Talks Falter on Middle East Peace

At WSJ, "U.S. Gambit on Mideast Peace Talks Falters" (via Google):

The Obama administration's campaign to forge a Middle East peace agreement appeared near collapse Tuesday, despite a U.S. move to negotiate the release of a convicted American spy in a last-gasp effort to win more concessions from Israel.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who was set to visit Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Wednesday, canceled his trip, the State Department said.

A formal breakdown in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, which the White House stressed hasn't occurred, would throw into turmoil President Barack Obama's second-term foreign-policy agenda, already reeling from rising tensions with Russia and an inability to stop the civil war in Syria.

Mr. Obama has said solving the Mideast conflict is one of three main international objectives of his second term. Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday criticized his administration's last-minute discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to offer up the spy, Jonathan Pollard, to persuade the Israelis to make good on previous promises to release prisoners. They called it a sign of a White House desperate for a major foreign-policy success.

"Releasing Pollard, in the context of the current peace-process travails, is bad policy," said Aaron David Miller, who served for some two decades as an adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. "It reflects the weakness and desperation of the administration that is presiding over a peace process not yet ready for prime time."

Mr. Obama's allies on Capitol Hill questioned the move.

"I've followed this issue closely over the years. It's hard for me to see how releasing Jonathan Pollard would help jump-start Middle East peace talks," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said. "It's one thing to consider releasing him after an agreement has been reached, but it's another to discuss setting him free before that has happened."

White House officials refused to declare the peace effort a failure on Tuesday. One senior administration official said the situation is "still fluid," and it is unclear how it will conclude.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Mr. Obama hasn't made a decision on whether to release Mr. Pollard.

Mr. Kerry has made a peace agreement the barometer through which to gauge his tenure by making dozens of trip to the Mideast over the past year and often holding meetings with Israeli and Arab officials by himself. Mr. Kerry has argued that ending the conflict would bring broader stability to the region and rob extremist groups like al Qaeda of an important recruiting tool.

Despite eight months of negotiations spearheaded by Mr. Kerry, diplomacy appeared to be unraveling late Tuesday after Mr. Abbas said he had signed papers formally applying to join 15 international organizations affiliated with the United Nations.

The U.S. had pressed Mr. Abbas during the negotiations not to move forward with such actions, which would have given the Palestinians more authority to press grievances. Washington hoped to forestall such a move through Israel's agreement to release political prisoners and to take other confidence-building steps as part of a larger process with a goal a formal peace agreement by April 29.

Mr. Netanyahu, though, had balked at following through with the prisoner release, infuriating the Palestinian side, and precipitating the U.S. offer of Mr. Pollard in a bid to get more Israeli cooperation.

All three sides have remained tight-lipped about how far the negotiations had progressed since their start in July, including the issue of the prisoner release...

Also at the Times of Israel, "Despite Palestinian unilateralism, talks will likely limp on," and "Pollard-for-prisoners deal said to be near completion."

And at the New York Times, "Abbas Takes Defiant Step, and Mideast Talks Falter."

Also at NY Daily News, "Kerry’s shambles: Mideast peace push turns to mush."

Vladimir Luxuria, Italian Transgender Communist, Arrested in Sochi for Flaunting 'Gay is OK' Banner

Like Marx said, destroy the family, bring down bourgeois capitalism.

According to Wikipedia:

Luxuria was a Communist Refoundation Party member of the Italian parliament, belonging to Romano Prodi's L'Unione coalition. She was the first openly transgender member of Parliament in Europe, and the world's second openly transgender MP after New Zealander Georgina Beyer. She lost her seat in the election of April, 2008.

Although Luxuria lives exclusively as a female, she has not undergone sex change surgery remaining physically and legally male. She has stated on occasion that she perceives herself as neither male nor female.

That gives you a little background on this disgusting trans-derp. They're always so flame-boyantly in-your-face about everthing, sheesh. Yet another depraved Communist homosexual.

See the Wall Street Journal, "Italian Gay-Rights Group Says Activist Was Detained, Released in Sochi: Former Parliament Member Vladimir Luxuria Was Protesting Russia Law Banning Gay 'Propaganda'":

An Italian gay-rights association said Sunday that Vladimir Luxuria, a former Italian member of parliament who is a transgendered gay-rights activist, was detained but later released by police in Sochi after unfurling a banner that said "gay is okay."

Flavio Romani of Arcigay-Associazione LGBT said that in a phone conversation on Sunday, Luxuria told him she was being held at a detention center in or near Sochi. Romani later said that Luxuria had been freed with no charges. Sochi police couldn't be reached for comment. Luxuria didn't respond to requests for comment.

Luxuria, who is transgendered, stood outside the main spectator entrance to the Olympics this weekend clad in a skirt with gay-pride rainbow colors waiving a rainbow umbrella and fan. Russians who were on their way to Saturday's U.S.-Russia hockey game stopped to take pictures with her. A few Olympic volunteers huddled nearby watching the scene, but didn't ask Luxuria to leave.

"I have come here with a rainbow flag because a man named Vladimir Putin is homophobic," she said.

When approached by The Wall Street Journal outside the Olympic Park on Saturday, Luxuria said she felt she might be arrested under a controversial law signed last year banning "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations." The law mandates fines for speaking in defense of gay rights or saying gay relationships are equal to heterosexual ones in front of minors. Critics say the bill is written so broadly that it could be used to crack down on nearly any public expressions of support for gay rights.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in January that gays should feel welcome at the Olympics so long as they "leave the children in peace."

More from the New York Times, "Transgender Former Member of Italian Parliament Detained in Sochi."

And from the excitable hate-addled extremist John Aravosis, at AmericaFlog, "Russians 'brutally' arrest former Italian member of parliament at Sochi Olympics."

Yes, "brutally." But don't those brutes like it that way?

The Left Still Harbors a Soft Spot for Communism

From Cathy Young, at Reason:

In the mid-1980s, in my student days at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, I once got into an argument at the campus pub with a student activist who thought communism was unfairly maligned. (Back then, I had a reputation as a right-wing extremist because I didn’t think it was crazy to call the USSR—from which my family and I had emigrated a few years earlier—an evil empire.) When I mentioned the tendency of communist regimes to rack up a rather high body count, the young man parried, “Well, what about all the people capitalism kills? Like the people who die from smoking so that tobacco companies can make money?”

Having recovered from shock at the sheer idiocy of this argument, I ventured to point out that cigarettes weren’t exactly unknown behind the Iron Curtain. I don’t recall where things went from there; but I was reminded of that conversation the other day, after reading an honest-to-goodness apologia for Communism on Salon.com, a once-interesting magazine that’s rapidly becoming too embarrassing to list on my résumé.

