Tag Archives: terrorism

Islamist Terrorism, European Denial, by Yves Mamou

People have a right to expect from a rational government that it will use its monopoly on initiatory violence to protect them from those who terrorize them. Governments in Europe are instead protecting the terrorists. From Yves Mamou from gatestoneinstitute.org:

Europeans have delegated to the State the exclusive right to use violence against criminals. But Europeans, especially in France and Germany, are discovering that some kind of “misunderstanding” seems actually to be at work. Their State, the one that has the monopoly on violence, does not want to be at war with its Islamist citizens and residents. Worse, the State gives off the feeling that it is afraid of its Muslim citizens.

“The concept of the rule of law means that the citizen is protected from the arbitrariness of the State. … Currently, the rule of law protects the attackers above all”. — Yves Michaud, French author and philosopher.

If a group of Jewish or Christian terrorists in Algeria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia had committed the same kind of stabbings, car-rammings, throat-slittings and shootings that France and Germany are suffering now, they would have provoked an immediate reaction. Tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of enraged Muslims would have rushed into the streets to kill, stab or eviscerate the first group of Jews or Christians they met. Within 24 hours, no church or synagogue would be able to open its doors: all of them would have been burned to cinders.

These words are not to stigmatize anyone; they are meant to explain what terrorists want. According to Gilles Kepel, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and a specialist of Islam, “ISIS calls for stabbing dirty and evil French people… because they want to trigger a civil war.” Muslim terrorists behind the wave of terrorist attacks apparently assume that thousands of French, Germans or Belgians will rush out into the streets, as they would do themselves, to kill, stab or eviscerate Muslims. Muslim sponsors of terrorism may not even be able to imagine that Europeans may not wish to participate in the pleasure of bloodthirsty riots.

The fact is that even if millions of Arabs and Muslims live in Europe today, Europeans are not Arabs and do not act as Arabs do. Westerners in Europe have delegated the “legitimate use of physical force” — commonly, if controversially, known as the “monopoly on violence” — to the State.

Max Weber, in his 1919 essay, “Politics as a Vocation”, claims that the State is any “human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” In other words, Weber describes the State as any organization that succeeds in having the exclusive right to use, threaten, or authorize physical force against residents of its territory (“Gewaltmonopol des Staates”).

To continue reading: Islamist Terrorism, European Denial

France: The Coming Civil War, by Yves Mamou

Push—Muslim immigration—will come to shove—widespread resistance—in France. It may have already arrived. From Yves Mamou at gatestoneinstitute.org:

For French President François Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: “terrorism” or “fanatics”.

• Instead, the French president reaffirms his determination to military actions abroad: “We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq,” the president said after the Nice attack.

So confronted with this failure of our elite who were elected to guide the country across nationals and internationals dangers, how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate?

In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the “bad” voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid to see the beauties of a society open to people who often who do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not. The elite took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. They also made a choice not to fight Islamism because Muslims vote collectively for this global elite.

“We are on the verge of a civil war.” That quote did not come from a fanatic or a lunatic. No, it came from head of France’s homeland security, the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure), Patrick Calvar. He has, in fact, spoken of the risk of a civil war many times. On July 12th, he warned a commission of members of parliament, in charge of a survey about the terrorist attacks of 2015, about it.

In May 2016, he delivered almost the same message to another commission of members of parliament, this time in charge of national defense. “Europe,” he said, “is in danger. Extremism is on the rise everywhere, and we are now turning our attention to some far-right movements who are preparing a confrontation”.

What kind of confrontation? “Intercommunity confrontations,” he said — polite for “a war against Muslims.” “One or two more terrorist attacks,” he added, “and we may well see a civil war.”

In February 2016, in front of a senate commission in charge of intelligence information, he said again: ” We are looking now at far-right extremists who are just waiting for more terrorist attacks to engage in violent confrontation”.

No one knows if the truck terrorist, who plowed into the July 14th Bastille Day crowd in Nice and killed more than 80 people, will be the trigger for a French civil war, but it might help to look at what creates the risk of one in France and other countries, such as Germany or Sweden.

