Bombs away! The Obama years

Map shows where President Barack Obama dropped his 20,000 bombs --outgoing US leader carries out 3,000 more strikes in 2016 than year before

And as the world gears up for a seemingly more violent four years, it is worth reflecting on President Obama's tenure.

According to newly released figures, President Obama had already upped the number of bombs on foreign countries.

US forces dropped over 3,000 more bombs in 2016 than 2015, taking the grand total of strikes for the year to at least 26,171.

This map by Statista shows you where they were:

Vast majority of strikes carried out in Iraq and Syria

The figures are likely to be an underestimate, since the only reliable data only comes from a handful of countries, and multiple bombs can be classed as a single “strike” under the Pentagon's definition.

"Easter worshippers" and other Democrat denials

Unless you have been living on the moon, you know that on Easter morning,

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—A series of blasts tore through churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter morning, killing at least 290 people and wounding more than 400 in coordinated attacks on tourists and the country’s minority Christian community.

At least eight explosions, most blamed on suicide bombers, took place across the country. Restaurants and houses of worship that moments earlier were hosting holiday feasts and joyful services were plunged into chaos, filled with rubble, broken furniture, shards of glass and the wounded and dead.

Remains of a church in Sri Lanka, bombed during worship on Easter morning

Let's see whether we can identify who was targeted by the bombers:

1. The targeted buildings were churches. Only the Christian religion refers to its houses of worship as churches.
2. It happened during worship on Easter morning. Easter is a religious occasion of significance to no one in the world except Christians.
3. Easter is always on the Sunday following the Jewish day of Passover. Passover can be any day of the week, but Easter is only on a Sunday. 
4. Therefore, it stands to reason that the killed and wounded were "Easter worshippers" gathered during a "holy weekend for many faiths." But should we identify them as "Christians"? Of course not. 

Think I jest? Well, here you go (click image to enlarge):

You can't make this stuff up. Do Democrats text each other to set the approved phrases and use of boldface before making public statements? Or is there some secret "message controL web site they consult first? Or is groupthink so deeply embedded in them that they automatically come up with the exact same euphemisms? As Martin G. commented elsewhere, "You've got to admire the message discipline. There was more message diversity at Stalin's 1936 party congress. A Rockette kickline has more individuality. They move through the political landscape with the single mindedness of army ants."

Gosh, as Harry K. tweeted, if only there existed a single word they could have used instead of "Easter worshippers." (I will also add that they unanimously misspelled "worshipers.")

I focus on Hillary's truly insulting tweet, since she is at least nominally a Methodist like me.

First, as I indicated above, this was not a "holy weekend for many faiths." Easter weekend is a holy weekend for exactly one faith: Christianity. This particular year, the Jewish holy day of Passover happened to have begun Friday evening and ended Saturday evening. But that is coincidental since Passover can occur on any day of the week. In 2014, Passover began on Monday evening. But Easter always occurs only on a Sunday. ("Easter Sunday" is repetitive.)

If Hillary had tweeted, "holy this year for two faiths" I would have no complaints except calling the victims "worshippers" instead of Christians. At least she acknowledged that hotels were also targeted because of their foreign guests, so not all the killed were "worshippers." (Three of the four children of Denmark's richest man were killed, for example.)

But the tweet that she sent proves positively that she simply refuses to identify Christian victims of terrorism as Christians because - oh, who the heck knows why? There is no rational basis for such evasions, by her or the other lockstep-language tweeters. (Update: Dennis Prager explains why.)

However, compare Hillary's Sri Lanka tweet to the one she sent out after a gunman attacked Muslims inside their mosques in New Zealand in March:

Note the specificity of the victims, the perpetrator, and the ideology behind the shooter:

• Victims? Muslims.
• Perp? A white supremacist
• Ideology? Islamophobia. 

After New Zealand, Hillary's heart broke for New Zealand and Muslims everywhere in the world. But after Sri Lanka? No heartbreak, only prayers for "everyone affected." The bombers' ideology? Gosh, she has no idea even though the Sri Lankan government knew almost immediately that the bombers were belonged to "Nations Thawahid Jaman (NTJ), a little-known local Islamist group which has previously defaced Buddhist statues" and which "was likely to have been inspired by ISIS," with connections to a "a wider international network" (link). 

Remains of St. Sebastian's Church, north of Colombo.