The author, Occupy activist and writer Jesse Myerson, already caused some controversy last month with a Rolling Stone article that outlined a five-step plan toward eliminating inequality and collectivizing wealth. But at least in that piece, Myerson limited himself to extolling a visionary American brand of kumbaya communism rather than defend any of its actual, real-world versions. Here, in an article that purports to correct Americans’ “misconceptions” about communism, he takes the further step of arguing that the real thing wasn’t as bad as we think.

Among these alleged misconceptions: the notion that “Communism killed 110 million people for resisting dispossession.” As an example, Myerson cites a comment by Fox News host Greg Gutfeld that “only the threat of death can prop up a left-wing dream, because no one in their right mind would volunteer for this crap. Hence, 110 million dead.”

Where’s the error? Well, says Myerson, the actual death toll probably wasn’t 110 million. (True; it may have been just under 100 million, which makes it so much better.) Besides, Myerson argues, many of the people killed by the Soviet regime were not resisters against communist utopia or collectivization—they were themselves communists who ran afoul of Stalin.

But here, Myerson battles a straw man. Not even the fiercest anti-Communist has ever suggested that all the victims of the “left-wing dream” died in defense of property rights. Rather, building and sustaining a system based on expropriation required such levels of violent coercion that the repressive juggernaut inevitably began to crush its own—as well as random victims who were neither communists nor anti-communist resisters. (People would end up in the gulag because a spiteful neighbor reported them for a disrespectful remark about Stalin, or simply because the local authorities needed to meet their quota of arrests.)

Myerson offers other well-worn excuses: the Soviets had to fight a civil war, and also “faced (and heroically defeated) the Nazis.” He leaves out the part where Stalin tried to team up with Hitler to gobble up Eastern Europe, refused to heed warnings of an attack for which he left his country shockingly unprepared, and then sent millions of untrained and barely armed recruits to certain slaughter.

As for Red China, Myerson acknowledges that tens of millions died in the famine that resulted from Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”—“a disastrous combination of applied pseudoscience, stat-juking, and political persecution designed to transform China into an industrial superpower”—and then summarily dismisses the notion that communism might be to blame. “Famine,” he explains, “is not a uniquely ‘left-wing’ problem.” Not even, it seems, when that famine is caused directly by the policies of a left-wing regime.

Then, Myerson tries to make the case that capitalism is just as homicidal as communism—and, in a bold stroke of what passes for logic at Salon these days, includes in his indictment deaths that might happen in the future. Specifically, he wants capitalism held accountable for the future death toll from human-made, capitalism-driven climate change. Myerson might be terribly disappointed to learn that, just like smoking-related health problems, environmental degradation is not always the result of capitalist greed: in fact, it’s widely believed to have been particularly bad under communist regimes.

Myerson’s muddled screed might not merit a second thought if it his defense of communism was just a personal eccentricity. Unfortunately, toned-down versions of such whitewashing are fairly common not only on the left but even in mainstream liberal opinion. In 2005, reviewing the book, Mao: the Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff chided the authors for their overly negative view of the subject: “Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. … Mao’s legacy is not all bad.” This rose-tinted view also explains why Westerners who dote on mass-murdering dictators of the left, such as folksinger and onetime Stalin devotee Pete Seeger, tend to get a pass from the media as misguided idealists with their heart in the right place.

More.

And ICYMI, from Robert Stacy McCain, "Intellectuals and the Total State: @JAMyerson’s Dilettante Marxism."

Glenn Greenwald Launches 'The Intercept' in Pathetic Diversion Against Impending Criminal Charges of Fencing Stolen Intelligence

I mentioned yesterday that Glenn Greenwald's a pathological liar. And what better way for a pathological liar to deflect the buring heat of justice bearing down than to accuse your accusers of being pathological liars?

And what better venue to denounce your accusers than the communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, which is the most anti-American news outlet this side of MSNBC?



The occasion for Greenwald's cries and accusations is the launch of his much-touted, Pierre Omidyar-backed media venture, "The Intercept."

They've got three pieces up at the website, which launched today: "Welcome to The Intercept"; "New Photos of the NSA and Other Top Intelligence Agencies Revealed for First Time"; and "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program." (At Memeorandum.)

Both Greenwald and partner Jeremy Scahill stress the intense urgency of getting their Omidyar-backed media project off the ground as soon as possibly, purportedly in order to mount an aggressive push-back against what Greenwald calls the "criminalization of journalism."

The problem, of course, is that their program's in fact cyberterrorism disguised under the cloak of journalism, and is thus arguably shielded by the First Amendment protections afforded to those who speak out against U.S. power.

The next problem, obviously, is that Greenwald's patent panoply of lies is pathetically enabled by a virtually unified left-wing partisan press that has continued its work of tearing down the United States since at least 2003 and the Bush administration's enforcement of the 1991 U.N.-backed armistice against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Recall that the entire mountain of lies surrounding Greenwald, his husband David Miranda, and the latter's intelligence-running to Berlin-based activist Laura Poitras, came crashing down under the withering and dogged reporting of blogger and columnist Louise Mensch. The facts are not in dispute. It's only Greenwald et al.'s disgusting and insipid spin that has worked to obscure the true scale of criminality here. Louise has the goods, at the Telegraph UK, "David Miranda detention: Why I believe the Guardian has smeared Britain's security services," and at Unfashionista, "David Miranda – Snowden’s Mule, and physical data," where she writes:

Look, boys and girls, you hold politicians to account, hold YOUR OWN to account too. No fear no favour – stop turning a blind eye and swallowing the spin so uncritically.

Ask yourselves this damned obvious question. If the data was copied everywhere and it didn’t matter, why is Rusbridger talking about “copies in New York and Rio”?

Why is David Miranda carrying it on encrypted thumb drives?

Why is David Miranda acting as a go-between at all?

Haven’t Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenberg and the Guardian heard of Dropbox? Or P2P filesharing sites? There are a million ways to store locked data in the cloud.

Let’s review:

He was returning to their home in Rio de Janeiro when he was stopped at Heathrow and officials confiscated electronics equipment, including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

This Guardian quote does not say “rolls of film… written notebooks” etc. It describes only electronic storage devices for data. They could have saved David Miranda “He is my partner, he is not a journalist” ‘s ticket price and expenses by, you know, storing all that in the cloud or shipping it via FedEx.

Glenn Greenwald to the New York Times:

Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden.

But Miranda and Poitras used a human mule (if indeed we believe him, I absolutely don’t, that he didn’t know what he was carrying).

Why?

Yes, I realise I’m asking journalists to ask hard questions about another journalist and they like to keep those for people outside their club. Thank goodness for blogging and Twitter – and the smashing of big media’s gatekeeping hold on information.

