Tag Archives: ISIL

News

Will Democrats blame global warming or the Crusades for the murder of 21 Christians?

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Breitbart reports on a new video from Islamic State: (H/T Ari)

A newly released video by Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists showing the mass beheading of 21 Christians condemns the faith’s believers as “crusaders.”

“All crusaders: safety for you will be only wishes, especially if you are fighting us all together,” a man on the video says with a North American English accent. “The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama Bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah we will mix it with your blood.”

The five-minute video, which includes the caption, “The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church,” shows Egyptian Coptic Christian men on their knees in orange jumpsuits having their heads severed by black-clad terrorists.

President Barack Obama has yet to comment on the mass beheading of Christians by Islamic State terrorists, since he was golfing on Sunday at a private golf course owned by billionaire Larry Ellison.

The release of the Islamic State’s Christian beheading video comes a week-and-a-half after Obama infuriated Christians by using the occasion of the National Prayer Breakfast to lecture Christians not to get on their “high horse” about Islamic State terrorists burning a caged Jordanian pilot because “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

The Democrats also declined to specify that the victims of this attack were Christians. That’s the same thing he did when he described the Jewish victims of Islamic terrorism as “a bunch of folks” who were “randomly shot“. Radical Islam is not the problem that Democrats are trying to solve, you know. Obama likes to call this sort of thing “senseless violence” or “workplace violence” in order to avoid impugning radical Islam. The State Department is now saying that radical Islam’s root cause is that we don’t give them “job opportunities“.

Democrats would prefer to ignore radical Islamic terrorism and focus on the real threat.

CNS News explains:

Not radical Muslim terrorism, not an unsecured border, not an ever-growing federal debt that now exceeds $18 trillion, not the fact that 109 million live in households on federal welfare programs. These are not the greatest threats facing us today.

“No challenge–no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

[…]President Obama then said that the U.S. military is saying that “climate change” is causing immediate risks to our national security–although he did not explain exactly what this meant or how the “Pentagon” had arrived at this conclusion.

“The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” said Obama. “We should act like it.”

Global warming alarmism really means increased regulation of business and consumer activity – that’s the greatest threat we face, according to Democrats. I think what we are seeing is a fundamental lack of seriousness on global security and foreign policy by the golfer-in-chief and his panel of cultural relativist advisors.

This article from the left-leaning Atlantic makes the point that ISIS/ISIL is very much Islamic:

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail.

[…]Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to [Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel]. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.

According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

Democrats are not just unserious about radical Islam, but in Ukraine, too.

Please do read this column from Charles Krauthammer:

Take Russia. The only news out of Obama’s one-hour press conference with Angela Merkel this week was that he still can’t make up his mind whether to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons. The Russians have sent in T-80 tanks and Grad rocket launchers. We’ve sent in humanitarian aid that includes blankets, MREs and psychological counselors.

How complementary: The counselors do grief therapy for those on the receiving end of the T-80 tank fire. “I think the Ukrainian people can feel confident that we have stood by them,” said Obama at the news conference.

Indeed. And don’t forget the blankets. America was once the arsenal of democracy, notes Elliott Abrams. We are now its linen closet.

Why no anti-tank and other defensive weapons? Because we are afraid that arming the victim of aggression will anger the aggressor.

[…]This passivity — strategic, syntactical, ideological — is more than just a reaction to the perceived overreach of the Bush years. Or a fear of failure. Or bowing to the domestic left. It is, above all, rooted in Obama’s deep belief that we — America, Christians, the West — lack the moral authority to engage, to project, i.e., to lead.

I play wargames quite often, and in my experience I find that T-80s are very capable, especially against the Ukraine. The main armament is a very good 125 mm gun with an auto-loader, and unlike the M1A2 Abrams, it does have anti-tank guided missiles. It also has reactive armor, making it resistant to ordinary man-portable anti-tank weapon systems. Yes, it doesn’t have the fire control or speed of the Abrams, but it is a very good tank. It has a very nice low-profile turrent that is hard to hit with unguided anti-tank missiles, especially when it is hull-down.

You are not going to be able to take out one of these from the front with a grenade or a light anti-tank weapon. You will need specialized anti-tank capability, either a well-equipped tank, or a shoulder-fired ATGM (e.g. – Javelin) or a TOW ATGM. In short, we need to arm Ukraine if we expect them to be able to deter a force equipped with T-80 tanks. This is not even to mention what is needed for Ukraine to be able to deal with Russian close-air support helicopters (Mi-28 / Ka-50, etc.) and/or strike aircraft (Su-34).

We really need to think carefully about foreign policy when we vote in elections – weakness and indecisiveness emboldens aggressors. The price of cutting our military budget in favor of Obamacare, green energy, welfare and other crap is that we can no longer reach into hotspots all over the world and prevent small threats from growing into bigger ones. We lose our ability to deter aggression and stop wars before they happen.

News

Obama responds to Islamic State terrorism by saying Christians are just as bad

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In the past I blogged about four myths about the Crusades, but for our purposes, the most important is that the Crusades at least started out as defensive reactions to the conquest of Western lands by Islam.

Anyway, here’s a reaction to Obama’s moral equivalence from Investors Business Daily.

