http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/campus-jihad-british-style/print/ Ah, college. The memories! Sitting under a shady tree on the quad reading Twelfth Night. Studying in your dorm room for the big test while “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” plays on a stereo down the hall. Going to a Muslim Student Union event at which the guest lecturer urges you and your fellow students “not to be […]
http://washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?SectionID=31&SubSectionID=49&ArticleID=18686&TM=61751.12 President Obama spent his first term pushing from power long-standing Arab allies in Egypt and Tunisia; seeking to engage the now blood-soaked Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad; pulling his punches against Iran’s nuclear program; and putting “daylight” between his administration and Israel. Now for his second term, he has nominated for the highest posts bearing […]
http://dianawest.net/
Not one of the 23 executive orders that President Obama signed — flanked by schoolchildren whom none of us want to see murdered and before an audience that included relatives of murdered schoolchildren — would have prevented the massacre at Sandy Hook.
Did the main idea of the sentence above come through — that the president’s latest orders would not have stopped the heavily armed monster who entered a Connecticut school last month and killed 20 children and six adults? Or was your brain overwhelmed by anxiety signals arising from the imagery of vulnerable youngsters?
The overwhelming imagery is no accident. It’s emotional manipulation, and I’ve never seen a more lowdown exercise of it than the White House’s “gun violence” event this week. What President Obama put the nation through was the propaganda equivalent of a slasher movie, a disgustingly crude attempt to jam our emotional buttons and frighten us into surrendering more of our rights to live free of centralized government surveillance and control.
Such pandering, of course, fails to address the cultural factors — godlessness, fatherlessness, a pornographically violent “entertainment”-media complex — that drive this most transgressive form of violence. Postmodern developments all, they help us see why, for example, well-armed settlers opening up the West didn’t ever shoot up the village school.
Here’s what I call “Obama’s Choice”: Do Americans want happy, live children or some old constitutional provision? Do members of Congress — the president’s main target along with the Constitution — want an “‘A’ grade from the gun lobby,” as he put it, or to give parents “peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade”? Gazing into the shiny button-eyes of the four children on stage, America heard the president say: “If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”
Yes, yes, yes, we reply. Yes, Mr. President, go ahead and sign the executive orders that put in place what amounts to a national database of kooks as defined by federal bureaucrats who consider conservative beliefs and military personnel to be crazy automatically. Yes, empower and encourage our doctors to add to that registry innocent patients who have committed no crime but who, like returning veterans, may have sought counseling. (Meanwhile, continue to permit confidentiality laws to silence attorneys with knowledge of clients’ actual criminality.) Outlaw the sale of high-powered guns and ammunition — equalizers in the face of home invaders, terrorists, drug gangs and, yes, a democratic government turned tyrannical. And tell me again why the Department of Homeland Security — emphasis on “homeland” — acquired more than 1 billion rounds of ammunition (including hundreds of thousands of hollow-point bullets) last year? And why did DHS order an additional 200,000 hollow-point bullets in December? What possible domestic threat requires a stockpile like that?
But I am looking away from the hearts and bunnies at the White House. I am supposed to be concentrating on the letters from little ones who, in the wake of Sandy Hook, President Obama said, asked him to take such measures. As the president put it: “On the letter that Julia wrote me, she said, ‘I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard.'”
There was a burst of laughter, perhaps unexpected, given that the president was winding up for a solemn pledge. “Julia, I will try very hard,” Obama continued, taking up his gauntlet against enemy-Congress on behalf of Julia and her four brothers and sisters. As the president also told us she wrote: “I know I would not be able to bear the thought of losing any of them.”
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/01/18/american-hostages-to-jihad-in-algeria-1640-to-present/
American Hostages to Jihad in Algeria: 1640 to Present
Early Wednesday (1/16/13) jihadists seized [2] a gas field in Amenas [3], eastern Algeria, near the border with Libya, taking hostage just under 200 workers, predominantly Algerians, but also some forty foreigners, among them an undisclosed number of Americans. Speaking to France 24, an unnamed hostage claimed [4] the prisoners were being forced to wear explosive belts. The hostage added [4] that their captors were heavily armed and had threatened to detonate the base should the Algerian army attempt to storm it.
