Trump couldn't buy this

Even with his billions, Trump couldn't buy this kind of great publicity:

Al-Qaeda Slams Trump as 'Hateful Crusader Master,' Issues Fresh Call for Jihad

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."

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.

A 15-year memorial

I made this video for the 10th anniversary, but I do not think I could do better now.

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.

Muslims against Islamism

Having previously praised certain moderate Muslims, here is an interview with M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD): Muslims against Islamism.

The war against Christians is being waged not just by ISIS but by its ideological Sunni forefathers of the Wahhabi Islamist movement, nurtured by the house of Saud and the Muslim Brotherhood and fed by Islamist benefactors from the Gulf (e.g., Qatar) and beyond. ISIS’s attacks against Christians were simply learned from the ideologies of the Wahhabi militants of Saudi Arabia, the home and the headquarters of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which sets the tone for the supremacist Islam, or Islamism, promoted across the planet. Saudi Arabia has a long, notorious track record of being one of the world’s worst offenders of religious freedom and notably of Christians, who are not allowed to worship publicly, build churches, or carry Bibles. The fate of Christians is tied to the abysmal fate of all minorities, including dissident Muslims — of all victims of persecution under political Islam and its militant fascist offshoots.

Related: "Nonsense about terrorism's 'root causes'," on CNN no less.

Already a predictable tsunami of nonsense has washed over us about the "root causes" of terrorism. We have heard from Obama administration officials and even the President himself that terrorism has something to do with lack of opportunities and poverty. Obama said on Wednesday that "we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances."

But almost all the Islamist terrorists are actually men and women of the upper half.

 

The Islamic State is Very Islamic

The Atlantic, "What ISIS really wants:"

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. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. ...

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

In 2002, I wrote that "Islam is what Muslims do," meaning that there is no objective reality to Islam that exists apart from the deeds of its adherents. There is no ideal form of Islam that exists independently of Muslims. The original post vanished when Google bought Blogger, but I made the same points here. And so back to Prof. Haykel, who makes the same point as well:

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.”

David Goldman, Jihad and Self-Sacrifice in Islam:

Comparative religion is not a statistical exercise: it is meaningless to tally up the victims of Crusaders and compare them to the victims of Islam and quibble about which religion is more violent. Religious war of conquest, that is, jihad, has the same role in Islam that the Lord’s Supper has in Christianity. Christianity (and Judaism) have exercised violence in the past but never sacralized violence. That is unique to Islam among the self-styled Mosaic religions.

America quits

Democrat strategist Doug Schoen wrote on the absence of Obama administration presence in the Paris rally (which I wrote about in, "US administration snubs the entire free world"). Schoen's essay is, "Obama AWOL in Paris: Message to America, allies is we don't care."

Sunday, President Obama morally abdicated his place as the leader of the free world.

His decision to stay home instead of standing side by side with French President Hollande as millions marched in Paris in solidarity with the slain journalists of Charlie Hebdo in opposition to radical Islam – an enemy fiercer than we have seen in decades – sent a clear message to the world: Obama just doesn’t care.

Which is exactly the message the president was trying to send. As I said yesterday,

Even the president of Mali made it. But not our president ("though his public schedule was empty the day of the massive gathering") nor anyone else from his administration. This was a deliberate, intended snub; there is no other possible conclusion.

The left-of-center NY Daily News almost gets it:

"Almost gets it" because the NYDN doesn't seem to get what Doug Schoen does, that this non-presence was not a mere disappointment of miscalculation on the White House's part. It was a deliberate abandonment of America's historic leadership in the defense of western civilization and Enlightenment freedoms.

But it is unsurprising when you think about it:

In Leftist mindset, America is the main cause (if not the only cause) of the misery of the rest of the world. The world has been literally suffering from a United States that is too rich, too militarily powerful and to capitalist for the health of the world. And this is exactly the world view of our president and all his top operatives. For the United States to be displaced from its "perch" is not merely laudatory, in their view it is positively desirable.

The rest of the world, friend and enemy alike, are surely starting to internalize that the United States is now weak on purpose and by design. Friends and enemies alike are now concluding surely that the United States can no longer be counted on either to support our allies or oppose our enemies in any significant measure.

And that is exactly the conclusion that Barack Obama wants them to draw.

Update: Well here is a twist that never occurred to me. A correspondent wondered whether the Hollande government even invited Obama.

Holder, Feinstein Warn of Paris-style terror attacks on U.S. soil

Officials warns of Paris-style terror attacks on U.S. soil - NY Daily News

Officials took to the airwaves Sunday to warn that coordinated terrorist attacks like the ones in Paris last week could happen in the U.S.

