German Jihadist Returns from Syria and Gives Testimony

At Der Spiegel, "Back from the 'Caliphate': Returnee Says IS Recruiting for Terror Attacks in Germany":

Islamist extremist Harry S. wasn't in Syria for long. But during his stay there, he claims, Islamic State leaders repeatedly tried to recruit him to commit terror attacks in Germany. Security officials believe he could be telling the truth.

It was an early summer morning in the Syrian desert, with not a cloud in the sky, when Mohamed Mahmoud asked those gathered around him: "Here are some prisoners. Which of you wants to waste them?"

Not long before, Islamic State (IS) had taken the city of Palmyra, and now jihadists from Germany and Austria were to participate in the executions of some of the prisoners taken in the operation. They drove to the site of the executions in Toyota pick-ups, bringing along an IS camera team in order to document the atrocity in the city of antique ruins. Even then, Mohamed Mahmoud was known to German security officials for his repeated propaganda-video calls to join the jihad. On that early summer day in Palmyra, though, he didn't just incite others. He grabbed a Kalashnikov himself and began firing. That day, Mahmoud and his group of executioners are thought to have killed six or seven prisoners.

The story comes from someone who was in Palmyra on that day: Harry S., a 27-year-old from Bremen. "I saw it all," he says.

Harry S. returned to Germany from Syria and is now in investigative custody. He has told security officials everything about the brief time he spent with Islamic State and has also demonstrated his readiness to deliver extensive testimony to German public prosecutors. He stands accused of membership in a terrorist group. His lawyer Udo Würtz declined to offer a detailed response when contacted, but said of his client: "He wants to come clean."

German investigators are extremely interested in the testimony of the apparently repentant returnee, even as they are likely unsettled by what he has to say.

A Vital Witness

Harry S., after all, is more than just a witness to firing squads and decapitations. He also says that on several occasions, IS members tried to recruit volunteers for terrorist attacks in Germany. In the spring, just after he first arrived in Syria, he says that he and another Islamist from Bremen were asked if they could imagine perpetrating attacks in Germany. Later, when he was staying not far from Raqqa, the self-proclaimed Islamic State capital city, masked men drove up in a jeep. They too asked him if he was interested in bringing the jihad to his homeland. Harry S. says he told them that he wasn't prepared to do so.

Harry S. was only in IS controlled territory for three months. Yet he might nevertheless become a vital witness for German security officials. Since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, fear of terrorism has risen across Europe, including in Germany, and security has been stepped up in train stations and airports. And the testimony from the Bremen returnee would seem to indicate that the fear is justified. Harry S. says that, during his time in the Syrian warzone, he frequently heard people talking about attacks in the West and says that pretty much every European jihadist was approached with the same questions he had been asked. "They want something that happens everywhere at the same time," Harry S. says.

Harry S.'s path from the Bremen quarter of Osterholz-Tenever to the jihadists of Islamic State was not particularly remarkable. His radicalization was similar to many other young, directionless men from European suburbs, from the Molenbeek district of Brussels to Lohberg in Dinslaken. In Tenever, some of the residential towers are up to 20 stories tall.

The son of parents from Ghana, Harry S. grew up in "difficult conditions," according to a court file. His father left the family just as he was entering puberty. Even though Harry S. initially only managed to graduate from a lower tier high school in Germany, he dreamed of returning to his parents' homeland and working as a construction engineer.

There was even a brief moment when it looked as though he was going to get control over his life. But then, in early 2010, he and some friends robbed a supermarket, getting away with €23,500, and flew to the island of Gran Canaria for a vacation. It wasn't long before the authorities were on to them and Harry S. was sentenced to two years behind bars for aggravated theft.

A Dangerous Radical

In prison, he met a Salafist named René Marc S., the "Emir of Gröpelingen" -- a man who Bremen officials consider to be a dangerous radical. It didn't take long before prison officials noticed a "change in character" in Harry S. According to prison records, he converted to Islam and expressed "radical sentiments" about world events. After his release, the new convert visited the Furqan Mosque (which has since been shut down) in the Gröpelingen neighborhood of Bremen. At the mosque, he became part of a Salafist clique which sent at least 16 adults and 11 children to Syria in 2014.