The main reason is the failure of the state.

1. France is at War but the Enemy is Never Named.

France is the main target of repeated Islamist attacks; the more important Islamist terrorist bloodbaths took place at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket of Vincennes (2015); the Bataclan Theater, its nearby restaurants and the Stade de France stadium, (2015); the failed attack on the Thalys train; the beheading of Hervé Cornara (2015); the assassination of two policemen in Magnanville in June (2016), and now the truck-ramming in Nice, on the day commemorating the French Revolution of 1789.

To continue reading: France: The Coming Civil War

The Myth of the ‘War on Terrorism’ by Justin Raimondo

When you engage in the metaphysically impossible—a war on a tactic—there is no way to even define victory, much less achieve it. So it goes in the war against the tactic of terrorism, now in its fifteenth year (still an infant compared to the wars on drugs and poverty). From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

Remember “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”? That was the justification for the worldwide war on terrorism the Bush administration trumpeted in the early days of the post-9/11 era. Keeping in mind that the American people don’t really care about what goes on thousands of miles away, and that the purpose of our foreign policy is – ostensibly – to keep us safe here at home, the Bushies and their neocon Praetorian Guard always kept their focus on the threat that was supposedly hanging over our heads: another 9/11. As that Old Right prophet Garet Garrett put it some sixty years ago, US foreign policy was rationalized to the public with “a complex of vaunting and fear,” and this was the fear part.

But now we hear that the latest iteration of the Terrorist Threat – ISIS – is losing ground in Syria, its home base: some 12 percent of its territory has been lost to a combination of opponents, and the Caliphate, we’re told, is shrinking. So does that mean the Terrorist Threat is abating, and we can get back to living our lives?

Heck no!

As CNN reports:

“IHS [Information Handling Services] senior analyst Columb Strack says that ‘as the Islamic State’s caliphate shrinks and it becomes increasingly clear that its governance project is failing, the group is re-prioritizing insurgency.”

“He told CNN: ‘As a result, we unfortunately expect an increase in mass casualty attacks and sabotage of economic infrastructure, across Iraq and Syria, and further afield, including Europe.’

“In other words, ISIS is going to become a more ‘traditional’ terror group, boasting of its international reach to attract recruits and bolster morale as it loses ground in Iraq and Syria.”

So let’s see if I have this straight: we fought them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, but now that we’re winning over there they’re coming over there.

Got that?

This preposterous shell game is becoming so transparently phony that not even the “experts” and government officials pushing it can possibly believe it.

In reality, the “war on terrorism” had nothing to do with protecting the American people from harm: it was always all about projecting US power as far as possible and effecting “regime change” throughout the Middle East. And not only there …

The real regime change came about right here in the good ol’ US of A: a system of universal surveillance was instituted as the “Patriot” Act was passed by a Congress that never bothered to read it. The police were militarized – after all, the Bad Guys were about to launch an attack on Peoria, or wherever, and we had to be ready. The banks were forced to report all “suspicious” transactions, and if you bought a pressure cooker your name went on a list of “terror suspects.” This was followed, more recently, by an attack by the Left on the Second Amendment: if your name is on a “terrorist watch list,” or the mysterious “no fly list,” the Nanny State would prevent you from getting your hands on a gun – and screw the Constitution.

Regime change at home and abroad – that’s the real point of the “war on terrorism.” The idea was and is to overthrow not only whatever government dares to get in the War Party’s way, but also to overthrow the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States. A real double-header!

To continue reading: The Myth of the ‘War on Terrorism’

The Triviality of Terrorism, by Paul Rosenberg

As SLL noted earlier today, fear is all they’ve got. Paul Rosenberg reaches the same conclusion from a different angle. From Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

In the general scheme of manmade disasters, terrorism is trivial. That’s not even debatable, as I’ll itemize below. Westerners who’ve been consuming televised fears for 15 years straight may object, but fear has nothing to do with truth… and very much the opposite.