Ask yourselves if Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras, are actively assisting Edward Snowden in his treacherous dissemination of classified, incredibly sensitive US and UK intelligence? From where I’m sitting, it looks like an attempt to fight charges in advance – by claiming that they are journalists and everything they do is covered by the First Amendment. Hence the New York Times putting Poitras on the cover of its magazine supplement this week and Greenwald’s repeated lies about the role of his husband and the events and aftermath of the detention to British journalists, unchallenged anywhere in the UK press, until I started tweeting about it & wrote my last blog on the topic.

They hope that claiming a journalistic role will protect them when they are stealing, storing and disseminating classified intel about not just NSA snooping but America’s intelligence programmes against China, Russia and so forth. They are, in doing so, risking countless lives. So are the Guardian newspaper. As Malcom Rifkind said countering BBC bias yesterday on the Today programme, the Guardian had no right to store that stolen intelligence or to report even on GCHQ data collection (legal, not illegal, data collection). As he said, the Guardian’s angle was the GCHQ could legally penetrate comms in a deeper way than was known – and of course the Guardian let Al Qaeda and others know that, meaning that terrorists will start protecting their communications. Some terrorists are sophisticated – others, like many extremist Islamist cells, are not. The latter have been warned off by the Guardian from ways that UK spooks were tracking them.

Read it all at the link.

As Louise notes, "If Obama were Bush, the U.S. media would be all over" this --- from the failure to prevent Edward Snowden's treasonous pilfering of top-secret intelligence, to the criminal dissemination of vital data on all aspects of the U.S. national security regime, including most diabolically the release of confidential information identifying human assets in American and British governmental organizations, putting lives gravely at risk.

BONUS: There's some background on the launch from Lloyd Grove, at the Daily Beast, "Welcome to Glenn Greenwald, Inc.?"

Rand Paul’s Paleolibertarian Patrimony

Dave Swindle used to repeatedly warn against backing Rand Paul, arguing that he was a carbon copy of his father Ron. See, for example, "The One Question Conservative Rand Paul Supporters Need to Answer," and "Was Sarah Palin Snookered Into Endorsing a Stealth Anti-Israel Candidate?"

But I thought he gave a great speech to the Heritage Foundation last year, and I've mentioned my possible support for a Rand Paul presidential bid in 2016. As always, the proof will be how genuine his views turn out to be. That being said, you know hard-left outlets like the New York Times would love to destroy him, so take this exegesis of Paul's ideological "patrimony" with the usual grain of salt.

See, "Rand Paul’s Mixed Inheritance":

As Rand Paul test-markets a presidential candidacy and tries to broaden his appeal, he is also trying to take libertarianism, an ideology long on the fringes of American politics, into the mainstream. Midway through his freshman term, he has become a prominent voice in Washington’s biggest debates — on government surveillance, spending and Middle East policy.

In the months since he commanded national attention and bipartisan praise for his 13-hour filibuster against the Obama administration’s drone strike program, Mr. Paul has impressed Republican leaders with his staying power, in part because of the stumbles of potential rivals and despite some of his own.

“Senator Paul is a credible national candidate,” said Mitt Romney, who ran for president as the consummate insider in 2012. “He has tapped into the growing sentiment that government has become too large and too intrusive.” In an email, Mr. Romney added that the votes and dollars Mr. Paul would attract from his father’s supporters could help make him “a serious contender for the Republican nomination.”

But if Mr. Paul reaps the benefits of his father’s name and history, he also must contend with the burdens of that patrimony. And as he has become a politician in his own right and now tours the circuit of early primary states, Mr. Paul has been calibrating how fully he embraces some libertarian precepts.

“I want to be judged by who I am, not by a relationship,” Mr. Paul, a self-described libertarian Republican, said in an interview last week. “I have wanted to develop my own way, and my own, I guess, connections to other intellectual movements myself when I came to Washington.”

Coming of age in America’s first family of libertarianism — he calls his father, a three-time presidential aspirant, “my hero” — Rand Paul was steeped in a narrow, rightward strain of the ideology, according to interviews, documents, and a review of speeches, articles and books.

Some of its adherents have formulated provocative theories on race, class and American history, and routinely voice beliefs that go far beyond the antiwar, anti-big-government, pro-civil-liberties message of the broader movement that has attracted legions of college students, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Tea Party activists.

That worldview, often called “paleolibertarianism,” emerges from the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, started with money raised by the senior Mr. Paul. It is named for the Austrian émigré who became an intellectual godfather of modern libertarian economic thinking, devoted to an unrestricted free market.

Some scholars affiliated with the Mises Institute have combined dark biblical prophecy with apocalyptic warnings that the nation is plunging toward economic collapse and cultural ruin. Others have championed the Confederacy. One economist, while faulting slavery because it was involuntary, suggested in an interview that the daily life of the enslaved was “not so bad — you pick cotton and sing songs.”

Mr. Paul says he abhors racism, has never visited the institute and should not have to answer for the more extreme views of all of those in the libertarian orbit.

“If you were to say to someone, ‘Well, you’re a conservative Republican or you are a Christian conservative Republican, does that mean that you think when the earthquake happened in Haiti that was God’s punishment for homosexuality?’ Well, no,” he said in an earlier interview. “It loses its sense of proportion if you have to go through and defend every single person about whom someone says is associated with you.”

Still, his 2011 book, “The Tea Party Goes to Washington,” praises some institute scholars, recommending their work and the institute website.

And he has sometimes touched on themes far from the mainstream. He has cautioned in the past of a plan to create a North American Union with a single currency for the United States, Mexico and Canada, and a stealth United Nations campaign to confiscate civilian handguns. He has repeatedly referred to the “tyranny” of the federal government.

Since becoming a national figure, Mr. Paul has generally stayed on safer ground. His denunciations of government intrusion on Americans’ privacy have been joined by lawmakers in both parties and have resonated with the public — though no other member of Congress as yet has joined him in his planned class-action suit against the National Security Agency.

He has renounced many of the isolationist tenets central to libertarianism, backed away from his longstanding objections to parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and teamed with members of the Congressional Black Caucus in calling for an easing of drug-sentencing laws. He recently unveiled a plan for investment in distressed inner cities.

Much of that is in keeping with the left-right alliance Mr. Paul promotes, an alternative to what he dismisses as a “mushy middle.” Such partnerships, he says, “include people who firmly do believe in the same things, that happen to serve in different parties.”

In recent months, potential rivals for leadership of the Republican Party have depicted him as an extremist. Before the recent investigations into political abuses by his administration, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said Mr. Paul’s “strain of libertarianism” was “very dangerous.” And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told donors in New York that in a national campaign Mr. Paul could not escape Ron Paul’s ideological history.

Mr. Paul is not the first political son encumbered by a father’s legacy, but his mantle is unusually heavy. He has been his father’s apprentice, aide, surrogate and, finally, successor. Side-by-side portraits of father and son adorn one wall in his Senate conference room...

