RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marathon runners in Boston, Orlando revellers, strollers on the Promenade des Anglais, pop concert patrons in Manchester and, most recently, New York cyclists are victims of Islamic terror. They are also victims of politicians and media enablers who refuse to acknowledge the blindlingly obvious.

Evil has many faces. The recent mass shootings in Las Vegas and in the church in Sutherland Springs in Texas are stark reminders of that. The motives of Stephen Paddock and Devin Kelley remain unclear at this stage. Whether they will ever be brought to light in a conclusive way I don’t know.

The explanation of mental illness is often a first port of call in these kinds of cases. For the most part, that seems to me to be superficial. Anyone who callously murders men, women and children as though they are vermin is undoubtedly unbalanced. This is true whether or not they’ve ever been treated or incarcerated for mental illness. The question to be answered is what else is going on?

Sometimes, the ‘what else’ is clear. When the IRA planted bombs in public places no-one was in doubt about motive, even if those culpable were certifiable maniacs. Motive is central to closure as it is often to prevention.

Motive can come down to personal aggrievement. Disturbingly, that might have been the case for Paddock and Kelley. That remains to be unravelled. What did not require unravelling was the motive of IRA bombers. They openly stated their motive. Equally, those who massacre in the name of Allah are not shy about their motive. And here perspective is required to confound the news cycle.

Those who kill for idiosyncratic personal reasons are in a quite different and much less threatening category than those who systematically kill for a cause. Kelley’s church shooting on November 5, in which he killed 26 people and injured another 20, is horrific on any scale. However, it should not at all supplant in our minds Sayfullo Saipov mowing down cyclists in a rented truck in Lower Manhattan on October 31, killing eight and injuring eleven.

The reason is clear. Saipov’s crime is one of over 30,000 similarly motivated crimes since 9/11. All of these crimes are acts of Islamic terrorism. All form part of a global jihad committed to the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. This is international serial killing on steroids.

It requires no unravelling of motive. Simply read the Koran. What it requires is resolute combatting. But how? Our political leaders are quislings. Most of them anyway.

Police have named the man accused of stabbing two people in the dressing room area of Macy’s at the Mall of America on Sunday.

Officials identified the 20-year-old suspect as Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahaman of Minneapolis. Police are calling this incident a botched theft attempt.

According to Bloomington Police Chief Jeff Potts, Abdirahaman went into a dressing room in the men’s department and attempted to steal some property.

The victim was stabbed after finding the suspect pawing through his belongings in the dressing room. When family members rushed in to help, a second victim was slashed. Potts said family members were able to disarm the suspect, and judging by his mug shot, they managed to rough him up a bit too.

The melee and ensuing police response alarmed nearby shoppers, who were waiting in line with their kids to see Santa Claus.

Officers quickly arrived at the scene and took Abdirahaman into custody.

Via KARE 11:

Potts said two adult male victims were brought to the hospital. Alexander Sanchez, 19, suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries to his face and upper body, and remains at HCMC, according to police.

John Sanchez, 25, was treated for stab wounds to his upper body and has been released from HCMC, Bloomington police say.

Potts said the suspect had “minor, superficial wounds” and was transported to jail.

Abdirahaman is being held on two counts of probable cause first-degree assault.

Our national discourse has blinded itself to the fact that, although the world is full of terrorists, nearly all act on behalf of causes irrelevant to America. Nor do we try to explain how the causes of foreign states and their satellite groups have helped create the wave of terrorism that now washes over us. The following tries to provide that explanation.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/11/reflections-on-terrorism-what-causes-whose-causes/

In a nutshell: Some states—for example, Cuba and the Soviet Union/Russia—use terrorism as an adjunct of foreign policy driven partly by ideology. For others, like Iran, terrorist groups such as Hezbollah are straightforward extensions of their apparatus. The Muslim world’s regimes use terrorism instead of open warfare. Politics-by-terrorism is the default mode of the Third World’s domestic politics as well. Saudi Arabia, the munificent mother house of Wahhabism, is in a particular category. Whenever states have used or fostered terrorist groups or motivated terrorists by ideology, they have set in motion people and events that have their own independent dynamics.

Some terrorism was explicitly crafted to go against America. The prime example is the Soviet Union’s Tricontinental Organization, which held its founding conference in Havana in 1965 under a banner of crossed submachine guns and was supported by a bureaucracy in Prague, which involved groups from around the world, including the then-aggressively secular Palestine Liberation Organization and some Islamist groups. The Latin American terrorist groups patronized by Cuba, including Colombia’s FARC, have notable anti-American roots.

But the anti-American focus of the Muslim world’s terrorism is a creature of circumstances, in which the United States itself has played a role. While Islam is foreign to and incompatible with America, there is nothing specifically anti-American about it. The Iranian revolution’s anti-American focus had nothing to do with Shia theology and everything with the fact that it was working against the American-allied Shah with the Soviet Union’s help.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded to purge the Muslim world of Western influence. Its modern theorist, Sayyid Qutb, saw America as repugnant but he did not necessarily view it as an enemy. Aware of this, the State Department and CIA have bent U.S. policy backward to make friends with Islamists—all to no avail, because America continues to take part in maintaining that influence, sometimes by supporting its geopolitical allies, such as the Saudi monarchy. It was in support of the Saudis that the U.S. government stopped Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. After that, secular Saddam fostered all manner of terrorism against America, cleverly doing so in Islam’s name.

