Tag: Muslims

RELIGION OF PEACE STRIKES AGAIN

I wonder how this will be used to take away more of my liberty and freedom. I thought gun laws in France were really tough. Maybe they should make them tougher. Then the terrorists wouldn’t shoot anyone with AK-47s. Get ready for Obama and DHS to warn of impending attacks in the U.S. The economy is imploding, they need a new distraction. Muslim terrorists always fits the bill.

“It’s A Butchery” – 12 Killed In Terrorist Attack On French Satirical Magazine Charlie Hebdo: Live Webcast

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/07/2015 07:11 -0500

A tragedy is unfolding in Paris at the moment where armed men stormed the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday morning, killing “at least 12 people” and injuring more, said a police officer. As a reminder, it was in November 2011 when the Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters were gutted by fire, hours before a special issue of the weekly featuring the Prophet Muhammad appeared on newsstands. Since then, the weekly moved to a new location, which was guarded by police, who were also shot at Wednesday morning. The shooters opened fire inside the magazine’s offices using automatic AK-47 rifles before fleeing, said the officer, cited by the WSJ. The attackers, described as “a commando with Kalasnikov and pump action… they went in there to kill” are believed to still be at large as France is “in shock” according to its president.

More details from AP:

Masked gunmen stormed the offices of a French satirical newspaper Wednesday, killing 11 people before escaping, police and a witness said. The weekly has previously drawn condemnation from Muslims.

 

French President Francois Hollande called the slayings a terrorist attack and said that several other terror attacks have been thwarted “in recent weeks.”

 

Xavier Castaing, head of communications for the Paris police prefecture, confirmed the deaths in the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly that been repeatedly threatened for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, among other controversial sketches.

 

Hollande rushed to the scene and top government officials planned an emergency meeting.

 

Luc Poignant, an official of the SBP police union, said the attackers escaped in two vehicles.

 

A witness to the attack, Benoit Bringer, told the iTele network he saw multiple masked men armed with automatic weapons at the newspaper’s office in central Paris.

In this video one can hear gun shots as the commentator remarks it is an automatic weapon. A woman can be seen running down the street and diving for cover between two cars.

A snapshot of what the alleged attackers look like via @Zaidbenjamin:

As Guardian’s Alexandra Topping writes: “The journalist Martin Boudot, from the Premières Lignes agency, has posted this video from the roof of a building situated close to the Charlie Hebdo building. we can hear gunshots and voices who cry ‘Allahu akbar’. In the distance we can see at least two people who appear to be fleeing.

Other newspapers in Paris have been placed under police protection, according to Le Monde.

French president Francois Hollande quickly arrived at the scene of what he called is clearly a terrorist attack. The latest headline updates from Bloomberg as they come in:

  • HOLLANDE SAYS 11 PEOPLE KILLED IN PARIS SHOOTINGS
  • PARIS ON HIGH TERRORIST ALERT, HOLLANDE SAYS
  • FRANCE’S HOLLANDE SAYS THE ATTACK IS A TERRORIST ACTION
  • HOLLANDE: SEVERAL TERRORIST ATTACKS FOILED IN RECENT WEEKS
  • HOLLANDE: FOUR PEOPLE ARE ’BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH’

The latest from Guardian:

A French police official says 11 people are dead in a shooting at a satirical weekly newspaper in central Paris.

 

Xavier Castaing, head of communications for the Paris police prefecture, confirmed the deaths.

 

French President Francois Hollande was headed to the scene of Wednesday’s shooting at Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly that has drawn repeated threats for its caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, among other controversial sketches.

Hollande’s full statement:

Francois Hollande has been speaking to the media. He said that 11 people had been killed and four people seriously injured but 40 people had been rescued.

 

Hollande said that the security level had been increased in Paris and a number of terrorist plots had been foiled in recent weeks.
An emergency meeting will be held at the Elysees Palace in the next hour.

 

Hollande said France had experienced “an exceptional act of barbarism committed against a newspaper”.

 

France was facing a “shock”, he added. “We need to show we are a united country,” he said.

 

France had to be “firm and strong” adding: “We will fight these threats and we will punish the attackers.”

 

France had been targeted because it was a country of freedom but no one would be allowed to go against “the spirit of the republic” in this way.

More on the controversial history of Charlie Hebdo via the Guardian:

Charlie Hebdo has a long record of taking its satire seriously. The weekly magazine’s response to previous efforts at intimidation was to be even more controversial or outrageous, defying the constraints of religious sensitivity or political correctness.

 

In November 2011, its offices were fire-bombed after it had published a special edition, supposedly guest-edited by the Prophet Mohammed and temporarily renamed ‘Charia Hebdo’. The cover was a cartoon of Mohammed threatening the readers with ‘a hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing’.

