Fort Hood: Workplace violence or act of terror?

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If you think the Fort Hood massacre was a terrorist act by a determined jihadist, rather than an “act of workplace violence that was coincidentally committed by a Muslim who spouted jihadist rhetoric,” consider signing National Review’s petition at Change.org:

Petitioning Chuck Hagel

The Ft. Hood massacre was an Act of Terror

Petition by National Review

The Fort Hood massacre was an act of war carried out by a violent jihadist who had infiltrated our Armed Forces while taking advice and encouragement from Anwar al-Awlaki, who was so clearly an al Qaeda commander that President Obama authorized his wartime killing by a drone strike. We are a nation at war based on a congressional authorization of military force enacted after al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. If the war is to be waged seriously, the government must recognize that the Fort Hood massacre – in which twice as many Americans were killed as were killed in the jihadist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 – was an act of terrorism committed by the enemy. We must honor the sacrifice of those killed and wounded at Fort Hood by acknowledging its true context.

To: Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense

The Administration has designated the Ft. Hood massacre as workplace violence, and not what it was: an Act of Terror. By not designating this event as such an act, it disrespects the lives of the 13 who lost their lives that day, and dozens more who were injured and those helped their fellow soldiers.

Furthermore, Nidal Hassan will not be tried as an enemy combatant, but instead will be court-martialed.

Finally, without an Act of Terror designation, those wounded in defense of our nation will not receive a Purple Heart.

This is outrageous and I call on you to change the official designation now before the trial for Nidal Hassan proceeds any further.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

As of this moment, 340 people have signed the petition.  National Review is looking for 10,000.

Hat tip: Earl

Sweden fiddles while Stockholm burns

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When multiple people send me a link to the same story, it’s obvious that I must talk about it.  The story, which seems impossible to believe but is in fact true, concerns the Swede’s creative approach to dealing with those “youths” who are currently entering their sixth (or is it seventh) day of rioting in Stockholm.

Before I focus on the Swedes, I should say here that it seems downright cavalier for me to remind anyone that these “youths” are Muslims who refuse to assimilate.  After all, Sweden doesn’t want to talk about it, and those of us with a few non-PC brain cells left have figured it out anyway.

In this regard, the PC crowd has managed to turn Muslim “youths” into the Victorian equivalent of piano legs.  Victorians, horrified by the crude honesty of the word “leg,” are reputed to have referred to these piano appendages as “limbs” when they referred to them at all, and some are believed to have gone so far as to cover them with skirts.  Some realities are just too dreadful to contemplate.

As with those piano “limbs,” we know that Muslim rioters are there, but the reality is so devastating for delicate sensibilities that the fine minds on the PC side of the spectrum have concluded that we must refer to them as “youths,” if we have to refer to them at all.  They understand that those with dirty (or racist) minds will know what lurks beneath these gauzy, veiled allusions,  while the pure will be protected from ugly truths.

Now back to Sweden’s creative approach to these euphemistically named “youths”:  Swedish law enforcement is doing nothing at all.  Rather like the Londoners who just milled about aimlessly when the Woolwich murderers slaughtered and then butchered Drummer Lee Rigby, and then trolled the streets for attention and applause, the Swedish police are merely “monitoring” the riots:

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

The Swedes seem to operate under the peculiar belief that Muslim rage will burn itself out.  In fact, Muslim rage may be the one thing that can refute those who rely upon the non-Prophet-approved laws of physics to claim that there is no such thing as “perpetual motion.”  We now know that there is definitely such a thing as “perpetual emotion,” with the laws of physics falling before the reality of Muslim rage.

Muslim rage is a perpetual fire that has burned untamed for more than 1,500 years.  The closest analogy is probably to those burning mountains of tires one reads about periodically.  They, by the mere act of burning, release ever more fuel to stoke their own perpetual flames.

However, even as the Muslim rage caravans passes by, once the dogs of war stop barking, life go on.  In Sweden, while the rioters get a pass, law-abiding Swedes are still in the line of fire.  The Swedish equivalent of “lovely Rita, meter maid” is undeterred by snow, sleet, rain, dark of night, or riot in the streets.  Car owners who were unlucky enough to see their cars go up in flames are getting one more grain of salt rubbed into their still smoldering wounds:

Photo by Fria Tider of Swedish meter maid at work

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken.