Still more at the link. The piece goes into some detail on the "fringe" paleos like Lew Rockwell (who had a thing for Cindy Sheehan sometime back) and Murray Rothbard. And it mentions how Rand, right before announcing his run for office in 2009, he appeared on nutjob Alex Jones' radio program. There's a lot of unsavory conspiracists and racists in those swamps, and frankly, just being Rand Paul he may never fully escape them.

Please Take Me off Your List of Hate

Dr. Helen Smith, Glenn Reynolds' "Insta-wife," destroys the disgusting hate-addled pseudo-science psychologist Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D., who published a book smearing the tea party as "extremist":

How DARE YOU send me this trash associating law abiding American citizens with Nazi Germany and Maoist China. I am a psychologist who has sympathy for my fellow Americans who are so “extremist” that they believe in lower taxes and the Second Amendment. Horrors!

What is “killing us” are polarized minds like Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D who is so narrow-minded that he thinks those who have different political beliefs than himself are the enemy and seeks to assign them with a “diagnosis.” What is truly extremist and scary to those of a more conservative or libertarian persuasion is that so many psychologists such as the one below are such political hacks for the Democratic Party. Please take me off your list of hate.

Helen Smith, Ph.D.

I get these idiotic far left-wing solicitations, and sometimes I'm almost as pissed off as Dr. Helen. I don't think I could express my disinterest which such exquisite contempt, but that's a template for the ages. Kudos. (And be sure to read Dr. Schneider's pathetic solicitation at the link.)

"Only those who share the partisan Democrat views of James Fallows, in other words, are avoiding the 'failure of journalism.' Fallows would have us believe that 'what is going on' is not a routine exercise in budget brinksmanship — something to which we have become accustomed as a ritual of divided government — but rather an 'internal crisis' exclusive to the Republican Party..."

From Robert Stacy McCain, "James Fallows, Eminent Fool, and the Surprising Vindication of John C. Calhoun":

The current phony crisis, in which Sen. Harry Reid has declared that the House must approve the Senate’s spending bill or else the government will shut down, has inspired The Atlantic‘s James Fallows to an extravagant exercise in rhetorical excess:

In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun . . . let me know.

This is as absurd and inappropriate as it is ignorant. To find a recent precedent, we need only go back to the 1990s, when the budget impasse between the new Republican majority in Congress and President Clinton led to a (partial) government shutdown. Or, really, we might consider the extraordinary process by which Reid and Nancy Pelosi shoved ObamaCare through the legislative grinder — “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” as Pelosi infamously said — as more truly “radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government” than anything Republicans in Congress are doing now.

Having deliberately ignored the made-for-TV dramatics, I am not the least alarmed by this phony crisis, which is neither particularly new nor remotely frightening. Democrats and their comrades in the media (Fallows was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter) are dishonestly characterizing opposition to ObamaCare as “extremist,” per se.

This is the exact opposite of truth: It is ObamaCare itself that is truly “extremist,” a measure that could only be rammed through Congress with late-night arm-twisting sessions. Were the 34 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare in March 2010 “extremists”? Or were the millions of voters who elected a Republican House majority in the 2010 mid-term landslide “extremists”?

James Fallows is a partisan Democrat who evidently does not even read conservatives, and who declares illegitimate any reporting that takes seriously the claims of the president’s Republican opponents...

Fallows is a bald-faced liar (and a Democrat-partisan hack, but I repeat myself).

Continue reading.

IMAGE CREDIT: "Do Not Challenge the Emperor," via Erick Brockway on Twitter.

U.S. Sees Direct Threat in Attack at Kenya Mall

Wow.

And I thought we had "decimated" al Qaeda.

Hardly, according to the New York Times:

NAIROBI, Kenya — Viewing the deadly siege at a shopping mall in Kenya as a direct threat to its security, the United States is deploying dozens of F.B.I. agents to investigate the wreckage, hoping to glean every piece of information possible to help prevent such a devastating attack from happening again, possibly even on American soil.

For years, the F.B.I. has been closely watching the Shabab, the Somali Islamist group that has claimed responsibility for the Nairobi massacre and recruited numerous Americans to fight and die — sometimes as suicide bombers — for its cause.

The Shabab has already attacked most of the major actors trying to end the chaos in Somalia — the United Nations, Uganda, aid groups, the Somali government and now Kenya. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bankrolling anti-Shabab operations for years, and there is growing fear that the group could turn its sights on American interests more directly, one of the reasons the Obama administration is committing so many resources to the investigation in Kenya.

“We are in this fight together,” said Robert F. Godec, the American ambassador to Kenya. “The more we know about the planning that went into this, the way it was conducted, what was used, the people involved, the better we can protect America, too.”

Less than a day after the bloody standoff ended, more than 20 F.B.I. agents wearing flak jackets and helmets were combing through the wreckage strewn across the steps of the mall. Dozens more agents will be headed to Nairobi, American officials say. Some of them are members of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force squad that investigates extremist groups operating in the Horn of Africa, a law enforcement official said.

Over the next few days, agents, including a full Evidence Response Team, will be collecting D.N.A., fingerprints and other biometric information, poring through surveillance footage and examining guns, laptops, cameras and computers — anything to gain insights into how the attack was carried out and the hierarchy, planning and structures behind the group, especially if they have any ties back to the United States.

American officials are mindful that Kenya, one of its closest allies in Africa, has become a precarious buffer zone between the United States and Islamist militants who have declared foreigners legitimate targets in their war.

More at the link.

And also, "A Shaken Kenya Is Hit by 2 More Deadly Attacks by Militants."

No surprise. These murderers are doing exactly as they've promised. At the Times of Israel, "Al-Shabab vow to continue attacks on Kenya."

Al Qaeda's Minnesota Recruiting Blows Lid Off Obama's 'Tide of War is Receding' Propaganda

From Katherine Zimmerman, at the Wall Street Journal, "Al Qaeda's African Surge Threatens the U.S." (via Google):

On Tuesday, after a four-day siege by terrorists who murdered at least 67 people, the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, still appeared not to have been secured by government forces. The attack by more than a dozen heavily armed members of the Somalia-based al Shabaabterrorist group—including reportedly several Americans—was a thoroughly planned operation. Teams of the al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists entered the mall's first and second floors in a two-pronged attack. The terrorists lined up hostages, separated Muslims from Christians and others, then tested the self-proclaimed Muslims on their knowledge of Arabic and Islam. Those who failed were shot, children included. The militants then settled in with the surviving hostages to repulse attempts to extract them.