"I certainly think that the possibility of such attacks exists in the United States," Attorney General Eric said on CBS's "Face the Nation" during a media blitz of four Sunday talk shows. ...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned Sunday that similar attacks on U.S. soil were “within the realm of possibility.”

“I think there are sleeper cells not only in France but certainly in other countries, and yes, even in our own,” Feinstein said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that there currently was “no credible defined threat.”

Obama to ask for declaration of war against ISIS

U.S. lawmaker: Obama may make formal Islamic State force request soon

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House is expected to ask the U.S. Congress soon for a formal authorization to use military force against Islamic State, a top Republican senator said on Thursday.

Bob Corker, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he has been talking to officials from President Barack Obama's administration and was optimistic they might soon spell out to Congress what they would like to see in an authorization.

Constitutionally, a Congressional authorization for the use of military force is a declaration of war.

This is a debate that the country needs and the Congress should have. It is imperative, however, that the administration spell out what its national strategic objectives are and what means it intends to use to achieve them, with what intensity and with what aftermath. But frankly, I am not hopeful that anyone in the administration is actually thinking about that.

Update: "US-led aircraft have dropped nearly 5,000 bombs in the air war against Islamic State."

The United States and its Western and Arab allies have carried out 1,676 strikes so far and launched 4,775 munitions, officials said. ...

The US share of the operation already has surpassed the American role in the 2011 air campaign in Libya.

Meanwhile: "Britain's MI5 chief warns al Qaeda in Syria planning mass attacks on West"

"A group of core al Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West," Director General Parker said in a rare public speech at MI5 headquarters in London. His last public speech was in October 2013.

In the speech, planned before the killings in Paris, Parker said seasoned al Qaeda militants in Syria aimed to "cause large-scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets" in the West.

What happened elsewhere while Muslims killed 12 people in Paris

While the eyes of the world were turned on the Muslim murders of 12 people in Paris, this is what the Muslim terrorists in Nigeria were doing: Boko Haram Massacres 2000 in Attack on Baga, City Burnt to the Ground.

Nigeria’s militant Islamists have carried out a second attack on the key north-eastern town of Baga, an official has told the BBC.

Boko Haram fighters burnt down almost the entire town on Wednesday, after over-running a military base on Saturday, Musa Alhaji Bukar said.

Bodies lay strewn on Baga’s streets, amid fears that some 2,000 people had been killed in the raids, he added.

Boko Haram launched a military campaign in 2009 to create an Islamic state.

But remember: when Muslim commit atrocities, it has nothing to do with Islam!

However, as Andrew C. McCarthy points out, the Paris murders cannot be blamed on extremists.

What Charlie Hebdo has satirized is a savage reality. That reality was visited on the magazine again today. As night follows day, progressive governments in Europe and the United States are already straining to pretend that this latest atrocity is the wanton work of “violent extremists,” utterly unrelated to Islam. You are to believe, then, that François Hollande, Barack Obama, David Cameron, and their cohort of non-Muslim Islamophiles are better versed in sharia than the Muslim scholars who’ve dedicated their lives to its study and have endorsed such scholarly works as Reliance.

Let me repeat what I have detailed here before: Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State did not make up sharia law. Islam did. We can keep our heads tucked snug in the sand, or we can recognize the source of the problem.

As I detailed in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, the literalist construction of sharia that Islamic supremacists seek to enforce is “literal” precisely because it comes from Islamic scripture, not from some purportedly “extremist” fabrication of Islam. Moreover, this “classical sharia” is enthusiastically endorsed in principle by several of the most influential institutions in the Islamic Middle East, which explains why it is routinely put into practice when Islamists are given — or seize — the opportunity to rule over a territory.

Islam is inherently a religion of death. Anyone who has actually studied Islam as presented by actual Muslim authors and clerics (as opposed to what is presented by Western secular-liberal apologists) cannot help but take a very stout anti-Islamic stand. 

Islam is itself at war with us and everything liberal-Western society holds dear. ISIS and the rest are fighting us violently as headlines too sadly prove, but Islam is itself the problem, for it is a pure, totalist religion that does not admit of any competitor.

See also, "The Threat of a Greater Jihad." "Greater" jihad is the peaceful kind, but it is actually the greater threat to freedom and liberty.

Also my three-part series on the theology of jihad and why jihad the the central act of worship in Islam.

Part one is here, What is Jihad, Really?

Part 2

Part 3

Aayan Hirsi Ali tutors us.