 

The petrol bomb attack completely destroyed the Paris offices, the magazine’s website was hacked and the staff were subjected to death threats. But six days later, it published a new front page depicting a male Charlie Hebdo cartoonist passionately kissing a bearded Muslim man in front of the charred aftermath of the bombing. The headline this time was: L’Amour plus fort que la haine (Love is stronger than hate).

 

Less than a year after that, it published more cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, including images of him naked and a cover showing him being pushed along in a wheelchair by an Orthodox Jew. The French government had appealed to the magazine not to go ahead with publication, and shut down embassies and schools in twenty countries when it went ahead anyway, out of fear of reprisals.

Live webcast from France 24:


 

REMIND ME – WHO AM I ROOTING FOR?

Turkey hates the Kurds. Turkey is on our side. ISIS has been fighting the Kurds on the Turkish border. We hate ISIS. Turkey is sending their tanks into Syria to fight whom? I’m so confused. Can someone tell me who to root for? They all look alike. Just point out the moderate Muslims that I’m supposed to root for. That should be easy. Right?

Turkey is boosting its military on the Syrian border as ISIS advances. Police tear-gassed a crowded checkpoint in an attempt to clear it and enhance security as the situation becomes more confused and dangerous. Over a dozen Turkish tanks lined up across the frontier from the Syrian town of Kobani where battles have raged for weeks between ISIS militants and Kurdish militiamen.

SEE A BACON SIGN, SAY SOMETHING

The mindset of liberals is a wonder to behold. They rule our society and will tell you what is proper, what you can and cannot do, and how you should live your life and run your business. It’s a disease of the mind. First they came for the pork lovers, and I said nothing.

Hat tip Gayle

Vermont Diner’s Bacon Sign Taken Down for Offending Muslims

By Andrew Johnson

A sign advertising the bacon at a Vermont diner has been taken down after a Muslim resident complained about the sign on the Internet and sparked a massive backlash against the restaurant, Sneakers Bistro.

In June, in return for taking part in a local volunteer initiative to plant flower beds in the city’s traffic medians, the diner was awarded a sign on a lamp post that said “Yield for Sneakers Bacon.” A woman took issue with the sign, calling it insensitive to those who don’t eat pork, according to WPTZ.

The woman’s objection, which she posted online, prompted several Facebook and Yelp comments calling on Sneakers Bistro to take down the sign. The diner’s owners contacted the woman to apologize and tell her the sign has been removed.

“We are here to serve people breakfast, not politics,” the owners wrote in a separate Facebook post over the weekend. “We removed the sign that was located on public property as a gesture of respect for our diverse community.”

The mayor of the town, Winooski, Vt., commended the diner for taking down the sign. “The cool part of living in a diverse community is that it’s not always comfortable,” Mayor Katherine “Deac” Decarreau told the television network. “It’s a fascinating place with lots of opportunities for conversation. The city has to pay attention to a lot of factors while acting within what we can regulate.”

Winooski is “a fabulous artist mecca,” Mayor Deac has told the Center for Media and Democracy. “Winooski has always welcomed immigrants,” she said, “including my ancestors who spoke only French in 1835 when they arrived here.”

RON PAUL ON BLOWBACK

by via Mises.org

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What’s really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.

Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

So far as I know, Ron Paul is the only prominent public figure in the six years since who has given an honest telling of this truth. The explosive exchange occurred during the Republican Presidential debate in South Carolina.

Ron was asked if he really wants the troops to come home, and whether that is really a Republican position.

“Well,” he said, “I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy. Senator Robert Taft didn’t even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy –no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There’s a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.”

He was then asked if 9-11 changed anything. He responded that US foreign policy was a “major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East –I think Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. ”

And then out of the blue, he was asked whether we invited the attacks.

“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, ‘I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.’ They have already now since that time –have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don’t think it was necessary.”

Then the very archetype of the State Enforcer popped up to shout him down.

“That’s really an extraordinary statement,” said Rudy Giuliani. “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

Now, this is interesting because it is obvious that Ron never said that we invited the attacks. This was a lie. He said the US foreign policy was a “contributing factor” in why they attacked us, a fact which only a fool or a liar could deny. Guiliani then went on to say that he has never “heard that before” –a statement that testifies to the extent of the blackout on this question.

Ron Paul was invited to respond, and concluded as follows:

“I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were –if other foreign countries were doing that to us?”

Wow, he broke the great taboo in American political life! Why this should be a taboo at all is unclear, but there it is. But now that it is finally out in the open, this shocking theory that the terrorists were not merely freedom-hating madmen but perhaps had some actual motive for their crime, let’s think a bit more about it.

It is a normal part of human experience that if you occupy, meddle, bully, and coerce, people who are affected by it all are going to get angry. You don’t have to be Muslim to get the point. The problem is that most of the American people simply have no idea what has been happening in the last ten years. Most Americans think that America the country is much like their own neighborhood: peaceful, happy, hard working, law abiding. So when you tell people that the US is actually something completely different, they are shocked.

