There's too much death.
Day after day we're subsumed by "senseless" acts of violence. Damn. What next? Car control?
At the Los Angeles Times, "Driver intentionally hit Westlake High students, killing 1, after Walmart stabbing, authorities say."
The poor kid.
From Raymond Ibrahim, at FrontPage Magazine, "Spearheaded by Pope Francis":
What if you had a deceased grandfather whom you were particularly fond of, and out of the blue, a stranger says: “Hey, that’s my grandpa!” Then—lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to ingratiate himself with you—he adds: “And everything you thought you knew about grandpa is wrong! Here, let me tell you what he really said and did throughout his life.” The stranger then proceeds to inform you that much of the good things you had long attributed to your grandfather were, not just false, but the exact opposite of what he is now attributing to your grandfather—much of which you find immensely disturbing. Would that endear this stranger to you? Every proponent of the so-called “Abrahamic Faiths” apparently thinks so. I will explain, but first let’s define “Abrahamism”: because the patriarch Abraham is an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all three religions, according to this position, share a commonality that should bridge gaps and foster growth between them. Pope Francis is one of the chief proponents of this view. Speaking of his recent participation at an interfaith conference in Bahrain, he said his purpose was to create “fraternal alliances” with Muslims “in the name of our Father Abraham.” Even so, Abrahamism is hardly limited to octogenarian theologians; it’s entrenched in mainstream American discourse. Thus, even the Huffington Post (rather ludicrously) claims that “Muhammad clearly rejected elitism and racism and demanded that Muslims see their Abrahamic brothers and sisters as equals before God.” In fact, Muhammad and his Allah called for perpetual war on Christians and Jews, until they either embraced Islam or lived in humbled submission to their Muslim conquerors (Koran 9:29). That, of course, did not stop former Secretary of State John Kerry from beating on a mosque drum and calling Muslims to prayer during his visit to Indonesia—before gushing: “It has been a special honor to visit this remarkable place of worship. We are all bound to one God and the Abrahamic faiths tie us together in love for our fellow man and honor for the same God.” After a Muslim from an Oklahoma City mosque decapitated a woman, “an official from Washington D.C. flew in to Oklahoma to present a special thank you to the Muslim congregation,” lest they feel too guilty over their coreligionist’s actions. He read them a message from former President Barack Obama: “Your service is a powerful example of the powerful roots of the Abrahamic faiths and how our communities can come together with shared peace with dignity and a sense of justice.” Needless to say, Obama himself has often spoken of “the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions.” Meanwhile, few people seem to have given this Abrahamic business much thought: How is one people’s appropriation of another people’s heritage—which is precisely what Abrahamism is all about—supposed to help the two peoples get along? For starters, Islam does not represent biblical characters the way they are presented in the Bible, the oldest book in existence that mentions them. Christians accept the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on. Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments—primarily for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names—Islam completely recasts them to fit its own agendas. One need only look to the topic at hand for proof: Abraham. Jews and Christians focus on different aspects of Abraham—the former see him as their patriarch in the flesh, the latter as their patriarch in faith or in spirit (e.g., Gal 3:6)—but they both rely on the same verbatim account of Abraham as found in Genesis. In the Muslim account, however, not only does Abraham (Ibrahim) quit his country on God’s promise that he will make him “a great nation” (Gen. 12), but he exemplifies the hate Muslims are obligated to have for all non-Muslims: “You have a good example in Abraham and those who followed him,” Allah informs Muslims in Koran 60:4; “for they said to their people, ‘We disown you and the idols that you worship besides Allah. We renounce you: enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in Allah alone.’” In fact, Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse that all “radical” Muslims—from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State—cite as proof that Muslims “must be hostile to the infidel—even if he is liberal and kind to you” (to quote the revered Sheikh Ibn Taymiyya, The Al-Qaeda Reader, p. 84). Thus, immediately after quoting 60:4, Osama bin Laden once wrote:So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility, and an internal hate from the heart. And this fierce hostility—that is, battle—ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed [a dhimmi], or if the Muslims are [at that point in time] weak and incapable [of spreading sharia law to the world]. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the hearts, this is great apostasy [The Al-Qaeda Reader, p. 43].Such is the mutilation Patriarch Abraham has undergone in Islam. Not only is he not a source of commonality between Muslims on the one hand and Jews and Christians on the other; he is the chief figure to justify “enmity and hate … between us until you believe in Allah alone.” Islam’s appropriation of Abraham has led to other, more concrete problems, of the sort one can expect when a stranger appears and says that the home you live in was actually bequeathed to him by your supposedly “shared” grandfather. Although the Jews claimed the Holy Land as their birthright for well over a millennium before Muhammad and Islam came along, Jerusalem is now special to Muslims partially because they also claim Abraham and other biblical figures. As a result, statements like the following from mainline Christian groups such as the Presbyterian Church USA are common: “[PCUSA] strongly condemns the U.S. President’s [Trump’s] decision to single out Jerusalem as a Jewish capital. Jerusalem is the spiritual heart of three Abrahamic faiths …” The Muslim appropriation and mutilation of revered biblical figures is a source of problems, not solutions. When, as another example, Islam’s Jesus—Isa—returns, he will smash all crosses (because they signify His death and resurrection, which Islam vehemently denies), abrogate the jizya (or dhimmi status, meaning Christians must either become Muslim or die) and slaughter all the pigs to boot. Again, not exactly a great shared source of “commonality” for Christians and Muslims. It is only the secular mindset, which cannot comprehend beyond the surface fact that three religions claim the same figures—and so they must all eventually “be friends”—that does not and never will get it. All the more shame, then, that supposed Christian leaders, such as Pope Francis, rely on such “logic.”
