President Boko Haram

From Noah at Down with Tyranny:

The Muslim Immigrant Who Saved Hundreds of American Lives

But this isn't unique or even unusual. Until a year ago, America has always been exactly what Lady Liberty says: a beacon to the oppressed of the world. Immigrants to America have always been profoundly grateful for the freedom, the opportunity, the safety America provides.

And they won't let the terrorists hurt her.

Christopher Dickey at the Daily Beast:

An Egyptian Muslim just-arrived in the United States on a Diversity Visa—precisely the type that Donald Trump is trying to blame for the bike-path murders on Halloween in Lower Manhattan—in fact stopped a terrorist atrocity that would have been much, much worse in 1997 on the New York City subway.

SNIP

(T)he young Egyptian, Abdel Rahman Mosabbah, from a small town on the Upper Nile near Luxor and the only member of his family with a university education, wanted to build a future in the United States. His was the classic immigrant dream: to put down roots and eventually to bring his wife and raise his family in a land of freedom and opportunity. He saw the terrorists as anything but heroes or martyrs. He saw them as a threat to him and to his new country that must be stopped. And had he not acted, the slaughter on the B Train would have been horrific.

The NYPD and FBI and probably the LIRR cops are much more aware than they once were. From 2002 onward, the NYPD searched and found already in its ranks among more than 30,000 sworn officers hundreds of people who spoke languages from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Asia because many of them had been born abroad. The job of a policeman, since the days of Irish, German, and Italian immigration in the 19th century, has always been a coveted position for newly arrived residents and citizens of the United States.

But here’s the question we ought to be asking ourselves today as we look back on that morning when jihadis were stopped in Brooklyn: Would an Abdel Rahman Mosabbah dare go to the police today? Would he go out in the heat of a dark summer night to try desperately to warn the cops of an impending attack when all Muslims, all immigrants, are being treated as suspect? Would he do that when diversity visas—like his visa—are being attacked by the president of the United States as if they they were a terrorist laissez-passer, a virtual license to kill?

In fact, this Muslim Diversity Visa recipient saved the lives of scores of Americans he had never met. And if Americans want to remain safe, they would do well to embrace such people, not shun them, shame them, and put them under threat.

The Resistance: Skittles

Wonkette:

And then there was this response to Donald Trump Jr.’s goddamned stupid “poisoned skittles” meme:

So say we all.

How to Survive

The news about the fascist tangelo just gets worse every day.  It's easy to give in to despair, but don't do it. Get busy instead.  And keep your eyes on the prize: saving democracy.

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:

Similarly, every American should read Yale History Professor and Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder’s “20-point guide to defending democracy under a Trump presidency.” 

 

Among his most important words of advice are “do not obey in advance,” to be wary if the Trump regime attempts to use a terrorist attack or similar tragedy to consolidate its power, and to adhere — especially if you are a lawyer, judge, government worker or other individual who may be called upon to shepherd Trump’s goals into fruition — to professional ethics.

European Terrorism vs American Terrorism

Yes, gun fetishists and 2nd Amendment extremists are terrorists. By far the most effective ones on the planet.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

Estimated number of deaths in Paris and Brussels attacks combined: 158
Estimated number of deaths due to gun violence in the United States so far in 2016: 2,788.

The Real Threats No Repug Will Ever Acknowledge, Much Less Address

Because real threats take hard work and tax money to deal with. Fake threats just take demagoguery.

Rude Pundit:

In fact, most of the things that are actual threats to the vast majority of Americans were either ignored or barely mentioned (Tuesday) night. Here's a short list of Things That Are Way More Likely to Kill You Than Muslim Terrorists or Hispanic Immigrants. These are the real threats to national security:

a. Christian white men with guns. Hell, you could probably just say, "All the fucking guns," and leave it at that. Not once did domestic terrorism from white people get mentioned, and that's probably because we still have a bizarre inability to label shit like Sandy Hook or the Planned Parenthood shooting "terrorism." And gun deaths in general are the security threat that Republicans dare not speak of.

b. Climate change is going to murder the fuck out of millions of people, barring drastic action. And it is going to propel the citizens of poor nations to ever-increasing acts of desperation, which will lead to more terrorism, which we'll probably deal with by bombing the famine-fucked or drowning nations.

c. Infrastructure collapsing around us. The Department of Transportation estimates that 14,000 people are killed annually due to shitty roads and bridges. By the Rude Pundit's mystical mathematical abilities, that adds up to...carry the three...a fuckload more people dying from the failure to invest in infrastructure than from every terrorist attack on the U.S. in the last, hell, let's say 100 years.

