Excerpt: [Huffpoo] At the briefing with reporters, Comey said he didn't know for sure what was driving a spike in homicides in some cities.
"It could be it's simply a collection of individual factors in different cities," Comey said in response to a question from The Huffington Post. "It's hard for me to believe that there isn't something broad that's affecting it, but maybe it could be. Maybe the reason that we're seeing a jump in homicide in different cities all over the county is driven by factors in those particular areas."' Obviously we can't blame the White House lack of support for law enforcement and it's changing attitude regarding criminal activity. Let's just go with 'videos.' It worked fine for Benghazi.
#3
To suggest that Comey doesn't know "for sure" what is taking place is beyond ludicrous. His statement moves him to the category of willing facilitator.
#4
Shootings are up, but property crime is down. Many of the homicides are in Chicago, Baltimore, and D.C. Apparently following the news is not Mr. Comey's strong suit.
"It could be it's simply a collection of individual factors in different cities"
#5
Like the enormous struggle with the issue of the Bell Curve in academia, certain things that are factual lead to conclusions that are apostasy in the liberal mind. Thus, since the criminal justice system has disproportional convictions of minorities to their demographic percentages, there are two possible reasons. Either they are disproportionately criminal in behavior, or the system is racist and selectively chooses them. Since the former is an unacceptable truth, it must be the latter, and everything must be bent to fit that conclusion. To disagree to to be branded racist, a sin greater than theft or violence since it is a sin of hate, not avarice.
Causation for the behavior, like the 70+% illegitimacy rate, welfare matriarchy, alternative culture symbolism, victimhood thinking, the absence of shame, government subsidy, none of these things which contribute to the forbidden rationale are examined since they do not support the acceptable thought.
#6
I blame affirmative actions mayors and DAs. But then, I've been, officially, a racist since 1975. And a misogynist (a "vive la difference" enthusiast) since 1974.
#9
A guy that has never put handcuffs on someone giving us his opinion how to be a cop... If Comey wants to know the score, all he has to do is lower himself to asking the poor old beat cop what is going on... Maybe the FBI Director can use his massive investigative skills to find one of those elusive beat cops...I'll give him a tip - they drive go-fast cars, clearly identified with markings and lights and sirens - on patrol 24 hours a day in any of the cities that he seems so clueless about.
#1
While we are on the subject, there were undoubtedly some nice propaganda movies made about Hitler's Germany retaking the Sudetenland under the same pretext of "defending the native speaking population", where X is German for 1939, and Russian for 2014.
#2
The Germans took Sudetenland a lot more quickly and efficiently that Russia is doing in Ukraine. Sometimes I think that Russian bear is pretty darn clumsy.
The Palestinian Arab teenage terrorists who recently stabbed two octogenarian Bubbes are not your average high school thugs. It takes a particular type of vicious person to approach a cluster of five elderly women taking their midmorning constitutional and stab two of them in the back over and over again in broad daylight.
These brutal kids cannot distinguish between targets and values. It seems that they are not alone--neither can the society in which they live. The value attached to attacking the elderly should be very low on the ladder of machismo achievements, and should invoke disgust. Palestinian leaders, teachers, parents, clerics, even terrorist leaders should shun this attack. But that's not what happened.
Palestinian youth have been indoctrinated to strike--to kill, to stab, and to run. The messages are all over the internet. So when these Palestinian Arab teenagers attacked a group of Jewish Israelis, albeit old and defenseless Jewish Israelis, in their warped teenaged eyes they scored a great victory. And they got away with it, too. (Although two people were subsequently arrested, they were quickly released). And in the eyes of their contemporaries and cohorts, they are heroes.
The terror attack took place mid-morning on the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem. It is a beautiful, picturesque, walking area that allows one to take in the glorious views of both the modern city of new Jerusalem and the Old City of Jerusalem as well as the hills of the Judean desert. The land it sits on is probably the very site descried in Genesis 22 when, after three days of travels, Abraham looked up and saw Mount Moriah, the place where he would bind his son Isaac as a sacrifice in the famous story known as the Akeidah. Beauty abounds. History resonates.
Arabs and Jews walk, jog and ride their bikes along the paths of the Promenade. There are often public concerts in the well-designed shady spaces and amphitheaters along the paths. There is a wondrous echo chamber where one can call out and hear a series of echoes bouncing back from the various hillsides and mountains of Jerusalem.