It is almost impossible to grasp the danger of Israel’s present moment. A month before the Knesset elections, the caretaker government led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz is moving full speed ahead with a maritime agreement with an enemy state that it insists will obligate Israel in perpetuity. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement Israel is concluding with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon will fundamentally alter Israel’s maritime borders, deny the Jewish state tens of billions of dollars, which will go instead to a government controlled by Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion, Hezbollah, and transform Hezbollah and Iran into actors in the eastern Mediterranean. The deal in question has been under negotiation for more than a decade. In 2010, as the natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean were being rapidly explored and developed by Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Egypt, Israel signed agreements with its neighbors to delineate the boundaries of each state’s EEZ. Since Israel and Lebanon are enemy states, Israel did not negotiate an agreement with Lebanon. Lebanon did however negotiate an agreement with Cyprus, as part of which it drew a line delineating the southern boundary of its maritime waters. Israel accepted the Lebanese line and submitted its maritime economic zone borders to the United Nations on the basis of the Lebanese/Cypriot agreement and the bilateral agreement it had concluded with Cyprus. Given that Hezbollah rejects Israel’s right to exist, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon surprised no one when it immediately objected to Israel’s map, even though it was based on Lebanon’s own demarcation. Lebanon demanded 854 square kilometers of Mediterranean waters that formally belonged to Israel. The Lebanese demand included complete control over the massive Qana natural gas field, much of which extends into Israel’s waters. Fred Hoff, who served at the time as the Obama administration’s point man for the eastern Mediterranean, offered a compromise deal which would have given around 55 percent of the area to Lebanon and left 45 percent under Israeli sovereignty. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon rejected the deal, and there the negotiations stood, more or less, until last July. In the meantime, Israel began developing the Karish gas field, which by all accounts is located in its EEZ. Karish was scheduled to go online last month, but in July, Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah threatened to attack Karish if Israel began production before reaching a deal with Lebanon. Hezbollah then attacked Karish with four drones, which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces. Rather than retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression, fearful of Hezbollah, Israel delayed the start of work at Karish, and Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein swooped into action. As Lebanon expert Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy has copiously documented, the Biden administration is dead set on giving as much money as possible to Lebanon—with full knowledge that money to Lebanon is money to Hezbollah. The administration’s desire to enrich a state dominated by Hezbollah/Iran stems from what Badran and the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran described in May 2021 as its overarching goal of realigning the United States away from its traditional allies—Israel and the Sunni states—and towards Iran. During his visit to Israel in July, just days after Hezbollah’s drone attacks on Karish, Biden upped U.S. pressure on Israel to conclude a deal with Lebanon and so enable the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government to begin raking in billions of dollars in gas revenues from the Qana field. U.S. pressure only increased since then. Rather than stand up to the administration and oppose a deal that empowers Hezbollah both economically and strategically at Israel’s expense, the Lapid-Gantz government caved. As head of the caretaker government, Lapid, and his partisan subordinate Energy Minister Karine Elharar began marathon U.S.-mediated negotiations with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese negotiators over the maritime boundary. Gantz compelled the IDF to support the deal and present his capitulation to Hezbollah extortion as a massive strategic achievement that strengthens Israel’s deterrent edge over Hezbollah. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the deal is that it doesn’t obligate Lebanon. Israel’s deal is with the United States, not Lebanon. And judging by Nasrallah’s statements, Hezbollah views it as a starting point, not an ending point. During the course of the negotiations, the Lebanese negotiators suddenly presented a new, even more expansive territorial demand. Lebanon, they said, is the rightful owner of more than the disputed 854 km of Israeli waters. It is also the rightful owner of large swaths of the Karish gas field. Hochstein reportedly used the ploy, along with Nasrallah’s extortionate demands, to compel Lapid and Gantz to agree to give up a hundred percent of the disputed waters. But now that Lebanon has already tipped its hat to its next demand, and given that Lebanon is not obliged by the boundary line Israel has accepted, it’s obvious that Lebanon will disavow the deal at a time of Hezbollah’s choosing. Lapid, Gantz and their allies portray the deal as a diplomatic and strategic masterstroke. By surrendering to all of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon’s 12-year-old demands, they brag that Israel has secured its ability to develop Karish. In other words, they’re bragging that they’re signing a protection deal with Hezbollah. In exchange for 854 square kilometers of sovereign Israeli waters, they believe that Hezbollah will permit us to exploit our natural resources—at least until Nasrallah decides to renew his threats and demands. Aside from the Israeli media, no one has been buying their line. On Monday morning, former U.S. ambassador David Friedman tweeted incredulously, “We spent years trying to broker a deal between Israel and Lebanon on the disputed maritime gas fields. Got very close with proposed splits of 55-60% for Lebanon and 45-40% for Israel. No one then imagined 100% to Lebanon and 0% to Israel. Would love to understand how we got here.” Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted at a press conference on Monday that whereas he held the line against Hezbollah for a decade, Lapid folded after only three months. To try to present their agreement as something other than capitulation to Hezbollah’s extortion, Lapid and Gantz are claiming the deal is the key to a Lebanon free of terrorist influence. This claim is weird on its face. After all, they insist that the Lebanon they are negotiating with is an independent entity not controlled by Hezbollah. And at the same time, they say Lebanon needs tens of billions of dollars from gas proceeds from Qana to free itself of Hezbollah control. And that isn’t the only absurdity in their claim. Lebanon’s financial dealings are both controlled by Hezbollah and entirely opaque. Hezbollah can be trusted to take as much of the gas proceeds as it sees fit and leave the Lebanese with the crumbs at the bottom of its plate. In his press conference Monday, Netanyahu said that the deal will not obligate a government under his leadership because it is “illegal.” And he is right. Under Israel’s 2013 Basic Law on territorial concessions, the government is required to present all agreements involving the relinquishment of Israeli territory to the Knesset for approval. To take legal effect, an agreement requires either the support of two thirds of the Knesset or the majority of the public in a referendum. Contrary to the basic law, Lapid and Gantz are refusing to bring the deal before the Knesset for approval. And with the support of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, they insist that since the agreement is about economic waters, it isn’t about territory and therefore doesn’t require Knesset approval. Baharav-Miara initially said that all that is required is for the Security Cabinet to approve the deal. That it doesn’t even have to be made available to the Knesset for perusal—let alone approval. Under public pressure, she updated her position Sunday and announced that the deal has to be approved by the full government and submitted to—but not approved—by the Knesset. This too is a mile short of the requirements of the law. Baharav-Miara’s behavior is also a harsh commentary on the corrupted, politicized state of Israel’s legal fraternity. It was her predecessor Avichai Mandelblit who insisted that caretaker governments may not carry out any non-essential functions or initiate policies that will obligate a successor government. On the basis of his dictate, Mandelblit barred Netanyahu’s caretaker government from appointing an acting state prosecutor. Obviously, the Lapid-Gantz surrender deal to Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government falls within the Mandelblit’s criteria for prohibited