Why would anyone hate us? The problem is that the military wing of the US government is very different from your neighborhood. After the Soviet Union crashed, US elites declared themselves masters of the universe, the only “indispensable nation” and the like. All countries must ask the US for permission to have a nuclear program. If we don’t like your government, we can overthrow it. Meanwhile, we sought a global empire unlike any in history: not just a sphere of interest but the entire world. Laurence Vance has the details but here is the bottom line: one-third of a million deployed troops in 134 countries in 1000 locations in foreign countries.

All during the 1990s, the US attempted to starve the population of Iraq, with the result of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Madelyn Albright said on national television that the deaths of 500,000 children (the UN’s number) was “worth it” in order to achieve our aims, which were ostensibly the elimination of non-existent, non-US built weapons of mass destruction. Yes, that annoyed a few people. There were constant bombings in Iraq all these years. And let us not forget how all this nonsense began: the first war in 1991 was waged in retaliation for a US-approved Iraqi invasion of its former province, Kuwait. Saddam had good reason to think that the US ambassador was telling the truth about non-interference with Kuwait relations: Saddam was our ally all through the Iran-Iraq war and before.

Ron spoke about complications of the Middle East. One of them is that the enemy we are now fighting, the Islamic extremists, are the very group that we supported and subsidized all through the 1980s in the name of fighting Communism. That’s the reason the US knows so much about their bunkers and hiding spots in Afghanistan: US taxdollars created them.

Now, I know this is a lot for the tender ears of Americans to take, who like to think that their government reflects their own values of faith, freedom, and friendliness. But here is the point that libertarians have been trying to hammer home for many years: the US government is the enemy of the American people and their values. It is not peaceful, it is not friendly, it is not motivated by the Christian faith but rather power and imperial lust.

Ron is such a wonderful person that I’m sorry that he had to be the one to tell the truth. One could sense in the debate that he was making an enormous sacrifice here. After Guiliani spoke, the red-state fascists in the audience all started whooping up the bloodlust that the politicians have been encouraging for the last six years –a mindless display of Nazi-like nationalism that would cause the founding fathers to shudder with fear of what we’ve become. These people are frantic about terrorism and extremism abroad, but they need to take a good hard look in the mirror.

Thank you, Ron, for doing this. We are all in your debt.

________
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.

Whither Israel?

Fred Reed with a no nonsense, balanced, non-vitriolic assessment of Israel and the hatred that drives everything in the Middle East. There are no solutions. There will be no compromise. There will be death and destruction. There are no good guys – only bad guys of differing degrees. The citizens of Israel & Gaza are just trying to live their lives. It’s the power hungry zealot leadership of both countries sacrificing them on the altar of ideology and religion. Does this Fourth Turning seem to be heating up or winding down?

The Road to Ruad

July 20, 2014

I first heard the phrase in Phnom Penh during the siege: “The situation is hopeless, but not critical.” As Israel and the Moslem world claw at each other unendingly, I wonder whether the same diagnosis doesn’t apply. Perhaps I am wrong. I don’t see how.

To begin at the beginning: The Jews had long wanted a country of their own and, after Germany, understandably really wanted one. The problem was that all the countries were already taken except maybe Antarctica, so they conquered parts of Palestine by force of arms.

There was nothing Jewish about this. Most of history consists of groups conquering each other’s territory. When you do this, the conquered people hate you, and begin to resist. To control them you resort to the rifle butt, the torture chamber, the air strike, and the secret police. This makes them hate you more, world without end. Consider the occupation of Jewish Palestine by the Romans, the Jewish resistance, and Rome’s murderous responses.

The neighboring Moslem peoples, and indeed all Moslems, came to hate the modern Jews like poison, and the Jews, now become Israelis, soon returned the sentiment. Historically, this was business as usual. Christians, Jews, and Moslems have spent a phenomenal amount of time hating each other. It doesn’t seem to have gained them much.

Anyway, a vaguely possible modus vivendi was the Two-State solution, now dead, if it ever wasn’t, because Israel is absorbing the occupied territories. So many Jewish settlers now live on occupied Moslem land that no Israeli government could force them to come back, even if it wanted to, which it emphatically doesn’t. So much for modus vivendi.

In what amounts to Greater Israel, the Jews came to have custody in Israel proper of about 1.7 million Moslems, in Gaza of over a million and a half who hate Israel and, in the West Bank, pushing toward three million more, who hate Israel. Why Israel wants additional Moslems isn’t clear—I don’t want any at all, as they seem to be nothing but trouble–but it does seem to be collecting them.

