Tag Archives: Terrorism

News

Car bomb kills 21 Christians in Egypt

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Mary tipped me to this story.

Excerpt:

A bomb killed at least 17 people outside a church in the Egyptian city of Alexandria early on New Year’s Day and the Interior Ministry said a foreign-backed suicide bomber may have been responsible.

Dozens of people were wounded by the blast, which scattered body parts, destroyed cars and smashed windows. The attack prompted Christians to protest on the streets, and some Christians and Muslims hurled stones at each other.

Egypt has stepped up security around churches, banning cars from parking outside them, since an al-Qaeda-linked group in Iraq issued a threat against the Church in Egypt in November.

[…]A statement on an Islamist website posted about two weeks before the blast called for attacks on Egypt’s churches, listing among them the one hit. No group was named in the statement.

Gateway Pundit had a later report of the bombing from AFP. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

A suspected suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Coptic church on Saturday, killing 21 people and wounding 79 others in an attack President Hosni Mubarak said was the work of “foreign hands.”

The strange thing that Gateway Pundit found was that the White House (Barack Obama) was emphasizing that a terrorist attack on a Coptic Christian church injured and killed Muslims, as well as Christians. This is the kind of moral equivalence you find so often on the left. If a bunch of Christians are blown up by a bunch of Muslims, then no one is to blame, because everyone is a victim, including the Muslims who committed the crime. People on the left just can’t bring themselves to say that violence against innocent people is wrong, and that the people who do it are wrong. They just can’t name evil or blame evil. They don’t want evil people to feel bad about being evil.

UPDATE: Gates of Vienna links to this AINA article which claims that the Egyptian church guards left the church an hour before the bomb went off.

Excerpt:

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but officials hastily blamed either Al-Qaida or the Israeli Mousad of being behind the blast, but none of them mentioned the Egyptian state security which is viewed by Copts as the real culprit.

To clear his security forces of negligence, the Minister of Interior said that the blast was an “individual” case, caused by a single suicide terrorist detonating his vest, and has nothing to do with an exploding car. The governor of Alexandria claimed the attack as being aimed at Muslims and Christians alike.

After the blast, traumatized Copts were angered by chants of “Allah Akbar” from Muslims and began hurling stones at the mosque. Immediately security forces which were absent during the car blast and the ensuing events, appeared and starting shooting tear gas at the Copts, and they in turn hurled stones at them, said an eyewitness. Fifteen Copts were rounded up from their homes by the authorities.

[…]Eyewitnesses confirmed that security forces guarding the church withdrew nearly one hour before the blast, leaving only four policemen and an officer to guard such a big church and nearly 2000 people attending the midnight mass. “Normally they would have waited until the mass was over,” said el-Gezeiry. He also commented on the Muslim’s schadenfreude at the massacre at the church, who were heard chanting “Allah Akbar.”

Read the whole thing.

News

Democrat energy policies lead to higher unemployment and higher utility bills

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Here’s an editorial from the sensible Washington Times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The federal government is ushering in 2011 with new powers that will jack up energy costs for consumers. In the name of fighting unproven climate-change theories, bureaucrats are pushing through tough new business restrictions on emissions from energy plants that light and heat homes across the country. As a result, Americans in the near future may be forced to pay a hidden tax in their electric bills or, worse, find themselves in the dark and cold.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules, which take effect Jan. 2, will impose limits on carbon dioxide. The EPA’s primary targets are coal-plant operators, who will be forced to choose between retrofitting their facilities with expensive emissions-control equipment and cooling towers or shutting them down. Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV – whose West Virginia coal-country constituents have the most to lose from the tough emissions restrictions – announced Friday that he had failed in his 11th-hour attempt to force a Senate vote to suspend the regulations before they take effect. His measure would have delayed for two years the new emissions requirements for power plants, refineries and manufacturing factories under the Clean Air Act.

A study released Dec. 8 by the Brattle Group, an economic consultancy, found that the new EPA rules could force the retirement of older power plants that produce 50,000 to 67,000 megawatts of electricity, or roughly 20 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power plants. As many as 70 million homes could be subject to blackouts, according to American Solutions, an advocacy group for conventional energy. Equipping remaining plants to comply with the mandates would cost $100 billion to $180 billion, the Brattle report warned. Those expenses would be passed along to consumers in the form of higher electric bills.

But it’s no problem, because we can just buy more oil from nations that sponsor terrorism and ship our jobs overseas. The Democrat party is the pro-terrorism and pro-outsourcing party. They want you to pay more for oil and gas, and they want to enrich nations that are hostile to American interests abroad. The moratorium on drilling, the subsidizing of “green jobs” programs, the blocking of new refinery construction, the blocking of new nuclear power plants, and so on, all add to higher gas prices and higher energy prices. This means less money in to bank accounts of working families for the things that working families need.

News

Department of Homeland Security to counter global warming threat

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From the Heritage Foundation think tank, my favorite think tank – but I also like the Family Research Council. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano just can’t speak in public without destroying any remaining confidence Americans have left in her agency. CNS News reports that at a conference devoted to “environmental justice”, Secretary Napolitano announced that the Department of Homeland Security would be creating the “Climate Change and Adaptation Task Force” to mitigate the affects of global warming on security and response operations. No…really.

According to CNS, Napolitano said the task force would examine: 1) “How will FEMA work with state and local partners to plan for increased flooding or wildfire or hurricane activity that is more serious than we’ve seen before?” 2) “What assistance can the Coast Guard bring to bear to assist remote villages in, for example, Alaska which already have been negatively affected by changes up in the Arctic?” 3) “How can we focus on how climate change is going to affect our rural citizenry including those who live along our borders both northern and southern?”, and 4) how will the Coast Guard or border services react to rising water levels.

[…]But let’s pretend that global warming does indeed pose an imminent national security threat, do the goals of this “task force” even make sense? No.

First, it’s built on the faulty premise that we are facing increased hurricane activity, flooding and wildfires due to global warming. Casual or not, the numbers simply don’t add up. In fact, we’ve had two consecutive hurricane seasons that were historically quiet. But again, pretending the premise is correct, wouldn’t the department be prepared for a greater-than-average number of response activities simply based on resource potential rather than adding some political cause to it all?

This alone proves that the intent of the “task force” is to make a silly political statement; otherwise Secretary Napolitano currently has her department vastly unprepared for no valid reason.

Secondly, the Coast Guard can already offer the specific assistance to Americans with which it is mandated. If our neighbors in the Arctic region are experiencing any of the issues that liberals attach to global warming — i.e. land loss, water-levels rising, extreme temperatures — what exactly would be the Coast Guard’s new mission? They perform rescue operations, but surely Napolitano doesn’t expect water levels to rise so fast that Alaskans can’t slowly back away?

[…]President Obama has also reallocated considerable resources at NASA, from its original mission of human exploration to global warming research. And other agencies like the Departments of Energy, Commerce and the EPA are also diverting considerable taxpayer dollars to fight global warming and increase economic burdens on our country while ignoring other urgent and pressing priorities. But the misplaced focus of DHS is particularly worrisome given its critical mandate.

Leftists have serious problems with the identification of evil as… evil. Instead, they’ll try to paint free-market conservatives and social conservatives as threats to national security, or point to scary weather as a threat to national security. They don’t dare deal with real threats from evil groups and individuals – that would make the evil people feel bad. And leftists don’t want evil people to feel bad. Leftists are committed to the notion of “moral equivalence” – that all groups that are deemed “evil” are actually equivalent morally to the groups that are “good”.