actions. Baharav-Miara’s behavior demonstrates that as far as Israel’s politicized legal fraternity is concerned, there are two laws governing the state—one for the left, and one for the right. For the left, everything is permitted. For the right, nothing is. In other words, as far as the legal fraternity is concerned, Israel is governed by its leftist government lawyers, not by the rule of law. This brings us to the media. In light of the strategic and economic implications of the deal, if Israel had a functioning media, journalists could have been expected to provide critical coverage of the agreement and carry out an informed debate. After all, that’s the purpose of the Fourth Estate. But rather than do its job, in a demonstration of its own political bias and corruption, with a few notable exceptions, Israel’s liberal media have done next to no due diligence in their reporting of the agreement. Instead, they have parroted the Lapid-Gantz government’s talking points one after the other. The only Hebrew-language media outlet that has subjected the radical surrender agreement to significant scrutiny has been Israel’s new conservative outlet Channel 14. Last week, Lapid petitioned the Central Elections Commission to shutter Channel 14, which, he insists, is opposition propaganda because it doesn’t provide him with enough positive coverage. On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas) tweeted, “I am deeply troubled that Biden officials pressured our Israeli allies to hand over their territory to the Iran-controlled terrorist group Hezbollah.” Cruz indicated that if the Republicans win control of Congress in next month’s elections, they will conduct a formal investigation of the administration’s actions. As Cruz put it, the deal is “another topic for the next Republican Congress to investigate.” On Monday night, Globes reported that until a few weeks ago, Israel’s position was that it would retain a third of the disputed waters and its rights to the Qana gas field. But then, at a fateful meeting in the Defense Ministry, Gantz and Lapid’s representative, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata, abandoned Israel’s long held stand and agreed to give up all of the disputed waters and Israel’s economic rights to Qana. Israel’s chief negotiator, Udi Adiri, vociferously rejected the capitulation and resigned in protest. Hulata was installed as the new head of Israel’s team.
I watched President Biden's address live this afternoon, now available at the video below.
And at the Wall Street Journal, "First known U.S. counterrorism operation in Afghanistan since exit last year targeted a private residence in Afghan capital":
WASHINGTON—The White House said Monday that a U.S. missile launched from a drone in Afghanistan killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, a founding member of the jihadist movement and one of the key strategists behind an international campaign of terror that culminated in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. The U.S. strike targeted a safe house in a residential area in central Kabul on Sunday morning, in what was the first known counterrorism operation in the country since U.S. forces withdrew last year. The Biden administration said the Taliban was aware that al Zawahiri was hiding in Kabul, the clearest display of the continuing alliance between al Qaeda and the group now ruling Afghanistan. Speaking from the White House balcony on Monday, President Biden announced the strike, describing al Zawahiri as a terror leader who for decades “was the mastermind behind the attacks against Americans.” Those attacks included the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens of others and 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people and injured more than 4,500. Al Zawahiri, 71, was an Egyptian national and longtime deputy of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. In the lead up to 9/11, Zawahiri was the most important of bin Laden’s advisers as they planned the hijackings. He was also instrumental in shaping how the terror group used the 2001 attacks to gain members, often through propaganda letters and videos. Mr. Biden during his eight-minute address said he approved the “carefully planned” operation a week ago “after being advised conditions were optimal.” “The United States did not seek its war on terror. You came to us. We answered with the same principles and resolve that has shaped us for generations upon generation to protect the innocent and defend liberty,” Mr. Biden said. The Taliban seized power during America’s final weeks in the country after two decades of war. The group has publicly pledged to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for terrorist organizations, and claims that it seeks peaceful relations with all countries. The revelation that al Qaeda’s leader and family moved to a safe house in one of the most affluent parts of Kabul soon after the Taliban returned to power undermines those claims. A senior Biden administration official said Zawahiri was killed by two U.S. Hellfire missiles fired from a drone as he stood on the balcony of the safe house in downtown Kabul. “Senior Haqqani Taliban figures were aware of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul,” the official said. Pentagon officials said they had no knowledge of the strike and the senior Biden administration official declined to specify which U.S. agency was responsible, suggesting it was a CIA operation. The CIA declined to comment. The strike is a badly needed victory for the Biden administration after the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal last summer that helped return the Taliban’s most conservative factions to power. The White House said no civilian casualties resulted from the strike just after 6 a.m. on Sunday morning. There was no known response from al Qaeda. The Taliban condemned the attack, calling it a violation of international law and the agreement it signed with the U.S. in 2020 that set the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. “Such actions are repetitions of the failed experiences of the past 20 years and are against U.S., Afghanistan and the region’s interests,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesman. The last U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan one year ago killed 10 civilian members of an Afghan family in the final week of U.S. presence in the country. The casualties included seven children. The operation was initially described as successful. The U.S. later admitted that the target was a mistake. The U.S. intelligence community has “high confidence” that the dead individual is Zawahiri, the official said. The president was first briefed on plans for a strike on July 1 in the White House Situation Room by advisers including CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Christine Abizaid, director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, the Biden official said. Mr. Biden made the decision to order the strike at a July 25 meeting with top advisers at which all the participants recommended going forward with it, the official said. The official said that for several years, U.S. intelligence agencies had been aware of a network of individuals that supported the al Qaeda leader. Intelligence agencies tracked several members of Zawahiri’s family, including his wife and children, as they moved to Kabul. The United States then got confirmation that Zawahiri himself was in Kabul. In early April, that intelligence was briefed to deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer and White House homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then later to national security adviser Jake Sullivan and the president, the official said. As with the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, U.S. spy agencies built a replica of the house where Zawahiri was staying, and brought it to meetings with Mr. Biden and his aides, the official said. Specialists used the model to confirm that Zawahiri could be killed in a missile strike without collapsing the entire structure and killing civilians, including members of his family. After the strike, Haqqani Taliban members sought to cover up the fact that Zawahiri had taken shelter there by moving Zawahiri’s family to another location, according to the administration official. “The safe house used by Zawahiri is now empty,” the official said. Under the terms of the agreement signed with the Trump administration in February 2020, the Taliban vowed to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to plan attacks against the U.S. and its allies. But the Taliban didn’t explicitly commit to continuing operations to target the group or to break ties with them. The United Nations has since reported that the Taliban and al Qaeda remain closely connected...U.S. Says Drone Strike Killed al Qaeda Leader Ayman al Zawahiri
She was the mother of Chesa Boudin, the radical San Francisco District Attorney who's up for recall on June 7. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the shooting death of Brink's security guard Peter Paige in the Weather Underground's 1981 armored truck robbery, in Rockland County, New York.
Chesa was raised by the notorious, violent Weather Underground militants Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Kathy Boudin, a "model prisoner," served 22 years behind bars at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She was paroled in 2003.
As the New York Times reports, "Kathy Boudin, Radical Imprisoned in a Fatal Robbery, Dies at 78":
She had a role in the Brink’s heist by the Weather Underground that left two police officers dead. But she became a model prisoner and, after being freed, helped former inmates. Kathy Boudin, who as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s took part in the murderous 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck and then, in prison and after being freed two decades later, helped inmates struggling to get their lives on track, died on Sunday in New York. She was 78. The cause was cancer, said Zayd Dohrn, whose family adopted Ms. Boudin’s son, Chesa Boudin. On a March day in 1970, Ms. Boudin was showering at a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion collapsed the walls around her. She and fellow extremists had been making bombs there, the intended target believed to have been the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Ms. Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and brief refuge at the home of a woman living down the block. She then disappeared. Within a few years, so did the Weather Underground. A breakaway faction of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, it called itself Weatherman, borrowing from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a 1965 Bob Dylan song with the lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The name evolved into Weather Underground. In that era of turbulence over civil rights and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group set off bombs at the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other buildings. If anything, it was more adept at issuing long manifestoes, laden and leaden with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and asserting the world’s “main struggle” as being that “between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.” With the Weather Underground fading by the mid-1970s as the war ended, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of having been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list. Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.” That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men. The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case. Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.” That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men. The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case. At her sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know that anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend to you my deepest sympathy,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.” She proved to be a model prisoner at Bedford Hills, mentoring other inmates, attending to those with AIDS, writing poetry and expressing remorse for her role in the Brink’s robbery deaths...
Please keep in your thoughts Brink’s guard Peter Paige and Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown (who was Nyack’s first African-American officer). All three were murdered in the course of the 1981 Brink’s heist. Also remember Brink’s guard Joseph Trombino, who was seriously wounded, but survived, only to be killed twenty years later on 9/11. The perpetrators were six members of the Black Liberation Army and four former members of Weather Underground who had since formed the May 19th Communist Organization. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the trial of the first three defendants (one from the BLA and two from the M19CO)...
Just like the good old times with Uncle Joe or back to the future?
At the New York Times, "Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War":
Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.” After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views. “Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them. “No longer,” one of the girls shot back. A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.” “It’s as though they’ve all plunged into some kind of madness,” Ms. Dubrova said in a phone interview, reflecting on the pro-war mood around her. With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within. The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent. There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain. In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported; they can do so conveniently through a specialized account in the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite. “I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.” But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression. Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.” In the Soviet logic, those who choose not to report their fellow citizens could be viewed as being suspect themselves. “In these conditions, fear is settling into people again,” said Nikita Petrov, a leading scholar of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear dictates that you report.” In March, Mr. Putin signed a law that punishes public statements contradicting the government line on what the Kremlin terms its “special military operation” in Ukraine with as much as 15 years in prison. It was a harsh but necessary measure, the Kremlin said, given the West’s “information war” against Russia. Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to the OVD-Info rights group, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters. “This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens. “This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens. A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned her that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100 percent a criminal case.” She is now being investigated for causing “grave consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison. Ms. Gen, 45, said she found little support among her students or from her school, and quit her job this month. When she talked in class about her opposition to the war, she said she felt “hatred” toward her radiating from some of her students. “My point of view did not resonate in the hearts and minds of basically anyone,” she said in an interview...
Still more.
I've never seen a knife attack this grisly. Frankly, I've rarely ever seen anything this grisly. It's personal when murdering by knife attack.
God have mercy. How unbelievably horrific.
Don't watch if you have a weak stomach, really.
Brooke Goldstein has video on Twitter, "GRAPHIC: This is pure Jew-hatred. This is a sickness. 4 Israelis were killed today in a stabbing attack in Beersheba."
And at the Times of Israel, "4 killed, 2 wounded in stabbing attack at Beersheba mall; terrorist shot dead: Arab Israeli from southern Bedouin town stabs woman at gas station, rams cyclist, then attacks others at shopping center; attacker was formerly imprisoned for Islamic State ties," and "Funerals held for Beersheba terror victims as bereaved families mourn ‘heavy loss’: Addressing Doris Yahbas, husband says terrorist ‘cut you away from us’; Laura Yitzhak’s partner asks: ‘What will I do now?’; attending ministers heckled in 2 incidents."
I've already blogged about Eileen Gu, but nothing like this.
There are at least 600,000 million Chinese living in abject poverty, but Chairman Xi can't let the cat out of the bag. So, Ms. Gu is promoted to the top of Wiebo while human-trafficking victim Xiaohuamei (little flower plum) is censored and crushed under the boot-heel of totalitarianism.
Absolutely unreal story. I already loathe China. I'm to the point of no longer reporting on the regime because it makes me furious. The diabolical hypocrisy is stunning. Americans like Eileen Gu to the cretins of the International Olympic Committee --- with this whole Olympics propaganda regime --- have blood on their hands. And that's to say nothing of the Chinese Communist Party thugs who should be destroyed rather than coddled. This is all so sickening, even anti-American.
At the New York Times. "Who Is the Real China? Eileen Gu or the Chained Woman?":
Two women have dominated Chinese social media during the Beijing Winter Olympics.
