Or are we just going to have some teary-eyed candlelight vigils and proclaim our “solidarity” with the victims? I suspect that is all we’ll do – oh, to be sure, any terrorists taken alive will be put on trial by the French and France might even carry out a few selected attacks in the Middle East; but I don’t think the French, or anyone, will really do anything.
To do something about this requires courage, determination and a willingness to inflict and suffer losses. And to have all that, you have to have something you believe in. Say what you want about the terrorists who carried out the attacks, but they clearly believe in something – something they are willing to throw away their lives for. To fight such, we need people who believe just as vigorously in a different set of ideas. What do the French believe? What do Americans believe? What do the people of the West believe? Some of the elements in Europe which are opposed to the establishment seem more interested in just deporting immigrants and ensuring more welfare for native-born layabouts. There are, of course, some who do believe in better ideas – but I don’t see them in charge; nor likely to become in charge any time soon.
I do wonder why we in the United States have not suffered such attacks – it could be just luck, but it also might relate to just how well-armed the American people are. Part of the appeal, as it were, for these types of attacks is that they provide the Islamists with a show which encourages other people to join up. You see, the prospect of Europeans – so long the dominant people of the world – completely cowed and dying helplessly at the hands of Islamists gives a sense of power to people inclined to believe Islamist propaganda. It might work out differently in the United States – certainly in parts of the United States. Rather than helpless, unarmed people the terrorists might find a good number shooting back. It would not at all be a good bit of propaganda if a terrorist cell went down before the arms of American civilians…even if a number of civilians were killed in the fight. Nope: helpless people screaming for their lives before the police can respond – that is what gets terrorist juices flowing.
But, still, we must expect that eventually some sort of attack like this will be launched in the United States. It really isn’t a matter of “if” but of “when”. Our borders are open so we’ve probably got a good number of people already here who are inclined to these types of attacks. But it would be better if we could calmly and reasonably assess the situation and reacted before such an atrocity occurs. Better to take the fight to the enemy rather than just waiting for him to strike – and even if you are of the belief that it was American actions which provoked the attacks, there’s no putting the cat back in the bag. If they are already provoked then nothing we do will un-provoke them. Better, then, to have at them before their plans are matured.
This is a world at war – and even if we want to ignore the war, it won’t ignore us. We’ll have to fight at some point – some of our lives will have to be lost. They’ll be lost in response to terrorist attacks, or because we sent out forces to attack the enemy. Pick which one you want.
Blogs For Victory 
So I have been absorbing as much information as possible about this attack and not surprisingly, many pundits and analysts still don’t get it. The leftists over at Salon are taking this opportunity to denounce the violent rhetoric from the American right, ie; Tea Party, but we should never expect the left to have rational opinions on any issue so this is simply status quo for them. What’s disappointing is some of the analysis coming from the right. Greg Palkot on Fox, who has been stationed in France for years actually spoke to the discord amongst the large French Muslim population and the lack of jobs, economic opportunity and poverty within that community. That analysis is insane. But not to be outdone, another security analyst on Fox was blaming the French for their lack of security and awareness of these types of attacks, and of course I also heard the obligatory comments that we have to “be careful” not too offend the many “moderate Muslims”.
There are no moderate muslims, period. And after 40+ years of Islamist attacks on innocent people world wide (remember the 1972 Munich Olympic Games?), they are just as culpable as any of the extremists and need to be called out for it. How many innocent Yazidi women and children, Coptic Christian men, and concert goers need to be killed until we do something? Are we going to allow this infestation of Muslim debris to continue for fear of not “offending” moderate Muslims? Or have we become so cowardly, that we will choose to retreat to our “safe spaces” where no offensive rhetoric can penetrate our fragile leftist sensibilities?
At this point in time, the world needs another George Patton but unfortunately America has the most effeminate President in our history who is more comfortable taking demeaning rhetorical swipes at his political opposition than doing the demanding work of world leadership. French President Francois Hollande has declared this an “act of war”, and good for him. I hope he fills the vacuum created by America and actually means what he says. Someone with clarity and a backbone needs to step up and realize that climate change is not the most imminent threat we face.