Harry S. tried to make the journey as well. From Istanbul, he flew in April 2014 to Gaziantep, a large Turkish city near the border with Syria, but his trip came to a premature end. Turkish authorities arrested him and sent him back to Bremen, where he told police that he had wanted to help out in Syrian refugee camps. The authorities didn't believe him and confiscated his passport in an effort to prevent him from making another attempt. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, he was required to report to the local police station.

But the authorities were still unable to prevent the Salafist from traveling to Syria to join the war. Harry S. simply grabbed an acquaintance's passport and, with another Islamist from Bremen, traveled overland via Vienna and Budapest. This time, there were no police waiting for him at the border to Syria. Instead, he was met by smugglers who brought him across the border to an IS safe house set up for new arrivals from around the world.

Harry S., a large man with broad shoulders, was trained as a fighter in Syria. He claims to have been drilled in training camps together with 50 other men: sit-ups, hours of standing in the sun and forced marches lasting the entire day. Those who gave up were locked up or beaten. His Kalashnikov, it was driven home to him, should become like his "third arm" and he was told to keep the weapon in bed with him while sleeping.

Once he finished training, he says he was to become a part of a special unit, a kind of suicide squad for house-to-house combat. Harry S. claims that, during his brief time in Syria, he was never sent into battle -- but he claims to know many young men, including Germans, who died in battle. "Luckily, I managed to get away," he says.

Still more.

Islamic State Fighters Flee Ramadi (VIDEO)

At the Wall Street Journal, "Islamic State Militants Flee Ramadi Stronghold Amid Iraqi Offensive":

BAGHDAD—Islamic State fighters fled their last bastion in the center of Ramadi Sunday night as Iraqi security forces encircled the area and prepared a final push to clear out any remaining fighters or explosives, Iraqi officials said.

State television beamed images of people celebrating in streets across the country, though the army had not yet declared Ramadi completely under its control. A number of Iraqi leaders said they were confident the city would fall within days, if not hours.

A defeat in the capital of Anbar province, which is just 60 miles from the capital Baghdad, would be Islamic State’s third major loss in as many months to Iraqi security forces and allied paramilitary groups. Those forces retook the oil refining town of Beiji in October and in November, Iraqi Kurdish forces drove the Sunni Muslim extremist group out of the strategic city of Sinjar.

A decisive victory in Sunni-majority Ramadi could strengthen national unity and soothe sectarian conflict in the Shiite-dominated country where Sunnis often complain of discrimination. It would also augur well for the coming battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and Islamic State’s main stronghold in Iraq.

“My eyes are filled with tears now upon hearing that security forces managed to defeat Daesh in Ramadi,” said Sheikh Ghazi al-Goud, a member of parliament from Anbar province, using another name for Islamic State. “This is a victory for all Iraqis. Iraqis proved through the Ramadi fight that they are united, Sunnis and Shiite.”

One reason for the Ramadi operation’s slow progress has been the Iraqi government’s reluctance to include Iran-backed Shiite militia groups who have so far carried most of the fight against Islamic State. Moderate Iraqi leaders and U.S. officials worried that deploying the Shiite-majority militias to Ramadi could spark further sectarian strain, or lead some Sunni civilians to fight with Islamic State.

Iraqi troops, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, have spent nearly three weeks fighting their way into Ramadi.

By late Sunday, Islamic State militants were fleeing Ramadi’s eastern suburbs along with their families and civilian hostages they had been using as human shields, a security official said.

Their departure came after Iraqi security forces encircled the city center and began pushing into a former government compound that had been the group’s last bastion in the city. Iraq’s military said they had occupied only one building in the government compound, a blood bank owned by Iraq’s ministry of health.

Iraqi troops picked their way through cratered city streets and booby-trapped buildings left behind by more than a month of almost continuous fighting, military officials said...

More.

How to Manufacture an Anti-Muslim Hate-Crime 'Epidemic'

From Michelle Malkin:

Step one: Find an expert with an impressive-sounding academic title to legitimize shoddy advocacy propaganda.

Meet Brian Levin. He’s the one-man band behind something called the “Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism” at California State University, San Bernardino. The “center” (that is: Levin) claims to be “nonpartisan” and “objective.” But he is a former top staffer of the militant, conservative-smearing Southern Poverty Law Center, which was forced to apologize earlier this year after including famed black neurosurgeon and GOP 2016 candidate Ben Carson on its “extremist watch list” of hate groups.