SNIP

So, really, you could say that the entire debate was theatre. It was like a bunch of high schoolers telling each other their favorite creepypastas while sharing some cheap wine they stole from their moms. Ooh, who's gonna scare us worse? Even though, at the end of the night, Slender Man is fuckin' fake and drunk driving is real, but guess which one they're afraid of?

Nuke the Saudis. Do It Now.

We've been fighting, overtly or covertly, in the Middle East for a century.  Yet despite battles in nearly every nation, we've never confronted the one country that is really the cause of it all.

At The Nation, Laila Lalami pointed a very direct finger at one kind of Muslim source of violence: the Wahhabi sect that has received vast subsidies from the Saudi government to spread its beliefs via propaganda, mosque construction, and “good works” in a not-so-good cause.

We must call to account the Saudi kings—Salman, Abdullah, and Fahd—whose funding of Wahhabi doctrine gave rise to the scourge of Islamic extremism.

When I was a child in Morocco, no clerics told me what to do, what to read or not read, what to believe, what to wear. And if they did, I was free not to listen. Faith was more than its conspicuous manifestations. But things began to change in the 1980s. It was the height of the Cold War and Arab tyrants saw an opportunity: They could hold on to power indefinitely by repressing the dissidents in their midst—most of them secular leftists—and by encouraging the religious right wing, with tacit or overt approval from the United States and other Western allies. Into the void created by the decimation of the Arab world’s secular left, the Wahhabis stepped in, with almost unlimited financial resources. Wahhabi ideas spread throughout the region not because they have any merit—they don’t—but because they were and remain well funded. We cannot defeat ISIS without defeating the Wahhabi theology that birthed it. And to do so would require spending as much effort and money in defending liberal ideas….

 The beheadings, the crucifixions, the destruction of cultural heritage that ISIS practices—none of these are new. They all happened, and continue to happen, in Saudi Arabia too. The government of Saudi Arabia has beheaded more people this year than ISIS. It persecutes Shias and atheists. It has slowly destroyed sites of cultural and religious significance around Mecca and Medina. To almost universal indifference, it has been bombing Yemen for seven months. Yet whenever terror strikes, it escapes notice and evades responsibility. In this, it is aided and abetted by Western governments, who buy oil from tyrants and sell them weapons, while paying lip service to human rights.

Not to mention nurturing and funding the 9-11 terrorists.

Military intervention has done nothing but exacerbated the problems in the Middle East.  But we've never tried military intervention in Saudi Arabia.

Nuke the Saudis.  Do it now.

Choosing Brave and Smart Over Scared and Stupid

Ever notice how real heroes are never the ones screaming "OMG we're all gonna die!"

Digby:

I've been aghast at the panic stricken bellowing coming from mainstream US media in the wake of Paris and needless to say, Fox News has been worse than most.  But once in awhile someone surprises you. Here's Fox's Shep Smith:

In the face of terror, will we panic or be calm and deliberative in approach?” Smith asked in a 90-second monologue. “Confronted with those who want to change our way of life, will we abandon our freedoms and the rights granted to us by the creator, or will we welcome huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Will we take extreme measures to fundamentally alter who and what we are?” 

“Our shining city on a hill is vulnerable,” he continued. “We’ve always known that. If we change it to accommodate the savages, have they won? And what then would be left to protect? We profess to stand as an example for all the world. Our unique experiment in freedom, tolerance, openness, and equality, is our gift to societies and peoples everywhere. Come, join us. Enjoy a chance at the American dream.” 