Who are these terrorists? Al Shabaab—in Arabic, "the youth"—traces its roots to the militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist political movement that rose to power in Somalia in 2006. A U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in December 2006 toppled the ICU, whose leaders fled. But al Shabaab remained and rapidly consolidated power as the dominant insurgent force. When less capable African Union peacekeepers replaced Ethiopian troops, al Shabaab recaptured much of southern and central Somalia by 2009.

There they might have remained if not for a United States- and United Nations-backed effort to beef up the African Union force. A far more robust and battle-tested Amisom (the African Union Mission in Somalia) pushed back al Shabaab, and by September 2012 the group had lost the strategic town of Kismayo, and with it much of al Shabaab's revenue and reputation.

What followed is essential to understanding the resiliency of local Islamist extremist groups and the evolution of al Qaeda. As al Shabaab began losing ground in Somalia, a leadership battle ensued between those who wanted to be part of a global Islamist movement and others with more parochial aims. In 2012, al Shabaab declared itself part of al Qaeda, eliminating dissenters through assassination.

Al Shabaab's decision to relegate the fight for Somali territory to secondary status was a major change. A group that had espoused more limited aims was suddenly abandoning its desire for local power in favor of a more idealized global fight. It is this model that is propelling al Qaeda, allowing the Islamist network to spread in Syria, Sinai, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.

Groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ansar al Shariah in Libya, Ansar Beit al Maqdis in the Sinai, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have metastasized from local to networked global al Qaeda groups. Al Shabaab is following al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which first hit Saudi targets and then moved on to the United States.

Yet the U.S. government insists on calling al Shabaab a local, Somali threat, playing down the potential threat to the U.S. The Obama administration has clung instead to the narrative that al Qaeda is on the "path to defeat" and its remnants are "lethal, but less capable," as President Obama put it in May.

A major tip-off in al Shabaab's transformation was its effort to recruit Americans. According to U.S. officials, 50 or so U.S. citizens have made their way to Somalia since 2007 to join al Shabaab. This includes members of the Somali diaspora and non-Somalis, such as Syrian-American Omar Hammami, who called himself Abu Mansur al Amriki, aka "the American," before he was killed earlier this month in Somalia, the victim of an internal dispute.

American Somalis began joining al Shabaab to fight the Ethiopians in 2007. Insight into its recruitment has come from the courtroom testimony of individuals who were arrested for providing material support to al Shabaab upon returning from Somalia: A local recruiter would promise vulnerable Muslim youths in the U.S. entry to paradise if they fought the Christian invaders. The youths would slip away for the trip to Somalia, often without the knowledge of their families....

Last month, al Shabaab released a video featuring what it called its "Minnesota Martyrs." Minnesota is home to the largest U.S. population of Somalis. The 40-minute video, the first in a promised series, featured three Americans. The video glorified the three young men, saying they had given their lives on what is now a global battlefield. Although some within the group may see Africa as their battleground, those who have cemented the relationship with al Qaeda understand that jihad stretches from Morocco to the Philippines, from Tanzania to Iraq. And as al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri has made clear, to the United States.

If reports now surfacing regarding Americans involved in the Nairobi attack—al Shabaab's response to the Kenyan military presence in Somalia—are confirmed, it will be difficult for the Obama administration to continue claiming that al Shabaab is purely local. The terror group has the means for a major attack, and al Qaeda's focus on the U.S. provides the motive...

RTWT at Google.

Also at CBS, "Kenya mall attack terrorists included "two or three" Americans, Kenyan foreign minister Amina Mohamed says."

Related: At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Slick video rekindles fears that Al-Shabab is recruiting Minnesotans."

Intense Speculation on Whereabouts of British 'White Widow' Samantha Lewthwaite

Authorities and the press still haven't got a clue on the whereabouts of Samantha Lewthwaite, to say nothing of whether she was involved in the Westgate massacre.

Robert Stacy McCain gave us an update this morning, "Terrorist ‘White Widow’ Killed in Kenya?"

We still don't know, actually. It's paroxysms of anticipation at this point.

See the Australian, "Hunt intensifies for 'White Widow' as Kenyan president declares victory against shopping centre terrorists":

A SHOP worker has described how a woman resembling the 'White Widow' sprayed bullets in her direction during the terrorist attack on a Kenyan mall.

The witness says she was cowering under boxes when an AK-37-wielding, pale-skinned woman with long dark hair locked eyes with her.

She then opened fire from a balcony.

The witness, named only as Caroline, told the Daily Mail she managed to escape unharmed as the terrorists advanced through the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi.

"She was high up but not far from me, close enough that I saw her looking along the floor where I was until she saw me," Caroline said.

"She stopped and aimed at me and then opened fire."

The shop assistant said the woman was wearing a baggy black top and had long black hair.

"I can't remember very much, but I remember she had pale skin," she said.

This witness account is but one of several reporting a white female among terrorists who attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi at the weekend, killing 61 civilians and six security forces. Some 175 were injured in the attack, including 62 who remain in hospital.

She is being linked to Briton Samantha Lewthwaite, an extremist Muslim convert who has been dubbed "The White Widow" by British media.

The timing of the attack has been linked to the trial of a British man on bomb-making charges who is believed to be a friend and associate of Lewthwaite.

Jermaine Grant, of east London, and his wife Warda Breik were arrested when police raided their Mombassa home and allegedly found bomb-making materials.

Both have been charged by anti-terrorism police for possessing explosive materials and conspiring to commit crimes. Both have denied the accusations.

Lots more at the link.

And see the Belfast Telegraph, "White Widow Samantha Lewthwaite could be among dead terrorism suspects who attacked a Nairobi shopping mall in Kenya."

It's still speculation. We won't know for sure until the dead terrorists are identified or the woman's whereabouts are verified.

BONUS: At Telegraph UK, "Kenya attack: White Widow Samantha Lewthwaite was 'a lovely young girl' (VIDEO)."

Leftists Freak Out as GOP 'Flips the Script' with Democrats' War on Women

The introduction to this clip is hilarious in how aggressively Chris Matthews asserts a conservative "war on women" --- which everyone knows only exists in the minds of Democrats. And now that we've got marquee Democrat headlines of disgusting Democrat dehumanization of women, Matthews is twisting in his seat at MSNBC, worrying about how the left's sexist women-groping, dick-exposing entitlement culture is somehow an aberration.

It's not. This is how leftists roll.



It turns out the RNC has been doing double-time getting the word out on all the disgusting Democrats sexism, and folks in D.C. are looking to tamp it down. See WaPo, "GOP finds its own ‘War on Women’."

And far-left extremist Katrina vanden Heuvel is not pleased, "The GOP misunderstands the ‘war on women’."

The New American Enemies List

From Victor Davis Hanson, at Pajamas Media:

The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides.