At SPLC, Levin infamously posited that the 2002 Beltway jihad snipers were Angry White Men, a fatal error echoed by politically correct law enforcement officials whose wild-goose chase needlessly cost lives. A decade later, the SPLC’s target map and list of social conservative groups were used by convicted left-wing domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins to shoot up the Washington, D.C., office of the Family Research Council.

The radical left-wing SPLC, whose annual “hate and extremism” report spawned Levin’s sham “center,” brazenly declared that its mission is to “destroy” its political opponents. Harper’s Magazine writer Ken Silverstein called the SPLC and its work “essentially a fraud” that “shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people.”

Step two: Enlist gullible, lazy, biased, and complicit journalists who recycle the “expert’s” sweeping pronouncements as proven facts, backed up by other ideologically vested advocacy group spokespeople.

NBC News, The New York Times, the Daily Mail and Slate all quoted Levin over the past week hyping his new “study” (published in esteemed academic journal The Huffington Post) on an alleged “increase,” “surge” and “spike” in “crimes against Muslims and mosques” this year.

Levin’s “methods” of “analysis”? Stringing together “apparent hate crimes reported in the media and by civil rights groups across the United States.” Most prominent among his sources: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose jihad-apologizing frontman Ibrahim Hooper was quoted by both NBC and The New York Times backing Levin’s “research” (which were, of course, based on several of CAIR’s grievance-grifting claims). Cozy, huh?

“We’re seeing so many of these things happening that it’s unbelievable,” Hooper told the Times.

Indeed, it is.

In his list of “Suspected Hate Crimes Directed at Actual or Perceived Muslim Institutions or Individuals Since Paris Attacks,” Levin cites a Nov. 26 incident in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, noting, “Cab driver shot. Attempted Murder.”

The rest of the story: The suspect is 26-year-old Anthony Mohamed, whose father is Muslim. Authorities have so far refused to press hate crimes charges despite CAIR’s demands. At a hearing this week, the cab driver denied in court that he had been subjected to negative comments about his religion before Mohamed allegedly shot him in the back. Court filings fail to mention any evidence of anti-Muslim bias in the case.

Or take a look at Levin’s No. 23: “12/6 Buena Park, CA. Sikh Temple. Vandalism, Crim. Mischief.” CAIR’s Los Angeles office publicized vandalism at an Orange County Sikh temple, immediately condemning a “tiny minority of bigots who violate our nation’s longstanding principles of religious tolerance and inclusion.”

The rest of the story: Authorities arrested a local, 20-year-old Brodie Durazo, after he admitted spray-painting the temple, a tractor trailer and other property in the gang-infested neighborhood. “I have lived alongside this temple for many years of my life and have never once seen you as anything but a peaceful people,” he told the temple-goers in a personal apology at the house of worship. “I just hope that you will see by my presence that all I want is for peace as well.”

Not a menacing “bigot.” Just a bored punk.

Or consider Levin’s No. 33: “12/10 Tampa, FL. Rocks/shots at 2 Muslim drivers. Assault, Threat leaving relig. service in hijab.”

Both women are unidentified. Their unvetted stories were immediately publicized by, you guessed it, CAIR. “Both incidents were investigated by Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies,” according to local Florida media, “though investigators said neither case involved definitive proof of a hate crime.” In one case, the sheriff’s office spokeswoman said, “It could have been road rage or just a misunderstanding.” In the second case involving alleged shots fired at a vehicle, investigators said the woman “was not sure where or when” a bullet hole found on the car was made.

Step three: Attack the messenger. After I published a lengthy post on my blog outlining an epidemic of Muslim hate-crime hoaxes at colleges, mosques and businesses dating back to 2001, Levin took to Twitter to accuse me of “smears.” The facts, which the rest of the media failed to inform readers about while hyping Levin’s work this week, speak for themselves (see michellemalkin.com).

Step four: Classify this article as “hate” and any media outlet that publishes it as a “hate group” so that other journalists shun the truth and continue perpetuating the hoax.

Defeating ISIS Won't Solve Threat of Islamic Jihad in Syria

At the Telegraph UK, "Defeating Islamic State will not end jihadist threat in Syria, report warns":

Study backed by Tony Blair Faith Foundation says that some 65,000 fighters in Syria who do not support Isil still have jihadist leanings.

Defeating Islamic State will not end jihadist threat in Syria, report warns https://t.co/U6htvDZYN5 pic.twitter.com/Ay40EAyary

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) December 20, 2015

Around 65,000 fighters with jihadist sympathies belong to rebel militias in Syria other than Islamic State, a new report claims, adding to concerns that defeating the group will do little to bring peace to the country.