I do wonder why we in the United States have not suffered such attacks
I wonder the same thing every day. Yesterday was day 121 of standing guard at the [UN] Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Fort Wayne. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see suspicious activity. Sometimes the activity has even been revealed to us by local law enforcement in an effort to at least make us aware of things that might impact our safety, as in a warning a couple weeks ago from a Fort Wayne police patrol car that a couple guys were watching us with binoculars and taking pictures of us from across the parking lot. Yesterday a large Ryder rental truck drove past out position, with the driver, a bearded middle eastern looking guy giving us a dirty look. He parked in the middle of the parking lot, about 50 yards away, and he and a passenger went in to a discount/surplus store next to the recruiting center where they stayed for nearly an hour. Then they came out, drove the truck about halfway across the parking lot and parked again for 10 minutes or so. Then they drove out of our parking lot and over into the Glenbrook Mall parking lot which is adjacent to the one we’re in but still in a location that was visible to us, where they got out and went into a department store. They were still there 2 hours later when the recruiters locked up and we all left.
About a block behind the recruiting center is a Muslim Cultural Center. There’s not much activity during the week, but on Fridays the place lights up. When we first became aware of its presence back in August, we’d see maybe a dozen cars on Friday afternoon. That number has been steadily increasing, and yesterday there were at least TWO dozen cars. We’ve started posting someone to surveil the place on Friday afternoon, and cars have been identified as ones that drove by our position in the front parking lot prior to going to the cultural center. We’re watching them, but they’re also watching us.
It really isn’t a matter of “if” but of “when”.
I was talking to an Indiana State Trooper friend of mine several weeks ago, and those were the exact words he used.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Yet we can’t monitor what goes on inside mosques, because that would for some reason be an intrusion into religious practice. We are taking, to its silliest and unfortunately deadliest, extreme, the bleat by someone in government administration objecting to surveillance of the developing enemy of Germany, that “gentlemen don’t read other peoples’ mail”.
I am concerned that you and your fellow guardians are becoming targets, yourselves. If not for that, I would encourage you (or someone else not overtly connected with you) to openly photograph the cars and trucks that concern you. Not in front of this “cultural center” of course, because that would be too too insensitive and probably prompt a lawsuit.
What amazes me—no, correct that to “enrages me”—– is that the government, the military, have still taken no steps to protect this site or the people who work there. Has anyone talked to the owners of the mall? Perhaps someone could be shamed into doing something, if they would cooperate—- a citywide drive to raise the money to do some basic work to make the recruiters less vulnerable. Groupfunding. Anything.
A question: How productive are these satellite recruiting centers? How many young people enter the military because there was a recruiting center located near a Baskin Robbins?
We’re actually looking into doing some things on our own, using money donated to us by civilians who stop by to show support. The property manager who works for the mall owner has become a good friend and ally, and will assist in any way he can. That said, the Secretary of Defense has begun laying the groundwork for a number of measures to be implemented NLT next spring, and some before the end of the year, so we won’t be there indefinitely — it just seems like it. It’ll be 4 months this next Monday.
This particular recruiting center is not only one of the most vulnerable in the region, maybe even in the country, it’s also anything but a satellite recruiting center. Sixteen to twenty recruiters for all 4 branches work out of this office. Their front door is open from around 7:45 AM to as late as 10PM, Monday through Friday, and we have someone on guard during that entire time. I don’t know the numbers for the Air Force and Army, but the Marines and Navy both currently have around 50 active recruits each, mostly those who either graduated last June and haven’t left for active duty yet, or those in an early entry program who are currently high school seniors.
I suppose there is some risk in our being there; how much, I don’t know, and, quite frankly, it’s not something we dwell on. Our group has done some tactical training together, and we’re all proficient with firearms. Being there has heightened our sense of situational awareness to the point that I’d say we’re probably hyper-vigilant at this point. Local law enforcement seems to be very comfortable with our being there, if for no other reason than the crime rate in this particular strip mall has dropped to zero since we’ve been there.