He concluded, “Today we mourn but we cannot allow ourselves to become like those who want to destroy us. We cannot resort to tactics of the barbarians. We must fight for what we believe in and who we are. Guard our freedoms faithfully for the generations to follow. And we must not let the rhetoric of potential and political extremists among us lead us to self-destruction. When there’s panic, we show resolve. When there’s calm for extremism, we resist. We are America. We must lead.”

The Guns of Paris

This is all I have to say.  Via Wonkette comments:

14 Years of Hysteria, Stupidity and Waste for No Good Reason

Some of us even predicted it back then.

Reader JB at TPM:

To me the most notable thing looking back on 9/11 13 years later is how crystal clear it is now that it was an anomalous event and not, contrary to all the rhetoric of the time, the dawn of a new era of domestic terrorism. The fact that basically nothing analogous – meaning a domestic terror attack planned and executed by foreigners or local cells funded by Al Queda or like groups -- has happened in the 13 years since is pretty incredible and unexpected. Perhaps more surprising still is that the only viable explanation for the dearth of attacks is that terrorists motivated to carry out attacks inside the United States do not exist.

We know this because, if they did exist, at least in any remotely capable form, they would have succeeded in carrying out dozens or hundreds of attacks by now because it is simply impossible to completely stop motivated terrorists from carrying out attacks in a free and open society with endless targets and no-questions-asked access to automatic firearm.

Could an attack happen tomorrow? Of course. But once every 13 years would still be an anomalous event, not a systemic threat. Remember the talk as the rubble smoldered of hundreds, maybe thousands, of “sleeper cells” lurking out there, waiting to strike? Well, we now know there were none at the time, and apparently none were formed even after we have fought two wars and killed thousands of innocent civilians since 9/11. One would think our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etcetera would spawn at least a few motivated and effective enemies bent on revenge through domestic attacks. Apparently not.

So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights. I’m not saying this was obvious when 9/11 happened. Far from it. I was just as freaked out as anyone else at the time and I think it would have been foolish to ignore the threat. But the fact is if we had we would have been far better off, because as it turns out there were not hundreds of other Mohammed Attas out there in the wings. In fact, there were none, at least not with any meaningful capabilities (which would exclude folks like the shoe bomber and the Tsarnaev brothers). We know this to be the case because if such people did exist we would have been hit 100 times over by now. It is too damn easy to sow terror and chaos with motivation and even a below average IQ. Think Newtown or D.C. sniper.

A few sad teenagers have committed far, far more domestic terror attacks than all the Islamic militants in the world over the past decade, and that is an outcome I think very few would have predicted, myself included, in the aftermath of 9/11. I’m sure the Rudy Guiliani set would love to take credit for the lack of attacks, but I think any serious expert on stopping domestic terrorism attacks would agree that the only way to bat as close to 1000 as we have is if your enemy is fictional.

Flying

Divine Irony:

(Source: atheismwethinkmore)

QOTD: War and Patriotism

Juan Cole at The Nation:

People who actually love the United States want to rescue it from foreign adventurism and improve the health and welfare of its people. They would want to discourage bigotry and black-and-white thinking, which makes war so much more thinkable. And they would eschew wars of aggression, a daisy chain that brings more wars in its wake.

Terrorists Are White Men With Guns and a Grudge

Maybe the Warren Terra wouldn't seem so intractable if we started paying attention to the people who are actually committing terrorism and the weapons they are actually using.

Michelle Goldberg at The Nation:

(Last week), an outspoken white atheist murdered three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We don’t yet know for sure whether this was a hate crime or whether the killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, had some other motivation; police have said the crime may have grown out of a dispute over parking. We do know that had Hicks been a Muslim and his victims atheists, few would be waiting for all the facts to come in before declaring him a terrorist. We know that there would be the usual calls for other Muslims to condemn the killings, coupled with the usual failure to take note of the many Muslims who did. And we know that demands for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins to distance themselves from Hicks are largely facetious, because no one really blames them. Violence perpetrated by Muslims is almost always seen as part of a global conspiracy, whereas white men like Hicks are usually seen as isolated psychopaths.

