April 18, 2014

It looks like the Kansas City sniper may have been copying the DC snipers in individual jihad. Fortunately, he was nowhere near as deadly.

Mohammed Whitaker, suspect in the Kansas City-area highway shootings, is charged with 18 felony counts covering nine incidents, Jackson County's prosecutor said Friday. Two counts are "A" felonies alleging he shot someone by firing into a motor vehicle. Seven are "B" felonies alleging he fired into a motor vehicle. The other nine counts accuse him of armed criminal action, Jean Peters Baker said.

There's no evidence to suggest that anyone else besides the arrestee was involved in the Kansas City highway shootings, she said. (Source)

The entire series in under 3 minutes!

Zombie trivia: Did you know The Walking Dead is the adult version of The Toy Story? It's true!

It's a lot easier differentiating friend from foe when they're honest. Don't you wish all our enemies did this?

Jamia Hafsa, a religious school for women in the Pakistani capital Islamabad connected to the notorious Lal Masjid has renamed its library in honour of slain al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden....

“It is true that we have named the library after Osama bin Laden,” a source told AFP Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“He might be a terrorist for others but we do not consider him as a terrorist. For us he was a hero of Islam.”

A small printed sign stuck over the library door gives bin Laden's name and refers to him as a “martyr.”

Kassim tried to throw off police by leaving an Islamophobic note behind after he bashed his wife's skull in, didn't work.

NBC:A broken family’s screams erupted in a San Diego courtroom after a guilty verdict was announced in the trial of an Iraqi immigrant who killed his wife.
As the defendant cried out in Arabic "not guilty," his mother-in-law flailed her arms, screaming "you killed my daughter," while his two teenage sons chose opposing sides.

Jurors found Kassim Al-Himidi, 49, guilty in the death of his wife Shaima Alawadi -- a bloody, brutal beating once considered a hate crime that was, in the end, an act of domestic violence.

After Judge William McGrath handed off the verdict for reading, several family members began screaming, including the defendant's oldest son, who yelled profanities, saying he disagreed with the jury's verdict.

It looks like all my old enemies from the Ansar Mujhadeen English Forum (AMEF) are all in prison now. I guess I can retire.

I'm too busy to go into the background of the entire case. Above I've posted part of a conversation between Khalid and his friend Emerson "Abu Nancy" Begolly as laid out in the federal complaint against him. Begolly was convicted of assaulting an FBI agent after they went to talk to him about his online activities in support of al Qaeda. The pair were part of a larger network that spent a lot of time online at the AMEF forum.

While it's true that most of their online friends form that forum are in jail, and that the forum also had a rather creepy obsession with me, Howie, and Aaron from SOFIR/Internet Haganah, contrary to popular belief I had nothing to do with any of their arrests nor have I been called to testify against any of them.

The fact that they've all landed in the federal penitentiary (or, in the case of Samir Khan, got themselves droned)? No, it's not a coincidence, but neither is it evidence that I had anything to do with it. It just means that a bunch of jihadis who couldn't help but draw attention to themselves by publicly stating their love of Osama bin Laden also happened to have mustache fetishes and angst about my sexual orientation. It's not causation so much as it is a correlation.

FBI Press Release:

PHILADELPHIA—Mohammad Hassan Khalid, 20, a Pakistani citizen and U.S. lawful permanent resident who resided in Maryland, was sentenced today to five years in prison for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. Khalid participated in a scheme to support, recruit, and coordinate members of a conspiracy in their plan to wage violent jihad in and around Europe. He pleaded guilty on May 4, 2012.

Khalid conspired with Jamie Paulin-Ramirez and Colleen LaRose, aka “Jihad Jane,” who were charged separately, in a conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. LaRose also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements, and attempted identity theft and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; Paulin-Ramirez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Court Judge Petrese B. Tucker ordered three years of supervised release, with limited access to computers, and a $100 special assessment. The sentencing result was announced by United States Attorney Zane David Memeger, FBI Special Agent in Charge Edward Hanko, and Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.

Khalid’s co‑defendant, Ali Charaf Damache, aka “Theblackflag,” an Algerian man who resided in Ireland, is in custody in Ireland pending extradition to the United States.

