How Bad Is Belgium State Security? Very Very Bad

Islam, Jihad, Terrorism, The State

Really farcical is the Atlantic writer’s complaint that Belgium’s “longstanding ethnic fractures”; “divisions between “French- and Flemish-speaking citizens,” and “distrust among different law-enforcement authorities,” “create barriers to effective policing” and “impede communication, investigation, and apprehension of suspected terrorists.”

Yes, let’s add to extant divisions in European countries by bringing into countries already divided more unassimilable Maghrebi Muslims.

Then there’s the alienation blame game:

… Belgium has a sizable Muslim population—roughly on par with that of other Northern European countries—but by some tallies has sent more fighters to join ISIS per capita than any other country in Europe. In Brussels’s Molenbeek neighborhood, the epicenter of Belgian jihadism, there’s high unemployment, an isolated Muslim population, poor education, and a lack of government services. …

… police agencies in different European countries do not cooperate effectively among each other. This creates special challenges, not only because terrorism is transnational but because Europe’s Schengen system makes it possible for people—including attackers—to cross borders with ease. Belgian officials had questioned some of the men involved in the Paris attacks prior to last November, but that information was never shared with French authorities. Since those attacks, European officials have been working to improve communication. …

… Finally, … there’s so much information reaching counterterrorism officials that it’s nearly impossible to sort through it all. [Try working in the private sector; government can never do anything right, b/c the incentives are inverted; the worse they do; the more funding they get.] “You talk about chatter, there’s just too much of it now, so you have all these officials across the world that are trying to neutralize these persistent threats,” he said.

No Place For Capitalism In The Obamas Cuban Experience

Barack Obama, Capitalism, Communism, Free Markets

A murderous, brutal dictator” is how conservative talkers have been referring to Cuban President Raul Castro, with whom Barack Obama seemed overjoyed to cavort; the president is indeed in his element in Cuba.

From conservatives I’d have liked to hear more about the glories of free-market capitalism, the suppression of which accounts for Cuba’s abject misery.

“The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace – this magic, organic agora – starts to splutter, and people suffer.”—ILANA (April 23, 2010)

It’s telling that the Obamas took their girls along for the Cuban experience. I bet those girls heard nothing about the forces that made it possible for them to grow so tall, healthy and lovely, and have the best of everything.

Their father, our dreadful cur of a president, spoke not about capitalism but about … race.

Blame Western Leaders For Brussels, Caging Freedom Fighters, Letting Islam Roam Free

Europe, Islam, Terrorism

While magnificent men like the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders live in bunkers, travel in armor-plated cars, have no family life, as they sacrifice their freedoms to defend against encroaching Islam—Islam roams freely in the West.

Islam’s preeminent emissaries, the West’s elected leaders—in the US, the UK, Western Europe—place Geert Wilders and his truths in the dock, again and again. Blame Western leaders for Brussels, caging freedom-fighters, letting Islam roam free. Time to un-elect the bastards.

“Dutch Party For Freedom (PVV) leader and prominent counter-Islamist campaigner Wilders spoke exclusively to Breitbart London in the aftermath of this morning’s major terror attack and has lamented it is just the beginning of growing Islamist violence”:

On this, Mr. Wilders remarked: “Returned Syria fighters are a huge threat. They are dangerous predators roaming our streets. It is absolutely unbelievable that our governments allow them to return. And it is incredible that, once returned, they are not imprisoned.

“In the Netherlands, we have dozens of these returned jihadists. Our government allows most of them to freely walk our streets and refuses to lock them up. I demand that they be detained at once. Every government in the West, which refuses to do so, is a moral accessory if one of these monsters commits an atrocity.

“The government must also close our national borders. The European Union’s Schengen zone, where no border controls are allowed, is a catastrophe. The Belgian Moroccan Salah Abdeslam, the mastermind of last November’s bloodbath in Paris, travelled freely from Belgium to the Netherlands on multiple occasions last year.

“This is intolerable. Open borders are a huge safety risk. Our citizens are in mortal danger if we do not restore control over our own national borders”.

Speaking earlier today Mr. Wilders lamented that commuters were killed in “cold blood” and said “The cause of all this bloodshed is Islam. We need to de-Islamize the West. That is the only way to safeguard our lives and protect our freedom”. …

MORE.

Related: “Brussels and the Police State of Denial” By Diana West.

UPDATED: Trump’s Foreign Policy Team (Stephen Miller’s A Star)

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy

The good news for ordinary Americans is that Donald Trump is advocating “the U.S. decrease its role in NATO’s,” and “certainly decrease it’s spending” in The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

All horrible news if you are of the professional ghoul class. Remember, the D.C. Comitatus doesn’t like less of anything because it means less of them.

The forces aligned against Donald Trump say his “global posture” will be “starkly at odds with longstanding U.S. policy.” Sounds promising. As reported by CNN, “the Republican front-runner’s brain trust on global affairs” is a group lacking name recognition and “clear policy-making track records.” The writers take it to mean “there are still unanswered questions about the international direction they would hope to lead the country in.”

Trump, unfortunately, is employing Dr. Walid Phares, who was the Fox News Channel’s Middle East and terrorism expert. He had advocated a muscular military response in Libya. And some other

The advisers already with Trump include Phares, a professor at National Defense University and and adviser to the U.S. House of Representatives on terrorism. The Lebanese-born Phares, who previously advised 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was also a high-ranking official in a Christian militia tied to massacres during Lebanon’s civil war.

Carter Page, the founder of Global Energy Capital, has experience as an investment banker in London and Moscow. George Papadopoulos, who worked for former Republican candidate Ben Carson, is an oil and gas consultant focused on the geopolitics of the energy trade, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Joe Schmitz, a lawyer, is a former Defense Department Inspector General and a former executive with the Blackwater security firm, associated with the killing of Iraqi civilians.

And Gen. Joseph Keith Kellogg, at one point a COO at Oracle, led the 82nd Airborne Division and served as chief operating officer of the multinational Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq from 2003 through 2004.

Trump has criticized American involvement in Iraq and said that he was an early opponent of intervention there.

He acknowledged that Kellogg and his perspectives on the conflict diverge.

“He does have a different opinion, but I do like different opinions,” Trump told CNN.

And he said more broadly of his advisers: “It doesn’t mean that I’m going to use what they’re saying.”

MORE.

UPDATE (3/22): Stephen Miller’s a star. See my coverage of his first interviews in “Donald Delivers Economic Expertise @ Free-Market Speed,” and these recent tweets: