Category Archives: Islam

The ISIS-Baathists Axis

To listen to the neoconservative and the pseudo-conservative interventionists who mar American media, it’s all so simple with “dem terrorists,” so black and white. Let’s go in there, again, and knock their collective block off. For those of us who grasp the complexity and intransigence of the region and its players, it comes as no surprise to learn that the “tight inner group” of the Islamic State, numbering 12-15 members, consists of “former high officers from the Baath army which served Saddam Hussein up until the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Members of this group ranged in rank from lieutenant-colonel to general.”

Ex-Maj. Gen. Abu Ali al-Anbari, its outstanding figure, acts as Al Baghdadi senior lieutenant. He also appears to be the brain that has charted ISIS’s current military strategy which, our sources learn, focuses on three major thrusts: the activation of sleeper cells in Europe for coordinated terrorist operations: multiple, synchronized attacks in the Middle East along a line running from Tripoli, Libya, through Egyptian Suez Canal cities and encompassing the Sinai Peninsula; and the full-dress Iraqi-Syrian warfront, with the accent currently on the major offensive launched Thursday, March 29, to capture the big Iraq oil town of Kirkuk.
Debkafile was first to report the arrival in Sinai during the first week of December of a group of ISIS officers from Iraq to take command of their latest convert, Ansar Beit Al-Miqdas.
Another former Iraqi army officer was entrusted with coordinating ISIS operations between the East Libyan Islamist contingent and the Sinai movement. Their mission is to topple the rule of President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi.
The imported Iraqi command made its presence felt in Libya Tuesday, Jan. 27 …

(DEBKAFile)

The ISIS-Ba’athist Axis is truly a fascinating thing. It explains why “Islamic State functions at present with machinelike efficiency in pursuit of its goals.” (DEBKAFile)

Adds a Commentary magazine commentator: “The simple fact of the matter is that former Baathists are today Islamists”:

Long before Saddam’s ouster, Baathism had stopped being an ideology and had instead become a vessel for power. It’s not too much of a leap for yesterday’s Baathists to become today’s Islamists. Indeed, Saddam Hussein himself found religion after his 1991 military defeat. That’s when “God is Great” appeared in Arabic on the Iraqi flag, and in the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Fedayeen Saddam roamed Baghdad acting as morality police as stringent as those of ISIS today. Dozens of women, for example, were beheaded for alleged morality crimes.
In an interview with the Japanese news service NHK, former vice president Tariq al-Hashemi, a staunch Sunni Islamist convicted of terrorism charges under Prime Minister Maliki (but in a court with many Sunni justices), reported that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a former Baathist.
When I met with a former Baathist general as well as a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service this past summer after Mosul’s fall, they were quite open that they cooperated with ISIS, even if they did not fully subordinate themselves to them.
Were Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and is his successor Haider al-Abbadi paranoid about Baathists and many in the Sunni Arab community? You betcha. Is that paranoia without justification? Absolutely not. …

(Commentary)

Breaking: Inadvertently, BHO Inferred Something True

Barack Obama, Christianity, English, Islam

Inadvertently, Barack Hussein Obama suggested a correct inference today. I didn’t say he spoke the truth (other than “the” and “a”); that would be too much to ask. Listen:

The first Crusade was proclaimed almost 1000 years ago; the inquisition a little after that. Indirectly—and in his attempt to draw “moral equivalency between the brutality of ISIS and Christianity”—Barack Obama situated the ISIS phenomenon in the Middle Ages.

From a man whose relationship with truth is at best tentative—that’s the best one can hope for. So what did President Pinocchio say at the National Prayer Breakfast?

Unless [LEST] we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was [WERE???] justified in the name of Christ.

It’s “LEST we get on our high, etc. …”

LEST you doubt that the man’s grammar even with teleprompter—the Millennials write this drivel—is as bad as all that, here’s the tape, sound included.

Obama’s easily as stupid as W. Bush, except that the media cover for him.

On Killing The ‘Right Way,’ For The ‘Right’ Reasons

Democracy, Islam, Jihad, Just War, Middle East, Terrorism

“Killed in an un-Islamic way” is how Jake Tapper of CNN described the torching by ISIS of a captive, caged Jordanian pilot. In case you didn’t know, beheading is killing the Islamic way.

Killing à la America, now that’s an entirely different matter. We do it right. The US is civilized: America strafes from above.

Villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen already know it, although the people on the ground near American drone bases in Somalia and Ethiopia are still blissfully unaware of it—Barack Obama is the uncrowned king of the killer drone. In Iraq, ordinary men and women scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, as promised, or targeted by Hellfire missiles. Ditto the Iranians, who once even downed, and promptly displayed to the world, an RQ-170 Sentinel, launched into Iranian airspace by Uncle Sam.

Here is the face of disfigurement by American forces.

Still, the “good” killers can claim they are without mens rea—criminal intent—we don’t mean to disfigure and kill all the little Shakiras we’ve disfigured and killed.

The child, reported London’s Daily Mail, “was burned beyond recognition by a U.S. drone and left for dead in a trashcan. … She was found by a medical mission team two years ago and was described as ‘lucky’ by staff as two other children found with her were killed by the military attack.” “[B]rought to the U.S. from her home in Pakistan,” the girl’s American surgeons patched her up.

As you can see, not much remains of the small, charred face. Nevertheless, as the narrative goes, the little girl and tens of thousands like her, should be grateful that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put little Shakira together again. (Or would have if they could have.)

That’s how we role; we reduce the “bad guys'” countries to rubble, decimate their neighborhoods with Daisy Cutters—all with good intentions and for a good cause: Democratizing the devils!

Ours is “The Jupiter Complex”: “the ability granted by the possession of huge air forces, to rain thunderbolts on the wicked.” “The Jupiter Complex,” writes (neoconservative) historian Paul Johnson, “was to be with the United States for the rest of the century.”

And into the next.

Savages all, if you ask me.

The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability

Britain, Crime, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Islam, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention.

Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discovered the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome. …

… The complete column is “The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability.” Read the rest on WND.