At the heart of the matter of this particular attack is a singular message. All terror is horrific and deplorable, but some terror is worse than others. Planning and singling out children is the worst, or so I thought until now where we have a plot to murder Jewish grandmothers in their 80’s. This act recalls the horrible murder of Leon Klinghoffer in 1985. To refresh your memory, Klinghoffer was murdered when Palestinian terrorists took the wheelchair bound elderly Jewish man and threw him off the Achille Lauro, the Greek cruise ship they had hijacked.
In this case, the case of the two elderly Jewish women, there has been no word of condemnation by Palestinian leaders. Arab leaders around the world have said nothing. And certainly, the United Nations has been silent. Where is the revulsion against these heinous acts of violence?
Two Palestinian teenagers are showing the world that any Jew and every Jew is a target. Their method of attack was not like in a bomb attack, when whoever is nearby is hit and may include the elderly or the young by simple virtue of happenstance.
The objective of all terrorists is to frighten. In that, this attack was very successful. But it also displayed for all to see the sheer inhumanity of the attackers and their sponsors. There can be no justification for attacking elderly women from behind, for stabbing them in the back.
One would hope that parents and children within the Palestinian world as well as their supporters are asking themselves, their families and their students if this terror attack went too far? I have heard a few murmurs to that effect but nothing more, certainly no proclamations of condemnation.
Both elderly women victims are expected to recover. One was in intensive care and her wounds are being treated. The second victim is in a heart surgery unit. She is there because the stabbing affected her preexisting heart condition. That should not be a surprise, as people in the 80’s often have heart conditions. What is astounding is that not one of the five elderly women present during the attack, all potential victims, suffered a heart attack during the terrorist attack or as they waited for medical help to arrive.
My hope is that a lesson can be learned. That clear-minded people will see these terrorists for what they are. Will realize that their actions cannot be justified.
And yet, I fear that instead, this will be another example of how the poor Palestinian has no other option but to attack because of the evil oppressive Israel. How five Israeli Bubbes in their 80's became evil oppressors that warranted murder remains a mystery to me.
Posted by: lord garth ||
05/13/2016 6:00 Comments ||
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#3
Do you think this is caused by GLOBAL WARMING? There can be NO other rational cause! I mean, all those Western oil companies have to be at fault!
And Christian imperial oppression!!1!
Did I leave anybody out?
The Iranian government is broadcasting a music video made by the Basij militia recruiting children to fight in Syria's civil war.
The original is in Persian (Farsi), but the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) translated some of the lyrics.
"On my leader [Ayatollah Khamenei's orders I am ready to give my life.
The goal is not just to free Iraq and Syria;
My path is through the sacred shrine [in Syria], but my goal is to reach Jerusalem.
... I don’t regret parting from my country;
In this just path I am wearing my martyrdom shroud."
Iran's regime has done this before. During the Iran-Iraq War, which killed around a million people between 1980 and 1988, the Basij recruited thousands of children to clear minefields.
After lengthy cult-like brainwashing sessions, the poor kids placed plastic keys around their necks, symbolizing martyrs' permission to enter paradise, and ran ahead of Iranian ground troops and tanks to remove Iraqi mines by detonating them with their feet and blowing their small bodies to pieces.
Children have been fighting in wars as long as there have been wars, but shoving them into the meat grinder in the 21st century is a war crime expressly prohibited and sometimes even punished by all civilized governments. The International Criminal Court in The Hague, for instance, convicted Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of war crimes in 2012 for "conscripting and enlisting children under the age of fifteen years and using them to participate actively in hostilities."
The Basij is a paramilitary branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Pasdaran, and it's commanded by the iron-fisted head of state, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It's mostly used for internal repression and provided many of the shock troops who brutally suppressed non-violent demonstrations during the Green Revolution in 2009.
"Parallel institutions" (nahad-e movazi) is how Iranians refer to the quasi-official organs of repression that have become increasingly open in crushing student protests," writes Human Rights Watch, "detaining activists, writers, and journalists in secret prisons, and threatening pro-democracy speakers and audiences at public events. These groups have carried out brutal assaults against students, writers, and reformist politicians, and have set up arbitrary checkpoints around Tehran. Groups such as Ansar-e Hizbollah and the Basij work under the control of the Office of the Supreme Leader, and there are many reports that the uniformed police are often afraid to directly confront these plainclothes agents. Illegal prisons, which are outside of the oversight of the National Prisons Office, are sites where political prisoners are abused, intimidated, and tortured with impunity."
The Basij is also known, ludicrously I should add, as the Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed. These people are superpredators. They attack unarmed civilians with knives, motorcycle chains and axes. They rape young women and boys. They have raped and murdered women who don't adhere to strict Islamic dress codes.