There is, of course, some truth there. An organized jihadist movement exists; an organized cadre of terroristic atheists does not. Yet in the United States, Islamophobia has been a consistent motivator of violence. Hicks’s killing of Yusor Mohammad, her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, should not be treated like a man-bites-dog story, a reversal of the usual pattern of terrorism. After all, Muslims in the United States are more often the victims of ideological violence than the perpetrators of it.

According to the latest FBI statistics, there were more than 160 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2013. Mosques and Islamic centers have been firebombed and vandalized; seven mosques were attacked during Ramadan alone in 2012. Several Muslims, or people thought to be Muslim, have been murdered or viciously attacked. In 2010, a white college student and self-described patriot tried to slash the throat of Bangladeshi cab driver Ahmed Sharif. The white supremacist who slaughtered six people in a Sikh temple in 2012 may have thought he was targeting Muslims. So, apparently, did Erika Menendez, the homeless New Yorker who pushed a man named Sunando Sen in front of a subway train that same year.

In most cases, the perpetrators have been disaffected, disaffiliated losers rather than part of any movement, but they’ve picked up broader currents of hatred and conspiracy theorizing. (The same can be said of some lone-wolf Muslim terrorists like Man Haron Monis, the fraudster and criminal who took hostages in Sydney last year, or the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon in 2013.) We don’t yet know if Hicks was driven by lonely fanaticism, but if he was, he’s not as much of an anomaly as he might at first appear. Explicitly atheist violence is unusual, but Hicks still fits the profile of the most common type of American terrorist: a white man with a weapon and a grudge.

Who's Afraid of a Lone Wolf?

Digby:

Terrorism carries a special brand of fear due to its political motivation.

But the "lone wolf" threat in the US? Considering the threat we live with from our fellow "lone wolf" citizens every day, even from political violence, it ridiculously hysterical. Nobody bats an eye at abortion clinics being targeted for years on end. A couple of right wing lunatics gunned down police officers in Las Vegas with a political beef a few months back and we didn't launch a national crusade against it. We can't even sustain any alarm at kids shooting up kids in schools for longer than a couple of days. We hardly even report it anymore it's so old hat. If there's one nation on earth that knows how to keep calm and carry on in the face of random armed misfits gunning down strangers it's us.

SNIP

From what I gather from the comments of various law enforcement officials and terrorism experts, the threat that concerns them is the Lone Wolf scenario. I'm sure it's very scary. But again, what makes it so much scarier than Adam Lanza or James Holmes or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold? I don't think anyone wants those kinds of killings but we haven't decided to turn ourselves into a full-blown police state to stop them. In fact, we have pretty much done nothing to stop them, even the smallest common sense measures like trying to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill kids. So all this handwringing over Muslim lone wolves seems just a bit over the top.

But it is very convenient and lucrative for certain politicians, news networks and military contractors, so there's that ...

Saudi Arabia Should Be Glass By Now

The evidence is overwhelming, and now it's court testimony: the autocratic assholes ruling Saudi Arabia planned, paid for, directed and took secret delight in the 9/11 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers.

And we're kissing their asses.

Think Progress:

A former Al Qaeda operative who helped plot the 9/11 terrorist attacks has claimed that he has firsthand knowledge that members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family financially supported the terrorist network in the late 1990s. Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, also said that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

“I was supposed to go to Washington and go with him…find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” the French-born Moussaoui said of a plan he made with a Saudi Arabian Embassy official while in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Moussaoui said he was arrested before he could carry out the plan.

The former terrorist’s testimony has been submitted as part of a case brought by the families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia for its alleged involvement in the terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 people. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on that day were Saudi.

Enjoy cheap gas while you can.  It's going to soar immediately up to $10 a gallon as soon as the Saudis finish wrecking the economies of every oil-producing nation that competes with them.

They redefine "vicious motherfuckers."  And they are a clear and present danger to the survival of human civilization.

Repugs Announce They Are Pro-ISIS in 3, 2, 1 ...

From Firedoglake:

- The Islamic State released a video where they executed a Kurdish soldier and threatened to behead President Barack Obama

Why Haven't We Nuked Saudi Arabia Yet?

