The new movie Youth is a feast for the eyes, but it’s far more than that. It’s about two old men, a famous composer (played by Michael Caine) and a famous film director (Harvey Keitel) on summer vacation at a gorgeous resort in the Swiss Alps — during which they confront truths about their lives and about people and things they have lost. Yes, I am well aware that with that last sentence I have made the movie sound unspeakably boring to most readers — but stick with me for a minute: It is, in fact, the exact opposite of boring, because, for the film’s two hours, the screen is always full of life, incident, emotion, and color. One scene was notable for me because it was a solitary exception to this rule: Rachel Weisz, as Caine’s daughter, gives a speech about how Caine was an absentee father and didn’t show an interest in his family even when he was home. I can’t fault Weisz’s performance — she delivers the monologue quite convincingly – but it’s a scene that really belongs in another movie, a much talkier melodrama.
The day after the San Bernardino jihadist attack that left fourteen dead and even more wounded, my old boss, Rudy Giuliani, came out and said what most sane people are thinking. After hours of pained, halting, incoherent babbling by public officials from President Obama on down about whether the mass-killing by two heavily armed, obviously well-trained Muslims constituted a terrorist attack, Rudy exploded:
You can come to one clear conclusion with the information they have right now. This is an act of terror. The question was motivation. . . . The question here is not, is it an act of terror. We’re beyond that. When you got two assault weapons, two handguns, you’re in body armor, you got a home that’s booby-trapped. You’ve [ACM: meaning “they’ve”] been practicing to do this. . . . If you can’t come to a conclusion at this point that this was an act of terror, you should find something else to do for a living besides law enforcement. I mean, you’re a moron.
Hard to argue with that.
John Esposito’s cohorts at Georgetown University presented a new online film showing Muslims in America as merely good neighbors wanting to commit random acts of senseless charity, but closer scrutiny reveals problems with the evidence.
“Muslims “are not the problem they are the solution,” leftist writer Eli Clifton simplistically states in American Muslims: Facts vs. Fiction, a short video that premiered November 19 at Georgetown University. While presenting Muslims as charitable good neighbors, the film and subsequent panel discussion before an auditorium audience of about 200 obscured various troubling facts about this faith community.
The film narration cites statistics to argue that “American Muslims are an integral part of our society” and parallel wider trends concerning matters such as religious observance and recycling. Tarek El-Messidi, the founder of the Muslim apologetics organization Celebrate Mercy, states that mercy “is really the cornerstone of what Islam teaches.” Yet the film’s profiled Muslim leaders, such as Congressman Keith Ellison and law professor Azizah al-Hibri (whose acolyte Qasim Rashid has bizarre ideas on free speech), are not necessarily all-American. A document that Mohamad Magid,president of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), discusses as a counter to Islamic State (IS) doctrinal credentials is also rather disingenuous.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were linked to ISIS and Al Qaeda.The ISW is characterizing the San Bernardino massacre along the lines of Mumbai (2008), the Westgate Mall in Kenya (2013) and the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (2015) and marking it as the first successful Al Qaeda/ISIS-related attack in the U.S. with skilled marksmen employing long guns and explosives.This assessment is based on reports that Tashfeen Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS, that Farook had contact with Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and Jabhat Al Nusra as well as the very nature and preparation for the attack. It is particularly striking that the couple was able to acquire weapons, combat gear, ammunition and explosive devices without detection. They also developed technical expertise in the bomb-making techniques made available by Al Qaeda and affiliated groups.The ISW believes that more attacks are likely to follow the success of the San Bernardino incident.Follow the link to the timeline to better understand the various connections……Janet Levy
Key Take-away: The San Bernardino shooting of December 2, 2015 was a terrorist attack conducted by perpetrators inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and possibly linked with and inspired by al Qaeda. The attack displays some of the sophistication and signatures of past al Qaeda attacks. Drawing a sharp dividing line between al Qaeda and ISIS threat groups when it comes to attacks on the homeland is difficult despite differences between them in the Middle East. The U.S. must expect that both groups will devote even greater resources to encouraging and supporting such attacks here and in Europe now that their feasibility has been demonstrated in both regions. American and Western efforts against al Qaeda and ISIS globally are failing and require fundamental reassessment.
View this timeline online here.
