The man arrested by police following the killing of the MP Sir David Amess has been named as Ali Harbi Ali.
The 25-year-old is being held under the Terrorism Act and officers have until Friday to question him.
The BBC understands Mr Ali was referred to the counter-terrorist Prevent scheme some years ago, but was never a formal subject of interest to MI5.
Whitehall officials told the BBC that the man being held was Ali Harbi Ali, a British man of Somali heritage.
Police said a man, who was held on suspicion of the MP’s murder in Essex on Friday, was now being held at London police station after being rearrested under the Terrorism Act. They are not looking for anyone else.
Early investigations revealed a potential motivation linked to Islamic extremism, police said on Friday.
A man arrested over a deadly bow and arrow attack in Norway had converted to Islam and there were fears he had been radicalised, police say.
The 37-year-old Danish citizen is accused of killing four women and a man on Wednesday night in the southern town of Kongsberg.
Police were in contact with the man last year over their concerns.
The suspect has not been identified, and police are working to establish whether it was a terror attack.
Meanwhile, flags were flown at half-mast on Thursday while flowers and other memorials were placed in Kongsberg’s main square.
The victims were all aged between 50 and 70, regional police chief Ole Bredrup Saeverud told reporters.
Residents have told local media that the close-knit community has been deeply shaken by the violence.
Police confronted the man six minutes after the attack began at 18:12 (16:12 GMT) on Wednesday, but he shot several arrows at the officers and escaped. He was caught at 18:47 – 35 minutes after the attack started.
All five victims are believed to have been killed after the police first encountered the man. Officers fired warning shots before he was eventually arrested.
OSLO, Oct 13 (Reuters) – A man armed with a bow and arrow killed five people and wounded two others in a series of attacks in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg on Wednesday, local police said.
The suspect was in custody, police added.
“The man used a bow and arrow … for some of the attacks,” police chief Oeyvind Aas told reporters. The police were investigating whether other weapons had also been used, he said.
“The man has been apprehended … from the information we now have, this person carried out these actions alone,” Aas added.
One of the wounded people was an off-duty police officer.
Newspaper VG showed images of an arrow that appeared to be stuck in the wall of a wood-paneled building.
Today in history, on October 10, 732 A.D., an epic battle saved Western Europe from becoming Islamic.
Precisely one hundred years after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad in 632 — a century which had seen the conquest of thousands of square miles of formerly Christian lands, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain — the scimitar of Islam found itself in the heart of Europe in 732, facing that continent’s chief military power, the Franks.
After the Muslim hordes, which reportedly numbered 80,000 men, had ravaged most of southwestern France, slaughtering and enslaving countless victims, they met and clashed with 30,000 Frankish infantrymen under the leadership of Charles Martel, on October 10, somewhere between Poitiers and Tours. An anonymous medieval Arab chronicler describes the battle as follows:
Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages [Arabic and Latin] and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman, his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who resisted manfully, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.
Entirely consisting of wild headlong charges, the Muslim attack proved ineffective, for “the men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [eastern Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight,” writes one chronicler. The Franks refused to break ranks and allow successive horsemen to gallop through the gaps, which Arab cavalry tactics relied on. Instead, they tightened their ranks and, “drawn up in a band around their chief [Charles], the people of the Austrasians carried all before them. Their tireless hands drove their swords down to the breasts [of the foe].”
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a more practical take:
When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable, with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop.
An investigation is underway into an alleged attack of a female U.S. military service member by several male Afghan evacuees being housed at Fort Bliss.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed to Fox News it is investigating a referral from a Fort Bliss Afghan refugee housing complex in New Mexico alleging that a woman, whose name and age are unknown at this time, was assaulted on Sept. 19 by a “small group of male evacuees.”
“We received the referral from Fort Bliss and our office is investigating the allegation,” FBI Public Affairs Officer Special Agent Jeanette Harper told Fox News.
Officials at Fort Bliss confirmed the report of the assault to Fox News.