And I’ll skip through the obvious fact that I’m opposed to people being murdered by maniacs and the equally obvious acknowledgment that terrorism is a very big thing to the people involved.

The Facts

When deciding whether a statement is true or false, facts should decide. If we let ourselves imagine that fear makes something true, we doom ourselves to lives of abuse.

So, let’s take a look at the facts.

To address this question directly, I decided to take facts from just the past hundred years or so and to stick to the large powers. My apologies to those associated with events I left out; I do not mean to minimize them.

This list shows how many deaths are attributable to each. These figures are from Wikipedia, and if there was a range, I took the middle of it.

World War II: 75,000,000
Great Leap Forward (China): 32,000,000
World War I: 18,000,000
Russian Civil War: 7,000,000
Ukrainian Genocide (Holodomor): 5,300,000
Killing Fields (Cambodia): 2,000,000
Korean War: 2,500,000
Vietnam War: 1,900,000
Great Purge (USSR): 1,000,000
Gulf War II (Iraq): 700,000
Gulf War I: 130,000
Mexican Drug War: 107,000
Afghan War: 85,000

Now, would you like to know how many people have died at the hands of terrorists? Here are the numbers, over more years and a larger area:

1900–1929: 520
1930–1949: 1,088
1950–1969: 283
1970–1979: 1,523
1980–1989: 3,401
1990–1999: 2,203
2000–2009: 6,625
2010–2015: 3,470

Terrorism numbers are difficult to define post-2000, because every minor skirmish is now called “terrorism.” So, the numbers above exclude many attacks on government facilities and uniformed government employees. Civil wars aren’t terrorism; attacks on churches, buses, and markets are terrorism.

All told, this comes to 19,113 deaths over 116 years. Compared to the almost 146,000,000 deaths listed above, terrorism amounts to one one-hundredth of one percent: 0.013% to be precise.

Compared to Rudolph Rummel’s data showing 262 million “deaths by government” over the 20th century, terrorism stands at a statistically insignificant 0.0073%

A few more comparisons:

• Since 1970, terrorism world-wide has claimed considerably less than 18,000 lives. Over those same years, the War on Drugs has claimed seven times as many in Mexico alone.

• In the worst year of terrorism (2001), less than 4,000 died. In just one battle of World War I (Verdun), more than 300,000 died – 75 times as many.

• On the worst day of terrorism (Sept. 11, 2001), less than 3,000 died. In one day of World War II (June 6, 1944), only in Normandy and only on the winning side, there were 4,413 confirmed dead.

Our Feelings Are Wrong

To most of us, war feels a lot less scary than terrorism. And the reason for that is obvious: the images that are presented to us and the attitudes of the people around us proclaim war to be normal.

War doesn’t surprise us; it doesn’t shock us. We’ve been trained to believe that wars are contained and that it’s mainly people in uniforms that are affected. The truth, however, is otherwise. Civilian deaths in World War II, for example, were double the number of soldier deaths.

Uniforms, authorizations, and official displays turn our eyes away from the massive horror of war. Everything around us supports the old saying that “one man dying is a tragedy; a million men dying is a statistic.” Everything supports fear of terror rather than fear of war.

Reality, however, is unmoved by our fears: War is death, dismemberment, and impoverishment, and it will never be anything else… just like terrorism, but much, much larger.

To continue reading: The Triviality of Terrorism

Former CIA Agent To Americans: Time To Talk About What’s Really Causing Terrorism, by Carey Wedler

SLL WILL BE ON A BUSINESS TRIP 6/15-6/17 AND WILL NOT BE POSTING. POSTING WILL RESUME 6/18.

There is a link between terrorism and US foreign policy: the latter is a cause, not an exclusive one, of the former. From Carey Wedler at theantimedia.org:

(ANTIMEDIA) In the wake of yet another terrorist attack, a former CIA counterterrorism agent has shared her insight into what causes such tragic, intentional carnage. Amaryllis Fox spoke for the first time publicly with Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+) about terrorism, misguided narratives on why it happens, and the underlying motivators driving it — ultimately urging Americans and those in power to adopt a different approach in combating the ongoing violence.