Individuals inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and with links to al Qaeda conducted the terrorist attack in San Bernardino on December 2. This attack was the first al Qaeda- or ISIS-related in the U.S. by a skilled shooter team using both guns and explosives, a technique that both groups used in the attacks in Mumbai of November 2008; on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2013; on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015; and on several targets in Paris on November 13, 2015. It marks a step-change in the threat that both al Qaeda and ISIS pose to the security of the American homeland.
In the wake of the San Bernadino Islamic terrorist attack, President Barack Obama on Friday continued to defend his ridiculed claim that climate change will lead to more violent extremism around the world. During his interview by CBS This Morning, Obama doubled down on what many called an absurd statement saying that global warming leads to severe flooding and disturbing shifts in weather patterns, people in vulnerable parts of the world could begin to embrace extremist ideologies or radical religious movements.
“As human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen,” Obama asserted. “And, you know, if you look at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families, that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.”
http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/04/when-islamic-refugees-turn-to-terror-on-the-glazov-gang/
This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.
He came on the show to discuss When Islamic “Refugees” Turn to Terror, shedding disturbing light on the most dangerous “course of action” of the enemy.
[See also Stephen on the two Glazov Gang specials: [1] Muslim Brotherhood: Above the Law in America and [2] How American Leadership is Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.]
With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist attack by devout Muslims against Americans, as it happens. It was an eminently jihadist act of murderous aggression by self-starting, home-grown Muslim terrorists.
Enough already of Obama and his ilk. The war against sudden jihad self-generated by Muslim immigrants and their offspring, threatening literally every American, is by now both real and present. It can and must be won, in spite of Obama and his ilk. From now on every Muslim is a legitimate suspect and every non-Muslim is a potential victim, with self-defense strategies understood and applied.
Turkey shot down a Russian jet. No gain, but plenty of damage to its economy. Russia gave up one jet to Turkey and has made its military presence in Syria and the strategic eastern Mediterranean permanent.
Turkey can no longer speak to Russia about the possibility of ousting Assad.
Putin seems to be making sure that NATO will do nothing.
At this year’s G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, said that the radical jihadist Islamic State (IS) was being financed by donors from at least 40 countries, including some G-20 member states — clearly pointing his finger, without naming names, at Saudi Arabia and Turkey. A few days later, two Turkish F-16 jets shot down a Russian SU-24 warplane, and claimed that the Russian jet had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds on the country’s Syrian border — a violation Russia denies. This was the first time a Soviet or Russian military aircraft was shot down by a NATO air force since the end of WWII.
As details began to emerge from the mass murder in California on Wednesday, it became perfectly clear that the perpetrators had set out to emulate the behavior of their Islamist brethren throughout the world.
Whether the Muslim Bonnie and Clyde — hiding in plain sight by “living the American dream” in San Bernardino — belonged to a particular terrorist organization has not yet been established.
But the method to the madness of their political-religious ideology was unmistakable. Leaving a 6-month-old baby behind to commit the kind of slaughter that was likely to result in their own deaths is not something that most parents outside of a mental institution, a radical mosque or the Palestinian Authority could understand.
Nor is it fathomable to Western couples recently blessed with a child to endanger that baby every single day of its short life during the period leading up to the massacre by concocting explosives and booby traps in its vicinity. They are too busy worrying about getting some sleep in between feedings and keeping the new member of their family safe, sound, healthy and happy, while trying to adjust their marriage to accommodate it all.
But Syed Farook, a Pakistani-American, and his Saudi wife, Tashfeen Malik, had more than a mere infant on their minds. After all, what is the value of one little baby compared to the greater good of global jihad in the name of Allah?
How much lower will America sink before it regains its senses? Wednesday, two Muslims walked into a Christmas party at a community service center in San Bernardino, California where one worked. They were wearing body armor and video cameras and carrying automatic rifles, pipe bombs and pistols. They opened fire, killed 14, and wounded 17.
The murderers, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik were killed by police.
Speaking to the Daily News, Farook’s father said his son, “was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”
Farook’s neighbor told the paper that over the past two years, Farook exchanged his Western dress for Islamic gowns and grew a beard.
These data points lead naturally to the conclusion that Farook and his wife were jihadists who killed in order to kill in the name of Islam.
But in America of December 2015, natural conclusions are considered irresponsible, at best.
In an interview with CNN following the shooting, US President Barack Obama said the massacre demonstrates that the US needs stricter gun laws. As for the motives of the shooters, Obama shrugged. “We don’t yet know the motives of the shooters,” he insisted.