“We can confirm a female service member supporting Operation Allies Welcome reported being assaulted on Sept. 19 by a small group of male evacuees at the Doña Ana Complex in New Mexico,” the 1st Armored Division and Fort Bliss Public Affairs said in an emailed statement. “We take the allegation seriously and appropriately referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The safety and well-being of our service members, as well as all of those on our installations, is paramount.”
The statement added that counseling and support has been provided to the service member.
“Task Force-Bliss is also implementing additional security measures to include increased health and safety patrols, additional lighting, and enforcement of the buddy system at the Dona Ana Complex,” the statement continued. “We will cooperate fully with the FBI and will continue to ensure the service member reporting this assault is fully supported.”
Rep. Yvette Herrell, a Republican congresswoman who represents New Mexico’s 2nd congressional district, called the news a “vetting failure.”
“My prayers are with the courageous soldier and her family. This is yet another tragic failure in the vetting process for Afghan nationals,” Herrell tweeted. “The American people deserve answers.”
The alleged attack comes on the heels of two Afghan refugees housed at Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy being indicted for federal crimes including sexual assault on a minor and domestic assault.
Bahrullah Noori, a 20-year-old Afghan evacuee, is being charged with attempting to engage in a sexual act with a minor using force against that person, along with three other counts of engaging in a sex act with a minor, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. Additionally, 32-year-old Mohammad Haroon Imaad is being charged with assaulting his wife by choking and suffocating her on September 17.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have reacted to the news of violence carried out by Afghan refugees being housed in the United States with demands for answers from the Biden administration.
On Thursday night, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford and four other Republican senators sent a letter to the Biden administration seeking more details on the way Afghan refugees are being vetted.
“How many Afghan nationals are waiting on background checks at a transit site? How many Afghan nationals have been paroled into the United States?” the Republican senators asked. “What specific categories, classes, or criteria constitute the Administration’s definition of ‘vulnerable Afghans’? How many individuals who have been paroled into the United States fall under each category, class, or criteria?”
Earlier this month, an official with the Biden administration categorically denied anyone “of concern” had made it into the country, saying there is a “second layer” of screening once a refugee gets to a U.S. entry point.
“No one has gotten into the United States or entered that is of concern,” the official said. “The administration is working with urgency and with care to enhance the screening and vetting operations to make them more efficient without compromising U.S. national security.”
Finally:
Action on Taliban Hostage Situation With Americans in Mazar-i-Sharif.
But that’s only one (1) of six planes that sitting there.
BREAKING: after weeks of stalemate, Congressional and diplomatic sources confirm to CBS News that a flight has taken off from the Mazar-I-sharif airport in Northern Afghanistan bound for Doha.
The ISIS leader behind the 2017 Niger attack that led to the deaths of four U.S. troops, was killed in an August drone strike, according to the French military.
Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, the leader of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, had been killed in a French drone strike. Sahrawi was killed near the border between Mali and Niger.
French President Emmanuel Macron first announced Sahrawi’s death in a Wednesday tweet. “Adnan Abou Walid al Sahrawi, leader of the terrorist group Islamic State in the Greater Sahara was neutralized by French forces. This is another major success in our fight against terrorist groups in the Sahel.”
French Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly discussed the strike further in a Thursday press conference.
Top Taliban members “brawled” on the floor of the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, over which faction — the hardliners or the moderates — should receive credit for the United States’ hasty withdrawal, according to the BBC, and whether the hardliners or the moderates should fill key cabinet positions.
Two top Taliban “moderates,” including the faction’s leader, Mullah Baradar, are also now reportedly missing.
Baradar is rumored to have sparked the clash after “exchang[ing] strong words with hardliner and member of the Haqqani terror network, Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani, who serves as the new Afghan minister of refugees. Baradar, it seems, has not appeared in public in nearly two weeks, leading to rumors that he was injured or killed following the knock-down-drag-out at the presidential palace.
The coordinated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 unfolded at nightmarish speed. At 8:46 a.m., the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Sixteen minutes later, a second jet hit the South Tower. At 9:37, an airliner hit the Pentagon. Within hours, thousands had died, including hundreds of first responders who’d rushed to the scenes to help.
But after the events quieted and the scope of the damage came into relief, it became clear that there was at least one element of the al-Qaeda terrorist plot where the damage had been mitigated—with the fatal crash of United Airlines Flight 93.