The jihadist attackers, in a statement [5] sent to ANI, a Mauritanian news agency, claimed “the operation was a response to flagrant interference of Algeria, [which] opened its airspace to the French Air Force [who] bombed areas of northern Mali,” and demanded [6] the “immediate halt of the aggression against our own in Mali.” Reference was also made [5] to “the participation of Algeria in the war with France,” as “being a betrayal of the blood of the martyrs of Algerians who were killed in the fight against French colonialism.” Al Mulathameen (“The Masked Brigade [7]”), who apparently prepared the announcement [5], is associated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda. The group insisted [6] it was holding more than 40 “crusaders” —a prototypical jihadist reference to non-Muslims — “including seven Americans, two French, two British as well as other citizens of various European nationalities.” Algeria’s interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, maintained the raid was orchestrated by Mokhtar Belmokhtar [8], an Algerian who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and has reportedly established his own group in the Sahara
Initial reports Thursday 1/17/13 (here [4], here [6]) indicated that perhaps half of the ~ 40 foreign workers, including some of the Americans, as well as ~30 to 40 of the ~ 150 Algerians held captive may have escaped their jihadist kidnappers. An ominous AP story [9] then reported the jihadist captors claimed 35 hostages, and 15 of their members were killed, after Algerian helicopters attacked the gas facility in a strafing run. Reuters subsequently reported [10] thirty hostages were killed, including seven foreign hostages, along with eleven of their jihadist captors, during the Algerian military assault. Following the violent conclusion of the standoff, US Today [11] later repeated both Algerian claims that 600 hostages in total had been freed, and the insistence by the jihadists that 35 of the hostages had been killed, purportedly including 5 Americans. But ABC News [12], citing unnamed “U.S. officials,” claimed five Americans who were at the Algerian natural gas facility when it was raided by the jihadists are now safe, and believed to have left the country.
By Friday (1/18/13) morning, British Prime Minister David Cameron [13] told lawmakers Algerian forces were “still pursuing terrorists,” while attempting to secure a “large and complex site,” and searching for missing hostages. Cameron noted 30 Britons had been unaccounted for Thursday (1/17/13), but as of Friday morning, that number was considerably smaller. According to Fox News [14], an American from Texas was still missing. Senior U.S. defense officials also told Fox News [14] that Thursday, two Americans had escaped unharmed; five other Americans who had been at the enormous Amenas facility were able to avoid being taken captive when the terrorists first attacked early Wednesday.
Wednesday (1/16/13), by sheer (if bitter) coincidence, a very apropos book I ordered because of my curiosity about the earliest American experiences of Islam [15]—150 years before the US became an international power (and convenient excuse for jihadist aggression [16])—arrived in the mail. Entitled, “A journal, of the captivity and sufferings of John Foss [17]; several years a prisoner at Algiers,” (published 1798), the book chronicles Foss’s seizure at sea in a trading frigate, October 25, 1793 (“As we judged ourselves to be about 35 leagues [3 nautical miles] westward of Cape St. Vincent” [Portugal]), by Algerian naval jihadists [15] while en route from Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Cadiz, southwestern Spain. Foss, and his fellow seamen were told [17] by their Algerian jihadist captor Rais Hudga Mahomet Salamia,
…now you are slaves and must be treated as such, and do not think that you will be treated worse than you really deserve, for your bigotry and superstition in believing in a man who was crucified by the Jews, and disregarding the true doctrine of God’s last and greatest prophet, Mahomet
Foss was held in captivity under abhorrent, brutal conditions [17] and put to hard labor in Algiers and its vicinity for two years until the nascent American government ransomed him and the surviving members of his captured vessel, The Polly. Before elaborating on Foss’s plight, and telling observations of Algerian Muslim society, recounted as historian Robert C. Davis [18] has acknowledged in a reliable, credible manner, an “…unembellished, Yankee way of laying out a tale, however horrific its details,” it must be noted that his experience as an American captive of Algerian naval jihadism was antedated by those of New Englanders dating back to 1640, during the colonial era. Abolitionist, and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner [19] (1811-1874), in his 1853, “White Slavery in the Barbary States [20],” documented the following accounts, quoting from 17th century New England town records, and letters:
…in 1640, “one Austin a man of good estate,” returning discontented to England from Qunipiack [Qunnipiac], now New Haven [Connecticut], on his way “was taken by the Turks, and his wife and family were carried to Algiers, and sold there as slaves.”…Instances now thicken. A ship, sailing from Charlestown [Rhode Island], in 1678, was taken by a corsair [naval jihadist], and carried into Algiers, whence its passengers and crew never returned. They probably died in slavery. Among these was Dr. Daniel Mason, a graduate of Harvard College, and the earliest of that name on the list; also James Ellison, the mate. The latter, in a testamentary letter addressed to his wife, and dated at Algiers, June 30, 1679, desired her to redeem out of captivity two of his companions. At the same period William Harris, a person of consequence in the colony, one of the associates of Roger Williams in the first planting of Providence, and now in the sixty-eighth year of his age, sailing from Boston for England on public business, was also taken by a corsair, and carried into Algiers. On the 23rd February, 1679, this veteran…together with all the crew were sold into slavery. The fate of his companions is unknown; but Mr. Harris, after remaining in this condition more than a year, obtained his freedom at the cost of $1200, called by him “the price of a good farm.”