From about 2008 through July 2011, Khalid and Damache conspired with LaRose, Paulin-Ramirez, and others to provide material support and resources to terrorists, including logistical support, recruitment services, financial support, identification documents, and personnel. Khalid, Damache, and others devised and coordinated a violent jihad organization consisting of men and women from Europe and the United States divided into a planning team, a research team, an action team, a recruitment team, and a finance team, some of whom would travel to South Asia for explosives training and return to Europe to wage violent jihad.

As part of the conspiracy, Khalid, Damache, LaRose, and others recruited men online to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe. In addition, Khalid, Damache, LaRose, and others allegedly recruited women who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad. LaRose, Paulin‑Ramirez, and others traveled to and around Europe to participate in and support violent jihad. In addition, Khalid, LaRose, and others also solicited funds online for terrorists.

For example, in July 2009, Khalid posted or caused to be posted an online solicitation for funds to support terrorism on behalf of LaRose and later sent electronic communications to multiple online forums requesting the deletion of all posts by LaRose after she was questioned by the FBI. In August 2009, Khalid sent a questionnaire to LaRose in which he asked another potential female recruit about her beliefs and intentions with regard to violent jihad. In addition, Khalid received and concealed the location of a U.S. passport that LaRose had stolen from another individual.

The Khalid case was investigated by the FBI field division in Baltimore, in conjunction with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Philadelphia and the FBI field divisions in New York and Washington, D.C. Authorities in Ireland also provided assistance in this matter.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams and Trial Attorney Matthew F. Blue from the Counterterrorism Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. The Office of International Affairs in the Justice Departments Criminal Division also provided assistance.

ABC News has released the contents of a letter written by Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It reads, in part:

"The U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians, but most of you already know that... I can't stand to see such [bullet hole] go unpunished," says the handwriting captured in the image obtained by ABC News from a law enforcement official in Massachusetts. "We Muslims are one body. You kill one of us, you hurt us all."

"The Islamic umma is killing innocent civilians, theirs and ours. Most know this but refused to acknowledge it... We can't stand to see such [terrorism] go unpunished. We civilized humans are one body. You kill one of us, you blow up our cities, fly planes into our buildings, you rape our women, you enslave our children, you maim our daughters, you destroy our freedoms, you hurt us all."

April 17, 2014

My father-in-law. Saw combat in Korea defending the Pusan Perimeter. Supported the troops in Vietnam while doing two tours in Thailand loading bombs on planes. He was an Air Force lifer, retired with full pension.

He taught me how to hunt deer. He taught me pretty much everything I knew about firearms. His job in the USAF was weapons. Yet he thought the 2nd Amendment applied to hunting rifles.

So he was also a staunch Democrat. The kind I look at and go "you voted for Obama"?

I don't care, I will always love and miss him.

RIP Pops.

Below the fold is my son's eulogy to him.

« Hide "Today We Laid To Rest A Hero"

Russian Imperial Flag

The tragic irony here is that despite this report, my friends in Russia will continue to believe that the "fascists" behind the "junta" in Ukraine are also "antisemitic" nationalists. When in fact it is their own government that is fascist. They honestly think they have a free media because they can watch music videos and late night TV runs softcore porn. Porn and MTV: the bread and circus of the New Rome:

Jews in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk where pro-Russian militants have taken over government buildings were told they have to "register" with the Ukrainians who are trying to make the city become part of Russia, according to Israeli media.

Jews emerging from a synagogue say they were handed leaflets that ordered the city's Jews to provide a list of property they own and pay a registration fee "or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation and see their assets confiscated," reported Ynet News, Israel's largest news website...

Consequences for non-compliance will result in citizenship bein g revoked "and you will be forced outside the country with a confiscation of property." A registration fee of $50 would be required, it said.

And you know what they call the Emperor in Russia? The Tsar. Which is just Russian for "Caesar". No, it's not a coincidence. They named themselves Caesar on purpose.

It's also the reason that the old Imperial Flag had the double headed Eagle. It represents Russia as the legitimate heir of Rome, both the Eastern empire in Constantinople (the eagle facing right) and the Western Empire in Rome (the eagle facing left).

Putin fancies himself Caesar of a new Holy Russian Empire. Or, at least, this is what he aspires to.

Thanks to Josh

A few weeks ago I noted that historical analogies can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing when we learn the right things from correctly applying lessons learned from history to similar current events, and a curse when we make the wrong comparisons and thus draw the wrong conclusions.