Like the three other planes hijacked on September 11, Flight 93 was overtaken by al-Qaeda operatives intent on crashing it into a center of American power—in Flight 93’s case, likely the White House or the U.S. Capitol. But instead of hitting its intended target, the United jet went down in a field in rural Pennsylvania. While all 44 people aboard the plane were killed, countless people who might have perished in Washington were spared because of a passenger revolt—a heroic struggle undertaken with whatever low-tech weapons they and the cabin crew members could muster.
Brendan Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us, a book about domestic airline hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, says that in the hundreds of cases he studied for his book, he never came across anything like Flight 93’s passenger revolt.
“The attitude of passengers tended to be that airlines would give the hijackers what they wanted, and so there was relatively little threat to the passengers,” Koerner says. “There aren’t really that many instances of passengers getting involved.”
7:39–7:48 a.m.: The terrorists board, likely one man short
On the morning of September 11, four terrorists boarded United Airlines Flight 93 at Newark International Airport: Ziad Jarrah, a trained pilot; and three others, who were trained in unarmed combat and would help storm the cockpit and control the crowd. All four sat in first class.
There was one fewer hijacker on Flight 93 than the five-man crews that commandeered the other three planes, leading the 9/11 Commission Report to speculate that the United Airlines hijacking operated with an incomplete team. That commission speculated that an intended fifth hijacker—Mohammed al-Qahtani—had been refused entry to the country in early August at Orlando International by a suspicious immigration official, who thought al-Qahtani wanted to overstay his visa and live in the United States.
8:42 a.m.: The flight departs late
UA 93 left its gate at Newark International at 8:01 am, only one minute later than scheduled. But heavy traffic on the runway delayed takeoff for approximately 42 minutes.
As a result, one of the flights (Flight 11) was hijacked nearly half an hour before UA 93 had even left the runway, and both of the World Trade Center towers would be hit before the hijackers on Flight 93 had taken over their plane.
9:24 a.m.: Airline dispatcher warns United 93 about cockpit intrusion
With multiple hijackings unfolding across the country, United Airlines dispatcher Ed Ballinger sent a text message warning to pilot Jason Dahl: “Beware any cockpit intrusion—two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.”
Dahl, seemingly confused, wrote back, “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”
9:28 a.m.: United 93 is hijacked
While flying 35,000 feet above eastern Ohio, United 93 suddenly lost 7,000 feet as the terrorists rushed the cockpit. In the cockpit, the captain or first officer could be heard shouting “Mayday!” and “Get out of here!” into a radio transmission.
Sometime before 9:30 a.m.: Hijackers kill a passenger in first class
Tom Burnett, a first-class passenger on the flight, called his wife from the back of the plane at 9:30 to report the hijacking. On the call, Burnett told his wife, Deena, that a passenger had been knifed in front of the other passengers. On a subsequent call a few minutes later, he told her the passenger had died.
9:32 a.m.: Hijacker Ziad Jarrah threatens the passengers via the intercom
“Ladies and Gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So, sit.”
9:35 a.m.: Jarrah redirects the jet’s autopilot toward Washington, D.C.
At approximately the same time, recordings from the cockpit capture the sound of a flight attendant pleading for her life, then falling silent.
9:35–9:55 a.m.: Passengers and crew call their loved ones
For approximately 20 minutes, passengers and crew relayed information about their hijacking…and received word of the grim news on the ground. Planes had, by this point, struck both of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. The passengers knew they were staring down a similar fate.
Passenger Jeremy Glick told his wife Lyz that passengers were voting on whether or not to storm the cockpit in an attempt to take back the plane.
“I have my butter knife from breakfast,” he reportedly joked.
Burnett told his wife that the passengers were going to wait until they were above a rural area before attempting their action.
Flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw boiled water, to throw on the hijackers.
Those on the flight who couldn’t get through to their loved ones left heart-wrenching voicemails instead. Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles called her husband, told him she loved him, and asked that he take care of her children.
“Are you guys ready?” one of the passengers, Todd Beamer, could be heard saying to the others while on a call with a telephone operator. “Let’s roll.”