First, what Obama did:

In remarks at a prayer meeting Thursday, President Obama implied Christianity, just like Islam, is filled with people who “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.” This is the progressive disease of moral equivalence at its worst.

In recent days and weeks, the world has watched grimly as the horrific barbarity of fundamentalist Islam has been put on full display.

With routine beheadings, crucifixions, tortures, mass killings of civilians, burying children alive, and, most recently, burning a prisoner alive and filming his death agony to the approving yells of onlookers, it’s clear something is horribly wrong within Islam.

And yet, apart from rather routine denunciations of the savagery, Obama used his appearance at a National Prayer Breakfast to upbraid Christians for their sins.

“Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

They write:

The remarks aren’t merely insulting. They betray a deep ignorance of Western Judeo-Christian culture and its history.

No one claims Christians haven’t done terrible things, some in the name of religion. But this is a straw-man argument.

Obama, for instance, talks of the Crusades. But far from being about conquest, the Crusades were a counter-reaction to the Muslim jihad that swept Christian lands in the Mideast, North Africa, Spain and Balkans.

Nothing less than Western civilization was at stake. Not much has changed today.

According to Open Doors USA’s World Watch List for 2015, “Approximately 100 million Christians are persecuted worldwide, making them one of the most persecuted religious groups in the world.”

And who are the persecutors? “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries” that make up Open Doors USA’s watch list, the report says.

Meanwhile, how are Muslims in the West treated? With visas, welfare, legal protection, even special speech codes to protect their religious sensibilities, along with copious apologies by people such as Obama. Even terrorists at Gitmo are given Halal meals, prayer mats and Qurans.

Obama’s done this before. In a speech in Cairo in 2009, he also suggested the Christian West had much to answer for.

In point of fact, the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage has led to tolerance, justice, women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

Neither slavery nor Jim Crow laws were “justified” by the U.S. Christian mainstream. Indeed, as history shows, Christians were the driving force behind the anti-slavery movement in the U.S. But slavery is still found in the Muslim Mideast and Africa.

Terrorist murderers won’t be appeased by Obama’s cringe-worthy remarks. They’ll be encouraged. As such, they aren’t merely wrong — they’re dangerous.

I’ve noticed this “reasoning” that Obama is employing before when discussing social issues with feminists. I produce facts showing that children are least likely to be abused when they grow up with their own parents in a married home. And they say that there exists some child who was abused by his married parents. As if the existence of one counterexample negates the probabilities or the relative frequencies in different situations. What Obama is really saying is this “because you defended yourself from Muslim conquerors 900 years ago, that justifies kidnapping underage girls into sex slavery after you murder their parents in front of them”. Should we have elected a President who is incapable of basic reasoning about history and about ethics? Well, we did.

News

Is Obama’s portrait of the state of the world realistic or delusional?

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CNS News compares Obama’s words to reality.

Excerpt:

President Obama is “living in a dream world” if he believes the U.S. is “stopping ISIL’s advance” in Iraq and Syria, says former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama said: “In Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL’s advance.  Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. We’re also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism.”

[…]”I think the ISIS threat is growing,” Bolton continued. “They have consolidated control over the territory. They have seized, going back a year now, a year since they took Fallujah, seven months since they took Mosul. And they see weakness on the American side. They think it’s winning support among colleagues in the region.”

Bolton disagreed with Obama’s assertion that the U.S.-led coalition is stopping ISIL’s advance with air strikes.

“No,” he said. “The president is living in a dream world. The fact is, we have no effective way of containing ISIS.”

Bolton said terrorist groups in North Africa, the Middle East, and as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan are beginning to declare loyalty to ISIS.

“I think moderate Arab regimes in the region, the king of Jordan, the oil-producing monarchies of the Iranians Peninsula, are in fear of what ISIS will do. The president’s notion that we have got opportunities is belied by the continued Iranian progress towards a deliverable nuclear weapons capability. The Middle East is descending into chaos and we are watching.”

Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told MSNBC on Wednesday morning that Obama “is living in a make-believe world when it comes to our national security.”

Cotton, like Bolton, disagrees that the U.S.-led coalition is stopping ISIS/ISIL’s advance: “That’s simply not the case,” Cotton told “Morning Joe.” “We may have arrested their progress somewhat in Iraq, but you don’t win the war on defense — you win on offense.”

Cotton also mentioned Yemen, cited by Obama just four months ago as an example of a successful counter-terrorism strategy. But Yemen’s government is now dealing with an apparently successful coup attempt.

Powerline blog describes a few more crises Obama failed to speak about accurately. We have problems with Iran continuing their progress towards nuclear weapons. Russia has occupied Crimea and continues to attack targets in Ukraine using regular Russian troops. In Yemen, Shia rebels are attempting a coup against the president, and the U.S. Navy is heading there to evacuate the U.S. embassy if necessary.

Meanwhile, Obama assures us that the real threat we should be worried about is global warming.

CNS News again:

Not radical Muslim terrorism, not an unsecured border, not an ever-growing federal debt that now exceeds $18 trillion, not the fact that 109 million live in households on federal welfare programs. These are not the greatest threats facing us today.

“No challenge–no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

That’s the top priority of the Democrat party.