Video: The Rise of ISIS | FRONTLINE Online |

Video: The Rise of ISIS | Watch FRONTLINE Online | PBS Video

An excellent, 52-minute documentary. Does not seem to have an embed link or I would have.

Forward! Forwar! For war!

But the lefty media are aglow already:

One sentence crystal ball

Wretchard T. Cat

8 hrs · 

“Radicals will grow in strength on both sides, namely the Salafist ISIS and the Shia militias, eventually driving the entire region towards destabilization, inevitably threatening global energy supplies and the global economy.”

The Worst Case Scenario In The Middle East, In One Sentence

Ali Khedery, the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq (2003 – 09), recently sat down with Reza Akhlaghi of the Foreign Policy Association to discuss...

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Pope Francis blesses bombings

Can I call 'em, or what? My August 7 analysis of Pope Francis' statement on ISIS: Pope Francis: Bomb ISIS now

Today:

Fearing a genocide of Christians, the Vatican has given its approval to US military air strikes in Iraq -- a rare exception to its policy of peaceful conflict resolution.

The horror of horrors

Muslims Force Christian To Convert To Islam, Then Brutally Behead Him

I have no words, nor are none needed.

Also, "ISIS is ‘Systematically Beheading Children' in 'Christian Genocide'"

Iraq: Hell has broken out here and nobody cares

Pope Francis: Bomb ISIS now

Pope Francis calls for action as Iraqi Christians forced to flee | Reuters

Pope Francis appealed to world leaders on Thursday to help end the crisis in northern Iraq after a sweeping advance by radical Islamic state militants forced thousands of residents of Iraq's biggest Christian town to flee their homes.

"His Holiness addresses an urgent appeal to the international community to take action to end the humanitarian tragedy now underway, to act to protect those affected or threatened by violence and to provide aid, especially for the most urgent needs of the many who have been forced to flee and who depend on the solidarity of others," the Vatican said in a statement.

The pope is no fool nor he is he a worldly naif. If this does not mean "bomb them," then someone explain what it does mean.

Bombing girls

Schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram are being used as suicide bombers

The speculation has arisen following a number of female suicide bombings in Kano, Nigeria, while a ten-year-old girl wearing explosives was found in Katsina state.

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In Iraq, suicide bombers were often jihadist volunteers from Syria or elsewhere who were sent on a mission to drive a truck from one place to another, and then turn it over to another driver at a certain, specific location. They were told no single driver could drive the whole way for security reasons.

What they were not told is that the truck carried a massive bomb and that when they reached the switch-over point it would be remotely detonated. We learned this from interrogating drivers who survived, usually because the bomb was faulty.

It was amazing how quickly those jihadist wannabes lost their fervor when they realized that al Qaeda had basically tried to murder them.

I have to wonder whether a similar tactic is being employed by Boko Haram.

Thank God for the Kurds!

Kurdistan declares "safe haven" for Christian refugees

27 Jul 2014

Author: 

Andrew Boyd

Kurdistan has declared a safe-haven for Christian refugees, as Islamist militants extinguish the Christian presence in Iraq’s second city, Mosul. According to news reports, every Christian has finally been driven out of the city.

Displaced Christians have expressed anger towards the international community for failing to protect them or offer asylum. One priest, who cannot be named, told religious liberty organisation, Release International, that he was furious that Britain ‘offered visas to terrorists’ but refused to grant them to Iraqi Christians. The priest was also dismayed that British jihadis were among the IS fighters.

‘There is no hope, no future. All we have is war and killing and fighting,’ says Thiar, a Christian refugee. He says he desperately wants to leave the country and join the rest of his family in Germany.

Militants from Islamic State (formerly ISIS) ordered Christians in Mosul to convert or pay protection tax and submit to Islamic rule. Those who refused would face execution by midday Saturday.

'For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians,’ Patriarch Louis Sako told the AFP news agency. According to reports, IS militants confiscated their homes and stripped them of their remaining belongings as they tried to leave.

Terrorism deniers exposed - The Washington Post

Terrorism deniers exposed - The Washington Post

The Rand Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute put out a lengthy report in June that documents the extent to which terrorist groups have grown in numbers, strength and controlled territory at their disposal for operations. It is a damning indictment of the failure of the Obama administration to stem the tide of al-Qaeda and related groups and makes clear that the notion that al-Qaeda was damaged or on its heels was utterly untrue.

... that we have no discernible strategy along these lines speaks volumes about the incompetency and irresponsibility of the Obama/Hillary Clinton/John Kerry foreign policy. And this data should serve as a test for 2016 candidates: Do they comprehend the threats we face? Are they willing to do what is necessary to prevent a far more potent strike than 9/11?

No and no.