9:57 a.m.: The passenger revolt begins.
The cockpit voice recorder captured the sound of passengers attempting to break through the door: yelling, thumping and crashing of dishes and glass. In response, Jarrah tried to cut off the oxygen and began pitching the plane left and right, to knock the passengers off balance.
9:58 a.m.: Jarrah instructed another hijacker to block the door.
9:59 a.m.: Jarrah began pitching the plane up and down, again hoping to neutralize the passenger assault.
10:00 a.m.: The hijackers discuss crashing early
Still approximately 20 minutes away from their target, the hijackers recognized that they would soon lose control of the aircraft.
“Shall we finish it off?” Jarrah asked one of the other hijackers in the cockpit.
“Not yet,” was the reply. “When they all come, we finish it off.”
In the background, a passenger screamed to another, “In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die!”
10:01 a.m.: The hijackers decide to crash the plane
Jarrah again asked the other hijacker if he should crash the vehicle. This time, he was told, “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.”
Jarrah pulled the control wheel hard to the left, causing the plane to fly upside down, and then to crash into the ground at a speed of 580 miles per hour.
It was 10:03 a.m.
There are still some institutions that are not given over to indoctrinating our youth with anti-American/anti-Civil Rights claptrap.
The Taliban will reportedly allow 200 Americans and other foreigners to leave on a flight to Qatar from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
A U.S. official spoke to Reuters about the departure, which is expected on Thursday and came after pressure from U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad.
The Qatari official said it wasn’t an evacuation flight as all of the passengers hold foreign passports and, if required, visas for their destinations, and have been ticketed by the airline. Qatar facilitated the transportation of the passengers to the airport in a convoy of minibuses parked Thursday morning in a Kabul hotel, one of them with a bullet hole through the windshield. The buses entered the airport shortly after 2 p.m. local time.
At the international terminal, passengers were divided by nationality, with Americans—all of them appearing to be of Afghan origin—mostly too traumatized by the ordeal of recent weeks to speak to a reporter. Qatari soldiers were providing security. (WSJ)
There are still thousands of Afghans who hold Special Immigrant Visas due to having helped the U.S. military and civilian effort that are still stranded.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally acknowledged that the Taliban is not allowing chartered flights to leave.
“We’ve made clear to all parties—we’ve made it clear to the Taliban—that these charters need to be able to depart,” he said.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Taliban officials told those arranging charter flights that they could only allow those with valid documentation to leave from Kabul, not Mazar-i-Sharif, prompting U.S. officials to tell Americans in at the Northern Afghanistan airport to come back to Kabul.
The next diplomatic move on Afghanistan may well occur at the United Nations, where the Taliban is still designated a terror organization. But is it?
Over the weekend the UN humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, flew to Kabul for meetings with Taliban leaders, including the group’s political honcho, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
None of his interlocutors asked him to remove the Taliban from the UN Security Council’s terror list, Mr. Griffiths told me, adding that Afghanistan isn’t the only place where UN humanitarian activity happens despite such listing.
To avert what the world body’s secretary general, Antonio Guterres, is calling a “looming humanitarian catastrophe,” an international conference to raise funds for UN relief efforts in Afghanistan is due to convene on September 13 at Geneva. That’s two days after the world marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which was hatched in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule.
During an interview regarding the recent suicide attack on Kabul airport, a former Navy SEAL quipped that no one making military decisions for the United States seems to have read a history book. Lack of knowledge, he implied, is partly why America is suffering a humiliating and unconscionable defeat in Afghanistan.
Here, then, is a short skeletal history of Muslim-Christian relations beginning with Islam’s founding in 622 AD by Muhammad, an Arab military leader intent on unifying the Arab world and conquering the rest. The lessons learned might put us on the right path forward.
Muhammad died in 632 and, soon thereafter, his followers began Muslim military advances into the Christian Levant. In your mind’s eye, if you can picture the Mediterranean Sea on your left, the landmass to its right – Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and part of Turkey—is known as the Levant, which means the place where the sun rises. A great trading center in ancient and medieval times, conquering the Levant was the Muslims’ first great conquest over the Christian Greeks at the Battle of Yarmuk, in 636, only four years after Muhammad’s death. Jerusalem surrendered in 638.