Everyone who sent me an email telling me about this story alluded in some way or another to Nero, who was widely reputed to have set Rome on fire so that he could rebuild it as a city worthy of his magnificence, and then to have serenaded himself with the fiddle as the city burned around him.  While that story is almost certainly untrue (the city probably burned because it had a lot of wood, a lot of refuse, and a lot of open flames, and Nero couldn’t have “fiddled” because fiddles didn’t exist), Sweden’s feckless behavior is a reality.

Nero is a cute analogy, but not a useful one.  I find Sydney Smith’s tale of Dame Partington’s battle with the Atlantic a little more on point, except that Sweden, rather than doing battle against the jihadist storm gathering against her, is issuing citations against those who aren’t wearing proper swim attire:

In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm [at Sidmouth], Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal; the Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington.

At the end of the day, Sweden (and the rest of Europe) lacking Dame Partington’s fighting spirit, will be inundated more quickly even than she was, and will discover that the real problem was never the missing swimsuits.

One more thing.  On the subject of “youths”:

 

A quick riff on yesterday’s events in London

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Beheading is a peculiarly devastating form of murder, more so than shooting or stabbing. Human identity is tied to the head. From birth, we are programmed to recognize faces and voices. It’s the human face and the mind behind it that separate us, not only from other animals, but from each other: The contents of our minds and the features of our faces are what make us unique. Decapitation therefore doesn’t just kill people, it effectively erases them. It seems fitting, somehow, that jihadists who buy into an extremist Islam that demands complete submission – the denial of the individual — would use beheading as their preferred form of execution.

The Islamic-inspired murder of a British soldier yesterday on London’s streets horrifies us because the men who carried out sought, not just to kill a man, but to erase him. The brave women who stepped forward to challenge these men remind us that, at least for now, in the West individualism still exists. The entire event, which played out before witnesses who were tweeting, photographing and videoing, therefore had a bizarre, Kabuki-quality to it, as if the actors were carrying out culturally defined roles in a play.

Richard Fernandez noticed much the same thing, only he said it a lot better than I could:

This incident illustrates, if nothing else, the endpoint of the social engineering of the West. It has been remarkably effective.

From a certain point of view, the British crowd behaved perfectly and this is the way “they” all want us to behave. The populace sheltered in place, didn’t do anything rash, talked to the perpetrators as people. They waited for the police to come and the hospital helicopter to take the corpse away. Some will doubtless get counseling to overcome their shattering experience.

And then they will congratulate themselves on how tough British society is; resilience and all that. The more caring will leave some flowers by a railing and hold a few candle vigils for healing and peace, until these wither and blow away and the news cycle washes up a new object of attention.

The attackers knew they were actors in a drama — as keenly watched in their communities as on the BBC. And in that other audience they were asking: “How will the locals behave?” We know now. And that other audience may derive an entirely different lesson from this tableau: “See? Only their women act like men. They follow orders. They are nothing anymore — these Westerners. They are a civilization whose core has been destroyed.”

Well, exactly.

What Richard didn’t know yet when he wrote those words is that, while Prime Minister Cameron did so the attack was terrorism, the Department of Defence had a different response:  it told its troops to shed their uniforms when on British streets.  The DOD assured everyone that this was a temporary move, while they figured out what to do, but the fact is that the damage was done the moment the order went out.  The once mighty British Empire had been told to stand down.  When I saw the Scottish play “The Black Watch,” I wondered whether it spoke to the end of the British soldier.  The verdict is still out on the troops, but that’s irrelevant.  Without leadership, even the best troops in the world are pointless.  They’re merely victims along with everyone else.  England has been turned into one vast field of sheeples, watched over by the wolves her Labor government deliberately invited in in order to destroy the Tory party.  (And yes, of course I’m thinking of the Gang of Eight’s amnesty . . . er, immigration reform bill.)

One more thing.  While I was trolling through my overflowing email inbox yesterday, I found a link a friend had sent me shortly after the Boston Marathon Bombing, in which Leftist talking head (or do I mean writing hand?) Marc Ambinder says “Folks, you must stop blaming Islam” and then tells us that America’s gun culture was the reason the Tsarnaev brothers killed.  Now we know, of course, that Islam was why the Tsarnaev brothers killed.