I can’t say that I’ve ever been a part of something where a group this size, from a variety of different backgrounds, has made and stuck to a commitment like this. It speaks well for the character of the men and women in our local group, and it speaks well of the mission of Oath Keepers in general.
You just be careful, Spook – there are plenty of nuts out there. But bless you for what you do.
We’ve been careful almost in the extreme, Mark, but you know, in the overall scheme of things, I can think of worse ways to go than protecting those who are serving this country.
I don’t know what Palkot said—have not been watching the news for so long now I have heard only a little of what happened in France—but if he commented on the seething mass of resentful humanity represented by the Muslim community in Paris as a breeding ground for this kind of attack I would not call THAT analysis “insane”. We have known for years that this enclave in the heart of France was going to explode.
Perhaps Palkot did not put the blame for this segregation of Muslims where it belongs—on the Muslims. France has been dealing, or rather not dealing, with immigration problems longer than we have, and the consequences have been pretty ugly. Like the U.S., France needs new, younger, workers to support its welfare state, but unlike the U.S., which borders Western civilization nations with fairly strong Christian backgrounds, France has had to depend on immigration from Islamic nations. The problem France has had with these immigrants is, to some extent, similar to problems here—-immigrants are not encouraged to assimilate, resulting in the establishment of de facto foreign nations encysted in the host nation. But the worst aspect of French immigration problems has been the nature of her immigrants.
The reason unemployment is so high among Muslims in France is that they refuse to work under the same conditions the French do. For example, a traditional entry level job for immigrants has been to drive taxis, yet Muslim taxi drivers have refused to drive women, or people with dogs. This kind of self-limiting of opportunity has isolated Muslims in France, making them somewhat unemployable, as the attitude toward women extends into every other job opportunity as well. So poverty is rampant, a sense of victimhood is easily stirred up, the natural resentment of a dependent class is nurtured as these people have to rely on government handouts with no sense of escape (in spite of the reality that they have created their own prisons) and adding to this is the militant aspect of Islam, which is that all non-Muslims must die.
The French have bent over backward to appease their Muslim immigrants, to prove their “tolerance” and open-mindedness, and the Unintended Consequences of this high-minded refusal to “impose their own values” on the people swarming into their country is that they have contributed to the establishment not just of foreign outposts in their nation but outposts of people whose entire philosophies of life and religion are antithetical to those of the French.
The French have made the same mistake Americans are determined to make, which is to be blind to the fact that Islam is morphing into much more of a political movement than a religion. Any “religion” which has as a foundation the conviction that it has not only the right but the obligation to destroy any human being which does not share its beliefs can no longer be treated as a religion, and has to be identified as an alien political movement. And any political movement which has as a goal the overthrow of a government can and should be removed by that government, without squeamishness about the possibility of treading on some religious toes in the process.
“Or are we just going to have some teary-eyed candlelight vigils and proclaim our “solidarity” with the victims?”
Perhaps Hashtag Sad?
I read the other day that when actor Rob Lowe tweeted, regarding France closing her borders, “NOW they close the borders?” there was immediate shrill hysterical response from people bleating that “these people” (presumably the Muslim immigrants in France) were—-wait for it——just “looking for a better life” in France, trying to escape the horrors of their homeland, waaaahhh waaaahhh waaaahhh.
People who leave their own countries just to have a “better life” then learn the language of the new host country, learn and respect its culture, follow that country’s laws, and adopt that host country as their own, including having allegiance to it.
It appears that Syrian families feel much less impelled to look for “a better life” in France than do young men. Most of the Syrian “refugees” in France have been young men, which is also what we saw in photos and videos of masses of “refugees”.
And the terrorists in Paris were all young men, some with Syrian passports.
New entries in the “Just How Crazy ARE We?” category:
(1) Bernie Sanders claims that “..climate change is directly related to growth of terrorism..”
(2) Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel testified in October 2014 that climate change was changing the way the military executed its missions.