The study by the Centre on Religion and Geopolitics said fighters with extremist views were to be found across Syria’s rebel groups.

Up to 60 per cent of all rebels belonged to groups with an Islamist agenda, with more than half of those adhering to Salafi-jihadism, the hardline ideology underpinning Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Some 15 groups besides Isil have jihadist views even if they are currently dedicated to the local fight against the Assad regime, the report said. They include al-Qaeda’s local branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam and one of the most powerful fighting forces, Ahrar al-Sham.

The Centre on Religion and Geopolitics is an arm of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Its senior adviser is Ed Husain, a London-born former Islamist who later set up a think-tank, Quilliam, to promote counter-radicalisation.

“ISIS represents a continuation of a way of thinking that started before it existed and will carry on if it is defeated,” the study says. “The West risks making a strategic failure by focusing only on ISIS.

"Defeating it militarily will not end global jihadism. We cannot bomb an ideology, but our war is ideological.”

Shattering Southern California's Illusion of Safety — #SanBernardino

Following-up, "An Existential Fear of Foreign Infiltration."

Now, at the Los Angeles Times, "San Bernardino terrorist attack shatters Southern California's illusion of safety":

As terrorist attacks fueled by extreme Islamist ideology convulsed cities in the U.S. and Europe over the last 15 years, Los Angeles and its sprawling suburbs were spared.

It couldn't last forever.

The assault on a San Bernardino social services center last week by a U.S.-born Muslim man and his Pakistani wife was an event of national significance, potentially reshaping next year's presidential contest and raising Americans' fears of terrorism to levels not seen since the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But the killing of 14 people by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik has had a particular effect in Southern California, a densely populated region whose residents have at times felt themselves remote from the transatlantic waves of terror that have washed over New York, London, Paris, Madrid and Washington, D.C.

That sense of separation is deeply rooted in the state's culture and history, experts say, though it is in many ways unrealistic. The truth is that the Southland — home to more than 22 million people, as well as an entertainment industry that is arguably the foremost exporter of the secular culture denounced by Islamic fundamentalists — is as vulnerable as anywhere else in the U.S. to extremist violence in the post-9/11 era.

"We used to call California an 'island on the land.' There was a sense of — take your pick: outside history, ahead of the curve. But that's simply not true," said William Deverell, a history professor at USC who studies the American West. "The notion that this is an island that can't be breached, that's wrong. And San Bernardino has proven it."

Deverell said the attack was in a sense more jarring for having happened in the far-flung Inland Empire, where many ex-Angelenos have sought refuge from high housing costs and urban crime, rather than at an iconic location in Santa Monica or the Hollywood Hills. Security experts say assaults on "soft" targets unprepared for politically motivated violence are now as much a risk as the spectacular, symbolically resonant attacks on famous buildings or tourist sites.

Farook and Malik appear to exemplify this brand of "homegrown" or "self-radicalized" terrorist. Federal officials have said the pair may have quietly plotted a mass killing for years in relative isolation, taking inspiration but not direction from overseas terrorist groups.

"You can't think of it in terms of, 'Here is someone sitting at terrorist central control who says we have to look at California more seriously.' It's not that at all," said Brian Michael Jenkins, a national security expert at the Rand Corp. "Whether or not something in California is a target of terrorism depends on whether someone who is radicalized lives in California."

Debbie Maller, 55, has lived in San Bernardino for two decades and was at a coffee shop in the city's downtown Friday afternoon. She said she had sometimes worried about terrorist violence when visiting big cities after the 9/11 attacks, but had never had such fears in her hometown.

"I would have never thought of the words 'San Bernardino' and 'terrorism' together," she said...

Still more.

Fear of Another Attack Lifts Trump to New High in Poll

Here's the latest New York Times survey, which was largely conducted before Trump's comments on banning Muslim migrants to the U.S.

See, "Fear of Terrorism Lifts Donald Trump in New York Times/CBS Poll":

Americans are more fearful about the likelihood of another terrorist attack than at any other time since the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, a gnawing sense of dread that has helped lift Donald J. Trump to a new high among Republican primary voters, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

In the aftermath of attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris and in San Bernardino, Calif., a plurality of the public views the threat of terrorism as the top issue facing the country. A month ago, only 4 percent of Americans said terrorism was the most important problem; now, 19 percent say it is, above any other issue.