“If I learned one lesson from my time with the CIA, it is this: everybody believes they are the good guy,” says Fox, who is currently “in the process of getting her CIA cover rolled back,” AJ+ reports. She is now a peace activist and runs Mulu, “an e-commerce company supporting at-risk communities around the world.”

Fox worked as a counterterrorism and intelligence official for the clandestine services during the 2000s. In her first public statement on her time there, she discussed the limitations on the American public’s perception of the war on terror:

“The conversation that’s going on in the United States right now about ISIS and about the United States overseas is more oversimplified than ever. Ask most Americans whether ISIS poses an existential threat to this country and they’ll say yes. That’s where the conversation stops.”

Indeed, while a majority of Americans fear terrorism, reaching a consensus on how to tackle ISIS has proved contentious. Fox explained the simplicity of the way the conflicts are viewed on both sides:

“If you’re walking down the street in Iraq or Syria and ask anybody why America dropped bombs, you get: ‘They were waging war on Islam.’”

In America, the question is: “Why were we attacked on 9/11?”

Fox says if you pose this question, “You get: they hate us because we’re free.”

However, she contests the validity of these assumptions, pointing to the powerful forces that drive conflict in the first place:
“Those are stories manufactured by a really small number of people on both sides who amass a great deal of power and wealth by convincing the rest of us to keep killing each other.

Indeed, both sides of the conflict expend significant effort campaigning to prove their crusades are justified. In the United States, after decades of prolonged conflict, the populace is largely desensitized to war and often ignorant of its current manifestations.

Fox challenges this paradigm:

“I think the question we need to be asking, as Americans examining our foreign policy, is whether or not we’re pouring kerosene on a candle. The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out, if you’re brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you might have made some of the same choices if you’d lived their life instead of yours.”

Of course, as Americans mourn the most recent mass shooting, it is doubtful many citizens are well-versed in the U.S. foreign policy that provokes such terrorism. Rather, they focus, understandably, on the wrong done to their nation. But Fox offered a unique perspective that lends insight to the “enemy.”

“An Al-Qaeda fighter made a point once during debriefing,” she recounted. “He said all these movies that America makes — like Independence Day, and the Hunger Games, and Star Wars — they’re all about a small scrappy band of rebels who will do anything in their power with the limited resources available to them to expel an outside, technological advanced invader. ‘And what you don’t realize,’ he said, ‘is that to us, to the rest of the world, you are the empire, and we are Luke and Han. You are the aliens and we are Will Smith.’”

To continue reading: Former CIA Agent To Americans: Time To Talk About What’s Really Causing Terrorism

He Said That? 5/22/16

From Terry Jones (born 1942), British comedian, screenwriter, actor, film director, historian, author and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe:

What really alarms me about President Bush’s ‘War on Terrorism’ is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is ‘Terrorism’ going to surrender? It’s well known, in philological circles, that it’s very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.

He Said That? 5/10/16

From Pentagon press secretary Paul Cook, announcing the death of Abu Wahib, a leader of the Islamic State:

We view him as a significant leader in ISIL leadership overall—not just in Anbar province—and so we think removing him from the battlefield will be a significant step forward.

The Wall Street Journal, “Airstrike in Iraq Kills Top Militant,” 5/10/16

Every so often the US or one of its allies kills somebody high up in an Islamic extremist hierarchy. It’s always hailed as a big blow against the Islamist organization and a big victory in war on the terrorism. In the same way, every so often one of the drug enforcement agencies announces a bust of a drug kingpin, and it is always hailed as a big victory in the war on drugs. Terrorism is bigger than ever and so is the drug trade. The kingpin strategy, despite the hype, does little to nothing to stop either one. This, however, never prompts any kind of rethink on whether we should be fighting either “war.”