From CNN web site

 But at least the New York Times was not afraid to name names in the headline: "Blasts Targeting Christians Kill Hundreds in Sri Lanka."

 a few hours on Sunday, suicide bombings hit three Catholic churches and three upscale hotels in the Indian Ocean island nation of Sri Lanka, still recovering from a quarter-century civil war in which the suicide bomb was pioneered. ...

The bombings were the deadliest attack on Christians in South Asia in recent memory and punctuated a rising trend of religious-based violence in the region.

But for Democrat politicos, Newspeak is the order of the day.

Update: Mark Steyn dissects some other media coverage. "Taqiyya for Easter."

Yet throughout Sunday the UK, Aussie, Danish and the rest of the world's media saw their job as thorough obfuscation of the truth. I heard about yesterday's attack from the BBC, which had extensive rolling coverage with correspondents on the ground - and yet seemed mainly to be trying to tell us as little as possible. A lady think-tanker from Chatham House was keen to focus on the brutality with which the Sri Lankan government had ended the Tamil insurgency a decade ago: a fascinating topic no doubt, but utterly irrelevant to the mound of Christian corpses in Colombo that morning. In the entire hour, hers was the only mention of Islam - when she cautioned that it would be grossly irresponsible and "Islam-phobic" even to bring up the subject.

She didn't really need to spell that out, did she? It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday's coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.

And if you are The But if you are the Washington Post, the real problem with the Sri Lanka mass murder of Christians is this: "Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West." Gratefully, the comments left there are fantastic. Australian Arthur Chrenkoff, who was born and raised in Communist Poland, responds:

This effort to use language as a cudgel has several sinister implications. It delegitimises perfectly normal political ideas through guilt by association. It also creates the impression that the (genuine) far right is much bigger, more influential and more threatening and dangerous than it actually is. This in turn is used to downplay and minimise the dangers of Islamist and far-left extremism and terrorism. But perhaps the scariest aspect of it all is that the left, by manufacturing the far right monster, are actually genuinely contributing to the growth of far-right extremism. The relentless flood of identity politics, grievance and victimhood, and shaming and guilting entire sections of population based on their skin colour and culture is genuinely radicalising some misfits into fascism, like the Christchurch terrorist, for example. For every action there is eventually an equal and opposite reaction. The left might think it’s courageously
defanging the fascist dragon but instead it’s just sowing its teeth.

Another response to the WaPo:

Top Ten Reason Mattis Should Be President

Via email from S. M. Saintsing, author of the outstanding novella, Winter Three:

Think of all the bennies we would get if Secretary of Defense and retired US Marine General James Mattis became president. Don't worry about how it might happen, just relish the idea:

1. The Secret Service would no longer need to protect the President from the crazies.  Instead, the Secret Service would have to protect the crazies from President Mattis.
    
2. The use of PowerPoint would be a federal crime.
    
3. Bipartisan gun legislation will finally be passed. All persons purchasing a gun will be required to watch a video of President Mattis pleading with them, with tears in his eyes, not to misuse their weapon, or "I will kill you all."  Following that, President Mattis explains proper sight alignment and sight picture.  Gun crime goes down, marksmanship goes up!
    
4. President Mattis' would turn ISIS into WASWAS because his daily schedule would read: 
1. Breakfast:  Kill ISIS
2. Morning: Kill ISIS
3. Lunch: Kill ISIS
4. Afternoon: Kill ISIS
5. Dinner:  Kill ISIS
6. Evening entertainment: Kill more ISIS
    
5. President Mattis would never get a 3 a.m. phone call. Instead, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s phone would ring at 3 a.m. with North Korean psychopath Kim Jong-un complaining that President Mattis keeps him awake at night.
    
6. White House press briefings now with 100% more knife hands.
    
7.  The verb "to kill" would be replaced in the dictionary with "to Mattis" after the US military Mattised all our enemies ushering in Pax Americana for hundreds of years.
    
8. Congress would pass a budget after President Mattis says “I’m only going to ask you once.”
    
9. The White House bowling alley would be replaced with the White House shooting range, open to the public.
    
10. The presidential limo would be replaced with an up-armored HMMWV with President Mattis riding in the turret manning the dual .50 cal.

ISIS attacks Tehran: Who do we root for now?

An Iranian policeman takes cover during an attack on the Iranian parliament in central Tehran, Iran, June 7, 2017.
Tasnim News Agency/Handout via REUTERS

Attackers bomb Iran parliament and mausoleum, at least 12 dead: Iranian media

Suicide bombers and gunmen attacked Iran's parliament and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran on Wednesday morning, killing at least 12 people in a twin assault at the heart of the Islamic Republic, Iranian officials and media said.