One is Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old skier born and raised in California who won a gold medal for China. The other is a mother of eight who was found chained around her neck to the wall of a doorless shack. The Chinese internet is exploding with discussions about which of the two represents the real China. Many people are angry that the government-controlled algorithms glorify Ms. Gu, who fits into the narrative of the powerful and prosperous China, while censoring the chained woman, whose deplorable conditions defy that narrative. The two women’s starkly different circumstances — celebrated vs. silenced — reflect the reality that to the Chinese state, everyone is a tool that serves a purpose until it does not. Whether she wants it, Ms. Gu has become a powerful propaganda tool for Beijing to demonstrate its appeal to global talent and the benefits of being loyal to China. She represents the successful China that Beijing would like the world to admire. The chained woman represents the poor and backward China that hundreds of millions still inhabit. They sometimes appear in the state media to demonstrate the country’s success in eradicating extreme poverty until their miseries become an inconvenient truth. “Does Eileen Gu’s success have anything to do with ordinary Chinese?” goes the headline of one viral article that was censored later. “Can we remember these women while cheering for Eileen Gu?” asks another headline. “To judge whether a society is civilized or not, we should not look at how successful the privileged are but how miserable the disadvantaged are,” the article said. “Ten thousand sports champions can’t wash away the humiliation of one enslaved woman, not to mention tens of thousands of them.” The Chinese government doesn’t like where the debate is heading. The juxtaposition of the two women highlights that underneath the glamorous surface of one of the world’s largest economies lie jarring poverty and widespread abuse of women’s rights. It defeats the purpose of recruiting star athletes like Ms. Gu: to showcase a powerful China with global appeal. “The reality is that the vast majority of Chinese won’t have the opportunity to become Eileen Gu,” Li Yinuo, founder of a prominent education company in Beijing, wrote in an article. But the tragedy of the chained woman, she wrote, could happen to anyone. A few hours later, her article was deleted. Embedded in the debate is a deep disappointment among middle-class Chinese who are usually willing to go along with the government’s narratives but are incensed by the repeated lies, lack of action and subsequent censorship in the case of the chained woman. They feel that the government is pouring too many resources behind a privileged member of the society while neglecting another member in dire need of help. They’re worried that the latter’s misfortune could happen to them or their daughters. Many social media users, including some self-claimed nationalistic little pinks, posted a quote from a famous Chinese novel: “I love the country. But does the country love me?” The story of the chained woman — whose name, according to the government, is Xiaohuamei (little flower plum) — has captivated the Chinese internet since a short video went viral in late January. In it, a middle-age woman with a dazed expression stood in the dark shack with a chain on her neck. Subsequent videos revealed that she had lost most of her teeth and seemed to be mentally disturbed. The local authorities issued four conflicting statements in the following two weeks. In the latest statement on Thursday, the authorities reported that Xiaohuamei could be a victim of human trafficking and that her husband was under investigation for false imprisonment. The government had denied both earlier. The fates of the two women converged online last week after Ms. Gu won her gold medal. At one point, Ms. Gu, who grew up in an upscale neighborhood in San Francisco and represents some of the biggest brands, like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Company, occupied 10 of the 20 hottest hashtags on Weibo. The hashtag about Xiaohuamei was nowhere to be seen, even though many people were still talking about her. Some social media users were outraged by the lopsided treatment of the two women. They felt that even though they had tried their best to be the obedient and useful tools in the giant machinery of the Chinese state, Xiaohuamei’s tragedy showed that the state won’t necessarily offer them protection...
The Department of Justice filed charges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Man this is wild.
A mild-mannered Kansas school teacher? (On right at the photo.)
Pretty mind-boggling.
At the New York Times, "American Woman Accused of Prominent Role in Islamic State":
The F.B.I. has arrested an American woman who federal prosecutors said had risen through the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria to become a battalion commander, training women and children to use assault rifles and suicide belts, the Justice Department disclosed on Saturday.
The woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, a former teacher from Kansas, was charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The circumstances of her capture in Syria were not immediately known, but the F.B.I. flew her to Virginia on Friday to face prosecution. Prosecutors described Ms. Fluke-Ekren as playing an unusually outsized role in the Islamic State as a woman and an American. Charges against American women involved with the Islamic State have been rare. Investigators said Ms. Fluke-Ekren was smuggled into Syria in 2012 from Libya. She traveled to the country, according to one witness, because she wanted to wage “violent jihad,” Raj Parekh, a federal prosecutor, wrote in a detention memo that was made public on Saturday. According to a criminal complaint that was filed in 2019, a witness told the F.B.I. that Ms. Fluke-Ekren and her husband brought $15,000 to Syria to buy weapons. Her husband, the witness said, eventually rose to be the commander of all snipers in Syria in 2014. He later died in an airstrike while conducting a terrorist attack on behalf of the Islamic State, investigators said. Ms. Fluke-Ekren met her husband in the United States, according to court documents. The same witness also told the F.B.I. that Ms. Fluke-Ekren had a plan in 2014 to attack a college in the United States using backpacks filled with explosives. Prosecutors did not reveal which college she had wanted to target. The criminal complaint said her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State at the time, who approved it for funding. The witness said the attack was put on hold after Ms. Fluke-Ekren learned she was pregnant. Ms. Fluke-Ekren had multiple children, but it is not clear how many. Prosecutors said Ms. Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt in 2008, lived there for about three years and then traveled to Libya, where she stayed for about a year before sneaking into Syria. According to one witness, Ms. Fluke-Ekren departed Libya because another terrorist organization, Ansar al-Sharia, was no longer conducting attacks in that country and she wanted to wage violent jihad. In his memo arguing to keep Ms. Fluke-Ekren behind bars while she awaits trial, Mr. Parekh said she had been a “fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of ISIS for many years.” The prosecutor said the government had numerous witnesses who were prepared to testify against her. According to the detention memo, the mayor of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, approved the opening of a military battalion to train women to help defend the city. Ms. Fluke-Ekren, investigators said, soon became the leader and organizer of it. Witnesses said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren taught classes for members of the battalion, and on one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle. One witness said that more than 100 women and girls had received training from Ms. Fluke-Ekren. She had hoped to create a cadre of suicide bombers that could infiltrate enemies’ positions, but the effort never materialized, according to the complaint. Ms. Fluke-Ekren told another witness about her desire to attack a shopping mall using a remote-detonated vehicle full of explosives. The witness said she wanted to kill large numbers of people. Court documents said that after the death of her husband, Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialized in drones and was working on a plan to drop chemical bombs from the air. He also died. She then married an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for the defense of Raqqa, a witness said. A witness also said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren claimed to have tried to send a message to her family with the goal of tricking them into believing she was dead so the U.S. government would stop trying to find her. She told the witness that she never wanted to return to the United States and wanted to die a martyr in Syria. Federal prosecutors in Virginia have mounted an aggressive effort to prosecute terrorists captured overseas. The cases can be extremely difficult because witnesses and other evidence can often only be found in war zones, as well as because of geopolitical considerations...