Ambinder is right that in America we have free speech, that people are allowed to disagree on things, and that ugly ideas can exist as long as they don’t become ugly acts.  Islam, though, is sui generis because the Western idea of free speech and individualism is predicated upon voluntary assimilation.  We allow things to happen on the fringe because we assume that everyone will gravitate to the bell curve portion of society, and embrace society’s values, whatever they happen to be.  Islam, however, does not assimilate.

Think about that for a minute, because it’s a rather staggering concept.  One of the hallmarks of being human is that we adapt.  I do believe that only cockroaches have the ability to adapt to as many climates, including extreme climates, as we do.  For humans to have adopted a mindset so impenetrable that it is incapable of change is really amazing.  In any group, of course, you’ll have some people who are more adaptable than others, but we’re talking about a religion/worldview that renders adaption impossible.

When I was a child, my parents told me (rightly or wrongly) that Turkish soldiers could not be brainwashed.  They were so self-assured in their Turkishness that they were invulnerable to lies, blandishments, fantasies, etc.  They were Turks.  End of story.  It occurs to me now that this myth might have been true, not in terms of modern, secular Turks, but in terms of the Janissaries, who were the most elite soldiers of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.  Once your brain has been steeped in Islam, perhaps you become incapable of blending….

The Boston bombers and political correctness — by guest blogger Lulu

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The elephant in the middle of the room that no one seems to want to look at is that there are people in this country, perhaps many people, who have been welcomed into this country, lived here for quite a while, embraced by Americans and treated kindly, who smile at you and seem perfectly normal, and who would happily kill you as an infidel. All of Dzhokhar’s college pals who shared joints, partied together, and played on sports teams together are shocked, and who can blame them, because he seemed so nice and normal and settled. What they don’t understand is that he only seemed nice. For quite awhile, inside he thought they were all infidels worthy of murder for the cause. It could have been all of them in the dorm or a classroom, smiles and pleasantries forgotten. He and his brother chose another more symbolic venue to declare their jihad and hatred of America and infidels, but he would have killed his dormmates, teammates or classmates just as happily.

That’s scary and unsettling. Who wants to think that people who smile and eat lunch with us may be putting on an elaborate act, that behind the smile lies a hatred deep enough to put a bomb next to a defenseless child and kill him, horribly maim dozens of others, then go back to school, refer to himself as a “stress free kind of guy” on twitter, hit the gym, and fool the dupes around him. This is the definition of evil. Evil exists when sane people follow an evil ideology, or when people are sociopathic and warped. Which are the Boston jihadists? They are both. They show a callous indifference to human life and no doubt a triumphal game of returning to the dorm or daily routine, easy as pie, F*&% America and its slutty women and unbelievers.

The Boston politically correct brigade will try to understand them and explain their deeds, as if planting a bomb next to kids in a crowd of people enjoying a race can be explained in any way by anything we did, as if anything—anything—can explain their decision to wage jihad at the Boston Marathon. The media and academia have become accustomed to blaming external factors for everything; school failure, criminal activity, gangs, violence. But other immigrant kids don’t do this. Not every kid who feels alienated does this. Hell, not even every kid who hates America does this. The deeds of Dzhokhar and Tamerlin Tsarnaev reflect their choices and their values. Their playing a “nice guy” role to their American friends and acquaintances reflects choices and values too. They weren’t teased or bullied. You kidding? A Golden Gloves boxer and a wrestling champ? More likely they were welcomed and treated decently by naïve people perhaps, but people far better than they, people that don’t live deceitful, fraudulent lives, plotting murder with a smile on their faces.
The question for us, knowing that there are others like the Boston jihadists living here and smiling at us, is what do we do? How do we stay open as a society and safe? If the majority of decent, law abiding Moslems are appalled by these actions, how do we get them to engage in protest and widespread condemnation of the acts, instead of defensive accusations that they might be picked on? How do we become a society that accepts personal responsibility again? How do we become a people who again can face that true evil exists in the ideology of the brothers and must be fought as hard and devotedly as we fought the true evil that existed in Nazi ideology.

Islam — the ultimate umbrella organization for violent malcontents

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Turban Bomb

As was to be expected (and all of you predicted), the media is rushing to indict . . . America for having failed to give two Chechen immigrant brothers the love they needed.  Because of this, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 years old, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19 old, became disaffected losers longing to kill.  Or, as their uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Maryland, told reporters: “This has nothing to do with Chechnya.” Instead the Bomb Brothers were “losers — not being able to settle themselves [in America] and thereby just hating everyone who did.”