 

Islamic State claimed responsibility and released a video purporting to show gunmen inside the parliament building and one man, who appeared wounded, on the floor.

The attackers were all killed and I'll bet none of them get the Muslim funeral prayer said over them, either.

But now the two main enemies of freedom are having at each other more seriously than ever. Let's hope they both lose.

Ramadan is ...

Part of the aftermath of a Baghdad bombing in May 2017.

... a Muslim month when drinking a cup of water during the daytime can condemn you to Hell but massacring other Muslims and especially infidels guarantees salvation.

How ISIS does digital

Edited

Messaging app Telegram centrepiece of IS social media strategy

BTW, the BBC news app is one of the best news feeds you can find.

Methodist terrorists

The Spectator blog sums up British media coverage of the massacre of children in Manchester at the end of an Ariana Grande performance in We must come together – and repeat the mantra ‘hope not hate’

We must all come together. Hope, not hate. Nothing to do with Islam. Nothing to do with Muslims. Just a rogue individual, possibly in the employ of some mysterious foreign agency. Just terrorism, bad people. Unaligned wickedness. Nothing to do with religion. We must all come together. And show love. And solidarity. Hope not hate.

Je Suis Ariana Grande. Already viciousness is being expressed on social media sites. People jumping to all sorts of conclusions. Horrible, horrible, people – no better than the murderer. Who might just as easily have been a Methodist. Remember Jo Cox? That wasn’t them, was it? There, you see.

So we should come together. Hope not hate. Nothing to do with immigration. Nothing to do with Islam. Nothing to do with Muslims. Just horridness of no discernible provenance. Hope not hate. [boldface added]

Let it be noted that the media in Britain are state controlled. Not state organs, mind, but Her Majesty's government has the authority under law to prohibit British media from covering stories or using angles of coverage that the government doesn't approve of. And so you get pablum like above. As British singer Morrisey tweeted,

The Queen receives absurd praise for her 'strong words' against the attack, yet she does not cancel today's garden party at Buckingham Palace - for which no criticism is allowed in the Britain of free press.

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an "extremist". An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?

At least US media are actually acknowledging that the Manchester bombing was carried out by person(s) who at least thought of themselves as Muslims (even though, you know, they weren't, not really). ABC News went straight to the point and expressed deep concern About Potential ‘Anti-Islamic Backlash’ After Manchester Terror Attack.

But why would there be a backlash against Muslims if the attack objectively had nothing to do with Islam? You may as well be worried about a backlash against Seventh Day Adventists or, well, Methodists.

Well, at least Methodists can be held partly responsible for the destruction of Rock Ridge:



And that is about the level of coverage of most media.

Enemies who shouldn't be, enemies who must be

This is a photo of Soviet army and US Army officers shortly after World War II. They seem to be at least halfway to getting drunk, and the Soviet in the middle is probably winning the race.

In my military career I was fortunate enough to have served with officers of many foreign nations, not all actually allied nations. German officers of course were my most common foreign companions; I well remember the Prussian haughtiness of Hauptmann Schneider - but it was an act and he was a great guy.

I wrote before about Egyptian Lt. Col. Solomon, with whom I served at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was representing the Egyptian army along with Lt. Col. Osman, both wonderful companions and great friends who were also outstanding military men.

There were many others, such as Brits and some Aussies and a handful of Indian army officers and Saudis, and many Honduran officers, who were simply superb. My personal acquaintance with Soviet officers was quite limited. The first time I met one in person was when I stepped into the corridor outside my office at the Pentagon and almost ran into two Soviet officers walking down the hall! Quickly I reached for a pistol that I wasn't wearing and then watched dumbfounded as they ambled on down the hall.

That day was not long after the failed coup attempt against Soviet general Secretary Gorbachev, which marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Shortly the USSR ended and was succeeded by the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia would become Russia again, and it was officers of this post-Soviet military whom I encountered in the Pentagon. But their uniforms were the same.

The Russians were here to learn how to be an army of a democratic, free-market state, and I think that  at the time both they and we believed that this would come about. Of course, it did not. Putin came to permanent power and former die-hard communists morphed into die-hard capitalist oligarchs. (You think we have pay gaps here? Ha, we're pikers compared to the former commies of both the USSR and China.)