And at the DOJ's page, "American Woman Who Led ISIS Battalion Charged with Providing Material Support to a Terrorist Organization" (via Memeorandum).
A phenomenal, wondrous interview, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "A Conversation With the Last Liberal Interventionist":
Do you think the U.S. was prudent and principled to invade Afghanistan? Yes. Doing so was the essence of prudence. It was necessary to prevent another 9/11. To do that, it was necessary to destroy the regime. Afterwards, it will not have escaped your attention that the “invasion” turned gradually into a symbolic, very light, noncombatant presence that nevertheless served as a shield behind which a civil society came together. Let’s not fall for the propaganda of the Trumpists and their de facto allies on the so-called far left. Contrary to what the world says, the United States could have stayed far longer at a cost many times less than what their other deployments cost. Is it paternalistic to assume that people around the world crave Western democratic norms? According to a Pew study from 2013, 99% of Afghans—men and women—desire to live under Sharia law. I am aware of that poll. The same words do not necessarily mean the same things. When a woman in Kabul refers to Sharia, she is not advocating for the right to be stoned in the event of adultery. By the way, a real liberal, an interventionist worth his salt, would never deny that broad principles are flexible. We know well that they obviously cannot be applied identically in Afghanistan or Burma, but that they must be adapted....
The Covid-19 pandemic has made travel exceedingly difficult and even taboo. Moreover, many environmentalists (Greta Thunberg is one example) discourage air travel in an effort to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint. Travel has been instrumental in your life. And you sort of ignored the lockdowns and traveled around the world during Covid. What is the importance of travel and why should we encourage it? For the same reason. The world of Greta Thunberg, a world without travel, a world where we closed ourselves off from others, would be an impoverished world. Spiritually, of course. Civilizationally, no doubt. But also, in the most trivial sense of the word, economically. Globalization must be reformed. The ecological battle must be fought. And to correct the damaging effects of technology, we need much, much more technology. But the tragic error would be to try to undo everything...
Read the whole thing. It's worth your time.
From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "His community hopes Allah will 'bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise'":
As far back as 2013, Pakistani Muslim terrorists had plotted to take "foreign Jews" hostage to trade for ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. In 2022, a Pakistani Muslim terrorist actually went out and did it. The hostage crisis at Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform Temple in Texas, ended with Faisal Akram of Blackburn, another post-industrial English town where Muslims make up a third of the population and Pakistanis account for over 10 percent, dead, and his Jewish hostages set free. Back home, the Blackburn Muslim Community page announced that "Faisal Akram has sadly departed from this temporary world" and prayed that Allah "bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise". The BMC page had previously promoted a “charity” event to raise money for “Palestinians” by the Human Relief Foundation, which had been banned by Israel over its ties to Hamas. The town has produced no shortage of Jihadists, including the youngest terrorist in the UK, as well as a number of Jihadis who traveled to join ISIS, an associate of shoe bomber Richard Reid, and a terrorist who played a key role in an Al Qaeda plot that targeted New York and D.C. Blackburn is one of the most segregated towns in the country and has been described as a “no-go zone”. The area that produced the Temple Terrorist has the highest Muslim population outside of London where some claim that flying the English flag has been effectively outlawed. The setting couldn’t be any better for the media to whitewash the murderous terrorist with the familiar excuses that he was the victim of failed integration in the United Kingdom. His family, in an even more familiar excuse, is claiming that he “was suffering from mental health issues”. That, along with the claim by FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno that the terrorist, "was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community", is becoming the very familiar narrative for covering up the latest Muslim terror attack. But antisemitism, like Islamism, was part of the air that Faisal Akram breathed in Blackburn. Salim Mulla, Blackburn's former mayor and current Labour councilor, claimed that Israel was behind ISIS and school shootings in America. Last year, four Muslim men from Blackburn took part in a "Palestinian" convoy while shouting, "F*** the Jews... F*** all of them. F*** their mothers, f*** their daughters and show your support for Palestine. Rape their daughters and we have to send a message like that. Please do it for the poor children in Gaza." Siddiqui aka Lady Al Qaeda, on whose behalf the Texas synagogue attack took place, was married to the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and had assorted recipes for mass murder in her possession when she was captured. Despite graduating from Brandeis, a formerly Jewish university, she demanded at her trial that jurors undergo DNA tests to prove that they are not Jewish. And the Aafia Foundation posted bizarre antisemitic rants about the "degree of poisonous venum (sic) within the heart of American mainstream jewry". The hatred of Jews, like the hatred of all non-Muslims, is a crucial motive for Islamic terrorism. If Blackburn is a miserable place, the tale of the Akram family may reveal why. The official family statement by the terrorist’s brother, Gulbar Akram, claims that "although my brother was suffering from mental health issues we were confident that he would not harm the hostages" and denied that the FBI had rescued the hostages from being killed by his brother. "Don’t believe the bull#### in the media they were released from the fire exit and Not rescued.” The Blackburn Community message describes the terrorist as having brothers named "Gulbar", “Malik” and the "Late Gulzameer Akram". Two brothers named Gulbar Akram and Gulzameer Akram in Blackburn had been locked up over stolen cars. Another time, a Blackburn resident named Gulbar Akram almost had his nose sliced off. A Gulzameer Akram ran a massive counterfeiting operation from a Blackburn home. A Malik Akram was locked up for harassing girls. Were all of them members of the same clan? The best way to cover up a terrorist attack is to shift the context. And that’s what they’re doing. But it’s important to dig into the true context to understand the true origins of the Texas attack. In his book, Among the Mosques, ex-Islamist Ed Husain described Blackburn as “another global hub for the Deobandis and the Tableeghi Jamaat” where the mosques pray for the destruction of the enemies of Islam and texts declare that “there can be no reconciliation between Islam and democracy”. The Deobandis, who control many of the mosques in Blackburn, originated the Taliban. Aafia Siddiqui, better known as 'Lady Al Qaeda', is a Deobandi, the terrorist on whose behalf Faisal Akram took a synagogue hostage, and a popular cause with Pakistanis. A few years ago the Pakistani Senate had even named the Islamic terrorist, the “Daughter of the Nation”. Indian Mujahideen co-founder Riyaz Bhatkal had plotted to take Jews hostage a decade ago in order to force 'Lady Al Qaeda's release. British Muslim “charities” were a major source of funding to the Jihadist group as they are for many Pakistani Jihadist enterprises. While much has been made of the advocacy on behalf of Siddiqui by CAIR and other Islamist colonists in America, top Muslim politicians in the UK also vocally demanded her release, including Lord Nazir Ahmed and Lord Altaf Sheikh. When Husain visited Blackburn, he warned that, "it is clear that a caliphist subculture thrives here, a separate world from the rest of British society.” Tableeghi Jamaat, whose mosques are known as "breeding grounds" for Jihad, is closely intertwined with Pakistani Islamism and vectored Islamic terrorism. Quite a number have joined Al Qaeda. It is no coincidence that so many Islamic terrorists have come out of Blackburn. Nor is it a coincidence that the latest Islamic terrorist attack on America originated there. Faisal Akram traveled to Texas, where ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ sleeps at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth. He was one of many Muslim pilgrims seeking to extricate her. Just last fall, the Dallas-Forth Worth CAIR and the Pakistani terror regime claimed that Aafia Siddiqui had been assaulted in U.S. custody in the latest effort of many on behalf of ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. Faisal’s target, a progressive Reform Temple which happened to carry the traditional name of Congregation Beth Israel despite its social justice activist clergyman’s hostility to Israel, was ideally selected to fit Muslim antisemitic obsessions with both Israel and Jews. The antisemitic rants, the hostage crisis, and the rapid cover-up are all regular features of life for Jews in Europe. Changing demographics are making them a new reality for American Jews. Any American city or town can become the new Blackburn. That’s the harsh lesson here. Pakistani antisemitism and obscure Jihadist movements are not local issues, they are global threats. The poison nurtured in a declining British post-industrial town blew up in Texas. We are all interconnected, and that interconnectedness has made the Jihad into a global enterprise. Ideas, tactics, and organizations that once took centuries to colonize the world can travel around it at the speed of the internet and a terror plot can happen at the speed of a jet plane. We can either police our borders, control our immigration, and build walls around our nations, or we must be resigned to being hunted, stalked, and killed anywhere and at any given moment. In Blackburn, Muslims anticipate the Texas Jihadist ascending to the “highest ranks of Paradise" where he will enjoy the company of 72 virgins. More Muslims from Blackburn, marinating in the same hatred for America, for Jews, and for anyone unlike them, will follow in his footsteps.
The president called the siege an "act of terror."
At the Dallas Morning News, "British hostage taker at Colleyville synagogue bought gun ‘on the street’, Biden said":
President Joe Biden said Sunday the British national who held four people hostage inside a Colleyville synagogue was armed with a gun apparently “purchased on the street.” The president said the hostage-taker spent his first night in Texas at a homeless shelter, and speculated that he might have gotten a gun there. Also on Sunday, Greater Manchester police in England said they detained two teenagers in connection with the gunman who took four people hostage for more than 11 hours over the weekend in Colleyville. Greater Manchester police tweeted about the arrests but released few details about why counterterrorism officers detained the teens. It was unclear what connection, if any, the teens had to 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, who died after Congregation Beth Israel Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and the three other hostages escaped unharmed and authorities swarmed the building. Authorities have not said how how Akram died. The FBI said early Saturday that Akram appeared to be the sole suspect. A spokeswoman for the Dallas office referred questions to British authorities and said the FBI hadn’t changed its statement. British law gives police wide latitude to make arrests during a terrorism investigation and diplomats counseled against drawing any conclusions. Biden, speaking from Philadelphia, said Akram might have been in the U.S. for only a few weeks. Citing a senior law enforcement official, NBC Nightly News reported that Akram arrived in the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 29. “This was an act of terror,” Biden said, adding that he doesn’t know why Congregation Beth Israel was targeted, or “why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been a prisoner for over 10 years” and used “anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli” language. He said there were no bombs that authorities know of, despite the attacker’s claims that he planted some. Biden said he had spoken with Attorney General Merrick Garland and they were working to “address these types of acts.” The president said he’d “put a call in to the rabbi” but indicated they hadn’t connected yet. Biden also praised law enforcement. “They did one hell of a job,” he said. “Thank God. Thank God.” An 11-hour standoff Colleyville police were called to the synagogue in the 6100 block of Pleasant Run Road about 10:40 a.m. Saturday. The synagogue was holding its Shabbat service, which began at 10 a.m. The service was streamed live on Facebook, and a man could be heard speaking. At times the man sounded angry and said he was going to die. The livestream was removed just before 2 p.m. FBI negotiators were in constant contact with the hostage-taker throughout the day, officials said. Shortly after 5 p.m., authorities were seen bringing a hostage, a man in black yarmulke out of the building. A loud bang was heard at the synagogue just after 9 p.m. Authorities said that was around the time that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team breached the building. Video from WFAA-TV (Channel 8) showed people running out a door of the synagogue, and then a man holding a gun opening the same door just seconds later before he turned around and closed it. Moments later, several rounds of gunfire could be heard, followed by the sound of an explosion. Cytron-Walker said Sunday that the experience was traumatizing. He said in a statement that the hostage-taker grew “increasingly belligerent and threatening” towards the end of the standoff, adding that he feels grateful to be alive and “we are resilient and we will recover.” He credited security training that his congregation has received over the years for helping him and the other hostages get through the situation. “Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself,” Cytron-Walker said. ‘Lady al-Qaeda’ During the standoff, Akram demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman serving an 86-year sentence for shooting at two U.S. military officers during an interrogation. Her lawyer, Marwa Elbially, said Sunday that his client condemns Akram’s actions, and “unequivocally condemns all forms of violence.” “We are all thankful that the hostages were safely released and that no one was harmed,” Elbially said during a virtual news conference. Siddiqui is being held at a federal prison in Fort Worth, about 20 miles southwest of the synagogue. Faizan Syed, director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Siddiqui’s family and those campaigning for her release from prison did not know the hostage-taker. “We want to make it very clear that the actions of this individual do not represent Dr. Siddiqui, her family or her campaign and we want to deter anybody who might have sympathies for her campaign to not take these types of actions in the future,” Syed told reporters during the news