Islam pushed on vigorously after this battle, sweeping over North Africa, uniting Arab countries, and setting its sights on conquering Constantinople, the Greek capital. Today, Constantinople is known as Istanbul and is part of Turkey. In 717, however, at what is known as the Siege of Constantinople, 80,000 Muslim troops and 1,880 galleys laid siege to the city. Possessing the equivalent of napalm, a fire that is very difficult to put out, the Greeks set fire to the galleys and after a year of siege and attack without success, Muslim forces retreated.
This Christian victory is thought to have slowed Muslim conquest of Europe but Islam penetrated Europe by crossing the Gibraltar Strait into Spain. Not content, in 732, Muslim forces moved north into what is now France. At this time France, western Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands were part of the Frankish Empire, led by Charles Martel, or Charles the Hammer, and his victory over the Muslim attack at the Battle of Tours, in France, is credited with reversing Islam’s spread in Europe. Christianity, not fully established in Western Europe at this time, began to unify Western Civilization around the Roman Catholic Church.
So, here is one of the great moments of history. Were it not for Charles Martel, Europe would have been swept up in the advance of Islam instead of the advance of Christianity. One of the differences is Christianity’s mental openness to science and intellectual inquiry – hence the rise of the great universities of Europe and Europe’s eventual influence on America.
The story does not end here. The struggle continued back and forth for another 1,289 years. Muslim Turks defeated the Christian Greeks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Greeks had re-conquered the Levant in the 1100s but lost again at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Back and forth it went. Muslim victories – then Christian victories – finally ending at the Siege of Acre in 1291 when the last of the Crusader influence was dispelled from the Holy Lands and the Hospitallers moved to Cyprus and Rhodes, where they held out until 1523.
Islam had conquered Spain. Islam had conquered the Holy Lands. Islam had conquered the Levant.
Islam laid siege to the Greek capital, Constantinople, which surrendered in 1453. That surrender marks the end of the Roman Empire and a victory for the Muslim Ottomans.
Painstakingly, Western Civilization began to fight back. Spain was re-conquered at the Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
[if I may interject, this isn’t correct. While the battle was a major turning point, the final battle of the Reconquista was in 1492 .ed]
A fleet of the Holy League, mostly from Spain and Venice, fought the last rowing naval battle at Lepanto, in 1571, routing the Muslims. Finally, in 1683, the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire fought it out literally at the gates of Vienna. The Ottoman defeat there meant that Islam ceased to be a menace to the West, especially with the Ottoman Empire’s and caliphate’s final dissolution on March 23, 1924, after World War I.
America was colonized by Christian Europe, specifically Protestant Christian Europe, beginning in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia, and Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. Americans take for granted the intense battle for humanity’s mind that this history represents. The notion of natural individual rights through a Creator; the notion of the development of the person (male or female); the notion of personal Liberty; the notion of people as a reflection of the divine—the undergirding of our way of life is the result of being on the Western side of this war.
We are now at the Battle of Afghanistan, 2021. Because our military and political leaders have not read a history book, they deem it a 20-year war, but they are wrong. It is a thirteen-hundred-and-eighty-nine-year war that we will lose because we do not know we are in it.
The Navy SEAL was right. Our political and military leaders make decisions without a clue. We had a stable and neutralized position in Afghanistan, with very few troops, that served as a check on Islamic Jihad and the rise of an Islamic caliphate and harsh Sharia Law.
We do not need to be there to nation-build—something that anyone who knows history knows cannot be successful. We are there because Islam decided to attack the West once again in 2001. We are there to save Western Civilization. We cannot allow a humiliating defeat.
I knew it.We hold – $9oops -$7 Billion (of the $9 Billion held outside of Afghanistan) of the Afghanistan goobermint’s money and I knew this was what Biden was hinting about.
In a briefing last week, Joe Biden told inquisitive reporters that every American who wants to get out of Afghanistan would get out of Afghanistan, and he was counting on the Taliban’s “self-interest” in letting the Americans leave.