That being said, the Russian officers I did work with (though briefly) were great guys, too, and serious about their craft.

And herein is the issue. In 2013 wrote a review of a book by the late Lt. Col. Phillip Corso, who served in Army Intelligence at the Pentagon in the early 1960s. He wrote of the relationship between the CIA, the British MI-6 and the Soviet KGB:

They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing the same intelligence game and trafficking in information. Information is power to be used. You don't simply give it away to your government's political leadership, whether it's the Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists, just because they tell you to. You can't trust the politicians, but you can trust other spies. At least that's what spies believe, so their primary loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to the profession first and to their respective governments last.

This kind of informal integration was not the case among the countries' armed forces, but I am confident that regular officers of the US Army, the British Army, the Soviet army, the Egyptian army, the German army, you name it, all felt a fundamental distrust of their nation's government at a very basic level, even if on the choice, responsibilities and intricacies of employing military forces. And every one of us, distrusting though we probably were, would have gone (and we did go) when told.

Even so, if you ever could have locked a group of American, Soviet, Egyptian, British, Saudi, and (even) French officers of equal rank in the same room, gave them a few cases of Coors to pass the time, and locked the door on your way out, when you came back in a couple of hours you would find a group of best friends telling each other war stories and nodding their heads at each others' tales, exclaiming, "Us, too!"

Did you ever notice that when two nations on the brink of war hold a last-gasp peace conference, the confreres are always wearing business suits? Funny that they never let the generals and colonels and captains get together and sort the thing out - maybe the suits are afraid we would. After all, of all men or women, military veterans know the futility and stupidity of war. And every one of them who might take the place of suits at a peace conference don't really trust their own governments, anyway.

For almost all of American history, we have fought enemies who shouldn't be enemies. The exceptions can be easily listed in one breath: The Nazis, the bushido Japanese and the North Koreans. The Nazis and the bushido Japanese are gone and North Korea is more dangerous than ever. But that's about it.

And now ISIS. They are enemies who must be. I cannot imagine any fellowship, any negotiation, with ISIS' officers or commanders that could come to a peaceful accommodation. ISIS seeks only to kill.

And so we must fight. After Manchester the task seems clear and unavoidable. To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, we may not want to fight ISIS, but ISIS definitely wants to fight us. Our choice is not whether to go to war. We are already at war. Our only choice is how the war will end.

Trump just went to war with Syria

File photo of US Navy warship firing a Tomahawk cruise missile

The United States attacked Syria directly Thursday night with dozens of cruise missiles.

The United States launched dozens of cruise missiles Thursday night at a Syrian airfield in response to what it believes was Syria's use of banned chemical weapons that killed at least 100 people, U.S. military officials told NBC News.

Two U.S. warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired 59 Tomahawk missiles intended for a single target — Ash Sha'irat in Homs province in western Syria, the officials said. That's the airfield from which the United States believes the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fired the banned weapons.

There was no immediate word on casualties. U.S. officials told NBC News that people were not targeted and that aircraft and infrastructure at the site, including the runway, were hit.

As is the imperial habit of US presidents these days, there was no authority from the Congress asked for or received before initiating a new war with a country that has not attacked the United States, nor poses an imminent threat to US lives.

On TV news reporting, President Trump stated that the strikes were "in vital national interests" of the United States. I would very much like him to explain in full just how. After all, in 2013 when President Obama was leaning toward the same action, Trump tweeted:

What, exactly, changed on the ground when Assad used chemical weapons this week? The casualty count hardly budged - hundreds of thousands of people have already been killed. Chemical weapons are indiscriminate and cruel, but are they more so than barrel bombs, area shelling and area bombing? And for that matter, does not the brutality of anti-Assad rebels, not just ISIS, pose a dilemma for the United States?

So what is really going on? I find it hard to conclude other than this cruise-missile attack was mainly a signaling operation aimed mainly at Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose first face-to-face meeting with Trump was tonight and will continue tomorrow. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants China to rein in Kim Jong Un's nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs. The signaling was also undoubtedly directed at Teheran as well.

As I type, Trump is on camera speaking of the cruise missile attack. He is speaking angrily about the images of the chemical attack's aftermath and the suffering of children caught in it. He is saying that it is in the interests of the United States to prevent the spread of the use of chemical weapons. I agree with that but protest strongly the unconstitutionality of Trump's attack against a nation with whom we were not already at war.