No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in Mexico for selling lethal semi-automatic weapons to drug cartels. But so far, the only identifiable purveyor of illegal weaponry is the president’s own attorney general, whose subordinates in the Fast and Furious operation sold hundreds of guns illegally to Mexican drug lords.

Suggestions to encourage greater incarceration of the mentally unstable, to jawbone Hollywood about its profitable (and gratuitous) gun violence, to regulate extremely violent — and extremely well-selling — video games usually fall on deaf liberal ears. In short, the stereotyped camouflaged, weekend gun enthusiast is not the problem that leads to Columbine, or the nearly 532 murders last year in Chicago. But because we can’t or won’t address the causes of the latter, we go after the former. He is not the unhinged sort that shoots a Gabby Giffords or innocents in an Aurora, Colorado, theater; but somehow is the supposed red-neck yokel that a journalist like ABC’s Brian Ross assumes does.

If the Department of Homeland Security, as is rumored, really did wish to stockpile hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, then why did it begin such repository buying right in the middle of a hysterical national debate about limiting access to various rifles and semi-automatic weapons? Was it not to create a climate of fear and panic buying that has emptied America’s shelves of the most popular types of ammunition? If the homicide rate in Philadelphia and Chicago is any indication, murderers still have plenty of access to bullets. Those who want to target practice or shoot a varmint on their property do not.

The CIA and FBI knew of the suspicious activity of the Boston bombers, of Major Hasan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki. And they did nothing to preempt their violence. The FBI is said to be carefully avoiding monitoring mosques, although all of the above terrorists were known by many fellow Muslim worshipers to be either disturbed or extremist or both. In contrast, the NSA monitors, we are told, nearly everyone’s communications rather than focusing on Middle Eastern male Muslims, even though Middle Eastern male Muslims have been involved in the vast majority of post-9/11 terrorist plots. The NSA is the electronic version of the TSA, which feels it is noble and liberal to stop an octogenarian in a wheel chair for special frisking as proper compensation for every focused look at a West Bank resident or Pakistani visitor on his way into the United States.

The words “Tea Party” and “patriot” in a non-profit’s name would more likely earn a negative appraisal from the IRS than would “Islam” or “Muslim.” One wonders how Lois Lerner’s IRS division would treat a hypothetical “Sarah Palin Foundation” versus “The Dr. Zawahiri Charity.”

Continue reading.

Britain's Head in the Sand on Islamic Terrorism — And Ours

From the inimitable Melanie Phillips, at London's Daily Mail, "Until our leaders admit the true nature of Islamic extremism, we will never defeat it."

Ever since the spectre of Islamic terrorism in the West first manifested itself, Britain has had its head stuck firmly in the sand.

After both 9/11 and the 7/7 London transport bombings, the Labour government promised to take measures to defend the country against further such attacks.

It defined the problem, however, merely as terrorism, failing to understand that the real issue was the extremist ideas which led to such violence.

Accordingly, it poured money into Muslim community groups, many of which turned out to be dangerously extreme.

When David Cameron came to power, his Government raised hopes of a more realistic approach when it pledged to counter extremist ideas rather than just violence.
This approach, too, has failed. The Government still has no coherent strategy for countering Islamist radicalisation.

Following last week’s barbaric slaughter of Drummer Rigby on the streets of Woolwich by two Islamic fanatics, the Prime Minister has announced that he will head a new Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Task Force.

And the Home Secretary has said she will look at widening the banning of radical groups preaching hate.

But at the heart of these promises remains a crucial gap. That is the need to define just what kind of extremism we are up against.

The Government has been extraordinarily reluctant to do this — because it refuses to face the blindingly obvious fact that this extremism is religious in nature.

It arises from an interpretation of Islam which takes the words of the Koran literally as a command to kill unbelievers in a jihad, or holy war, in order to impose strict Islamic tenets on the rest of the world.

Of course, millions of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere totally reject this interpretation of their religion.

Most British Muslims want to live peacefully and enjoy the benefits of Western culture. They undoubtedly utterly deplore the notion that the kind of carnage that occurred in Woolwich should take place in Britain.

And let’s not forget that, worldwide, most victims of the jihad are themselves Muslims whom the extremists judge to be polluted by Western ideas.

Nevertheless, this fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran is what is being spouted by hate preachers in Britain and on the internet, and is steadily radicalising thousands of young British Muslims.

Now the Prime Minister says he will crack down on such extremism. Yet after the Woolwich atrocity, he claimed it was ‘a betrayal of Islam’ and that ‘there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act’.

The London Mayor Boris Johnson went even further, claiming: ‘It is completely wrong to blame this killing on the religion of Islam’ and that the cause was simply the killers’ ‘warped and deluded mindset’.

Yet the video footage of the killers — who had shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ when butchering Drummer Rigby — records one of them citing verses in the Koran exhorting the faithful to fight and kill unbelievers, and declaring: ‘We swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.’

Frankly, these comments by the Prime Minister and London Mayor were as absurd as saying the medieval Inquisition, for example, had nothing to do with the Catholic Church, but was just the product of a few warped and deluded individuals.

Well, speaking the truth about Islamic jihad takes courage. And so far British leaders haven't demonstrated they have it. And it's not just Britain. President Obama dismissed the London barbarity as "senseless violence" --- because, you know, if it's "senseless," it's random and not worthy of the outright condemnation that such leftist extremism requires.

More from Ms. Phillips at the link.

Meanwhile, never give into the terror apologists and appeasers, wherever they may be.

British Army Wives' Terror Fears

At the Sunday Express UK, "Army wives' terror fear: military families plea for more guards after Rigby murder":

The day after 25-year-old Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered outside Woolwich barracks, anxious mothers met Army chiefs to call for more protection.

The women asked for their views to be heard at the very top “because they are feeling so exposed to ­danger”. Highly trained MoD police would have been at the scene of the murder in minutes had they still been conducting patrols.

They are trained to deal with lifethreatening incidents on the perimeter of the barracks and have authority to shoot to kill, the Sunday Express can reveal.

One source claimed that had such officers been in place, they would have been able to deal with the situation last Wednesday quicker than the Met Police firearms officers who arrived at the scene within 14 minutes.

During the wait the two suspects spouted extremist propaganda to bystanders.

The source said: "MoD police radios were linked into the Met's so they would have been right on top of this within minutes and would have known exactly what to do...

Continue reading.

David Cameron Pledges Crackdown on 'Hate Clerics'

I'll believe it when I see it.

At London's Daily Mail, "I'll gag the hate clerics: Cameron to launch new terror task force to stamp out religious extremism":

David Cameron is planning new powers to muzzle Islamic hate preachers accused of provoking terrorist outrages such as the killing of soldier Lee Rigby.