Returning to Foss’s memoir, it opens [17] with experiential advice, coupled to an appeal:
The importance as well as utility of having a work of this kind generally disseminated through the United States, must be apparent to every thinking person. The suffering of our fellow citizens in Algiers were great indeed! They ought not to be too easily forgotten. Every step to avoid a repetition of them will undoubtedly be pursued. But should, at any future period, from causes not seen, more Americans be doomed to wear the galling chain (God grant that period may never arrive), a knowledge of the habits, manners, and customs of the place, may not be unserviceable. From the tender and feeding soul, a perusal of the following pages, must call forth the tear of sympathy. The hardships—the sufferings—the agonizing tortures, which our fellow citizens had to endure, while groaning under all the horrors of Mahometan vassalage, of Algerine tyranny, must call into action every tender sigh and virgin drops of pity embalm the memory of those whose fate it was to sink under the weight of accumulated woes.—Alas! they’re gone.
Foss also preempts [17] any criticism that the account might somehow have exaggerated his travails given the nature of Islamic doctrine and practice, certainly by the Muslim votaries of Algeria.
Some of my descriptions of the treatment of the Captives may appear rather wire-drawn, but then my readers ought to be informed that these merciless Barbarians are taught by their religion to treat the Christian Captives with unexampled cruelty, and that in so doing they do God a service! Hence to expect pity or commiseration from those sons of Ishmael would be as absurd, as to expect a shrubbery from the burning deserts, or cooling streams, from the parched plains of Arabia.
Upon arriving in Algiers (November 1, 1793), Foss recounts [17],
…we were rowed onshore, and landed amidst the shouts and huzzas of thousands of malicious barbarians. We were conducted to the Dey’s [Algerian ruler’s] palace by a guard, and as we passed through the streets, our ears were stunned with shouts, clapping of hands and other acclamations of joy from the inhabitants; thanking God for their great success and victories over so many Christian dogs and unbelievers, the appellation they generally give to all Christians.
During their brief audience [17] before the Dey, the captives were told “he was determined never to make peace with the United States,” * and referring directly to those Americans before him he added, “now I have got you, you christian dogs, you shall eat stones.” Dispatched to the Dey’s slave pen or bagno, the enslaved prisoners were [17] stripped naked, issued their year’s allotment of slave’s garments, and chained:
…it [the clothing allotment] contained a blanket, a capoot (which is a sort of jacket with a head) a waistcoat made something like a frock, to draw over the head, it not being open at the belly, a shirt, with neither collar nor wristbands, a pair of trowsers [trousers], made somewhat like a woman’s petticoat, (with this difference,) the bottom being sewed up, and two holes to put the legs through and a pair of slippers…[T]hey put a chain on each man’s legs, reaching up to the shoulder, and weighing about 25, or 30lb., this was our first night’s lodging in this doleful mansion of horror and despair
Robert Davis’s brief assessment [18] of Foss’s journal has concluded, appositely, that it captures the “two iron realities” of Algerian slavery—arduous labor, and death. The high mortality was a consequence of chronic malnutrition, traumatic work accidents from the dangerous tasks imposed, and mistreatment (i.e., beatings, including with a bastinado, or cudgel to the soles of the feet, commonly repeated 150-200 times). But Davis’s brief overview ignores [18] Foss’s rich narrative account of the Islamically-inspired mores he witnessed during his captivity, and recorded in unapologetic, disturbing detail. These latter descriptions of Foss—consistently omitted by Davis and contemporary academics of his mindset—are redolent with an Islamic Weltanschauung that persists, all too broadly, into our era.