As I wrote in 2013,

"Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey made it clear that a few runs on target would do no good, that if the bombing was not be be merely symbolic, it would require a sustained, large effort of no short duration."

Does Secretary of Defense Mattis think differently today? If so, why? I also observed,

As for deterring leaders of other nations, assessing what example to make of Syria to deter them is like entering a dark room blindfolded, in the dead of night in a dense fog, to look for a black cat that may not even be there. Does anyone really expect that the Iranian government [or N. Korea's] will abandon its goal of attaining nuclear capability just because the United States mounted bombing campaign against Syria?

But Trump in his appearance tonight did not mention encourager les autres as a motive for the cruise missiles. The only stated motive was deterrence. If the question is only protection of the innocent, then I want to know whether this administration considers chemical weapons to be sui generis so that American warmaking on their users is justifiable for that reason alone. That is: in a civil war in which everyone agrees that hundreds of thousands of people on all sides have died, untold numbers of whom were murdered outside the laws of war but by conventional means, is the use of chemical weapons by itself a just cause of war for the US to wage on Syria, a nation not at peace with itself but with which the US is now at peace except for al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists with whom the US is already at war?

If that is the case being made, then it is being made very, very poorly. Let the case be made if there is one to make, and let it be made coherently and sensibly within the framework of existing US law and justice.

Syria's Shayrat airfield, the target

Because otherwise, absent a direct and imminent threat to US lives, there is no Constitutional justification for tonight's attack. Stopping the spread of chemical weapons is not exactly a new goal for the US government; every president since Woodrow Wilson has oriented on that. What was the urgency for this attack now that foreclosed deliberations with bipartisan leaders of the Congress on how to proceed?

No one ever made a good decision in anger. I fear that that this president has set the table for us to learn (again) the hard way the ancient proverb, "Decide in haste, repent in leisure."

ISIS is full of slackers!

No, its' not The Onion or Duffelblog, it's hard news reporting: "Fair-weather fighters: ISIS jihadists claim headaches, bad backs to get out of battle, documents show."

Headaches, bad backs and general malaise are plaguing the ranks of ISIS, with jihadists calling out sick from the fight to save their caliphate, according to a report. 

Foreign fighters in particular seem to be going soft in the face of an offensive led by the Iraqi national military, Kurdish fighters and international forces. Documents discovered in recently liberated sections of Mosul show how the fair-weather jihadists go to great lengths to get out of combat. 

The Washington Post reported that Iraqi forces who took over an ISIS base in Mosul found a document lamenting 14 “problem” fighters from the Tariq Bin Ziyad battalion. On the surface, reports that militants are on the ropes in former stronghold cities appears to be a good thing, but some disenfranchised members may work their way back to Europe. 

“He doesn’t want to fight, wants to return to France,” one note reportedly said about a 24-year-old Algerian, who is  a resident of France. “Claims his will is martyrdom operation in France. Claims sick but doesn’t have a medical report.” 

Another man from Kosovo complained of a headache. A Belgian militant got out of fighting by offering a doctor's note saying he had back pain.

A former US Marine infantry officer with several years' Middle East service emailed me the article with the comment, 

I love the light-duty-chit approach that is shared by [slackers] around the globe - the mysterious, but ubiquitous, "Oh my back!!".

Yeah, "martydom operations" ain't all they're cracked up to be, right? So legions of jihadis seem to be as smart as Simpkins here:



Things will go rapidly downhill from here for ISIS, especially since the US Marines accidentally mis-routed one of their regimental clerks to Raqqa, Syria, capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

RAQQA, Syria — The self-proclaimed Islamic State has been reportedly paralyzed by administrative paperwork and bureaucracy after a U.S. Marine administrative clerk was mistakenly sent there, Duffel Blog has learned.

Marine Staff Sgt. Alonso Gray executed a mistaken set of permanent change-of-station orders to Raqqa earlier this month, moving to ISIS’s de facto capital and starting work in their administrative section. Within days of his arrival however, pay errors, late morning reports and “improperly routed routing sheets” have caused the group to crumble from within.

Seemingly unaware that he was working for the global terrorist organization, Gray insisted they submit their DTS vouchers to him at least 90 days prior to going TDY. Commanders then panicked when he told them that their units were “non-mission capable” due to incomplete annual training requirements.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former leader of the group, says taking Gray on board was the worst decision he ever made.

