A witness, who asked to remain anonymous, told CBC’s French-language service Radio-Canada that two masked individuals entered the mosque.
“It seemed to me that they had a Quebecois accent. They started to fire, and as they shot they yelled, ‘Allahu akbar!’ The bullets hit people that were praying. People who were praying lost their lives. A bullet passed right over my head,” said the witness.
Initial reports were saying five people were dead; now I’m reading on Twitter that it was eight.
Assuming the reports of attackers yelling “Allah Akbar” were true, it does rather suggest that the spin the media was desperately hoping to pin on this shooting (“hate” and “Islamophobia” ginned up because President Trump signed some executive orders) is untrue.
Early reports have been silent on whether this is a Sunni or Shia mosque; that’s fairly key information for determining who the attackers might be. (The Islamic State loves little more than slaughtering Shia, and has a history of doing so in Shia mosques.)
Keep in mind that early reports on active shooters are often wrong. Initial reports said there were three shooters, the ones I’m looking at now say two are in custody. Reports are they had AK-47s; 90% of the time that’s wrong and they’re using an AR-pattern MSR. Even the “Allah Akbar” part could be wrong.
But it was certainly a terrorist attack.
Stay tuned…
Update 1 Some news outlets have fallen for a fake report from a fake Twitter account that the attackers were “white supremacists.”
Authorities in Orlando said that 50 people were killed in what authorities are calling an act of domestic terrorism, and many others were injured in the violence at Pulse, a popular gay bar and dance club. Police had initially thought about 20 people were killed in the attack, but authorities said later on Sunday morning that the toll was significantly higher.
The body count evidently includes the shooter.
The suspected gunman was identified by relatives and law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old from Fort Pierce, Fla. One relative said that Mateen’s family was in shock after being told on Sunday morning about his involvement. This relative said Mateen’s family was very sorry about what had happened.
Police have not identified a possible motive, and details about Mateen’s background were scarce on Sunday morning. His family is from Afghanistan, while Mateen is believed to have been born in the United States.
So a man named Omar with roots in Afghanistan opens fire in a gay nightclub. What could his motivations possibly be? It’s an insoluble mystery!
The CBS News article, in contrast to the Washington Post, is not nearly so reticent about the shooter’s motives:
A U.S. intelligence source told CBS news senior investigative producer Pat Milton that Islamic terrorism is being investigated as a possible motive in the shooting due to several indicators including the style of the attack, which had similarities to the attacks in Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March. The gunman put up a protracted gun battle with police and was heavily armed, the source said.
Also this: “FBI Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Ron Hopper said at a press conference that there are ‘some suggestions’ the gunman ‘may have leanings’ toward Jihadist ideology.”
And TMZ, who was evidently willing to spare a staff member from their dedicated Kardashian team, states bluntly “Omar Mateen Terrorist was 29-Year-Old Islamic Radical.”
“African-Americans living in poor neighborhoods cannot rely on Democratic leaders to take the decisive steps needed to ameliorate the problem as long as the Democratic Party can take the black vote for granted. The question, then, is how long can Democratic Party leaders and candidates continue to rely on African-American voters before African-American voters take matters into their own hands.”
“The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.”
Obama Administration finally comes out and admits that the Islamic State has committed genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shiites. That’s like Harry Truman finally declaring the Holocaust genocide two years after the liberation of Auschwitz…
Contrary to his expectations of finding a pliable ally in Iran, he found the Iranians in control, glad to borrow his air force, arrogant and disdainful in Damascus (and Baghdad) and well on the path to dominating a vast stretch of strategically vital territory. And Iran has no interest in playing junior partner to anyone—least of all a traditional Christian enemy.
Suddenly, Putin had a vision of a nuclear-armed, radical-Shia empire on Russia’s southern flank. Those Iranian missiles that can reach Israel? They can reach major Russian cities, too.
Putin’s initial bet on Shia Iran also backfired by turning the Islamic world’s Sunni majority against him — not least Saudi Arabia, which can continue to hold down the price of oil and gas, punishing Russia’s economy far more than it wounds American fracking efforts. And Sunni terrorists have taken a renewed interest in Russia.
Gawker is poison AIDS cancer. In the same way that the Cross is the symbol for the redemptive power of Christ’s blood, Gawker is the symbol of a metastasized social media. Gawker is Nidhogg, the dragon which gnaws at the root of the World Tree. The causes they enunciate are tarnished, just for being in their mouths.”
I don’t wish ill on anyone who works there, obviously. I mean, I guess their every action technically does sustain a legitimately evil beast of legend, some Revelations type shit, and they ruin lives for profit whenever they aren’t simply wasting your time.
Arshid Hussain, 40, was jailed for 35 years while siblings Basharat, 39, and Bannaras, 36, were jailed for 25 and 19 years respectively.
Their uncle, Qurban Ali, 53, who was found guilty of conspiracy to rape, was jailed for 10 years.
Associate Karen MacGregor, 59, was jailed for 13 years and Shelley Davies, 40, given an 18 month suspended term.
Of course, 15 girls is just the number proven in court; the original estimate was more than 1,400 young girls had been sexually abused in Rotherham.
