One of two gunmen who shouted ‘Allahu akbar!’ as they opened fire at a mosque in Quebec City was of Moroccan origin, a witness and local media reported Monday, revealing the first details about the attackers in the massacre that killed six men.
The terror suspects were identified as Mohamed Khadir and Alexandre Bissonnette, the CBC reported. The two men were arrested soon after the shooting at the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre Sunday night and were expected to appear in court later Monday, police told reporters.
Also: “The attackers were students at Université Laval, a school in Quebec, a source close to the investigation told Radio Canada, saying one was Moroccan. Police said the suspects were not on their radar.”
And this is an interesting tidbit: “The French-speaking province of Quebec has been embroiled in a lengthy debate about race and religious accommodation. The previous separatist government of the province called for a ban on ostentatious religious symbols such as the hijab in public institutions.”
Safwan Choudhry, the national spokesperson of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at, one of the largest Muslim communities in Canada, told CTV Toronto he was in disbelief.
“Nothing like this, on this scale, has ever happened in Canada to my knowledge,” Choudhry said on Sunday night. “Never has a mosque been shot up quite like this during prayer time and during worship.”
I’ve read comments on Twitter saying that this was Ahmadiyya mosque. As Ahmadiyya are considered heretical to both Sunni and Shia, that would greatly increase the scope of possible attackers if that were true.
His Facebook page reveals few details about his reasoning for the shooting, and appears similar to other 20-something college students. His last public post, on January 20, was a photo of a dog wearing a Dominos pizza delivery outfit, with the caption, “I want one! #fridayfeeling.” Other photos show him with family, with friends at parties and in a Halloween costume, as the killer from the movie “Scream.” He has also posted recently about discoveries on Pluto, camping and wanting to travel one day to Torngat Mountains National Park. He also shared a video last year about a brewery owned by members of the band Megadeth. Bissonnette likes the Facebook pages of U.S. President Donald Trump and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, but he does not express support for them elsewhere on his page. Other likes include the Israel Defense Forces, United With Israel and Parti Québécois of Université Laval.
Nothing about him screams “jihadi,” and if he’s a convert, he would seem to be an extremely recent one.
By contrast, there’s next-to-nothing coming out about the purportedly Moroccan-born Mohamed Khadir.
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.”
It’s been one of those weeks. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
This just in: The eight years of the Obama Administration have been a miserable failure.
Some ObamaCare patients are losing their plans, others are facing huge rate hikes. In Tennessee, they’re getting both. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt.)
ObamaCare’s unraveling shows the danger of a one-size-fits-all federal program. What’s happening in Tennessee is only a nationwide harbinger. Every single neighboring state will have less competition on its ObamaCare exchanges next year. The entire state of Alabama will have only one insurer. Almost all are facing double-digit premium increases: in Mississippi a weighted average of 16%; in Kentucky 25%; in Georgia 33%.
These problems aren’t confined to the Southeast. ObamaCare exchange buyers will have only one option in nearly a third of American counties, according to an August report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a 300% increase in single-option counties from last year. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have approved rates leading to average premium increases next year of over 26%.
Race relations have gotten worse under Obama. That’s what happens when you have George Soros spending millions to poison race relations, and let Social Justice Warriors go rampaging through your institutions…
Both Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte and Donald Trump are gaining in New Hampshire. Remember that until very recently New Hampshire was considered a solidly Republican state.
NFL ratings are down across the, and one-third of people surveyed says its because of the Black Lives Matter pandering. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt.)
Another Friday, another LinkSwarm. On a personal note, I am once again looking for a Senior Technical Writing position in the greater Austin area. If you have any leads in that direction, please let me know.
Republicans cave on everything and leave town. But somehow it’s Trump that’s going to sully the spotless reputation of the Grand Old Party…
But at least congress overrode Obama’s veto of bill allowing 9/11 survivors to sue the Saudis 97-1. One wonders why Obama even bothered vetoing the bill, given how he had already stabbed the Saudis in the back with the Iran deal.
Apparently, some in this party really do think they’re going to hand the election to Hillary, and, bizarrely, they think this will bully the rest of us into knuckling under to their agenda in 2020.
Rather than simply getting payback and tanking their candidate in return.
This party is on the verge of self-destructing. The upper class of the party is upset that the lower class has finally had its say, and they’re determined that should never be permitted to happen again.
Why then would anyone of the lower class ever vote for the GOP again? Are they required to sign a piece of paper confirming that they are Lessers who should know their place in order to have the privilege of voting against their own interests?
He’s also turns his fire on #NeverTrump:
we have a hundred people who claim to be #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary but, strangely enough, never talk about the downsides of a Hillary presidency. Oh, they’ll talk up how much of an authoritarian Trump is, but not Hillary’s sense of entitlement, grievance, vengeance, and her own history of authoritarianism and lawlessness in covering up her crimes.
They talk all day about “Principles,” but discard the most basic principles — such as keeping a proven lawbreaker out of the White House, or just honestly admitting which candidate they’re actually supporting to their readers — as convenience may recommend.