“I was supposed to PCS from Mosul to Raqqa before the Iraqi Army attacked, but instead he sent me here,” said Baghdadi, speaking from his cell in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

I'll bet one reason that the Greeks' Trojan War lasted 10 years was because it took that long to get the requisitions approved for the Trojan Horse.

Am I on the ISIS kill list?

ISIS Puts Out Holiday Attack List Of U.S. Churches

The Islamic State published the names and addresses of thousands of churches in the United States and called on its adherents to attack them during the holiday season, according to a message posted late-night Wednesday in the group’s “Secrets of Jihadis” social media group.

A user going by the name of “Abu Marya al-Iraqi” posted an Arabic-language message calling “for bloody celebrations in the Christian New Year” and announced the group’s plans to utilize its network of lone wolf attackers to “turn the Christian New Year into a bloody horror movie.”

Well, I will be in my church on Christmas morning. I can't find a copy of the list, but if mine isn't on it I am going to be really ticked.

Warning to ISIS members or sympathizers: If you come on the premises of my church this Sunday or any other time, I will baptize you!

What comes after ISIS?

ISIS is crumbling - though there are miles to go before we rest - and the question looming ever larger is simply, "What comes after ISIS?"

The Islamic State could eventually lose control of Raqqa, but it is expected to regroup in remote areas, such as Al Bukamal and Al Qaim, along the Syria-Iraq border. The movement may be disrupted, but U.S. officials concede that it will be almost impossible to totally dismantle it. An end to Syria’s wider six-year war—in any way that both stabilizes one of the most important geostrategic countries in the Middle East and favors U.S. interests—also seems increasingly remote.

And the quest for a caliphate goes on. “Al Qaeda might lay claim to it for a moment, and the Islamic State may lay claim to it, but there’s always been this dream of recapturing and bringing back the caliphate,” a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told me. “Who’s going to tap into that next?”

Peace is definitely not on the horizon.

Meanwhile in Iraq, crucifixions continue

Reuters: Crucifixions and vice patrols show Islamic State maintains Mosul grip

Islamic State militants fighting to hold on to their Mosul stronghold have killed at least 20 people in the last two days for passing information to "the enemy" and are back on the city streets policing the length of men's beards, residents say.

Five crucified bodies were put on display at a road junction on Tuesday, a clear message to the city's remaining 1.5 million residents that the ultra-hardline Islamists are still in charge, despite losing territory to the east of the city.

Others were seen hanging from electricity poles and traffic signals around the city, residents said on Wednesday.

Thousands of Islamic State fighters have run Mosul, the largest city under their control in Iraq and neighboring Syria, since they conquered large parts of northern Iraq in 2014.

They are now battling a 100,000-strong coalition including Iraqi troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and mainly Shi'ite paramilitary groups, which has almost surrounded the city and has broken into eastern neighborhoods.

Residents contacted by telephone said many parts of the city were calmer than they had been for days, allowing people to venture out to seek food, even in areas which have seen heavy fighting over the last week.

"I went out in my car for the first time since the start of the clashes in the eastern districts," said one Mosul resident. "I saw some of the Hisba elements of Daesh (Islamic State) checking people's beards and clothes and looking for smokers".

Islamic State's Hisba force is a morality police unit which imposes the Sunni jihadists' interpretation of Islamic behavior. It forbids smoking, says women should be veiled and wear gloves, and bans men from Western-style dress including jeans and logos. ...

"I saw five corpses of young men which had been crucified at a road junction in east Mosul," not far from districts which had seen heavy fighting, said another resident.
"The Daesh people hung the bodies out and said that these were agents passing news to the infidel forces and apostates," he said, referring to the Western allies backing the campaign and the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad.

The coming European civil wars

Giles Kepel, one of the foremost scholars of Islam in the Western world, has said Europe better get ready for war:

According to German newspaper Die Welt, Kepel said the terror group’s [ISIS] aim is to incite hatred towards Muslims from the rest of the society which would eventually radicalise others to the point that Europe could enter into full-blown civil war.

Kepel, who is a specialist on Islamic and contemporary Arab world, added these ISIS fanatics not only want to destroy Europe, but to eliminate more moderate Islamic opposition.

“The terrorism is above all an expression of a war within Islam,” he explained. “The long-term goal of the Jihad Generation is to destroy Europe through civil war and then build an Islamic society from the ashes.

See also my 2005 series, "The Forever Jihad."