“In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today – from infectious disease to terrorism.”
(3) Slate explained that the rise of ISIS could be attributed to “climate migrants.”
(4) The attacks in Paris have been referred to as “gun violence”.
(5) Mizzou snowflakes whine about the press coverage of the Paris attacks, complaining that no one is paying attention to the “terrorism” on their campus. (Just curious—–does seeing someone next to you shot and killed really compare with hearing that someone saw a swastika smeared on a wall in feces? More than a hundred dead is compared to having hurt feelings over an unsubstantiated claim of a vague image made, allegedly, of poo? Can these morons really be serious?)
(6) Paris attacks blamed on George Bush
(7) Paris attack is really only retaliation for being bombed
From what I understand, they actually started a #f***Paris hashtag: they are genuinely angry that we are paying attention to those trivial events in Paris rather than concentrating our attention on their need for a “safe space”. David Burge tweeted the other day: “Campus is now a theatrical mashup between 1984 and Lord of the Flies, populated by people who don’t understand either reference”.
A new generation of useful idiots in the making. How sad!
I was thinking the same thing about Lord of the Flies this morning, after reading of yet another shrill and strident demand that yet another professor in yet another university be fired for posting things on her social media pages and web site that snowflakes who made the effort to go to those sites then found to be “threatening”. What came to mind was the image of small mobs being encouraged by small successes (groveling apologies) and expanding into bigger mobs with bigger demands (firing anyone they target) and the realization that it is only a matter of time till they turn on themselves and start eating their own.
We have done the equivalent of giving loaded weapons to children. And these ARE children. I don’t care how many years they have been on this planet, the infantilization of our population means that even a 25-year-old is a child, mentally and emotionally, if he or she has never matured. And we have a society which not only does not encourage or foster maturity, it rejects it.
We have a federal policy referring to 26-year-olds as “children” who must be covered under their parents’ insurance plans. We have a whole party which has chosen to identify itself as a 20-something male hanging around in a onesie and another (Julia) being cared for and coddled, cradle to grave, by the government. We have a party which tells females they should not be expected to act like real women, but who should be free to enjoy sexual pleasure without any responsibility for the outcome, because the human lives they have created are of no value and can be dismembered and discarded before they interfere with the pursuit of pleasure. We have universities which no longer represent individualism and intellectual vigor and the journey from dependence to independence both in thinking and in day to day life morphing into nothing but expensive sleep-away daycare centers for children in their twenties who still throw temper tantrums to get their own way and demand that the schools provide cozy nests of emotional security.
The end result of this unending immaturity is the destruction, or at least erosion, of the basic traits of men and women. Women are no longer brought up with pride at having the responsibility and the honor of producing life and nurturing our young, but are told that the ability to have children is a burden to be thrown aside, and that sex is just for fun. Little boys are not brought up to become men, but are sheltered from all possibilities of conflict (such as winning or losing sports events) and neither gender is held to any responsibility for its actions. For that matter, neither gender is held to its gender, as all sexual identification is increasingly blurred and fluid.
Without the civilizing structure of personal responsibility and the demands of maturity, children remain children, but children with adult appetites and adult strengths combined with infantile demands for instant gratification of all needs and wants. and the result is the mess we are seeing in our universities today.
One result of this kind of dysfunction is the power given to troublemakers. Right now, anyone who wants to start an emotional firestorm can do merely by hanging a sloppy tangle of rope that might be construed as a noose on any doorknob or tree branch. He can smear some poo in a vaguely swastika-like pattern on any wall—-or not bother but just claim he saw this somewhere. The inmates who are so proud of being in charge of the asylum have given control of their emotions to unknown agitators, who manipulate them like puppets.
Someone mentioned the philosophy of Marcuse as the source of the problem – so, I went and read the “Cliff’s Notes” version and, yeah, that is pretty much it…and you don’t need more than that. Bottom line, the man felt that tolerance only applied to leftwing thought: all other thought could be rightly suppressed in the name of tolerance and freedom! Marcuse was apparently quite popular with the 60’s radicals, who are now running the colleges and have been stuffing young minds with his bull for decades…and here we are, a place where speech codes and demands for safe spaces exist…but only in defense of leftwing thought and in opposition to any thought which disagrees. And to think that Marcuse got to the United States because he fled Hitler’s Germany and we provided him safe haven and well-paid employment.