Willful Ignorance
The point here is the Muslim terrorists who were set in motion against America in Islam’s name on behalf of whomever and for whatever raison d’etat often merged religious reasons, secular reasons, and reasons of private interest seamlessly. The U.S. ruling class has never understood this. George W. Bush’s argument that U.S. troops in Iraq were fighting the terrorists there so we would not have to fight them here was willful ignorance.

Post-Saddam Iraq was overrun by terrorists, alright. But they were Sunni and Shia terrorists terrorizing to subdue each other’s communities. In 2003, they had nothing against America. The one out of four Iraqi Arabs who were Sunni, having ruled the Shia (and Kurds) brutally for their own benefit during and before the Saddam era, reacted to the Shia’s new assertiveness by trying to terrorize them into continuing their privileges.

Every time some Muslim bombs, beheads, shoots, runs over, and otherwise terrorizes the likes of us in New York, Paris, London, Madrid, Boston, Barcelona, San Bernardino, or any other Western city, the Euro-American ruling class asks whether he acted in concert with international organizations. Decades ago, it asked about connections with states. It breathes a collective sigh of relief when, most of the time, it learns the terrorist had “self-radicalized,” mostly through the internet.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/12/reflections-on-terrorism-idiots-in-paradise/

Thinking of such terrorists as “idiots”—unorganized, capable only of small harm—gives a false sense of safety. Why? Contemporary Euro-American society protects terrorists from those upon whom they prey, and provides all they need to kill and multiply. Given such a paradisiacal environment, terrorists need neither genius nor organization to wreak havoc. The idiots are not the “self-radicalized” terrorists, but the ones who think that their lack of obvious connections to international organizations makes us, somehow, less endangered.

To understand why the ubiquitous “terrorism-by-idiots” that we are now experiencing is inherently more dangerous than episodic acts on behalf of smart states, realize how this form of terrorism evolved from previous ones.

The Old, State-Sponsored Terror
When one state wages war on another by terrorism, it challenges the victim and focuses its collective response. Prudent practitioners of terrorism—the Soviet Union, Egypt under Gamal Nasser, Syria, contemporary Iran—have kept their sponsorship within the bounds of their Euro-American and Israeli victims’ tolerance. The Saudi government protects itself by touting opposition to terrorism, even as countless princelings are the world’s biggest financiers of violent Islamist ideology.

Over the past half-century, as the bounds of western societies’ tolerance stretched and the number of anti-Western terrorists multiplied, anti-Western terrorism acquired its own dynamic—what had been a tool of states, more or less calibrated to concrete state interests, morphed into a field of endeavor for groups ever more diverse and less dependent.

A northeast Ohio man who gunned down two men and wounded three others this past February is headed to prison. A jury has convicted him of double murder, and today the jury recommended that the judge hand down a sentence of 30 years to life, sparing him the death penalty. The judge then gave Nasser Hamad of Howlett, Ohio, a sentence of life in prison.

Hamad had claimed he acted in self-defense during the February 25th incident, and then during the trial claimed that the shooting was due to PTSD. He and his attorney also said that the charges against him were part of an “Islamophobic” conspiracy against him because he is Arab and Muslim.

They repeatedly demanded that the surviving victims of his shooting be charged with hate crimes.

During today’s sentencing hearing, Hamad said that he hasn’t received adequate counsel. Hamad was convicted last week on two charges of aggravated murder and multiple counts of attempted murder.

As I reported here at PJ Media last March, the incident was prompted by a months-long feud between families and taunts by Hamad on social media. The Youngstown Vindicator describes what happened:

Hamad “acknowledged” that the fight had ended at the point where he went into the house and retrieved his gun, the filing says. He also acknowledged that the five were in the van when he walked the 70 feet from his front door to the van and fired nine to 10 shots at the five.

When the bullets ran out, Hamad went back into the house and got a second ammunition magazine. “Again, he did not call 911, lock himself securely in his home and wait for police,” the filing says. CONTINUE AT SITE

The new issue of the Islamic State’s weekly al-Naba newsletter includes a page of tips for lone jihadists that emphasized their first course of action in future attacks should be to escape from the site and live to kill again.

The advice comes after last week’s issue in which ISIS acknowledged Manhattan terror suspect Sayfullo Saipov as “one of the soldiers of the Islamic State of America,” but did not mention him by name, panned the size of the Home Depot rental truck he used in the West Side bike path attack, and noted the high casualty toll of the Oct. 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
(ISIS al-Naba graphic)

ISIS has also not issued a formal claim for the Halloween New York attack through their Amaq news agency, perhaps out of disappointment that Saipov was captured brandishing a paintball gun and BB gun after their propaganda has urged terrorists to become martyrs or elude capture and conduct serial attacks.

With a wash of blood over a Paris cityscape, the full-page graphic faintly shows a masked man peering through binoculars, checking bullets in a magazine, and aiming a gun. The two-year anniversary of the coordinated Paris attacks, including the massacre at the Bataclan concert hall, is Monday; the pro-ISIS Wafa’ Media Foundation released a propaganda poster this week showing the Eiffel Tower extending upward as a rifle and vowing to “kill the young before the older.” CONTINUE AT SITE