Is Putin a modern day Hitler? We, especially in the US, tend to focus on Hitler's antisemitism and genocide when thinking about what made Hitler so bad. But WWII didn't start because Hitler was persecuting his own people. It started because he invaded country after country in order to 'protect' German minorities, to right the wrongs of maps that didn't mesh with his dreams of ethnic unity.

Given that, then, yes, Putin is a modern day Hitler. Over at Forbes, Paul Johnson agrees. But he takes the analogy one step further: The Western leaders are modern day Chamberlains:

What’s to stop Putin? The West is led by the modern equivalents of Chamberlain: President François Hollande of France is a political nonentity repudiated by his own compatriots; Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have both ruled out the use of force to stop Putin from annexing Ukraine; and worst of all, President Barack Obama–the one man who has the power to stop Putin in his tracks–does nothing. He makes Neville Chamberlain seem like a bellicose activist.

The question is ... what should our response be to Putin? Send the military into Ukraine to ensure that Putin doesn't invade is Johnson's idea. He thinks Putin wouldn't dare invade the remaining portions of Ukraine if US/NATO troops were there.

Me? I'm not so sure. If I understand correctly, the US has zero tanks left in Europe. I've no idea how many our NATO allies have but I can't imagine it would be enough to stop a land invasion through the Ukrainian steppe. We have air and sea superiority, but that only goes so far.

Also, the Ukraine isn't a member of NATO. We have no obligation to help it. If the Ukraine wanted our help, it should have signed on the dotted line years ago.

I guess there are two questions that I don't have great answers for: Should we even try to deter Putin from more land grabs so he won't try the same thing in NATO countries like Latvia & Estonia (also with large ethnic Russian enclaves)? And if we should try to nip this in the bud, then what are our feasible options given our weakened post-Cold War military stance in Europe and Europe's chronic under-spending on the military?

The whole thing is a must read, here's a teaser:

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that....

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

Are we really considering allowing Sharia law in our court system?

ABU DHABI // A father who whipped his 12-year-old son to death has had his one-year jail sentence overturned by the court of cassation.

Emirati R M admitted repeatedly hitting his son with an electrical wire and a cane, claiming he only wanted to discipline him for poor school grades.

The beating was so severe the son was left unconscious and covered in blood.

He was driven to hospital by his mother where he was declared dead.

Prosecutors originally charged R M with causing death by beating, which holds a maximum jail term of 15 years.

At the first trial in Abu Dhabi Criminal Court, the charge was changed to premeditated murder.

As the boy’s heirs, the father’s parents, waived their rights to a death sentence, R M was sentenced to three years in jail and a blood money settlement of Dh200,000.

His sentence was later reduced by the appeals court to one year, as the boy’s mother also waived her right to blood money.

On Wednesday, the court of cassation ruled that the heirs should not have been consulted in this case.

The law states that a father cannot be charged with premeditated murder unless he confesses, which R M did not, or if it was a straightforward murder act.

In this case, as the tools he used to kill his son were not weapons, it proved it was an attack driven by anger and not planned.

Also, Sharia states that a parent cannot be executed for killing his or her own child.

(Hat Tip: TROP)

April 16, 2014

As J.P. Travis at IHateTheMedia points out, Christian bakers and photographers are prosecuted and run out of business for refusing to perform at gay weddings.

But don't expect leftists to go after Muslims for similar refusals.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Some drivers of the zone-based taxis operating out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport have notified their companies they don't want to drive the cabs for religious reasons, citing rooftop placards that are advertising the upcoming Gay Games.

Hopkins released a statement saying that two of the three taxi companies operating at the airport -- Ace and Yellow Taxi – were informed by several of their drivers they will no longer participate in the airport's dedicated taxi cab program.

Patrick Keenan, general manager for the third company, Americab, said two of his drivers also have opted not to drive because of the Gay Games ads. The drivers are Muslims, Keenan and Hopkins spokeswoman Jackie Mayo said.

An update to this story.

The BLM is accused of not only killing cattle and destroying water tanks and fences belonging to Bundy, but also damaging the dens of the tortoise they claimed to be protecting:

(Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit)

Regardless of how you feel about the Confederate flag, what it boils down to is this: two students carry a piece of cloth in exercise of their first amendment rights and the school praises minority students for not resorting to violence.

