a close election right now,” Silver tweeted July 22.
Bernie Sanders supporters made their displeasure known, booing and interrupting speeches for hours. They even booed and chanted “Bernie” during the opening invocation.
Their fanatical devotion makes sense. As Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller astutely observed a few hours later on Fox News Channel, to his followers Sanders is more like a religious figure than a politician.
In the early part of the first day of the convention, loud boos rang out over and over again when Hillary Clinton or running-mate Tim Kaine’s names were mentioned. Sometimes the boos drowned out the speakers. Some angry Bernie Sanders supporters taped their mouths shut to protest how the party treated their candidate. At other times, the noise generated by Sanders delegates shook the Wells Fargo Center.
In Philadelphia the official theme of Day One was “United Together,” which ought to set off alarm bells.
The statement about party unity, it turns out, was aspirational, not factual. Monday was a down-and-dirty, raucous affair. Delegates sat through seven hours of speeches, live music, and videos extolling the virtues of Clinton and ridiculing Trump. Throughout the home base of the Philadelphia Flyers, 76ers, and Soul, there are “all-gender” bathrooms. Delegates displayed smartalecky signs reading “love trumps hate.”
Protesters arrived in seemingly greater numbers than at the GOP convention in Cleveland last week. They were angrier and more physically aggressive than in Cleveland. More than 50 of them associated with something called Democracy Spring were detained by police and issued citations for disorderly conduct. Some held a sit-in at an entry point to the convention site while others climbed barricades erected for crowd control.
And inside the convention hall the knives were out for those who resisted the so-called revolution led by Sanders, a self-described socialist.
As the City of Brotherly Love roasted in 100-degree heat, Democrats unceremoniously dumped the administrative head of the party, Democratic National Committee chairman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. She had been booed by fellow Democrats at events leading up to the convention — and for good reason.
Dummiecrat Johnson is well rewarded by the Arab American Institute and gets a 5+ for his anti Israel sentiments…..rsk
Rep. Hank Johnson is not known for his towering intellect or penetrating insight. In fact, he’s an ignorant loon.
Back in 2010, Johnson astonished attendees at a House Armed Services Committee hearing by claiming that if too many U.S. military personnel transferred to our base on Guam, it could cause the island to “capsize.”
These days, Johnson has turned his attention to the cause of the Palestinians. At a meeting for the anti-Israel U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Johnson compared Israeli settlers to “termites” and Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Donald Trump.
Washington Free Beacon:
“There has been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself, there has been settlement activity that has marched forward with impunity and at an ever increasing rate to the point where it has become alarming,” Johnson said during an event sponsored by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, an anti-Israel organization that galvanizes supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS.
“It has come to the point that occupation, with highways that cut through Palestinian land, with walls that go up, with the inability or the restriction, with the illegality of Palestinians being able to travel on those roads and those roads cutting off Palestinian neighborhoods from each other,” Johnson continued. “And then with the building of walls and the building of check points that restrict movement of Palestinians. We’ve gotten to the point where the thought of a Palestinian homeland gets further and further removed from reality.”
Johnson, who in 2010 voiced his fears that Guam would tip over and capsize if too many people resided on the island, said that “Jewish people” routinely steal land and property from Palestinians.
“You see one home after another being appropriated by Jewish people who come in to claim that land just because somebody did not spend the night there,” he said, referring to claims that Israeli settlers plot to seize Palestinian land. ‘“The home their [Palestinian] ancestors lived in for generations becomes an Israeli home and a flag goes up,” he said, adding, “the Palestinians are barred from flying flags in their own neighborhoods.”
Johnson went on to compare Lieberman to Trump as he lashed out against the Israeli government.
“The fact is the Israeli government, which is the most right-wing government ever to exist in the state of Israel in its history, the most right wing government, you got a guy like Trump who is now the minister of defense in Israel calling the shots on defense,” he said, adding that he is not the only member of Congress who holds these views.
