Recently in War on Terror Category
The self-delusion of secular Jews - UnHerd
Playwright David Mamet writes:
"Western Jews have traditionally voted for liberalism, which is to say for inclusion in some imaginary coalition of the right-thinking. We support the United Nations, a Potemkin village of remittance men hired to denounce Israel, and we elect politicians who kowtow to murderous antisemites. We send our children to elite universities, which teach antisemitism and support anti-Jewish demonstrations, and then advise them to "stay safe". Can you name another group which behaves similarly?...
"Mike Tyson remarked that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the nose. Diaspora Leftist Jews have tried to escape punishment by staying out of the ring -- and acknowledging our enemies' right to an opinion, and our responsibility as Jews to defend that right at whatever cost to our interests. The American Civil Liberties Union stands up for the right of protestors to demonstrate -- that is, to "act out" -- in favour of genocide, much as their co-religionary Aaron explained to Moses: "What could I do? They took the gold and threw it in the pot and this calf came out, and we worshipped it."...
"Jews were not instructed to worship fairness (a human concept, incapable of absolute determination), but to worship God and keep his ordinances. Indeed, a devotion to God and the Word of God is the sole protection we poor weak humans have against doing evil. Our devotion will not protect us from the evil others do, however -- and that's why we have armies."
This report from Australia illustrates what Real ID is all about. Worries about your ability to get on an airplane was just leverage to get you to scream at your state legislators until they agreed to surrender your personal data to the Feds. (It worked!)
"Driver's licences will be added to the Commonwealth Government's already vast biometric databases after it struck an agreement with the states and territories, handing authorities access to an unprecedented level of information about citizens.
"A system known as "the interoperability Hub" is already in place in Australia, allowing agencies to take an image from CCTV and other media and run it against a national database of passport pictures of Australian citizens -- a process known as "The Capability".
"But soon driver's licences will be added to the system, allowing both government and private entities to access your photo, age and address.
"It is a $21 million system being sold as a way to tackle terrorism and make commercial services more secure.
"But experts warn people now risk losing control of their biometric identity entirely as commercial interests, governments and organised crime gangs all move to capture more personal metadata for their own gain."
DVIDS - News - Oklahoma Cavalry unit inherits Active Duty mission in Afghanistan
?KABUL, Afghanistan - Oklahoma Army National Guard members of 1st Squadron, 180th Cavalry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, held a transfer of authority ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, Dec. 31, 2017, alongside members of 3rd Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, representing the transfer of mission from one organization to another.
"Nearly 500 members of the 180th are currently deployed to Afghanistan in support of the NATO-led train, advise and assist mission, Operation Resolute Support. In this case, the 180th replaces the 3-73rd for the Kabul Security Forces mission; a mission focused primarily on adviser force protection....
"While deployed, the 180th will work alongside other coalition forces, including the British Army, Royal Danish Army and Mongolian Armed Forces, all of which play a key role in the Resolute Support Mission, from base defense operations, site force protection, adviser force protection, to incident response."
BRRRT / A-10 Thunderbolt II Firing Sound | Know Your Meme
It may sound like a flatulent warthog, but it's really an A-10 delivering hundreds of 30 mm, armor-piercing, depleted-uranium rounds. For US ground troops, it's the sound of deliverance.
MORE: A-10 Warthog is now a possible choice of sexual identity.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly
The first part of the speech focuses on Israel's rising reputation in the world, as the nation builds deeper ties with more nations, as nations seek Israel's advice in counterterrorism, water conservation, agriculture, and other fields. Netanyahu looks forward to the day when UN ambassadors stop passing resolutions against Israel because their governments back home have strong, positive relationships with Israel.
Netanyahu reviewed the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and identifies its root:
"But this conflict has never been about the settlements or about establishing a Palestinian state. It's always been about the existence of a Jewish state, a Jewish state in any boundary....
"Had the Palestinians said yes to a Jewish state in 1947, there would have been no war, no refugees and no conflict. And when the Palestinians finally say yes to a Jewish state, we will be able to end this conflict once and for all."
Netanyahu went on to contrast official Palestinian applause for violence against Israelis with official Israeli crackdowns on anti-Palestinian extremists.
"Now here's the tragedy, because, see, the Palestinians are not only trapped in the past, their leaders are poisoning the future.
"I want you to imagine a day in the life of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, I'll call him Ali. Ali wakes up before school, he goes to practice with a soccer team named after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the murder of a busload of 37 Israelis.
"At school, Ali attends an event sponsored by the Palestinian Ministry of Education honoring Baha Alyan, who last year murdered three Israeli civilians. On his walk home, Ali looks up at a towering statue erected just a few weeks ago by the Palestinian Authority to honor Abu Sukar, who detonated a bomb in the center of Jerusalem, killing 15 Israelis.