conference with Siddiqui’s lawyer. “This is something that is appalling, heinous and against the wishes of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.” Saleema Gul, a representative of The Aafia Foundation, added the Houston-based group’s sympathy for the hostages and their families. “We do not condone the incident that took place yesterday, or any other means to secure Dr. Aafia’s freedom other than through advocacy and legal means,” Gul said. In September, pro-ISIS British preacher Anjem Choudary launched a campaign calling for Siddiqui’s release. “The obligation upon us is to either free her physically or to ransom her or to exchange her,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. The post asserted that Siddiqui was the victim of “huge injustice” and that he aimed “to call on those who have the ability to free her from captivity.” The architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, described her to interrogators as a top al-Qaeda courier and financier, though her supporters discount that and say his statement was the result of torture. U.S. officials came to describe her as “Lady al-Qaeda,” and the FBI placed her on its list of seven most wanted terrorists in 2004. She was caught four years later and convicted in 2010 of trying to shoot two interrogators. Militants have tried to use hostages as leverage to secure her release for over a decade. An outpouring of support Rabbi Andrew Marc Paley of Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in Dallas, said in an email to his congregation that authorities asked him to help care for the hostages after they escaped. Paley said the first hostage released was an elderly man who was reunited with his daughter. “I was able to speak to both of them and both were obviously relieved and in general good spirits,” the rabbi wrote. Paley said he then met with the rabbi’s wife, Adena Cytron-Walker, and one of their daughters, as well as relatives of the other hostages. After the rescue, he hugged Cytron-Walker, saying later he was “a little dazed and surprised” but smiling. Concerns about rising anti-semitism The U.S. Department of Justice released data in the fall showing a 42% increase in hate crimes nationally since 2014. The data identified Jews as the most targeted religious group in America. In 2018, a gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life, while yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Paley said the Colleyville attack brought to the surface feelings of anger and sadness that “this terrible event is sadly not new to the Jewish community.” Rabbi Jeffrey Meyers of Tree of Life said in a statement his heart was heavy seeing the Colleyville attack. “While everyone is physically safe, they are also forever changed,” Meyers said. “My own community knows too well the pain, trauma and lost sense of security that comes when violence forces its way in, especially into our sacred spaces.” Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a tweet that while the immediate crisis is over for Congregation Beth Israel and the Jewish community, “the fear of rising antisemitism remains.” Rabbi Gary Zola, a professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, said he hopes there comes a point where people aren’t afraid to go into synagogues, mosques or churches because of incidents like the Colleyville standoff. He urged people to speak up and work together...
Actually, the number should be higher.
What is wrong with these people.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Poll: Nearly half of Californians say 9/11 had lasting impact on their lives":
Two decades after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a majority of Californians believe the surveillance laws passed in its aftermath were justified, while the state’s most conservative and most liberal voters are more skeptical, according to a new poll. The survey from the Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies, in partnership with the Los Angeles Times, found that the events of that day remain a vivid memory for three-quarters of the state’s voters, and nearly half say 9/11 has had a lasting effect on themselves or their families. “It was a demarcation point in American life,” said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director. “Here we are 20 years later ... going through long lines at the airport, increased security. It all stems back from that day.” A sizable number of California voters say they have been improperly treated because of increased safety measures. One in four voters report being harassed during security screenings at airports, for example. There is little difference between how Democrats and Republicans say they have experienced mistreatment, but substantial difference among racial and ethnic backgrounds. Roughly 25% of white, Latino and Asian voters in California say they have been harassed, compared with 39% of Black voters and 51% of American Indian/Native American respondents. Still, the findings show that the immediacy of 9/11 is beginning to fade from Californians’ collective memory. Although roughly 90% of Californians over 50 say they have a clear recollection of that day — when terrorists hijacked four airplanes to attack targets in the U.S. — the number dwindles to less than 20% among those under 30, who were children or not yet born when the assaults occurred. Young Californians are far less likely to say the events of Sept. 11 had a lasting effect on themselves or their families. Overall, voters in the state were nearly evenly split; 47% said they or their families experienced an enduring effect from the attacks, and 52% did not. Voters under 40 are also more wary of the federal laws adopted after the attacks, which gave law enforcement more authority to conduct surveillance of the public. Less than half of those younger Californians say the policies are justified, compared with majorities of voters age 40 and older, with support climbing to 75% among people over 75. Overall, 56% of the state’s voters back such laws, and 22% say the measures are unjustified with another 22% holding no opinion. Attitudes do not neatly conform to partisan leanings. Republicans and Democrats support the laws in equal measure (roughly 60%), and half of voters with no party preference say the same. Voters on the extremes of the ideological spectrum — strong conservatives and strong liberals — are less likely than moderate voters to see the policies as justified. And the share of voters who had no opinion on the laws climbed as their level of education increased; 29% of those with postgraduate degrees said they had no opinion, compared with 9% who did not have a high school degree. Such a pattern is unusual among the most highly educated respondents, who are more likely to hold defined views, DiCamillo said. In this case, the merit of surveillance laws “is a more complicated issue,” he said. “It’s not a straightforward yes or no.” The findings also underscore how some views about the lasting impact of 9/11 defy the trend of hyper-polarization that has crept into nearly every corner of American life. Although party affiliation has some influence on Californians’ perspectives, DiCamillo said it has “kind of a modest influence.” “It’s there, but lurking in the background,” he said, a vast difference from most topics he polls on, where there’s “just unbelievable partisan differences on viewing the realities of American life.” Similarly, Democrats and Republicans report comparable attitudes about how fears of a terrorist attack influence their behavior. Twenty-one percent of Democrats and 17% of Republicans say they have skipped going to a theme park, sports stadium or large entertainment venue because of such safety concerns; 1 in 5 voters with no party preference report the same...
Still more.