Ivy League Professor Suspected Of Terrorism For Doing Math On A Plane, by Tyler Durden

The damage economists have done to the economy is bad, but it’s ludicrous to pull an Ivy League professor of economics off a plane for writing equations on a notepad. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Last week, American Airlines flight 3950 sat on the tarmac in Philadelphia waiting to take off for a quick flight to Syracuse. Seated together were two people who didn’t know each other; a 40 year-old man with dark, curly hair and foreign accent, and a blonde haired thirty-something woman.

The woman looked on as the man scribbled some foreign type symbols in a notepad with intense focus, and when the woman asked whether or not Syracuse was home for him, the man replied with a simple “no.” These two elements were enough to make the woman uncomfortable enough to pass a note to a crew-member that allegedly said she wasn’t feeling well. After a period of time went by, the crew-member asked the woman if she was still sick, to which the woman replied that she was OK to fly. However, the plane turned around anyway, making its way back to the gate, where the woman would eventually be taken off the plane.

As the plane continued to sit, a crew-member gave some intermittent excuses over the intercom as to why the plane hadn’t pushed back again. After another period of time with still no movement, the pilot made his way back to the man’s seat and ended up escorting him off the plane as well. The man was ultimately led to an agent, who started out the conversation by asking what the man knew about his seatmate on the flight. The man was under the impression that perhaps the agent was trying to figure out what was wrong with the woman, so he replied that she had acted a bit funny, but didn’t really seem visibly ill.

That’s where the story turns for the man, as the agent finally admitted to him the real reason he was escorted off the plane and was now answering the agent’s questions: he was suspected of terrorism.

All the man could do was laugh, as he pointed out the fact that those foreign symbols in his notepad were not part of any cryptic note, rather it was a differential equation. The man was literally suspected of terrorism for just doing math.

Had the airline bothered to do a quick check of its numbers prone passenger, it would have found that the man’s name is Guido Menzio, an Ivy League economist from the UPenn. Menzio was on his way to give a talk at Queen’s University on a working paper he co-authored about menu costs and price dispersion. The confused blonde who sat next to him on the plane was ultimately concerned with his tweaking of a price-setting model that he was about to present.

To continue reading: Ivy League Professor Suspected Of Terrorism For Doing Math On A Plane

How US covered up Saudi role in 9/11, by Paul Sperry

Maybe if enough people make enough noise about this, we’ll finally get to the bottom of Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11. SLL and many other websites are trying. From Paul Sperry at nypost.com:

In its report on the still-censored “28 pages” implicating the Saudi government in 9/11, “60 Minutes” last weekend said the Saudi role in the attacks has been “soft-pedaled” to protect America’s delicate alliance with the oil-rich kingdom.

That’s quite an understatement.

Actually, the kingdom’s involvement was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government. And the coverup goes beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi report in a vault in the US Capitol basement. Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook.

Case agents I’ve interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was “diplomatic immunity.”

Those sources say the pages missing from the 9/11 congressional inquiry report — which comprise the entire final chapter dealing with “foreign support for the September 11 hijackers” — details “incontrovertible evidence” gathered from both CIA and FBI case files of official Saudi assistance for at least two of the Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego.

Some information has leaked from the redacted section, including a flurry of pre-9/11 phone calls between one of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego and the Saudi Embassy, and the transfer of some $130,000 from then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar’s family checking account to yet another of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego.

An investigator who worked with the JTTF in Washington complained that instead of investigating Bandar, the US government protected him — literally. He said the State Department assigned a security detail to help guard Bandar not only at the embassy, but also at his McLean, Va., mansion.

The source added that the task force wanted to jail a number of embassy employees, “but the embassy complained to the US attorney” and their diplomatic visas were revoked as a compromise.

Former FBI agent John Guandolo, who worked 9/11 and related al Qaeda cases out of the bureau’s Washington field office, says Bandar should have been a key suspect in the 9/11 probe.

“The Saudi ambassador funded two of the 9/11 hijackers through a third party,” Guandolo said. “He should be treated as a terrorist suspect, as should other members of the Saudi elite class who the US government knows are currently funding the global jihad.”

But Bandar held sway over the FBI.

To continue reading: How US covered up Saudi role in 9/11

Europe: Suicide by Jihad, by Guy Millière

SLL is consistently libertarian, but it knows of no plank in the libertarian platform that requires countries to import people who want to soak them dry and replace and eventually destroy the native culture and way of life with ones they import. SLL has said too many times to count that open immigration is not compatible with welfare states. Eliminate the freebies and make the choice: assimilate or starve, and immigrants assimilate. Don’t eliminate the freebies, and here’s what happens. From Guy Millière at gatestoneinstitute.org:

• In the last two decades, Belgium has become the hub of jihad in Europe. The district of Molenbeek in Brussels is now a foreign Islamist territory in the heart of Belgium. It is not, however, a lawless zone: sharia law has effectively replaced Belgian law.

• One of the organizers of the Paris bombings, Salah Abdeslam, was able to live peacefully in Molenbeek for four months until police decided to arrest him. Belgian police knew exactly where he was, but did nothing until French authorities asked them to. After his arrest, he was treated as a petty criminal. Police did not ask him anything about the jihadist networks with which he worked. Officers who interrogated him were ordered to be gentle. The people who hid him were not indicted.

• Europe’s leaders disseminated the idea that the West was guilty of oppressing Muslims. They therefore sowed the seeds of anti-Western resentment among Muslims in Europe.

• Hoping to please followers of radical Islam and show them Europe could understand their “grievances,” they placed pressure on Israel. When Europeans were attacked, they did not understand why. They had done their best to please the Muslims. They had not even harassed the jihadists.

The March 22 jihadist attacks in Brussels were predictable. What is surprising is that they did not take place sooner. What is also surprising is that more people were not killed. It seems that the authors of the attacks had larger projects in mind; they wanted to attack a nuclear power plant. Others may succeed in doing just that.

In the last two decades, Belgium has become the hub of jihad in Europe. The district of Molenbeek in Brussels is now a foreign Islamist territory in the heart of Belgium. It is not, however, a lawless zone: sharia law has effectively replaced Belgian law. Almost all the women wear veils or burqas; those who do not take risks. Drug trafficking and radical mosques are everyplace. The police stay outside and intervene only in cases of extreme emergency, using military-like commando operations. Other areas of Belgium, such as Shaerbeek and Anderlecht have the same status as Molenbeek.

The Belgian authorities have allowed the situation to deteriorate. The situation in the country now is virtually equivalent to a surrender.

They seemed to hope that willful blindness and accepting the unacceptable would permit the country to be spared. It did not.

The attack on Belgium’s Jewish Museum on May 24, 2014 should have served as a warning. It did not. That “only” Jews were the target led the Belgian government to underestimate the threat. The jihadi who wanted to kill passengers on train from Amsterdam to Paris, on August 21, 2015, prepared his attack in Brussels. That three American heroes neutralized him before he could start shooting again led the Belgian government to think the danger was not large.

The jihadis who struck Paris on November 13, 2015 had also organized their attacks from Molenbeek, but the blood was not spilled in Belgium. Belgian authorities perhaps assumed that Belgium would be spared. They spoke of “imminent danger” for a day or so, but never increased security.

One of the organizers of the Paris bombings, Salah Abdeslam, Europe’s most wanted terrorist criminal, was able to live peacefully in Molenbeek for four months until police decided to arrest him. Belgian police knew exactly where he was, but did nothing until French authorities asked them to. After his arrest, he was treated as a petty criminal, not a jihadi terrorist. Police did not ask him anything concerning the jihadist networks with which he worked. Because he was hurt during police operations, officers who interrogated him were ordered to be gentle. The people who agreed to hide him for so long were not considered suspects and were not indicted.

The Brussels jihadist attacks took place two days later.

Despite the worst attacks on Belgium soil since World War II, Belgian authorities do not seem ready to change their behavior.

To continue reading: Europe: Suicide by Jihad