France has always been proud of her “tolerance” and “inclusiveness” and has been reluctant to deal with the fact that she has been the target not of immigration but of invasion, trembling at the prospect of appearing “racist” or, even worse, “intolerant”. This attitude has had two immediately recognized outcomes.
One, of course, is blood in the streets, murdered people piled upon each other as terrified people climb over them in attempts to reach safety. The other may be even more ominous—-a new generation of even more soft-headed victims-in-the-making.
“A group of friends was standing near the candles that had been lit at the foot of the monument at the square, trying to find out if the waiter that had served them at La Belle Equipe, one of the restaurants attacked in the 11th arrondissement, had been killed.
But they aren’t angry, at least not at the perpetrators. “They’re stupid, but they aren’t evil,” their friend Sabrina, an administrative worker in one of the theaters in the 11th arrondissement, said. “They are victims of a system that excluded them from society, that’s why they felt this doesn’t belong to them and they could attack. There are those who live here in alienation, and we are all to blame for this alienation.”
“After the attacks in January, they said we should unite, but that essentially meant that we should be together and not think independently,” says Clemens Mama, a teacher. “They don’t want us to think that maybe it’s connected to the policies of our government and of the United States in the Middle East.” No, she wasn’t surprised that the attackers apparently included people who were born and raised in France. “These are people the government gave up on, and you have to ask why,” she said.
No one wanted to talk about Islamists or the Islamic State, even after it took responsibility for the attacks and French President Francois Hollande announced that the group was behind them. “Daesh is so dangerous to France,” said Johann Crispel, a business student at a college near one of the restaurants that was attacked, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State and wrinkling his nose as he enunciated it. “Perhaps it’s correct to bomb them in the name of democracy and freedom, but it brought the war in Syria to us in France. I don’t think it’s worth it.”
It was hard to find anyone at this gathering who would say a bad word about the attackers, and expressions of patriotism were restrained. Perhaps it should be no surprise in this part of town. Most residents of the 11th arrondissement are what the French call “bobo,” bohemian and bourgeois, middle-class academics in their 30s and 40s with clearly leftist leanings.<\:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2015/11/15/well-heres-one-paris-neighborhood-that-isnt-angry-at-isis
However, the screed issued by ISIS explaining its reasons for slaughtering innocents never mentioned hurt feelings over “exclusion from society” or feeling “alienated” from French culture. No, they mentioned only one reason—-their religion. Over and over again. Even the refrain of “crusaders” was a reference to a religious war between Islam and the rest of the world. There was no whine about the government “giving up on” them.
And no, no one has to “ask why” the French government “gives up on” surly immigrants who refuse to speak the language and demand that every aspect of French life be restructured to accommodate them, including adoption of Sharia law and Muslim treatment of women. Here is another example of the conviction that “the government” is responsible for every need of every person and therefore for every act of every person.
It is still astonishing to see that – sad, too. But for the left that is how it is – they’ve built this anti-fact world and they will make events fit into their view, regardless of how stupid it will all sound to anyone living in the real world.
I’m hoping that Doug Giles will stop being so hesitant to tell us what he really thinks, but in the meantime he is offering an opinion: I have emphasized some of what he says. Not that he needs anyone else to help him make his point, but some of it needs to be shouted even louder than he is shouting.
“Garsh, who’d a thunk that evil ISIS operatives, with mass murderous wet-dreams, would try to scam their way into France under the guise of being persecuted, California-Dreamin’, nanny-goat-bearded good guys?
I’ll tell you who would’ve “thunk” it: pretty much everyone with a lick of common sense, that’s who.
Helen Keller could’ve have seen that one coming.
Dear God, some of you are slow on the uptick. Please forgive them, Lord.