And from January, "Europe's coming civil war," in which Swiss

Lieutenant-General André Blattmann has issued a warning to the Swiss people that society is dangerously close to collapse and advised those not already armed as part of the Swiss Army reserve to take steps to arm themselves.

"We are facing an unprecedented age of terror"

We are facing an unprecedented age of terror - Telegraph

Christians are being persecuted in some 50 countries, among them North Korea, Syria, Somalia and Sudan. In 2003 there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq; today a few thousand. In Mosul, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, Christians were forced to flee by Islamic State (Isil) in the summer of 2014. In Afghanistan the last church was burned to the ground in 2010. In Gaza in 2007, after the rise of Hamas, the last Christian bookshop was destroyed and its owner murdered. In Yemen, on Good Friday, Father Tom Uzhunnallil, an Indian Catholic priest, was crucified by Isil. The ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the Middle East is one of the crimes against humanity of our time, and I am appalled that there has been little serious international protest.

But the real target is not Christianity but freedom. 

But if freedom is the true target, what has killing Christianity to do with that? It is because Jesus Christ invented personal liberty. To be a first-century Jew or Gentile was to live wholly subsumed into a wide social context that determined what your occupation would be, when you could work and when you could not, whom you would marry, where you would live, what you may do and when, how to treat your parents and relatives, how to raise your children, what you must teach them, how you must worship and when and where, how you must dress, what you may eat and when you may eat it, and countless other things.

The very concept of individual liberty was non-existent. If you could go back in time and tell an ordinary Judean that the God-given rights of men and women were the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one would have understood you any more than if you had tried to explain how suborbital mechanics.

This was social system into which Jesus was born. And he set about it with a wrecking ball. Here is why I say that Jesus of Nazareth invented individual liberty:

1. Jesus denounced the social system of honor and shame that dominated how people lived and related with each other. 

2. Jesus directly refuted the idea that blood relationships could determine how an individual lived his life. 

3. Jesus insisted that the heart of true religion was not obligations imposed upon a person externally, but was an ethic of love from within.

All of these things are repugnant, actually hostile to ISIS and its allies, but also to the Totalist Left of the West.

More: "Christians are being eradicated from the Middle East"

Also, "An Up-close Look at the Liberal-Muslim Alliance" and its reasons, one of which is obvious but needs to be stated plainly: The left instinctively denies the worth of America.

Michigan ISIS targeted church

Authorities in Dearborn, Mich., have announced the arrest of a Muslim who admitted to an undercover FBI agent that he planned to kill Christians at a church in Dearborn Heights.

Federal authorities are accusing a Dearborn Heights man of supporting Islamic State extremists and planning to “shoot up” a Detroit church.

Khalil Abu-Rayyan, 21, hasn’t been charged with terrorism-related crimes but faces federal charges of illegally having a firearm while using a controlled substance.

But a complaint unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court reveals the FBI has been investigating him since May “regarding increasingly violent threats he has made to others about committing acts of terror and martyrdom — including brutal acts against police officers, churchgoers and others — on behalf of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and Levant.”

Besides allegedly using Twitter to express support for the terror group — often referred to as ISIS or ISIL — Abu-Rayyan reportedly told an undercover FBI employee about a plot to target a church.

“I tried to shoot up a church one day,” Abu-Rayyan is quoted as saying in court records. “I don’t know the name of it, but it’s close to my job. It’s one of the biggest ones in Detroit. Ya, I had it planned out. I bought a bunch of bullets. I practiced a lot with it. I practiced reloading and unloading. But my dad searched my car one day, and he found everything. He found the gun and the bullets and a mask I was going to wear.”

Investigators didn’t name the church Abu-Rayyan allegedly eyed, but claim the property covers about two blocks less than half a mile from his work and can accommodate up to 6,000 members. He allegedly purchased a gun and told an undercover FBI employee that attacking a church would be “easy.”

“A lot of people go there. Plus people are not allowed to carry guns in church,” the affidavit quotes him as saying. “Plus it would make the news. Everybody would’ve heard. Honestly I regret not doing it. (If I) can’t go do jihad at the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here.”

Key line: "people are not allowed to carry guns in church."

Swiss politician channels reality

SWISS CONGRESSMAN GOES BRUTAL AND BALLISTIC ON MUSLIMS AND ISLAM 

Excellent speech by Swiss member of Parliament Oskar Freysinger said with passion and truth that no politician in Washington is yet ready to speak from the floor of Congress. In order for us to beat back the Islamists we need some key leaders in Washington to make a similar speech and lead the nation against the Islamist threat head on. 

