First up, Unions kill Hostess. By calling a strike against a company that was already in bankruptcy, against the advice of the Teamsters, who had already taken a look at the Hostess books, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ensured that instead of a 6% pay cut, unionized workers would take a 100% pay cut. Way to go, unions!
Israel still seems to be gearing up for a ground offensive in Gaza. And by firing rockets at Tel Aviv, Hamas pretty much guarantees that the only faction in Israeli politics urging restraint will retink their position. “I get a lot less liberal when you want to kill me.”
Lefties are trying to boycott Papa Johns for daring to lay people off because of ObamaCare. “If this is anything like the Chick-fil-A buycott, and you want Papa John’s for dinner, you’d better get your order in now.” It’s amazing that any business in America ever has to declare bankruptcy, given there are so many liberals around who can tell them exactly how much profit they “need”…
Former general and former CIA head David Petraeus testifies on Benghazi. He says his report said the attack was launched by al Qaeda, but higher-ups in the Obama Administration deleted the reference. The more we hear about Benghazi, the more it appears that Fox News was right.
Stratfor says that not only was the Anwar al-Awlaki killing itself a blow to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but it also got Samir Khan, the creator and editor of AQAP’s English-language magazine: “individuals who possess the charisma and background of al-Awlaki or the graphics and editorial skills of Khan are difficult to come by in Yemen.” Evidently graphics designers aren’t big on hanging out in Yemen and preaching jihad. Who knew?
The Club for Growth agrees with me (and Ted Cruz) that the China currency bill is a bad idea.
University of Wisconsin-Stout caves in over their stupid Firefly poster mess.
Finally, not a link, but I did want to note that I received a mailer for State Representative Dr. Charles Schwertner, declaring his candidacy for the Texas State District Senate District 5 seat currently held by the retiring Steve Ogden. I thought it was notable since I don’t think I’ve ever received a political flyer this far out (the primary is March 6, 2012), much less for a local race. I suspect this, along with the mention of the $300,000 he has in his war chest, is a preemptive show of strength designed to deter other candidates from jumping into the race. So far it seems to be working, as I haven’t seen reports of anyone else running.
Christopher Hitchens, who is probably considerably more pro-Palestinian and skeptical of Israel than I am by a good measure, questions the motives of the “Gaza Flotilla,” noting the many ties of the organizers to Hamas, and of Hamas to Assad’s Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. “The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians.”
Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will face the death penalty. Good news, but why did it take a year and half to get to this point?
I stopped doing This Week in Jihad because it was eating up too much of my time. But this week there were enough big Jihad-related stories to justify putting one up:
Michael Totten has an interesting interview with Claire Berlinski on the situation in Turkey. If Turkey put up a status update, it would read “Mood: Delusional.” Also, is it just me, or does Berlinski look an awful lot like Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House?
You know that “unarmed peace flotilla”? Yeah, not so much.
Female Kuwaiti “activist” calls for the return of sexual slavery to keep rich Muslim men from committing adultery. Sisters are doing it to themselves. And somewhere, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is kicking himself.
Strafor analyzes the latest al Qaeda video and sees a message of defeat. “The very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat and an indication that the jihadists might not be receiving the divine blessing they claim.” The also show how al Qaeda ignorance of American gun control laws (no, you can’t buy automatic weapons at a gun show, since you need to fill out a form, undergo a background check that can take up to 90 days, and have a local law enforcement “chief” authorize your form (among other requirements), and that assumes you live in a state they haven’t been outlawed in) has lead to the arrests of several Jihadests looking to purchase them.
It turns out that, despite initial reports, Bin Laden was unarmed when the SEAL team sent him to Allah. I’ve got absolutely no problem with that, but you know there are some liberals who will get their panties in a knot over the very thought.
Little did I know that this untested young Commander-in-Chief would muster the courage to read his weekly Gallup numbers and, in one daring unilateral extra-judicial targeted hit job, toss aside every single idiotic foreign policy principle of his election campaign. Perhaps most satisfyingly, it was a mission made possible thanks to information extracted by methods he previously banned as “illegal torture.”
James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal. Including why we went in with troops rather than B-52s: “The president wanted proof that bin Laden was dead. So he assembled a small death panel, which went to the compound in Pakistan and shot him.” Heh.
The White House seems to be unclear on some of the details of the operation. Not a good idea to be handing the “deathers” ammunition this early.
And now, in honor of Bin Laden’s demise, and stolen from Dwight’s pal Borepatch, here’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist:
Believe it or not, thought I had seen the “I Kill You!” pic, I had actually never seen the video before going to Borepatch’s site. Given that this video has over 133 million hits, I may be a wee little bit behind the curve on this one. Tune in next week when I cover such cutting edge Internet phenomena as Mahir’s website, an animated dancing baby, and cat pictures with funny misspelled captions…
Ironically the circumstances surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden tends to confirm the theory that terrorism, rather than being a spontaneous meme that floats above the planet, is in fact deeply rooted in the intelligence agencies and regimes of certain states. Thus, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are creations of some kind of rage any more than than September 11 was wholly the result of some kind of amorphous resentment. Osama Bin Laden had backers; people with uniforms, ranks and the resources of bureaucracies behind them. Those who believe that the War on Terror is nothing but a law enforcement problem must ask themselves whether it is really rather larger than that.