There’s your narrative:  this was just like Columbine all over again.  Islam was merely a religious bagatelle attached to two young men who would have been ticking time bombs regardless.  And most importantly as far as the Left is concerned, there’s no indication that these boys acted under al Qaeda’s guidance.  They were truly Americanized in that they were self-starters, arriving at terrorism due to their own disaffection and diligence.

To which I say, who cares about al Qaeda?  al Qaeda does not have to be involved in every attack before the bombing can be labeled as bona fide Islamic terrorism.  al Qaeda is just one head of the hydra.  It’s not the beast itself.

The problem is Islam — by which I don’t mean the garden-variety faith that millions of people practice as a party of their ordinary, non-hate-filled lives.  That’s a housebroken version of Islam, and I highly approve of it.

No, the problem is the very core of Islam — its Jihad element — which is a magnet for disaffected people.  The chicken and egg debate (i.e., which came first, Islam or disaffection?) is irrelevant.  The only thing relevant is that Islam comes last, right before the bomb explodes.  Whether Islam breeds terrorists or just provides an attractive justification for malevolent people doesn’t matter.  There it is, sitting like a big ticking egg, just waiting to go BOOM!

chicken_or_egg

I’ve quoted my cousin, the former prison minister (Christian), dozens of times here, but I think it’s important to say again what he once wrote in an email to me:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly [sic] remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

The core of Islam, which is built around Mohammad’s demands that his followers go forth and kill, both creates and attracts killers.  Until we address and de-fang Islam, there will always be “disaffected,” “lone wolves,” who just “coincidentally” have as their last words “Allahu Akhbar.”

European surrender

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I noted when I was in London that the City was filled with obvious Muslims (by which I mean burqa-ed and hijab-ed women, and their male escorts).  London, though, still felt like a modern western city.  Not so other cities in Europe.  Andrew McCarthy explains why, and warns us that the Obama administration is trying to take us down the same ideological road that led to sharia-only enclaves dotting Europe.

Principled, but suicidally stupid

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I’m deeply impressed by the integrity of those peace activists who are willing to challenge Obama, just as they did Bush.  They are free from the hypocrisy of those who took to the streets for one president while giving the next a pass.

Having said that, war is a useful device when a culture is bound and determined to kill you.  I’m not a fan of having my airplanes bombed, my airplanes turned into bombs, my subways destroyed, my nightclubs bombed, and various and sundry people being beheaded all over the place.  Nor am I going to enjoy life much when, as a female,  I’m swathed in a burqa and basically consigned to permanent house arrest.

Turning the other cheek in a mild dispute bespeaks a certain amount of grace; turning it in an existential battle, however, is suicidal stupidity.

The Huma problem

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In the wake of Weinergate, a lot of people were pointing out that Weiner left himself open to some serious blackmail.  Given the fact that he’s not a fishmonger but is, instead, a member of Congress, the blackmail implications affect all of us.

It turns out, though, that this may be the least of our worries when it comes to Weiner.  Huma Abedin, his elegant wife, who is Hillary’s closest companion (so much so that there were rumors some years ago that they were lovers), has Muslim Brotherhood connections.  And yes, I know you’ve heard that before, but Rob, at Joshua Pundit builds on that basic fact to explain why it actually matters, as opposed to having mere headline value.

In the mad, mad, mad world of PC, silly little jokes about Islamist terrorists have only a one minute shelf life

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This morning, my friend Kim Priestap sent a group of us an email telling about the Yemeni man arrested for trying to yank open the cockpit door while hollering the standard “Allahu Akbar!”  Lee DeCovnik thinks we might have been seeing a dry run.  The man apparently raced from one end of the plane (the bathroom in the rear) all the way up to the front (the cockpit), and then tried to open the door:

There were a couple of disturbing items in this dry run. First, this was a single “dry runner” who was most likely timing the walk from the rear lavatory and the noting response from the aircrew, while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” We also know that other dry runs have had up to 13 possible hijackers on a single flight. Was this a dry run of the initial diversion, where the real action may start in the rear of the aircraft, where aircrews are often located?