The local government tolerated sexual violence on a vast scale. Why? In part, because the criminals who committed these sickening acts were Muslims from the local Pakistani community, and noticing their depravity was considered insensitive at best, racist at worst.
The British home secretary says “institutionalized political correctness” contributed to the abandonment of hundreds of girls to their tormentors. Imagine something out of the nightmarish world of Stieg Larsson, brought to life and abetted by the muddle-headed cowardice of people who fear the disapproval of the diversity police.
In Rotherham, multiculturalism triumphed over not just feminism, but over the law, over basic human decency, and over civilization itself.
There have been adultery accusations popping up on Rubio’s campaign trail, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. However, I was surprised to read they date back to at least 2010.
Think California is boned? Europe’s pension crisis is even worse:
Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a projection for 2060.
Also this:
The global decline of the blue model stands to inflict even more pain on Europe than on the United States. Europeans are worse at making babies than the United States, worse at integrating immigrants, worse at saving money to pay boomer retirement bills—but no worse at making promises to voters that they will be unable to keep.
“Venezuela’s accelerating economic meltdown is rapidly turning into a full-fledged humanitarian crisis. For too many in that country, the pervasive shortages of food, medicine, electricity, and other basic goods are making everyday life a nightmare.”
“UC-Berkeley Law School Dean Resigns After Being Sued For Sexual Harassment.” (Hat tip: Instapundit, who asks “Why are leftist institutions such cesspits of sexual predation?”)
Pat Condell speaks his mind on Cologne and other mass incidents of Muslim men committing sex crimes,
That “99% of women in Egypt have been physically molested” stat is shocking enough that I went looking for evidence of it, and this was evidently Condell’s source. It says that 99% have been sexual harassed, but a mere “96.5 percent of the women who’d been harassed said they’d been physically assaulted.” So Condell’s stat is slightly off, but the percentage is still staggering, assuming the UN report is accurate…
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.
Six things a Washington Post reporter found out following Ted Cruz around. “The majority of the undecided voters I have spoken with have said they were very impressed after hearing Cruz speak. Many of them said they were undecided coming into a rally and supported him when it was over.”
“Unfortunately, 2016, the little of it that we have so far seen, is already beginning to look like another year of Grim Slide, of a world stumbling down a slippery slope to become less secure, less stable, and less free.”
Iran and Saudi Arabia have severed diplomatic relations over Saudi execution of a Shiite cleric, and Kuwait has recalled their ambassador from Tehran; don’t be surprised if the other Sunni nations follow suit. Good thing we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House…
Turkey’s Prime Minister: Hey, you know who was a model of effective leadership? Adolf Hitler.
It looks like Karachi, Basra, and Mogadishu all rolled into one. People sell drugs openly just next to the Gronland subway station.
It’s not Norway or Europe anymore, except when there is welfare money to be collected. The police have largely given up. Early in 2010 Aftenposten stated that there are sharia patrols in this area, and gay couples are assaulted and chased away.
Mass sexual assaults involving up to 1,000 Arab men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.
Rahm Emanuel’s failure in Chicago is emblematic of the blue model failure in America’s cities. “The city’s bloated pension obligations have already forced Emanuel to make severe education cuts. It will continue to force cuts in city services in various cities, making it harder and harder for mayors to govern, and increasing the antagonism among various constituencies.”
Confessions of a social justice warrior white knight. “Their communities thrive on self loathing disguised as elitism…SJWs insist their goal is to make everyone equal, and for a long time I believed it, but their communities actually enforce factionalism and division.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
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.
Why Hillary’s email scandal (still) matters: “Ignoring the fact that ordinary people are deciding that Hillary Clinton is an untrustworthy liar won’t actually make that issue go away for the Democrats.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz continues to work her special brand of magic at the DNC. “I’ve begun to deeply question whether she has the leadership skills to get us through the election. This is not just about how many debates we have. This is one of a series of long-running events in which the chair has not shown the political judgment that is needed.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Theory: The people flooding into Europe are innocent families of refugees fleeing war. Reality: “young men [heaving] rocks at the authorities and showing up on YouTube videos shouting Allahu Akbar.”
“There is something shallow and decadent about a pontiff who prioritizes “climate change” even as every last Christian is driven from the Archeparchy of Mosul. What will they say of such a pope? That he fiddled with the thermostat while Rome burned?”
I increasingly think the Democrat/Muslim union has to do with old-fashioned relativism. Democrats don’t actually believe that women’s rights and gay rights apply to everyone; white people: sure. Arabs? Well, who am I to judge? And Muslims know this.
When Robby George is just dumbfounded as to why all these Muslims support the party of abortion on demand and gay marriage, the answer seems pretty clear to me: They’re supporting the party of abortion on demand and gay marriage for infidels
Another:
I think the issue is more that they see Muslims as a new potential mascot group that they can champion and therefore obtain that cheap sense of moral superiority that comes with riding in like a white knight. I think a lot of liberal attitudes towards minorities aren’t actually based on the good of the minorities, but how good it makes the liberals feel to champion them. Muslims are (as of now) a tiny, insignificant minority. They’re mostly kinda swarthy, so the “it’s racism” meme is easily transferable, and a significant chunk of liberals loathe Christianity.