Old and Busted: Birthers. The New Hotness: Deathers. That’s right, Cindy Sheehan (remember her?) doesn’t think than Bin Laden is dead. Oh, she also refers to The United States of America as “This lying, murderous Empire.” Remember when all the left was crowing about her “absolute moral authority”? Whatever happened to them?
David Pryce-Jones says that Bin Laden’s death marks the end of his monstrous fantasy of a 21st century Islamic caliphate. I’m not so sure. Dreams, even wicked, impossible dreams, have a way of lingerong on long past their expiration date, and both Saudi Arabia and Iran have smaller-scale versions of that dream as part of their national strategy.
And now I need to embed the totally sweet Tiawanese animation on the event:
(Hat tips: Ace of Spades, Instapundit, the Right Side of Austin.)
This was an important victory, but the war against terror continues. Al Qaeda has a decentralized command structure, so cutting off the head won’t kill the beast.
The fact that it took us just under a decade to track Bin Laden down does not reflect well on the CIA. Human intelligence takes a while to develop, but ten years is ridiculous. We’re lucky he hadn’t died from natural causes already.
It proves, once again, that Pakistan is not our friend. I suspect, fairly strongly, that members of the Pakistani ISI (and possibly higher levels of Pakistan’s government) have been sheltering Bin Laden ever since we routed the Taliban.
Unlike Dwight, I do not believe that Bin Laden’s death ensures Obama’s reelection. It certainly doesn’t hurt, but it’s over a year and a half before the election in a horrible economy upon which stagflation is now taking a firm grip. If the Misery Index is at Jimmy Carter levels come November 2012, Osama’s capture will be a very distant memory indeed.
Why has the picture of Bin Laden’s corpse not been released? Nobody cares how gruesome it is, we want to see it to silence doubters and those who will rave about “Zionist plots” to claim he’s still alive.
Why on earth did we afford Osama bin laden a “proper” Islamic burial at sea? He’s Osama Bin Freaken Laden. We should have stuck it on a spike with a dead pig carcass and let it rot a few days. Those who would get upset at such treatment for the murderer of over 3,000 people aren’t the sort we can win over anyway.
The current unrest in Egypt makes makes things look pretty grim for the Copts: “I’ve pored over every news report I can find, and have seen no sign that local Christians are involved in this uprising against Mubarak. This tells me all I need to know about the calls for ‘democracy’ and ‘reform’ in Egypt. They know that Mubarak’s fall would mean to them what Hussein’s fall meant to Iraqi Christians: the end.”
More from JihadWatch’s indefatigable Robert Spencer on the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement in the unrest in Egypt. The amount of writing and analysis keeps up on the topic of jihad is positively dizzying. It’s hard to keep up just summarizing him…
Tell a Muslim their food smells bad and lose your house in Canada. This decision was overturned, but it proves Mark Steyn’s point that all Canadian “Human Rights Tribunals” need to be eliminated as threats to free speech…
The big Jihad news this week, of course, was the Moscow bombing. But that was hardly the only thing of note:
The Moscow bombers were evidently trained in Pakistan. “An al-Qaeda linked website said that the group Islamic Caucasus Emirate, led by the rebe Doku Umarov, was poised to claim it had staged the attack. It said that Russia’s harsh military measures against independence activists in the Caucasus had provoked the attack. It said: ‘You disbelievers are the firewood of Hell. You will enter it.'” (I’m guessing “rebe” is short for “rebel,” though I have not heretofore heard it used.)
Dokka Umerov has repeatedly made it very clear that he wants nothing to do with al Qaeda, or bin Laden.
The latter point reveals the following about the global War on Terror. First, the US and British efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have succeeded in destroying al Qaeda’s reputation amongst Islamist organizations. If an Islamist cause as major as the Caucasus Emirate wants to stay clean of al Qaeda, it means that al Qaeda equals trouble. Al Qaeda involvement means interference from the world’s great powers.
Second, Russia’s situation reveals that the US and British efforts have failed to do significant damage to the ideology of Islamism. If a nationalist movement turns itself into a movement with Islamist objectives in order to make itself stronger, then it proves that the ideals to which al Qaeda subscribes have not been significantly damaged.
Australian artist receives death threats from left-wingers and islamists for anti-burqua mural. Once again we see the alliance of the left and radical Islam.
New Imam of Ground Zero Mosque says that all apostates from Islam should be jailed. This is a great improvement from the standard clerical opinion that they should be killed…
All you Islamophobes who say Mohammed was a pedophile are way off base. Sure, Mohammed married a 6 year old, but all Islamic experts agree that he refrained from having sex with her until she reached the ripe old age of 9.
Islamic man in Buffalo texts his wife that he can’t live without her. Twenty minutes later he beheaded her.