Blinding ourselves—or allowing academic, media, and political “elites” to obfuscate this tragic and dangerous reality for us—continues to put basic American security at unnecessary risk. Before letting John Foss’s eloquent, frank words from 1798 speak [17] for themselves, I note with a glimmer of optimism in the face of the tragic events in Amenas, Algeria, this uncharacteristically candid (and likely painful) admission in Wednesday’s (1/16/13) New York Times coverage [21]:
The United States is traditionally a major importer of Algerian crude, although over the last few years much of those imports have been replaced by new oil production in American shale oil fields in North Dakota and Texas.
Key extracts recording what John Foss [17] observed during his captivity in Algeria on the conditions of Algeria’s American (and other Christian) slaves, Algerian Muslim attitudes and behaviors towards non-Muslims, and each other, and the Islamic motivations for what he witnessed, published circa 1798, follow:
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/337983
We don’t have a spending problem.”
Those soothing words are apparently none other than Barack Obama’s. As the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore reported, House Speaker John Boehner says Obama insisted to him that America has a problem with health care, not federal expenditures.
Maybe the spendaholic-in-chief is missing something. America is being tortured by a free-spending federal government that acts irresponsibly on good days and illegally on bad ones.
In just the first quarter of fiscal year 2013, Washington dug Americans $293 billion deeper down the hole, the Congressional Budget Office announced January 8. That pace likely will make this the fifth consecutive year with a federal deficit exceeding $1 trillion. This was obscene enough when George W. Bush botched the 2008 financial meltdown. Since then, Obama gleefully has frolicked in red ink.
Also, federal welfare spending is set to increase 80 percent between now and fiscal year 2022 and total $11 trillion. What fuels this explosion in the dole? According to a January 15 analysis by Senate Budget Committee Republicans, bureaucrats use “aggressive outreach to those who say they do not need financial assistance.” Also, “recruitment workers are even instructed on how to ‘overcome the word “no”’ when individuals resist enrollment.”
This week, the Republican-led House approved $33 billion in Hurricane Sandy assistance. This sum, atop another $17 billion, includes such non-sequiturs as $10 million for FBI paychecks, $50 million to plant trees around America, $150 million for fisheries, and $2 billion for interstate highways.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamas-dangerous-fantasy-of-al-qaeda-defeated/?print=1
When he met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington last Friday, Barack Obama said this about the war in Afghanistan: “We achieved our central goal … or have come very close to achieving our central goal, which is to de-capacitate al-Qaeda, to dismantle them, to make sure that they can’t attack us again.”
He said this four days after a Muslim imam who was a soldier in the Afghan National Army opened fire on a group of his British “allies,” murdering one of them and wounding six. The Taliban, al-Qaeda’s partner in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack, which was yet another in an ever-lengthening string of “insider” attacks by Afghan forces against those who are putting themselves at risk to train and assist them. The BBC reports that “in 2012, more than 60 Nato service personnel, and a quarter of the British troops who died in Helmand, were killed in such attacks.”
The Taliban is not al-Qaeda, although the distinction on the ground in Afghanistan may be exceedingly fine, too fine to be discerned by the average NATO soldier when the Afghan he is trying to teach how to be a military man turns the gun he has just given him on his benefactor. In any case, the appalling fact that “a quarter of the British troops who died in Helmand” perished in such attacks indicates that the enemy in Afghanistan is far from being either “de-capacitated” or dismantled, and still has the ability to attack us.
Nonetheless, Obama officials keep doing the victory dance over an al-Qaeda that they repeatedly imply is on the verge of extinction. Jeh Johnson, general counsel at the Defense Department, recently said that “military pursuit of al-Qaida” should end soon. His reasoning was apparently that al-Qaeda is now so severely damaged that we will soon reach a “tipping point” after which military action against them will no longer be necessary, and local police can handle it.