Toss that one into the bin of lies and errors coming from this Biden Afghanistan fiasco.
Turns out the Taliban has its own ideas about what its self-interest is.
The Taliban have offered Joe Biden a deal: unfreeze the Afghan funds and they will extend the deadline.
Grenell, a former acting director of National Intelligence during President Trump’s administration, has been consistently accurate about what is going down at State and other government agencies during the ongoing Afghanistan fiasco, so his disturbing report is very likely accurate.
What we are seeing here is an emerging hostage situation in that country as Biden insists on pulling out by his Aug. 31 deadline, which the Taliban is holding him to, under penalty of “consequences.” The State Department has claimed that 300 Americans are awaiting evacuation and have not made it to the Kabul airport yet. According to this disturbing collection of reports from AT deputy editor Andrea Widburg, it’s likely more. Her sources report that with the State Department thwarting even private efforts, they are having a hellish time getting out.
Grenell’s report demonstrates that far from having “self-interest” in seeing Americans out, the Taliban terrorists have a “self-interest” in hostage-taking hardball with Americans left behind after August 31.
For the past several years, global terrorism was in retreat and had dropped off the list of Americans’ fears entirely. Now, after the debacle in Afghanistan, it’s suddenly front-page news again. Will a revival of terrorism be President Joe Biden’s legacy?
Rewind the tape to 2015. ISIS – which emerged as a powerhouse after President Barack Obama’s decision to evacuate Iraq – was claiming huge swaths of land, to the surprise of Obama (who had dismissed ISIS as the “JV team”). And, not coincidentally, the number of terrorist attacks spiked. In 2013, there were four Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide. By 2015, the number had exploded to 106, three of them in the U.S.
In 2015, ISIS struck in Paris in a coordinated assault, killing more than 130 people, and the attack in San Bernardino, California, claimed 14 lives and injured 22. Earlier that same year, terrorists killed five people at a recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, two in Garland, Texas. In the next year came the ISIS-inspired mass shooting at a Florida nightclub that claimed 49 lives, bombs in New York and New Jersey, an attack in Ohio.
In December 2015, terrorism was at the top of the list of problems facing the United States, according to an ongoing Gallup poll, beating out the economy, government, and guns as chief concerns. Obama, meanwhile, kept telling the nation that defeating ISIS would be a long and arduous process, which was true only because Obama was micromanaging the effort.
Proof of that came when ISIS was routed just seven months after President Donald Trump took office. As we noted at Investor’s Business Daily, “Rather than talk endlessly about how long and hard the fight would be, Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his ‘top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.’” Turns out he meant it.
Since then, the number of Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide has plunged. In the U.S., there have been only two acts of terrorism in the past four-plus years that were fueled by Islamic extremism. And in Gallup’s poll of top problems, terrorism stopped even registering. No one mentioned it in the July 2021 survey.
Then Biden, in an eerie repeat of the Obama years, decided to pull troops out of Afghanistan against the advice of many, after which the country quickly fell to Taliban terrorists – despite Biden’s promise that this wouldn’t happen. And then ISIS suddenly re-emerged, this time called ISIS-K.
Biden seems to think that ISIS won’t be a problem this time around because, in his view of the world, the Taliban and ISIS are “arch” enemies. Never mind that the Taliban is made up of terror specialists who now are equipped with some of the most advanced weaponry in the world.
Plus, it’s far from clear that the Taliban will help in any fight against ISIS-K. After all, the Taliban had previously released thousands of ISIS-K prisoners from the Bagram Air Force Base after the U.S. abandoned it.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said on Friday that “Well, I don’t know the exact number. Clearly, it’s in the thousands when you consider both prisons, because both of them were taken over by the Taliban and emptied. But I couldn’t give you a precise figure.”
Some of the prisoners released by their “arch enemies” may have been involved in the terrorist attacks in Kabul that claimed the lives of 13 U.S. military men and women.
In response to that, Biden has launched two drone attacks against ISIS-K planners. But the question going forward is this: Will the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan, the rebirth of ISIS, and the appearance of American weakness fuel another huge spike in Islamic terror around the world – including in the United States?