Now, for those of you who bought the altruistic bovine scatology regarding the Hello-Kitty refugees, please go find a sledge-hammer and hit yourself in the face with it for aiding and abetting this atrocity.
In addition, after crashing your mug, go down to the nearest cafe … order a triple espresso … down it after it cools and then … please … wake the hashtag up because your We-Are-The-World acid trip is getting people needlessly slaughtered.
Yes, I said it. Your political correctness opened the door, and thereby helped cause, this Parisian catastrophe with your oh-so-trendy, big-hearted and empty-headed belief that: “if we embrace Islam then they’ll chill out and play parcheesi with us.”
Well, you were dead wrong … again. Operative word: dead.
This is what political correctness has yielded up, namely: nations full of retards led by leaders that think they’re morally superior by embracing their own death.
Here’s reality, folks: Islam makes things suck everywhere it goes.
For instance: They hate our freedoms, our Constitution, our customs, our flag, our various religions, our atheists, our women, the gays; they’d stone Bruce Jenner, they despise our music, they don’t like bacon or bikinis and, truth be told, they’d love nothing more than to take over Western Civilization and make it bow in submission to the dictates of a 7th century pedophile who heard voices. That’s Islam in a nutshell. They radically and fundamentally hate us. So … if what I just described sounds peachy with you, and for your posterity, then inject some Muslims into your national mix and give it about 30-40 years to simmer. “
http://townhall.com/columnists/douggiles/2015/11/16/dear-france-your-trendy-pc-stance-with-islam-is-killing-you-literally-take-note-america
What Giles is saying, and what most of the world is refusing to admit, is that there is blood on the hands of every Liberal who has advocated turning a blind eye to the reality of the conquer-the-world-even-if-by-force mandate of Islam, and in so doing enable the kind of butchery we saw in Paris. We have seen it before, most notably on 9/11 but over and over again, all around the world.
We stand by and watch Muslims kill other Muslims because they are not “the right KIND” of Muslim, and we still call Islam “the religion of peace”. We ignore the fact that the so-called “moderate” Muslims never raise a voice to condemn acts of brutality and still declaim that most Muslims are peace-loving and gentle, washed in the benign light of a benign religion.
David Horowitz has repeatedly stripped away the facade of moderation in Islam, and has been ignored. This is a chilling example.
He is often, if not always, approached in a college speech by a soft-spoken self-styled “moderate Muslim” and he always asks this person the same question. And he always gets the same answer. So if “moderate” Muslims agree with the statement that all Jews should return to Israel so they can be killed in one place, and Muslims will not have to hunt them down all over the world to eliminate them, can we believe that “moderate” Muslims do not believe there is anything wrong with killing other “infidels” to comply with the dictates of the Koran?
In a similar vein, Geraldo Rivera, who has been an apologist for Islamic acts for some time, just got jolted out of his smugness. His daughter was in the stadium when it was put under attack by murderers, and suddenly the reality of radical Islam was brought home to him. It is so easy to take what the Left considers the Moral High Ground when you have nothing to lose, when you pose as morally superior because it is always Someone Else at the sharp end of the stick. I am betting that just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no Islam apologists in any group targeted by armed thugs, or with swords at their throats.
We need to admit that this kind of savagery is aided and abetted by squishies who love to see themselves as morally and intellectually enlightened and therefore oh-so-TOLERANT of brutality, as long as they are not subjected to it themselves.
Just when you thought you’d heard it all. YCMTSU!!
“A State Department spokesperson claimed in a statement that refugees are “subject to the highest level of security screening of any individuals who enter the United States.”
Let me guess—this “highest level of security screening” is done by the IT geniuses who also “secured” State Department emails.
In a nation run by Curly, Moe and Larry, it’s hard to read a single statement from a single government official or spokesperson without snickering or laughing out loud. Not because what they say is funny—it’s not, it’s tragic—but because they seem to think we will believe them.
Or, more likely, they really don’t give a damn if we believe them or not because we are stuck with them for another year and two months.