The Prime Minister wants to stop extremist clerics using schools, colleges, prisons and mosques to spread their ‘poison’ and is to head a new Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Task Force (TERFOR) made up of senior Ministers, MI5, police and moderate religious leaders.

The high-powered group will study a number of measures, including banning extremist clerics from being given public platforms to incite students, prisoners and other followers – and forcing mosque leaders to answer for ‘hate preachers’.

More at the link.

At the photo is prominent Muslim hate preacher Anjem Choudary at a demonstration with jihad killer Michael Adebojalo in 2007.

More at Pat Dollard, "Feel-Good Story of the Day: Anti-Muslim Actions Rise In Britain After Public Beheading."

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva Made Terrorism Watch List in 2011

At Jammie Wearing Fools, "Surprise! Psycho Mother of Boston Bombers Also on Terror Watch List."

And the Wall Street Journal, "Suspects' Mother Was Placed on Watch List":

MAKHACHKALA, Russia—The mother of the two young men alleged to have plotted and carried out the Boston Marathon bombing was placed on the same classified watch list as her elder son, according to U.S. officials, raising further questions about her role in his apparent radicalization.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva and her son Tamerlan were placed at the same time in late 2011 on the Terror Identities Datamart Environment database, a low-level watch list that contains the names of more than 500,000 people flagged by multiple U.S. security agencies. It wasn't clear why she was placed on the list.

Her presence on the list is one more thing Ms. Tsarnaeva shared with Tamerlan, who is believed to have masterminded the marathon bombing.

Earlier in the week, after insisting in a two-hour interview with The Wall Street Journal that Tamerlan had been framed, Ms. Tsarnaeva said strife in her family had arisen from its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to adjust to American life. "We never should have come to America," she said. "We tried, but I wouldn't do it again."

Ms. Tsarnaeva said in the interview she often surfed many of the same Internet sites as her son, as the two exchanged ideas on religion and adopted more orthodox Islamic practices. She denied that she or her son adopted any extremist ideologies, however. Now back in Russia living with her husband, Anzor, she said she doesn't know when she will be able come to the U.S. to see her remaining son, Dzhokhar, who was moved Friday from a Boston hospital to a prison medical facility. While the Tsarnaevs had talked about traveling this week to Boston, Ms. Tsarnaeva now says that U.S. officials who came to see them in Makhachkala said they would not for now have the opportunity to see Dzhokhar. She also says she would like to stay closer to relatives. Mr. Tsarnaev has said he will go to the U.S., but he hasn't said when.

Ms. Tsarnaeva also faces a warrant for her arrest in the U.S. after failing to show up for an October court appearance on charges she shoplifted seven dresses at a suburban Boston department store, according to court records. Ms. Tsarnaeva is charged with one count of larceny and two counts of vandalizing property because several of the dresses were damaged in the alleged June 30, 2012, incident at a Lord & Taylor in Natick, Mass., according to court records.

Authorities are still pursuing the case and would arrest her if given the opportunity, a spokeswoman for the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office said Friday.

Continue reading.

And ICYMI, "America's Insane Asylum for Jihadists, Hustlers and Frauds."

Sophisticated Bomb Design Indicates Tamerlan Tsarnaev May Have Received Weapons Training in Chechnya

Because, of course there wasn't any international planning, or some such shit like that.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Boston bombs showed some expertise: Investigators say the triggering devices used suggest the older brother received guidance on his recent trip to Russia":

Investigators say the triggering devices used suggest the older brother received guidance on his recent trip to Russia
":WASHINGTON — Investigators said the two Boston Marathon bombs were triggered by long-range remote controls for toy cars — a more sophisticated design than originally believed — bolstering a theory that the older suspect received bomb-making guidance on his six-month trip to Russia last year.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a shootout with police last week, "more than likely got some instruction in Dagestan," a federal law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The official said investigators continued to believe that Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, were radicalized in the U.S., and that no foreign terrorist group orchestrated the plot.

Nevertheless, the CIA revealed Wednesday that it had asked the FBI and other federal agencies to put Tamerlan Tsarnaev on the terrorism watch list in October 2011 after receiving information from Russia. His name was not placed on a no-fly list, but it was circulated to various intelligence and domestic security agencies.

The information the CIA received "was nearly identical to the information the FBI received in March 2011" from Russia, one official said — unspecific allegations that he had become an Islamic extremist.

The CIA shared all the information provided by the foreign government including two possible dates of birth, his name and a possible name variant as well, an official said.

FBI and Russian security services have been conducting interviews separately in the Dagestan area since the Tsarnaev brothers became suspects in the bombings last week, according to a federal law enforcement official. The agencies are talking to Tsarnaev family members, including the father of the brothers.

The officials asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Further suggesting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev's Russia trip played a role, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told reporters Wednesday in Brussels that the elder suspect "learned something where he went, and he came back with a willingness to kill people."

A joint FBI and Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin sent to state and local law enforcement Tuesday night suggested that the bombs' triggering mechanism was more sophisticated than previously thought.

"The sophistication of the explosive devices is similar to what you might find on a battlefield, and I am concerned there is a person out there, either in the Chechen region or in the United States, who trained him," Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement.


"For anyone to rule out a foreign connection at this time, I think is highly premature," he said.

Katherine Russell, Widow of Marathon Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Converted to Islam, Wore Hijab, Was 'Brainwashed' by Extremist Husband

Such an ultimate bummer that this young lady got mixed up with that jihadi loser scum.

At London's Daily Mail, "EXCLUSIVE - How doctor's daughter became the Muslim convert widow of Boston bomber: Terrorist husband 'brainwashed' her and she gave up her dreams of college to have his baby at 21":

None who knew her as a child could have dreamed that this would be the face she would one day present to the world, nor that her life and those of so many Bostonians would be so violently caught up with two brothers from Chechnya and a cause as unclear as it was brutal.

As a girl growing up in Rhode Island Katherine was known to her friends as Katie. One school friend who asked not to be named recalled: ‘I saw her like a few months ago and she was just totally transformed. She was not the same person at all.’

Sickening Leftists Claim 'We Know Absolutely Nothing About What Motivated' Boston Bombing Suspects

Readers may have noticed that I don't go in for the whole speculation game very much. I'd prefer to let the big stories sort themselves out, as the fact become known, before laying out my own grand theories about causes and ideological complicity. I'll tell you, though, since the photos of the suspects were released on Tuesday, along with the information of the crude pressure-cooker bomb that was used in the slaughter, I was certain that the suspects would turn out to be home-grown terrorists influenced by Islamic militants in the Middle East, with most likely affiliations to the global al Qaeda network. And that seems to be the case. As more information comes to light, it's becoming increasingly clear that the Tsarnaev brothers were driven to hatred of Americans through Islamic doctrines calling for jihad warfare against unbelievers.