Second, this dry run was so blatant, so unsubtle, that you have to wonder if this incident itself was a diversion from other airline or routes. Or conversely, because this was so blatant, will the authorities continue to give special significance to these particular circumstances? That’s a tough call by the Homeland Security either way.

Upon first hearing the news from Kim, I immediately fired a very silly email back to my friends:

A la the 24 hour spin that followed bin Laden’s death, we’ll soon be hearing that he was actually yelling “I need a bathroom” and was simply banging at the wrong door.

It was a joke.  I was joking.  Really.  Except I was also apparently plugged into the “lone crazy man/lone confused Muslim” line that is now de rigueur for all sudden jihad syndrome attacks.  When I trolled over to the British papers a few minutes ago, this is the first thing I saw:

The Yemeni man who was wrestled to the floor after pounding on the cockpit door of a plane approaching San Francisco may have mistaken it for the bathroom.

Rageit Almurisi cannot speak English very well and could have misunderstood the signs inside the jet, his cousin claimed.

The 28-year-old, who was heard yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’, had also only been on three planes in his life and would have been unfamiliar with the layout.

[snip]

Almurisi had been taking classes in English but was not happy with his progress. His cousin said: ‘He might have seriously mistaken the cockpit for the bathroom. He’s only been on three planes in his whole life.’

I find it embarrassing that my shallow, silly little joke turns out to be the party line.

Also, one does rather wonder how many flights people have to take before they start to understand the basic toilet versus cockpit principles.  Five?  Twelve?  Thirty-seven?  Does it matter if one was educated in a Madrassa, as opposed to PS 157?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

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Islamists work to change the (veiled) head count in London

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A little less than a year ago, after the French enacted the burqa ban that just recently went into effect, I published a post entitled When is a burqa, not a burqa?  When it’s a weapon, in which I wrote the following:

Because Islamic religious trappings are not about man’s relationship to God but, instead, are about man’s relationship to the Islamic state, every Islamic procedure or practice, whether it’s abstaining from alcohol, ritual foot washing, burqas or minarets is, in essence, a body count.  The number of burqa clad women in any given society is the equivalent of a Western census.  If you can get all of your women to wear the burqa and then, through rape and acid-throwing intimidation, get all of their women to wear the burqa, you’ve won.  Who cares that the women so clad are not closer to Allah?  It’s enough that they’ve been submitted, willingly or not, to Islam.  There is no faith involved, just force and a numbers game.

Today, in a British newspaper, I read this:

Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today.

Other targets of the ‘Talibanesque thugs’, being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.

Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: ‘Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment’.

[snip]

It is believed Muslim extremists are behind a spate of attacks being investigated by police, according to the Sunday Times.

An Asian woman who works in a pharmacy in east London was told to dress more modestly and wear a veil or the shop would be boycotted.

When she went to the media to talk about the abuse she suffered, a man later entered the pharmacy and told her: ‘If you keep doing these things, we are going to kill you’.

The 31-year-old, who is not a practising Muslim, said she has since been told to take holiday by the pharmacy owners and now fears she may lose her job.

She said: ‘Why should I wear a hijab (headscarf) or burqa? I haven’t done anything wrong.’

It’s all about body counts.  When the critical mass of women in London, Muslim or not, are in burqas, it’s an Islamic country.  Likewise, when the gays — the same ones who currently insist on siding politically with the Muslims against the Jews — are all hanged, it’s an Islamic country.

We in the West aren’t dying with our boots on; we’re dying in an abject, multiculturalist, politically correct grovel.

There’s a new U.C. in town

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There are a lot of University of California campuses:  UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco (medical school only), UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, etc.

Oh, about those last two:  UC Irvine and UC Riverside have become the hotbeds of pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish activism.  The campuses are in the news right now because some Palestinian students are being prosecuted for intentionally disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, depriving him of his free speech rights.  The verbal attack against Ambassador Oren is just a teeny example of what gets dished out regularly on those campuses (especially UC Irvine), but with Oren they picked such a high profile target that there was finally some push-back.

The AP has an incredibly brief report on the story.  What fascinated me was the headline, which I first spotted on the SF Chronicle’s home page:

I know that, when writing headlines, space is at a premium, but doesn’t that phrasing make it look as if there’s a new campus to add to the UC roster? You know: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Muslim….

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