"When Ali gets home, he turns on the TV and sees an interview with a senior Palestinian official, Jibril Rajoub, who says that if he had a nuclear bomb, he'd detonate it over Israel that very day. Ali then turns on the radio and he hears President Abbas's adviser, Sultan Abu al-Einein, urging Palestinians, here's a quote, 'to slit the throats of Israelis wherever you find them.' Ali checks his Facebook and he sees a recent post by President Abbas's Fatah Party calling the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics a 'heroic act'. On YouTube, Ali watches a clip of President Abbas himself saying, 'We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.' Direct quote.
"Over dinner, Ali asks his mother what would happen if he killed a Jew and went to an Israeli prison? Here's what she tells him. She tells him he'd be paid thousands of dollars each month by the Palestinian Authority. In fact, she tells him, the more Jews he would kill, the more money he'd get. Oh, and when he gets out of prison, Ali would be guaranteed a job with the Palestinian Authority....
"We in Israel don't do this. We educate our children for peace. In fact, we recently launched a pilot program, my government did, to make the study of Arabic mandatory for Jewish children so that we can better understand each other, so that we can live together side-by-side in peace.
"Of course, like all societies Israel has fringe elements. But it's our response to those fringe elements, it's our response to those fringe elements that makes all the difference.
"Take the tragic case of Ahmed Dawabsha. I'll never forget visiting Ahmed in the hospital just hours after he was attacked. A little boy, really a baby, he was badly burned. Ahmed was the victim of a horrible terrorist act perpetrated by Jews. He lay bandaged and unconscious as Israeli doctors worked around the clock to save him.
"No words can bring comfort to this boy or to his family. Still, as I stood by his bedside I told his uncle, 'This is not our people. This is not our way.' I then ordered extraordinary measures to bring Ahmed's assailants to justice and today the Jewish citizens of Israel accused of attacking the Dawabsha family are in jail awaiting trial.
"Now, for some, this story shows that both sides have their extremists and both sides are equally responsible for this seemingly endless conflict.
"But what Ahmed's story actually proves is the very opposite. It illustrates the profound difference between our two societies, because while Israeli leaders condemn terrorists, all terrorists, Arabs and Jews alike, Palestinian leaders celebrate terrorists. While Israel jails the handful of Jewish terrorists among us, the Palestinians pay thousands of terrorists among them."
"The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West's will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.
"But al-Qaeda didn't create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West's intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.
"Consider the following propositions:
- There is no truth, only competing agendas.
- All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West's history of racism and colonialism.
- There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
- The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
- Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
- The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
- For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.
- But "oppressed" people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
- When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist's point of view, and make concessions.
"These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, "political correctness" to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism....
"I think it's important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into slitting its own throat."
American female pediatrician Simi Rahman writes:
"You really can't tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.
"And that's the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They're like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there....
"And that's when the absurdity started to really hit home. What in the world were we doing? We were training our children to kowtow without questioning an authority that we believed would keep them safe from evil western ways. And so the community's children went to Sunday school, wore hijab, prayed and fasted. They were enveloped in a Muslim identity that was unlike any that I had experienced before. I was raised in a Muslim country in the Middle East and religion was something we kept in its place, somewhere after school, soccer and cartoons. Here was a more distilled, pure and, most dangerously, a context-free Islam. There were no grandmothers here to sagely tell us which parts of the Quran to turn a blind eye to. There were no older cousins here who skipped Friday prayers and goofed off with their friends instead. Oh no. This was Islam simmered in a sauce of Midwestern sincerity, and boiled down to its dark, concentrated core. This was dangerous.
"As my children grew older, I grew more afraid. I had tolerated their father's insistence on sending them to Sunday school, where mostly they played and learned a few surahs. But as they grew older I knew it would change. A sincerity would creep in to their gaze, teenage rebellion would find just cause in judging your less religious parents as wanting and inferior. Bad Muslims. How many teenagers have started to wear hijab before their own mothers? I've lost count. Mothers who found themselves in this dilemma would choose to join their child on this journey. They would cover too, and as such offered a layer of protection from the ideology by offering perspective.
"I worried though, about the Internet, about radical recruiters posing as friends, finding willing and malleable clay in our unformed children. For we would keep them unformed. We would shield them from western influences in order to protect them, only to create a rift that could be exploited as an entry point. We would in essence be leaving our children vulnerable to radicalization.
"And that is exactly what has been happening. The young girls from Europe and the US who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS, have done so because they're looking for what all teenagers are looking for, a sense of identity, to differentiate themselves from their parents and find a separate identity, the thrill of rebellion, adventure. They can't date, drink or dance, so they might as well Daesh."
Can Islam Be Reformed?: History and human nature say yes :: Daniel Pipes
"Key to Islam's role in public life is Sharia and the many untenable demands it makes on Muslims. Running a government with the minimal taxes permitted by Sharia has proved to be unsustainable; and how can one run a financial system without charging interest? A penal system that requires four men to view an adulterous act in flagrante delicto is impractical. Sharia's prohibition on warfare against fellow Muslims is impossible for all to live up to; indeed, roughly three-quarters of all warfare waged by Muslims has been directed against other Muslims. Likewise, the insistence on perpetual jihad against non-Muslims demands too much.