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/13/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[5 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
That's a very narrow view of the situation. Al Qaeda plans to pick up the dropped baton of jihad, so the war will continue. And ISIS expects to be driven back and nearly destroyed before the tempered remnant bursts out with Allah's aid to conquer the entire world. Either way, the war will continue until those infected with the virus of Triumphalist Islam are either killed or surrender.
[CNN] The Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, as an organized military force in Iraq and Syria, is losing -- even losing badly. This does not mean the end of ISIS, and we may see organized (as in Libya and Afghanistan) and unorganized (as in Gay Paree and San Bernardino) bands carrying the ISIS label and banner for some time yet.
But these will be a mere echo (and perhaps even a mockery) of the force that carried out the shocking seizure of terrain in Iraq, threatening even Baghdad, a year and a half ago. However, nothing needs reforming like other people's bad habits... the end of ISIS does not mean the end of Islamic extremism, and we should expect to see a resurgence of al Qaeda and its affiliates, as its splinter rival begins its death spiral.
Simply put, despite its quite impressive debut on the international stage, ISIS is out of its league. By trying to bring about the "caliphate" as a tangible entity, it has given its opponents, both local and international, a fixed target to strike.
The territory it controls in Iraq and Syria is now being attacked from the southeast by the Iraqi Army and Hashd al Shabi popular mobilization units (militia units of varying loyalites, mostly Shia Arab), from the northeast by the KDPand PUK Peshmerga (militias of the two ruling parties in Iraqi Kurdistan) forces, from the northwest by the Syrian YPG (People's Protection Units) Kurdish forces, and from the southwest -- at least nominally -- by the Syrian regime and its Iranian/Russian allies.
Further, all the Iraqi forces (save the Hashd) are being supported by U.S. airpower, the Syrian forces by Russian airpower, and the YPG forces by both. In Iraq, two major cities have been reclaimed from ISIS (Tikrit and Ramadi), in addition to a number of significant towns. In December, the Iraqi defense minister stated that ISIS control of Iraqi territory was down from 40% at its height to only 17% then. While no cities have yet been reclaimed on the Syrian side of the border, ISIS continues to lose territory, with the coalition in January claiming about a 20% reduction. ISIS' enemies are far closer to their "capital" of Raqqa then they were six months ago.
So long as ISIS (or its predecessors, the Islamic State in Iraq and al Qaeda in Iraq) remained in the shadows as a terrorist group, and stuck to its core competencies of liquidation and suicide bombs, it was very difficult to find and root out, subject only to intelligence-driven raids by the commandos of the Joint Special Operations Command (Delta Force and SEAL Team 6, mostly). But ISIS' strategy of creating a political entity on the ground has also made it vulnerable to both airpower and conventional armies, while--as events of the last 24 hours show--it is still subject to JSOC kill/capture operations. So while the implementation of the U.S. strategy has been scandalously slow, it is now clearly demonstrating its effectiveness.
So long as ISIS (or its predecessors, the Islamic State in Iraq and al Qaeda in Iraq) remained in the shadows as a terrorist group, and stuck to its core competencies of liquidation and boom-mobiles, it was very difficult to find and root out. But ISIS' strategy of creating a political entity on the ground has made it vulnerable to both airpower and conventional armies. And while the implementation of the U.S. strategy has been scandalously slow, it is now clearly demonstrating its effectiveness.
Iraqi Army forces are moving to djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... , already nearly surrounded on the northern side by Kurdish forces, while the Hashd are clearing the more rural areas west of Samarra/Tikrit and south of Mosul. The liberation of Mosul is no longer in doubt.
An optimistic timeline would have the operation occurring this summer, a pessimistic timeline next spring. But its eventual outcome is as close to certainty as exists. When tens of thousands of troops, supported by U.S. airpower, mass against a few thousand defenders, it is clear how that story ends, militarily.
And we are already seeing ISIS react to this eventuality. Late last month, we saw ISIS return to its terrorist roots and launch suicide bombs into the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. In so doing, ISIS is demonstrating its weakness and regressing from a military force back to a terrorist one.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/13/2016 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under: Islamic State
#1
The only one who lost any war in the Middle East was Saddam Hussein.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/13/2016 7:37 Comments ||
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#2
As long as the Caliphate exists - ISIS wins. As long as chaos, disorder, corruption, and deviancy exist in the ME - ISIS has a recruiting ground. I wish I could share Ollivant's optimistic view.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The Iranian government is broadcasting a music video made by the Basij militia recruiting children to fight in Syria's civil war.