Posted by Jean-Baptiste Kim on Saturday, December 26, 2015

Excellent speech by Swiss member of Parliament Oskar Freysinger, said with passion and truth that no politician in Washington is yet ready to speak from the floor of Congress. In order for us to beat back the Islamists we need some key leaders in Washington to make a similar speech and lead the nation against the Islamist threat head on. 

Fantasies about Islam and of it

Americans, especially but not only on the Left, live in a world of fantasy beliefs about Islam, according to Dr. Stephen M. Kirby:

In this world there are two teams involved, of differing sizes and membership, and interacting at different times and places.  The large team consists of a group of non-Muslims who know little if anything about Islam, generally wish with all of their hearts that it is a “Religion of Peace,” seem to prefer any presentation that will support that wish, and frown on anyone who expresses skepticism about that wish during the presentation, or afterwards.  The small team usually consists of one Muslim making a presentation that largely fulfills the wish of the large team.  The accuracy of the presentation is not questioned because the presenter has already established his credentials simply by being a Muslim.

In this world of Fantasy Islam, the presenter is able to create his own version of Islam, react with patronizing sympathy or condescending dismissiveness toward any non-Muslim who questions his version, and knows that the majority of his audience will support him in maintaining the comfort of this fantasy.

But Muslims have fantasies about their own religion, too. Lee Harris wrote years ago about Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology:

A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.

And so with Muslims who think that the supposed glory of the long-lost caliphate can be restored. Al Qaeda and ISIS alike are fantasists - deadly ones, tragically, but their imperviousness to being disillusioned makes them all the more dangerous. And they find "useful idiots" among so much of the American Left.

Evil for its own sake

With the news that Syed Farook and wife Tashfeen Malik left their six-month-old infant with granny before they went on their massacre spree, Maggie Gallagher points out that they were

... willing to turn their baby’s home into a bomb factory, willing to drop the baby off at his mom’s, willing to go back to an office Christmas party with two assault rifles, several handguns, and three connected homemade pipe bombs and murder 14 people. ... 

I am trying to imagine what kind of woman could do this: get married to a man she met online, come to America, have a baby that by all the neighbors’ accounts appeared well-loved and cared for — while building pipe bombs, collecting bullets, planning to die in a murderous spree in the name of her foul false god who demands blood sacrifices. What could she have felt when she dropped the baby off? Did she turn one last time to kiss the life she brought into the world, moments before she went to snuff out 14 other lives? 

A mother whose soul is so dark that she calmly, deliberately, chooses mass murder over mothering — who can explain it?

See my 2012 post, "He has a demon, and is mad."

Some Men Just Want To Watch The World Burn:

San Bernadino as Farook's rite of passage

Was the San Beradino shooting intended to be only an opening act for more to follow?

This was not a suicide mission. The attack was carefully planned and well conducted. The shooters, Farook and his wife Tashfeen, left their 6-month old baby with a relative. Police say their gunfire lasted only about a half-minute, then they stopped and drove away. Their home was found to be a virtual armory of ammunition and explosve devices. They evidently, though unrealistically, expected to make a successful getaway.

Farook is said to have had an argument with another event attendee, after which he stomped out in a huff. I say that the argument was only a deliberately-contrived setup to give him the excuse to leave, then change clothes and get armed to come back in shooting.

Why all this elaborate preparation?

I think this attack was a "make my bones" demonstration by Farook to get into ISIS or other terrorist organization. It was his initiation ceremony or Farook's sales brochure, an advertisement to ISIS, et. al. that he was worthy of them. I do not think that ISIS proper knew about it beforehand.

I think that Farook and the missus thought they could make it into hiding, then innocently emerge later. And I think that the wife's Middle Eastern connections will turn out to be a key to uncovering how Farook got seduced by the Dark Side.

No doubt the FBI is working to determine who the "Middle Eastern looking men" are that a neighbor said started showing up at Farook's house about six months ago. And they are surely even now checking with USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc., on deliveries made to the house that the neighbors reported - where originated, by whom, who paid and whether by traceable instrument.

Someone either taught Farook to make pipe bombs or made them for him. Someone inculcated a sense of discipline in the couple to hit the one target for a very short time and leave. Clearly they expected more to come in whatever kind of Islamist affiliation they had.

That is the real thing that should keep us up at night. How many more Farooks are there, and where? And when?