If, God forbid, that does happen, the cause will be easy to pinpoint. And Joe Biden will have presided over two major increases in global terrorism since 9/11.
The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist, although sometimes it’s nice if you can extract some actionable intelligence from them first.
But only sometimes.
With that in mind, let’s applaud Presidentish Joe Biden for ordering the strike — or having been instructed to order the strike — that killed an ISIS-K “planner” late on Friday.
Still, one dead planner for 13 dead American servicemembers isn’t very good math, especially after the huge propaganda victory earned by the Taliban and ISIS-K these last two weeks.
Biden needed a big display of strength and resolve. What we delivered, at least so far, was quite a bit less.
Maybe there will be more dead terrorists soon, lots more. But given that Biden has left behind untold numbers of Americans and our Afghan allies, the Taliban and ISIS-K have a lot of potential human shields.
And as I wrote yesterday for our VIPs, it didn’t have to be that way — the dang Soviets showed the world how to safely withdraw from Afghanistan more than 30 years ago. The only thing more embarrassing than getting shown up by your superpower rival is getting shown up by your defunct, former superpower rival.
Democrats are the modern Bourbons: They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Actually, Biden has learned nothing and apparently forgotten quite a bit.
I hate to say it, but all this does is make it look like the U.S. is striking at any available target, just to make it appear that we’re ‘doing something’.
turns out others have the same opinion
I hate to be conspiratorial but do we know this actually even happened?
BLUF: Most people realize [that] people who wish them to be disarmed do so because they wish to do things that would be difficult to accomplish if the people were armed.
The classic case for confiscation of weapons in Western Civilization in the last hundred years, is the government will defend you. You do not need weapons to defend yourself. The Taliban is reported to have emulated this Western propaganda in Kabul, after taking over in August of 2021.
KABUL, Aug 16 (Reuters) – Taliban fighters in the Afghan capital, Kabul, started collecting weapons from civilians on Monday because people no longer need them for personal protection, a Taliban official said.
“We understand people kept weapons for personal safety. They can now feel safe. We are not here to harm innocent civilians,” the official told Reuters.
The Taliban are following a long tradition of disarming individuals under the pretext individuals do not need weapons because the government will protect them. The Taliban feels the need to add a caveat:
“We are not here to harm innocent civilians.”
As governments became more sophisticated in their need to dissimulate, they often claim the government will protect people, so they do not need weapons.
It is a claim made in the English experience with gun control. Joyce Lee Malcolm documents this in her scholarly book “Guns and Violence: The English Experience”. On page 176, she documents a significant expansion of the law against the carry of weapons in 1953. Sir Lionel Heald, the Attorney General, is promoting the bill. He says: It is the duty of society to protect them, and they should not have to do that… The argument of self-defense is one to which, perhaps, we should not attach too much weight.
Self-defense was specifically eliminated as a reason to have a firearm in English, Canadian, and later, Australian law.
Gun control laws, and the number of legal, or even illegal firearms, have not shown any correlation to violent crime.
They show an unwillingness of governments to trust their people with weapons.
Most European gun control laws were created after World War I and before World War II, for political purposes, not crime control. Murder rates were essentially unchanged, although, as expected, there was a spike during World War II.
In India, the British instituted weapons control after the Mutiny/uprising in 1857. It was clear the purpose was to prevent uprisings. Most gun control laws were the result of conquest and war.
Misleading the people who are governed in order to disarm them has a long and unpleasant history. Niccoló Machiavelli, known as the father of modern political science, states deception when disarming people is a necessary thing.
“For it is enough to ask a man to give up his arms, without telling him that you intend killing him with them; after you have the arms in hand, then you can do your will with them.” The Discourses, end of chapter XLIV
In the Koran, it is permissible to lie and deceive in order to gain an advantage to advance the cause of Islam.
Most people realize people who wish them to be disarmed do so because they wish to do things that would be difficult to accomplish if the people were armed.
The Afghan revolt against the Soviet-installed regime started with the puppet government’s attempt to disarm Afghans.
This is not an auspicious start for a new Taliban government. Afghans love their weapons. Afghanistan is a land of warring tribes. A man is expected to be able to defend himself and his tribe.