Mr. Trump, who has called for monitoring mosques and even barring Muslims from entering the United States, has been the clear beneficiary of this moment of deep anxiety. More than four in 10 Republican primary voters say the most important quality in a candidate is strong leadership, which eclipses honesty, empathy, experience or electability. These voters heavily favor Mr. Trump.

The survey was largely conducted before Mr. Trump’s proposal, announced Monday, to temporarily block Muslims from entering the country.

“He’ll keep a sharp eye on those Muslims,” Bettina Norden, 60, a farmer in Springfield, Ore., said in a follow-up interview. “He’ll keep the Patriot Act together. He’ll watch immigration. Stop the Muslims from immigrating.”

Republicans expressed confidence in Mr. Trump’s ability to confront terrorism: Seven in 10 voters who said they were likely to vote in a Republican primary said he was well-equipped to respond to the threat, with four in 10 “very confident” he could handle terrorism. Only Senator Ted Cruz of Texas comes close to those numbers.

But it is not only Republicans feeling renewed fear about terrorist strikes on American soil. Forty-four percent of the public says an attack is “very” likely to happen in the next few months, the most in Times or CBS News polls since October 2001, just after the deadliest terrorist assault in the country’s history. Seven in 10 Americans now call the Islamic State extremist group a major threat to the United States’ security, the highest level since the Times/CBS News poll began asking the question last year.

The public has little faith in President Obama’s handling of terrorism and the threat from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Fifty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of terrorism, and seven in 10 say the fight against the Islamic State is going badly. There have been few foreign-directed terrorist attacks in the United States in the past decade, and American officials have repeatedly said that there is no credible evidence of planning for a large-scale attack in the United States by the Islamic State or its supporters.

Yet while Mr. Trump may be benefiting among Republicans from a perceived loss of safety, he remains a highly divisive figure with the broader electorate. Sixty-four percent of voters said they would be concerned or scared about what he would do if he became president. And while he occupies a commanding position among Republican primary voters, with more than twice the support of his nearest competitor, his backers are still a minority of that relatively small population.

Even as he leads the Republican field in support, he also has the most Republican primary voters, 23 percent, who say they would be most dissatisfied with him as the party’s nominee...

Popular but polarizing. That's a fascinating dynamic.

But keep reading.

Obama Seeks to Ban People on No-Fly Lists from Buying Firearms (VIDEO)

Amazingly, the president actually acknowledged the terrorist threat. He didn't utter the phrase "radical Islam," but there was a noticeable difference in his speech. A low bar, I know. But still.

No matter though. Our strategy against Islamic State will remain unchanged, while stateside the administration is ramping up its efforts to strip law-abiding citizens of their constitutional rights.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Terrorist Threat Has ‘Evolved’ Into a New Phase, Obama Says":

President Barack Obama, in a rare Oval Office address on Sunday, outlined his administration’s intensified efforts to combat “a new phase” of terrorist threats in the U.S., aiming to boost confidence in his national-security strategy after last week’s deadly attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

Mr. Obama said the attack underscores that the threat of terrorism in the U.S. “has evolved into a new phase.”

President Barack Obama, in a rare Oval Office address on Sunday, outlined his administration’s intensified efforts to combat “a new phase” of terrorist threats in the U.S., aiming to boost confidence in his national-security strategy after last week’s deadly attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

Mr. Obama said the attack underscores that the threat of terrorism in the U.S. “has evolved into a new phase.”

“This was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people,” he said, standing behind a podium inside the Oval Office.

The prime-time address marked a turning point in his administration’s fight against Islamic State and other terrorist groups that previously had largely played out on foreign soil. The San Bernardino massacre—the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001—shattered any sense among Americans that the battle was one waged overseas. The challenge now for Mr. Obama lies in assuring the country that the government is doing everything it can to prevent similar attacks.

Mr. Obama didn't announce an overhaul of his counterterrorism strategy or any sweeping changes in the U.S.-led military campaign in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State. Instead, he sought to reassure a jittery nation by emphasizing a boost in national-security measures designed to blunt terrorists’ ability to strike in the U.S., and in elements of his Islamic State strategy.

“We will prevail by being strong and smart, resilient and relentless,” he said.

Mr. Obama forcefully called for Muslim leaders to do more to stop radicalization.

“Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda promote, to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity,” he said.