Yeah, yeah, oil, blah blah. The fact is that the one action by the United States that would go further than any other to end terrorism would be to nuke Saudi Arabia.

First, no nation or terrorist group has been more responsible for terrorism on American soil that the motherfucking architects of 9/11:

DSWright at Firedoglake:

Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” has written to federal courts in New York and Oklahoma claiming to have information that would directly implicate the government of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Moussaoui, currently serving a life-sentence for his role in 9/11, has claimed that a member of the Saudi royal family paid for the hijackers flight training and offered to identify various financial institutions that were involved in funding the attack.

Moussaoui ultimately admitted after years of legal proceedings and furious denials that he was planning to be involved in the 9/11 attacks with his target being the White House. Whether or not the US government is aware of the government of Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11 is difficult to say exactly, but Moussaoui’s potential testimony is most valuable at the moment to lawyers involved in lawsuits against Saudi Arabia – some of whom have interviewed him.

The most sensational Moussaoui filing is a four-page handwritten letter dated Oct. 23 and docketed this month in federal court in Oklahoma City. In it, Moussaoui claims that a Saudi prince helped him financially in 2001 when he was studying at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, and also funneled a large amount of money to some of the 19 men who hijacked planes on Sept. 11. The prince “was assisting me in my Islamic terrorist activities … and was doing so knowingly for Osama bin Laden,” he said.

Moussaoui described how bin Laden got the religious instruction necessary to go forward with the terrorist attacks from Saudi religious leaders and carried them out over the objections of the Taliban. He also claimed he shared information this year with a Secret Service agent about a 1990s plot by al-Qaida to shoot down Air Force One and assassinate then-President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton with assistance from a top Saudi Embassy employee.

The issue with Moussaoui seems to be questions of competence and motivation. During his trial there were mental competence concerns and given he is in a super-max prison he could be searching for attention or someway to escape his boredom. Of course, that does not mean he is not telling the truth.

Saudi Arabia’s fingerprints are all over 9/11 from Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, being the son of a Saudi oligarch to an overwhelming majority of the hijackers themselves being Saudi citizens. But the Saudis through their oil wealth have bought considerable influence in DC and have remained generally unscathed by their connection to 9/11. If Zacarias Moussaoui’s allegations can be proven, the Saudi government is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

Second no nation or terrorist group more frequently and publicly commits the kind of barbaric torture than the leading freakazoids of Wahabbi:

hom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Stonings. Did we mention the stonings? And it's not just Syria:

Raif Badawi, the Saudi liberal convicted of publishing a blog, has been told he will again be flogged 50 times on Friday – the second part of his 1,000-lash sentence which also includes a 10-year jail term.

The US, Britain and other western governments had all called for the punishment to be dropped but there has been no sign of any diplomatic action against Riyadh. Amnesty International on Wednesday urged the UK government to challenge Saudi Arabia, which has ignored all protests over the case.

Badawi will be given 50 more lashes outside a mosque in his home city of Jeddah unless a Saudi prison doctor determines he is not yet fit to face the punishment owing to injuries sustained last Friday. If nothing changes, he will be flogged every Friday for the next 19 weeks.

Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, wonders why British authorities are so vocal about the Charlie Hebdo attacks, yet "tone everything down" when it comes to the Saudis. U.S. authorities, too, we might add.

QOTD: Terrorism Fear-Mongering

Charlie Pierce:

We are back in the hands of the spooks again. In all of our institutions, secrecy and the magical thinking of the intelligence priesthood inflitrates itself like foul water after a storm, bringing rot we cannot see until it brings everything down. Then the members of the priesthood put on their most glittering robes and blame the heretics out there who did not believe, the infrastructure of disbelief that the priesthood's own mendacity constructed within the incense-clouded cathedral it has made of our fears.

QOTD: Ebola Epidemic

From the Nation:

“This isn’t a natural disaster,” international health crusader Paul Farmer told The Washington Post. “This is the terrorism of poverty.”

The Cure for Terrorism

ummagumma.co: