Obama’s Pentagon: We’re winning the war against the Islamic State! Whistleblowers: That’s because you’re cooking the books.
Scenes from the Pretend War: Obama blocks 75% of airstrikes against the Islamic State. Forget dying for a mistake, Obama is willing to risk American lives for a sham war he has no intention of winning.
Greeks say that it’s virtually impossible to screen terrorists out among incoming “refugees.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali says that feminists are focused on “trivial bullshit” rather than fighting real threats to women like radical Islam.
Must be frustrating for the Islamic State to repeatedly detail the Koranic justifications for their actions, only for liberals to go: “No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
Europe has been following the liberal, progressive, pseudo-socialist path a lot longer than we have. Instead of doing little things that make sense all along, they’ll let the problem get really big and stupid, and then it is guillotines, gulags, and cattle cars. There’s a lot of really pissed off Europeans right now, and over the centuries we’ve got plenty of examples of what masses of pissed off Europeans do when pushed.
I stopped doing the regular This Week in Jihad update because: A.) It took a lot of damn time, and B.) Sites like JihadWatch were doing it better.
But since the Paris attacks, a metric ton of Jihad-related links have come streaming out of the firehose, so here’s a new This Week In Jihad just so a I have a place to put them all:
When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world’s leaders will fly in to “solve” a “problem” that doesn’t exist rather than to address the one that does. But don’t worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there’ll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?
Snip.
What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world – an attack on one portion of “humanity” by those who claim to speak for another portion of “humanity”. And these are not “universal values” but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta “universal” when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those “universal values” are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don’t want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live – modern, pluralist, western societies and those “universal values” of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who’s been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
Over nine years, as I witnessed the neighborhood become increasingly intolerant. Alcohol became unavailable in most shops and supermarkets; I heard stories of fanatics at the Comte des Flandres metro station who pressured women to wear the veil; Islamic bookshops proliferated, and it became impossible to buy a decent newspaper. With an unemployment rate of 30 percent, the streets were eerily empty until late in the morning. Nowhere was there a bar or café where white, black and brown people would mingle. Instead, I witnessed petty crime, aggression, and frustrated youths who spat at our girlfriends and called them “filthy whores.” If you made a remark, you were inevitably scolded and called a racist. There used to be Jewish shops on Chaussée de Gand, but these were terrorized by gangs of young kids and most closed their doors around 2008. Openly gay people were routinely intimidated, and also packed up their bags.
Cracked writer reads every issue of the Islamic State’s full-color magazine Dabiq. On the one hand, there’s some useful information here. (“Attention Internet: People who celebrate pictures of civilians they’ve killed as well as pictures of their own friend’s murdered corpses don’t give a shit what you call them.”) On the other, the writer seemed to go into the assignment painfully ignorant of some of the most basic facts about the Islamic State (like their radical hatred of Shiites).
The first, and most obvious, difference: There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no “Jewish State” establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory, and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance. Among Syrian Muslims, there is.
“Ending a fight means our will must be stronger than our enemies’ – and I’m not convinced that right now, we as a nation are up to it. ISIS isn’t convinced either, and until we convince them by killing them, this will not end well for us.”
“I would be darned to listen to all three of those candidates to discern a clear Democratic line of how you’re actually going to fight terrorism. They were very vague, very non-specific, and I think they have a lot of work to do.” Hard to fight radical Islam if you’re unwilling to even speak its name…
There are reports that the Islamic State took responsibility. Also reports that Belgium has closed their border.
This is not a “tragedy,” as so many mealy-mouth leftists are calling it. This was an act of war. And Europe’s current open borders policy on Middle East “refugees” almost certainly contributed to it.
Two exceptionally obvious courses of action present themselves:
All of Europe, not just Paris, should close their borders until adequate border controls are in place, and immediately start forcibly deporting illegal aliens from Muslim countries.
Paris should ask that Article 5 of the NATO treaty be activated, to be followed shortly by a broad coalition (including the United States) completely destroying the Islamic State and followed by a heavy, lasting multinational occupation of the territory formerly held by it.
For a long time, liberals have soft-peddled and downplayed Islamic terrorism so they could continue their moral preening about how enlightened and sophisticated they are. The time for people dying so liberals can avoid feeling bad about themselves is over. Either confront radical Islam with the force necessary to destroy it, or cede power to those willing to do so.
The big story this week has been the Children of the Corn running amok in Missouri. I hope to have a longer piece on that by and by. In the meantime, enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm:
Maryland’s “bullet fingerprint” database cost $5 million to set up and maintain. Number of criminals caught by it? Zero. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
How much money each state is sending to the Presidential race. Texas is number one in SuperPAC money, and number two (behind California) in hard money.
Kafkatrap vs. Honeytrap. “If you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference.”
Woman starts making documentary about Men’s Rights Movement. Funny things happens: When she starts making an actual, even-handed documentary, the funders who wanted a feminist hit piece drop her like a hot potato, but Kickstarter backers step up to the plate after a plug from Milo Yiannopoulos.
What’s Obama’s strategy in Iraq and Syria? He doesn’t have one. “Without a clear overarching strategy to resolve the conflict.” Say what you want about Bush, he wanted to win in Iraq. Obama wants to do just enough to not get blamed for losing.
Speaking of Islamic refugees, shotguns (which don’t need a permit) are selling like hotcakes in Austria. Whatever could be the reason?
“The Democratic party is mainly a coalition of interest groups, and the current model of Democratic politics — poor and largely non-white people providing the muscle and rich white liberals calling the shots — is unsustainable…Democrats gleefully predict that demographic changes are going to give their party a permanent majority. The unspoken corollary to that is that white liberals think they’re going to remain in charge of it.”
Right now Austin is enjoying our traditional “two weeks of flooding following three months of drought” fall. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
“In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him.”
Paul Ryan elected Speaker of the House. If Ryan decides to govern as an actual Republican, he could be a very effective Speaker…
At the most recent Republican Presidential debate, Sen. Marco Rubio said the H1-B visa program is badly in need of reform. One tiny problem: Sen. Rubio’s own H1-B bill doesn’t implement any of the reforms demanded by Presidential Candidate Rubio. “It does not require recruitment of American workers. It does not require employers to ‘pay more than you would pay someone else’…Rubio’s bill would provide Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his comrades ‘a huge increase in the supply of lower-cost foreign guest workers so they can undercut and replace American workers.'” Indeed, Rubio’s bill “would triple the number of H1-B foreign workers admitted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
How to fix the Republican debates: “First, cancel the rest of the debates. Instead, announce that the RNC will host the debates and pick the panel of questioners. Allow any news organization that wishes to broadcast it.”
Feminism is “a War Against Human Nature aimed at using the coercive power of government to bring about an androgynous ‘equality’ that ignores the actual differences between men and women. Feminism is a totalitarian movement to destroy civilization as we know it — and feminists say so themselves.”
Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that just two (or is it three, this past summer is one big blur) months after Greece voted through its third bailout, one which will raise its debt/GDP to over 200% on a fleeting promise that someone, somewhere just may grant Greece a debt extension (which will do absolutely nothing about the nominal amount of debt), its creditors have already grown tired with the game and are refusing to pay the next Greek loan tranche of €2 billion.
Specifically, the payment of the first €2b tranche of €3b is now sait[sic] to be delayed because Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras failed to implement reforms on schedule, Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports, citing unidentified senior EU official.
And evidently one of the latest sticking points is that Tsipras wants to prop up deadbeat home loans for houses worth as much as $331,185.
Greece edges close to default. Greece’s creditors demand reform. Greece agrees to reforms at last minute. Greece gets bailout. Greece fails to implement reforms.
The Law and Justice Party has won 38% of the vote, and looks to have won enough seats (232 seats out of 460) to form a parliamentary majority without including any other party, marking the first time since Democracy was restored in 1989 that no left-wing party will have a role in the ruling government. Law and Justice is described as “Euroskeptic” and “Right Wing” because it opposes the EU’s current pro-Muslim immigration policies and seeks closer ties to the U.S. (among other reasons), but is also “promising to raise the minimum wage and increase welfare spending,” which is hardly a “right wing” (or smart) policy.
But the area where Law and Justice could have the biggest influence is in wrecking the EU’s global warming policies. “Law & Justice generally opposes wind and solar energy and favors an energy policy that emphasizes tariffs targeted at Russian natural gas.” Poland also generates 90% of their electricity from coal, which bodes ill for meeting the EU target of 27% “green” energy by 2030.
Law and Justice is also markedly more wary of Germany, and less willing to appease Russia, than their centrist Civic Platform predecessors, almost as if they had some sorts of historical reasons for their views.