"To get around these and other unrealistic demands, premodern Muslims developed certain legal fig leaves that allowed for the relaxation of Islamic provisions without directly violating them. Jurists came up with hiyal (tricks) and other means by which the letter of the law could be fulfilled while negating its spirit. For example, various mechanisms were developed to live in harmony with non-Muslim states. There is also the double sale (bai al-inah) of an item, which permits the purchaser to pay a disguised form of interest. Wars against fellow Muslims were renamed jihad.
"This compromise between Sharia and reality amounted to what I dubbed Islam's "medieval synthesis" in my book In the Path of God (1983). This synthesis translated Islam from a body of abstract, infeasible demands into a workable system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia and made the code of law operational. Sharia could now be sufficiently applied without Muslims being subjected to its more stringent demands....
"For anti-Islamist Muslims, the great burden is to develop not just an alternative vision to the Islamist one but an alternative movement to Islamism. The Islamists reached their position of power and influence through dedication and hard work, through generosity and selflessness. Anti-Islamists must also labor, probably for decades, to develop an ideology as coherent and compelling as that of the Islamists, and then spread it. Scholars interpreting sacred scriptures and leaders mobilizing followers have central roles in this process.
"Non-Muslims can help a modern Islam move forward in two ways: first, by resisting all forms of Islamism--not just the brutal extremism of an Osama bin Laden, but also the stealthy, lawful, political movements such as Turkey's AKP. ErdoÄŸan is less ferocious than Bin Laden, but he is more effective and no less dangerous. Whoever values free speech, equality before the law, and other human rights denied or diminished by Sharia must consistently oppose any hint of Islamism.
"Second, non-Muslims should support moderate and Westernizing anti-Islamists. Such figures are weak and fractured today and face a daunting task, but they do exist, and they represent the only hope for defeating the menace of global jihad and Islamic supremacism, then replacing it with an Islam that does not threaten civilization."
Islam's 'Reformation' Is Already Here - and It's Called 'ISIS' - Raymond Ibrahim - American Thinker
"Islam's current reformation follows the same logic of the Protestant Reformation - specifically by prioritizing scripture over centuries of tradition and legal debate - but with antithetical results that reflect the contradictory teachings of the core texts of Christianity and Islam...."
Ibrahim quotes Daniel Pipes on the milder, medieval version of Islam crafted by scholars, but disconnected from the foundational texts and history: "translat[ing] Islam from a body of abstract, infeasible demands [as stipulated in the Koran and Hadith] into a workable system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia and made the code of law operational. Sharia could now be sufficiently applied without Muslims being subjected to its more stringent demands[.] ... [However, w]hile the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists."
"How Christianity and Islam can follow similar patterns of reform but with antithetical results rests in the fact that their scriptures are often antithetical to one another. This is the key point, and one admittedly unintelligible to postmodern, secular sensibilities, which tend to lump all religious scriptures together in a melting pot of relativism without bothering to evaluate the significance of their respective words and teachings."
Ibrahim compares the statements of the New Testament and the Koran on tolerance, apostasy, marriage, and lying. He writes:
"It is precisely because Christian scriptural literalism lends itself to religious freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of women that Western civilization developed the way it did - despite the nonstop propaganda campaign emanating from academia, Hollywood, and other major media that says otherwise.
"And it is precisely because Islamic scriptural literalism is at odds with religious freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of women that Islamic civilization is the way it is - despite the nonstop propaganda campaign emanating from academia, Hollywood, and other major media that says otherwise.
Those in the West waiting for an Islamic "reformation" along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation, on the assumption that it will lead to similar results, must embrace two facts: 1) Islam's reformation is well on its way, and yes, along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation - with a focus on scripture and a disregard for tradition - and for similar historic reasons (literacy, scriptural dissemination, etc.); 2) but because the core teachings of the founders and scriptures of Christianity and Islam markedly differ from one another, Islam's reformation is producing something markedly different.
"Put differently, those in the West calling for an "Islamic reformation" need to acknowledge what it is they are really calling for: the secularization of Islam in the name of modernity, and the trivialization and sidelining of Islamic law from Muslim society....
"That would not be a "reformation" - certainly nothing analogous to the Protestant Reformation.
"Upholding the literal teachings of Christianity is possible within a secular - or any - state. Christ called on believers to "render unto Caesar the things of Caesar [temporal] and unto God the things of God [spiritual]" (Matt. 22:21). For the "kingdom of God" is "not of this world" (John 18:36)....
"On the other hand, mainstream Islam is devoted to upholding the law, and Islamic scripture calls for a fusion between Islamic law - sharia - and the state."
Jeff Dunetz pays tribute to "one of the people most responsible for tuning me into a political geek." Weinstein was working as a government-funded economic development adviser in Pakistan, promoting dairy development, when he was kidnapped from by al-Qaeda. He had been in captivity for three and a half years, during which time the Obama Administration and Pakistani governments did little to secure his release.