In fact, right now they’re howling about Ted Cruz’ “calculations” in endorsing Trump, while not admitting their own pose of “Being Against Both Equally” is in fact a completely contrived lie they’ve calculated will permit them to agitate for their candidate (Hillary) while not compromising their career prospects within Conservatism, Inc. too much.
How much can I agitate for Hillary while still retaining plausible deniability?
How much can I agitate for Hillary to appease my anti-Trump donors while still keeping enough pro-Trump readers that my anti-Trump donors will feel they’re getting enough eyeballs per dollar of their patronage?
The party — not just the party;the writers who are supposed to have telling the truth as their first mission, but instead of become nonstop liars all the time decrying Trump as a liar himself — has declared war on all of the Lessers beneath their station, those not in The Media and who should, therefore, not have quite as much of a say in things as they themselves have.
They’ve made themselves into exactly what they pretend to oppose — and exactly what I do in fact oppose.
Canada launches prescription smack. Part of me wants to see how the experiment turns out. And part of me wants to start offering junkies one-way bus tickets to the Great (China) White North.
There’s a proper and an improper way to turn down an orgy. Proper: “No thank you.” Improper: Getting stabby. Don’t they teach kids basic manners these days?
The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, the one used to funnel some $100 million of undisclosed donations to the Clintons, spends 72% of donations on “overhead” and only 28% on charity.
“Clinton Chooses Black Lives Matter Over Law Enforcement Support.” Well of course she did! My working hypothesis is that Hillary has been running Black Lives Matter since the very beginning as a desperate attempt to get black voters to the polls for a non-Obama candidate in November.
What’s wrong with Hillary? I know, the full answer to that question would take hours, if not days. So let’s rephrase that: What’s physically wrong with Hillary?
This falls more under “reported as a public service” than “here’s something I really believe”: Odds Hillary Won Without Widespread Fraud: 1 in 77 Billion Says Berkeley, Stanford Studies.” The problem with this sort of thing is that all the previous times I’ve seen similar reports, the methodology was seriously flawed. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Hillary cheated her way to the Democratic nomination, but no, it’s not “scientifically proven.” Though I’m hardly going to march in the streets to debunk this one…
There is also an effort underway to build a memorial to the victims of communism in the Garden of the Provinces and Territories in Ottawa. Plans are to have the memorial finished and dedicated in 2017.
Indeed, Obamacare is the fail that keeps failing: “As a result of the ACA, between 4 million and 9 million fewer people are projected to have employment-based coverage each year from 2017 through 2026 than would have had such coverage if the ACA had never been enacted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Great news! The Nigerian Army has rescued rescued 800 Boko Haram hostages. That’s compared to the number of those hostages rescued by the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, which is (stops, counts, carries the one) Zero.
Donald Trump suggested targeting the families of terrorists. Putin’s Russia does exactly that.
The Obama Administration treats Little Sisters of the Poor worse than Exxon, Visa and Pepsi, all of whom have health plans lacking the abortion mandate. Then again, as Instapundit noted: “To be fair, that was basically because they hate those groups and wanted to punish them.”
Xi Jinping has accumulated more power than any leader since Mao. “He has been fighting dissent with even more ruthlessness than he has been waging war on graft. Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party.”
Belgium’s current crises sounds an awful lot like where California is headed: Expensive government that’s congenitally incapable of solving problems.
David Brin says the Amendment that most protects the right of citizens to film interactions with the police is the Sixth.
Rob Ford was more than just a loud-mouth drunk. “Ford was a political pragmatist who simply didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about him other than his constituents. It was that gumption that endeared him to hundreds of thousands of Torontonians.”
Even Thomas “What’s The Matter With Kansas” Frank calls Obama “ineffective and gutless.” (Warning: Salon Liberal Whining Ahead.)
Liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe thinks that ObamaCare is probably doomed due to the Halbig decision. “I cannot see how this Court could do anything other than decide the same way as the DC Circuit did. The statue is clear on its face.”
Even “ObamaCare Architect” MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber said the same thing back in 2012: “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”
As to Mr Earnest’s point on “what Congress intended”, who can say? No Congressman who voted for the bill read it. Presumably, some legislator’s staffer wrote that actual line about “established by the State”. If we could locate him among the vast entourages of the Emirs of Incumbistan, we could ask him what his “intention” was. Until then, calibrating the competing degrees of deference to a corrupt bureaucracy, a contemptuous executive, a politicized judiciary and a feckless hack legislature brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s line about arguing the precedence of a louse and a flea, with a tick and a cockroach thrown in.
Sarah Palin endorses Joe Carr against Lamar Alexander in Tennessee senate primary. I don’t think anyone who watched Alexander’s “Lamar!” flannel flameout in the 1996 Presidential race has ever really trusted him since…
A New York City cupcake truck seems a little unclear on who their clientele might be. (They’ve since deleted both this tweet and the one where they implored people not to “snitch” to cops when they see crimes committed…)
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.