SOUTH HUNTINGTON, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) – Two Long Island high school students have been suspended for allegedly bringing a Confederate flag to school.

Brother Gary Cregan, principal of St. Anthony's High School in South Huntington, said the two seniors walked in with a Confederate flag draped around their shoulders during an after-hours sporting event at the school.

As CBS 2′s Kathryn Brown reported, there is outrage and disgust on Long Island.

"The African-American students who immediately saw it really exercised heroic restraint and fortunately a teacher immediately confiscated the flag and took the students out of the gym," Cregan said.

This is indicative of what is wrong with today's educational system. In this one incident, the school administration displays its ignorance, its political correctness, its intolerance, and its double standard for acceptable violence.

Frankly, African Americans should be offended more by the principal's comments about 'heroic restraint.' Is he suggesting blacks are more prone to violence so it takes some grand effort just to behave civilly?

That's sounds horribly racist if you ask me, even more so than carrying a Confederate flag. Really, which is more 'heroic' - restraining from committing violence against someone displaying something you don't like, or carrying a harmless, albeit controversial, symbol in such a hostile environment?

When I read the headline over at the Washington Times regarding a super-secret State Department memo that claims that Afghanistan won't be ready to govern itself by the time US troops pull out I had to laugh out loud (LOLing, to you younger readers).

That is a .... secret?

Confidential U.S. assessments, which the State Department tried to hide from the public, show nearly all Afghan Cabinet ministries are woefully ill-prepared to govern after the U.S. withdraws its troops, often describing the gaps in knowledge, capability and safeguards as “critical” and describing an infrastructure in danger of collapsing if left to its own accord.

*I use know here as an epistemological certainty

Some of you may immediately ask, "but what about Islamic countries that allow men to legally abuse women and prevent them from leaving the house? What about countries that demand women provide witnesses to rape or face execution? What about countries that don't allow women to drive, to vote, or even leave their own house without a man's permission? What about countries that ignore 'honor killings'? What about countries that still allow slavery? What about places that publicly beat women for not covering their bodies?"

You have to be kidding. Those things are nowhere as bad or as sexist as availability of porn or taking pictures on a subway.

Sexism in Britain is more widespread than in any other country due to a 'boys' club culture', a United Nations official has concluded.

Rashida Manjoo, a South African human rights expert, was charged by the UN Humans Rights Council to monitor violence against women in the UK and report back to them. [...]

In particular, she highlighted "the easy availability of porn, the use of social media including influencing young children around images" and "harassment on the [London] Tubes", referencing the current 'Women Who Eat On Tubes' trend of people taking pictures of women eating on the London Undergound, and posting them onto Facebook.

And, in case you are wondering, Manjoo is a Muslim. That may explain why she completely ignores the abuses of women in Islamic countries while condemning western countries.

An FBI agent walks into a gun store...

Sounds like the start of a bad joke. But, unfortunately, it isn't.

From SHTF Plan via Gateway Pundit:

After showing proper identification, the agent told the shop owners that he was tasked with all the gun shops in the general area and that he was charged with investigating "suspicious purchases" in accordance with counterterrorism operations.

The suspicious purchases he mentioned, however, were completely normal transactions. This included, paying with cash, purchasing long guns, and other similarly innocuous behavior.

However, what surprised the owners the most was his statement regarding what he was most interested in tracking.

According to the witness, the agent stated, "If you see some Middle Eastern guy come in. You don't have to be so worried about that. What we're really looking for are people talking about being sovereign such as sovereign citizens or people talking about Big Government."

April 15, 2014

From CNN:

A new video shows what looks like the largest and most dangerous gathering of al Qaeda in years. And the CIA and the Pentagon either didn't know about it or couldn't get a drone there in time to strike.

U.S. officials won't comment on that, but every frame of the video is now being analyzed by the United States.

In the middle of the clip, the man known as al Qaeda's crown prince, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, appears brazenly out in the open, greeting followers in Yemen. Al-Wuhayshi, the No. 2 leader of al Qaeda globally and the head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has said he wants to attack the United States. But in the video, he looks unconcerned that he could be hit by an American drone.

The video started appearing on jihadist websites recently, drawing the attention of U.S. officials and global terrorism experts. U.S. officials say they believe it's authentic.