This means that Israel can never be a democracy because, if the Moslems had the vote, Israel would stop being a Jewish state and just be a country with a lot of Jews. Worse, the moment Moslem voters, who breed faster than Jews, outnumbered these by one vote (if they ever did), Israel would become an Islamic republic, like Afghanistan. I do not think the Israelis have this in mind.

How a First World people can live as keepers of what appear to irremediably primitive Third Worlders is not clear, even without hatred.

There is worse.  The Moslems cannot be allowed much commercial success, since it would translate into political power. And intermarriage must be prevented at all costs, since Jews, of whom there are not many to begin with, could be bred out of existence. Is this not Alabama in 1900?

So what can Israel do with its internal Moslems? Logically it can (a) shoot them all, which even Netanyahu probably wouldn’t do, or (b) exist forever with a huge and perhaps growing number of hate-filled subjects, or (c) push them across the borders at bayonet-point. Is there another choice?

Since the Moslems both internal and external hate the Jews, Israel must constantly fight them off, often militarily. Just now it is invading Gaza again, which has been firing rockets into Israel. The Moslems are always doing something, such as blowing up buses full of Israelis, so Israel is always bombing Gaza, invading Gaza, killing Turks, bombing Lebanon,  invading it, bombing Iraq, killing Iranian scientists, and so on. There is the usual political posturing and kindergarten yelling about you started it, no, you started it, but underlying the noise is that the two sides bitterly hate each other.

If there is any reason to believe that it will ever stop, I am unaware of it. Does anyone seriously foresee a multi-culti, Koom Bah Yah amity, with turbans and yarmulkes back-yard barbecuing together and swapping dirty stories? Anybody who thinks this possible must be smoking Drano. The two flavors of Moslem are murdering each other in droves, and they have the same faith. They’re going to learn to love Jews?

Any day now.

No military solution is possible. Israel’s First World, heavily armed, high-tech forces can defeat, usually easily, any forces arrayed against it by its Third-World enemies. It just can’t keep them defeated. Nor can the Moslems decisively defeat Israel. The only remotely plausible approach would be to force Israel to mobilize and stay mobilized until its economy collapsed, which for a lot of reasons isn’t going to happen, and anyway the US would intervene.

The beat goes on.

Meanwhile, Israel depends utterly on America for its survival. Yes, it is an advanced, highly educated, commercially astute nation, and if it lived in peace would be a small roaring success.  But it doesn’t live in peace. And it is too small to buy or build the forces it needs to repel its neighbors and keep its supply lines open. It cannot field a large army other than briefly because it just doesn’t have the population. A garrison state, it very much needs US support.

Said support is not just military and economic.  If votes in the UN are an indication, Israel is detested by most of the planet, which would endeavor to do all manner of anti-Israeli things if the US didn’t veto all of them. Israel has a PR problem. In Gaza we see the now-common spectacle of a national military fighting a non-state enemy of barely armed militants. The result is dead children, recorded on cell-phone cameras. Image-wise, not good.

In America politics regarding Israel are often bitter and even more confusing. For example, I know feminists hostile to Israel, which doesn’t mistreat women at all, yet well disposed to Moslems, for whom mere misogyny would be a great step upward. Many Jews of my acquaintance are ambivalent or confused, wanting Israel to survive yet loathing its government.

How firm is American support for Israel? Very—for now, anyway. This is due in part to the immensely powerful Israel lobby in Washington, in part to a certain lack of enthusiasm for Moslems after 9/11, and in part to the lack of strong anti-Jewish sentiment in America. The United States isn’t Poland. In fact there is a lot of pro-Jewish feeling, seldom mentioned because it doesn’t fit the journalistic template of the eternally endangered Jew on the raw edge of extermination, sieg heil.  Of course, pro-Jewish and pro-Israel are different categories.

If there is ever a threat to American support, it will be not from anti-Semitism but from indifference. There is a potential softness in the support. When Netanyahu gets 29 (was it?) standing ovations in Congress (which he did) it is not because all Congressmen are wildly enthusiastic about Israel.  God himself would not receive such unanimous enthusiasm. Electoral politics screens out principle, and politicians will vote for whatever they think in their interest. If congressmen spoke honestly (yes, I know) I think you would find a small neo-Nazi group virulently against Israel, a substantial Christian group strongly for—and a majority who just wanted the question to go away.

There are powerful forces—Big Oil, companies that want to do business in Iran—that would happily abandon a small, petro-dry nation with no resources. Thus the crucial importance of the lobby.

All in all, it seems to me that Israel has gotten itself into a horrible situation, hated within, hated without, and hanging by a lobby. What can the Israelis do? Emigrate to New York? Undertake an absolutely horrific ethnic cleansing? Exercise the Antarctica Option? Spend all eternity ducking rockets and bombing neighbors? Live as herdsmen of unwanted Moslems that they have to avoid assimilating?

I don’t see a happy ending. Or any ending.