From this morning's Wall Street Journal, "Boston Attack Renews Fears About Homegrown Terrorism: Threat Evolves From Complex International Plots to Small-Scale Attacks by Individuals Within U.S." According to the story, much remains unknown, although here's some key details:

The brothers spent 10 years in the U.S. during a formative period of their lives, exhibiting normal behavior for first-generation immigrants, said Mitchell Silber, a former intelligence official in the New York Police Department. "The question is, what catalyzed the change? Was it Chechen nationalism? Did it start with Chechen nationalism and somehow migrate to a pan-Islamist jihad cause?"

A YouTube page that appeared to belong to the elder Mr. Tsarnaev featured multiple jihadi videos that he had endorsed in the past six months. One video features the preaching of Abd al-Hamid al-Juhani, who was an assistant to an al Qaeda scholar in Chechnya, and another features Feiz Mohammad, an extremist Salafi Lebanese preacher based in Australia. Four months ago, he also "liked" a well-produced video featuring the black flags of Khorasan, a significant jihadist theme.

Mr. Silber, now with the investigative firm K2 Intelligence, said the Boston bombings show that the terrorist threat persisted even in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden. "This more pedestrian, bare-bones terrorism is out there, and it's going to be very difficult to detect."

And further:

A wild card in the bombing is the possible role of the Chechen separatist cause, which flared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 only to be crushed by the Kremlin. Olga Oliker, an international security specialist at the Rand Corp. think tank, said that the Chechen separatist leadership has become radicalized and more recently formed an umbrella radical group, the Caucuses Emirate, which was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization in 2011.

The leadership, however, tends not to direct overseas operations. Ms. Oliker said it is more likely the two brothers were sympathizers who decided to take action in the U.S.

Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, said Chechen influence in the global jihad shouldn't be discounted. He noted two recent rounds of arrests in Europe that involved Chechens allegedly carrying out plots at the direction of al Qaeda.

Certainly more on the elder Tsarnaev's ties to Chechnya will be unraveled, although his radicalization spiked after he returned from his recent trip to the homeland. Robert Spencer has more on that, "Boston Marathon jihad murderers may have trained in Chechen Islamic school."

Either way, enough is known now. The Tsarnaevs were jihad terrorists, plain and simple. There is no denying it, although such efforts at denial are shamelessly underway by Islamic jihad's apologists on the anti-American left. See Atlas Shrugs, for example, "ELSPETH REEVE AT ATLANTIC WIRE CARRIES WATER FOR SLAUGHTERERS: 'THE U.S. ANTI-MUSLIM CROWD IS QUITE PLEASED WITH ITSELF'."

And here's the sickening spin from far-left extremist Paul Waldman, at the American Prospect, "Substituting Identity for Motivation":

Let's be honest and admit that everyone had a hope about who the Boston bomber would out to be. Conservatives hoped it would be some swarthy Middle Easterner, which would validate their belief that the existential threat from Islam is ongoing and that their preferred policies are the best way to deal with that threat. Liberals hoped it would be a Timothy McVeigh-like character, some radical right-winger or white supremacist, which would perhaps make us all think more broadly about terrorism and what the threats really are. The truth turned out to be … well, we don't really know yet. Assuming these two brothers are indeed the bombers, they're literally Caucasian, but they're also Muslim. Most importantly, as of yet we know absolutely nothing about what motivated them. Nothing. Keep that in mind.

That is so much bullshit it boggles the mind.

"Assuming these brothers are the bombers"?

Right. The entire country is horribly torn over making any assumptions about these two.

And what's this about "we know absolutely nothing about them"? Is it even possible to issue a more bald-faced lie?

Of course not. But it's not just the marquee America-hating leftists at the American Prospect. All across the mainstream media today we have the shameful spectacle of the press moaning about how officials are "struggling" to determine the motives of the bombers. Here's the banner headline right now at the New York Times, "Bomb Investigation Shifts to a New Mystery: Motive." And this just in at the Chicago Tribune, "Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive." And at the Los Angeles Times, "Search for motive in Boston attack begins." Here's Reuters, "Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive."

And on and on...

It's disgusting.

I'll have more on the left's complicity in Islam's jihad against America.

Meanwhile, David Horowitz provides some moral clarity:

Watching the news about the Boston bombing and the Muslim fanatics who perpetrated the deed, I cannot help reflect on all the nasty attacks that liberals and progressives and Muslim activists have conducted against conservatives who have attempted to warn Americans that their enemies are religious fanatics driven by an apocalyptic hatred of us because we are Jews, Christians, atheists, democrats – in a word, infidels.

It has been said by Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and other Democrats that George Bush created the terrorists by attempting to enforce a UN Security council resolution and take down one of the monsters of the 20th Century in Iraq. It has been said by the late Susan Sontag and other progressive intellectuals that the heinous attacks of 9/11 were the result of American policies. The Center for American Progress and university administrators have relentlessly defamed as Islamphobes and bigots those of us who have had the temerity to talk about the Islamic roots of Islamic terror. If only we ignored the Islamic beliefs behind the terrorism and made nice to all Muslims indiscriminately, the terrorists wouldn’t hate us.

Boston has exposed this as the Big Lie and fatuous delusion that it has always been. The Boston killers were treated better in America than all but an elite among Americans born here who love their country. They were given scholarships, they were admitted to the most exclusive prep schools, they lived in a Cambridge environment where critics of Islamic terror were regarded as Islamophobes and they as a minority deserving special consideration and concern. And yet they hated us. They hated America and ordinary Americans like the victims of their mayhem, and enlisted in the army of our mortal enemies. They hated us because they were fanatical believers in the idea that Mohammed had desired them to kill infidels and purify the earth for Allah. This is the face of our enemy and the sooner the delusional liberals among us wake up to this fact, the safer all of us will be.

Leftists Could Push Polygamy After Same-Sex Marriage

Because once you abandon the one man, one woman standard, there is no bright line saying when to stop redefining marriage.

See William Jacobson, "“Polygamy would have to be permitted”":

Also, “it’s just bad faith to forbid the brother and sister on these putative health grounds”

The words in the title and subtitle were spoken by one of the leading thinkers and advocates in favor of gay marriage, University of Chicago Professor Martha Nussbaum, in a speech she gave at Cornell Law School in 2009 (video and discussion below).

I was reminded of those words after Dr. Benjamin Carson created a stir when, during a television interview...

More at the link.

And see John Nolte, "No Media Outrage After Sotomayor ‘Compares’ Homosexuality to Incest."

PREVIOUSLY: "Progressives Smear Dr. Benjamin Carson on Polygamy Comments Even Though Justice Sotomayor Raised Exact Same Concerns."

PLUS: "Anti-Marriage Extremist Walter James Casper III and the Unitarian Push for Polyamorous Sexual Licentiousness."