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/01/18/keep-fracking-america/?singlepage=true
Recent events in Mali and Libya, not to mention Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, Bengla Desh, Somalia, and several other pleasure spots remind us — if such a reminder were necessary — that the Islamic world is, to put it mildly, not a fun place to be. According to religionofpeace.com [1], Islamic terrorists have accounted for 20,261 deadly terror attacks since 9/11. Just this random Thursday, January 17, the website reports the following:
2013.01.17 (Hillah, Iraq) – al-Qaeda detonate a car bomb outside a soccer stadium in a Shia neighborhood, killing at least seven.
2013.01.17 (Dujail, Iraq) – Eleven Shia pilgrims are sent to Allah by dedicated Sunni car bombers.
2013.01.17 (Garissa, Kenya) – Religious extremists burst into a restaurant and gun down five patrons.
2013.01.17 (Narathiwat, Thailand) – Islamic ‘insurgents’ murder a school truck driver in front of seven children.
2013.01.17 (Pattani, Thailand) – A 78-year-old farmer is shot to death in a bath tub by Muslim terrorists.
2013.01.16 (Idlib, Syria) – al-Nusra suicide bombers massacre two dozen Syrians in an urban area.
Now it’s undeniable that back in the twentieth century, Germany, the Soviet Union and China were yet bigger killing machines, but in our time the Islamic world is the problem.
Plot Summary for
“Have Gun – Will Travel” (1957)
Professional gunfighter Paladin was a West Point graduate who, after the Civil War, settled into San Francisco’s Hotel Carlton were he awaited responses to his business card: over the picture of a chess knight “Have Gun, Will Travel … Wire Paladin, San Francisco.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323968304578245581353840710.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
The Senator says Chuck Hagel no longer believes what he said.
Chuck Schumer, the senior Senator from New York and Harry Reid wannabe, is not currently a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nor has he ever served on it in his 14 years in the Senate, or on its House counterpart during his 18 years as a Congressman from New York City. So of course he’s uniquely qualified to pronounce on the subject of Chuck Hagel’s fitness to serve as Secretary of Defense.
That is what some of our media friends are saying now that Mr. Schumer has announced his support for the nominee following a 90-minute meeting on Monday. Mr. Schumer—who calls himself the Senate’s “Shomer Israel,” or “guardian of Israel”—had previously played coy about his views of Mr. Hagel, noting in a statement that he had “genuine concerns over certain aspects of his record on Israel and Iran.”But all that was put to rest during their meeting. Mr. Schumer reports that Mr. Hagel disavowed his former opposition to unilateral U.S. sanctions or military strikes on Iran. He reversed his former support for opening direct talks with the leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group.
He promised to implement a provision in the 2013 defense bill giving servicewomen greater access to abortion, something he had repeatedly opposed as a Senator. He walked back his former opposition to the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay soldiers. And he said he regretted using the term “Jewish lobby” in reference to pro-Israel groups.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/prop-a-palooza-the-use-and-abuse-of-kiddie-human-shields?f=must_reads
THE ARABS HAVE BEEN USING KIDDIES FOR SHIELDS BY HIDING AMONG THEM…THEY ARE ALSO THE PROPS USED IN THE AL DURA LIBEL AND IN ALL ARAB/ISRAEL WARS…..TO INCITE BLAME AND HATRED FOR ISRAEL….NOT A NEW TRICK…RSK
The president of the United States released a binder full of new gun-control executive orders on Wednesday. Instead of standing alone, bearing full responsibility for the imperial actions he is about to take, President Obama surrounded himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. This is the most cynical in Beltway theatrical staging — a feckless attempt to invoke “For the Children” immunity by hiding behind them.
What has happened to the deliberative process in this country? Public debate in Washington has deteriorated into Sesame Street sing-alongs. We are already inundated with logical fallacies: argumentum ad populum (it’s popular, therefore it’s true); argumentum ad nauseam (if you repeat it often enough, it’ll become truth); argumentum ad hominem (sabotage the person, sabotage the truth); and argumentum ad verecundiam (if my favorite authority says it’s true, it’s true).
To that list we can now add “argumentum ad filium”: If politicians appeal to the children, it’s unassailably good and true. The Obama White House has shamelessly employed this kiddie human shield strategy at every turn to blunt substantive criticism and dissent.