The president also called on Congress to pass provisions he believes would further reduce terrorist threats in the U.S., including legislation that would ban assault weapons and gun sales to people who are on the terrorist no-fly list. Such an approach has some bipartisan support, but Republican leaders have opposed it, saying it would violate the Second Amendment rights of Americans who are on the list erroneously.

The president urged lawmakers to pass a new resolution authorizing the military campaign against Islamic State. That measure has stalled in Congress.

Mr. Obama called for a review of the program that waives visa requirements for foreigners from certain countries mainly in Europe and Asia. Last week, the Obama administration laid out changes to the program, which allows people from 38 countries, largely in Europe and Asia, to enter the U.S. without visas. The program will now include a check for any visits to countries that are considered havens for terrorists.

In the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks that killed 130 people, Mr. Obama spoke out sharply against legislation in Congress to halt the resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the U.S. But the visa-waiver program has emerged as a potential point of agreement between the two major political parties.

While Mr. Obama called for streamlining technology that allows law enforcement to better track potential threats, he didn’t seek to renew the debate on surveillance. The administration is also looking into tackling the use of encrypted messages to plan attacks.

While declaring the San Bernardino attack, which killed 14 people and injured 21, an “act of terror,” Mr. Obama on Sunday appealed to Americans to resist reacting in ways he believes would alienate Muslims in the U.S. and fuel the extremist ideology perpetuated by groups like Islamic State...

The terrorists at CAIR are rolling over in laughter. All of this plays right into their hands. Meanwhile, law-abiding Americans are going to be increasingly targeted, on gun rights, and with a crackdown on so-called "hate speech," of which there's no First Amendment exception. Leftists don't care about the legality of their agenda, of course. It's ideology all the way down.

More.

America Confronts New Menace After #SanBernardino Jihad Massacre

At WSJ, "Nation Confronts a New Menace After San Bernardino Shooting":

Chilling terror danger seen from extremist sympathizers who, unnoticed by authorities, amass deadly arsenals to attack anywhere in U.S.

Even with many details about the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre still unknown, law-enforcement officials see a chilling terror danger from extremist sympathizers who, unnoticed by authorities, are able to amass deadly arsenals to attack vulnerable gatherings anywhere in the U.S.

Much about the case has crystallized trends that officials have feared for years: The attackers, a young married couple with a baby, had never surfaced as subjects of any terror investigation and lived apparently ordinary suburban lives while secretly stockpiling guns, ammunition and homemade bombs.

The attacks Wednesday believed carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook, a religious Muslim and U.S. citizen, and his wife,  Tashfeen Malik, a native of Pakistan, targeted a gathering of county workers far from any high-profile metropolis. The couple entered the room armed to kill a lot of people, quickly.

“Terrorists have adapted and evolved in order to carry out heinous plots since 9/11, and this tragedy reinforces the need for law enforcement to evolve its intelligence-gathering and investigative techniques,’’ said U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

As the shooting rampage was about to begin, authorities said, Ms. Malik posted a message on Facebook pledging her allegiance to the leader of Islamic State. Pipe bombs later found at the couple’s Redlands, Calif., home echoed designs posted online by the al Qaeda publication, Inspire. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had evidence the couple showed signs of radicalization.

An Islamic State-linked news agency said the California shootings were carried out by their supporters, part of string of attacks that included those in Paris last month, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online postings by extremists. The claim couldn’t be verified.

U.S. counterterrorism has long focused on people traveling to and from Syria and Iraq. Now, another threat looms from local terrorism sympathizers inspired to violence by Islamic State, but who act without any direct orders, said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program on Extremism at the Center for Cyber & Homeland Security at George Washington University.

People with sympathies but no formal communication or ties with extremist groups can operate under the radar, he said, until they act. “That’s the big threat,” he said.

Unlike the Paris attacks, which were carried out by people whose friendships and family connections appear to have formed the backbone of one or more terrorist cells, the husband and wife in Wednesday’s attack hadn’t trained in Syria and, so far, don’t appear associated with a terrorist cell.

The San Bernardino attack “shows that a small number of people determined to plan but not boast can get away with it,” said Patrick Skinner, a former case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. “In this way, terrorism is exactly like any other crime.”

The couple, who were killed Wednesday in a gunbattle with police, apparently sought to hide evidence that might connect them to others, law-enforcement officials said. Two relatively new cellular phones were found smashed in a garbage can and a computer in their townhouse was missing a hard drive. Investigators have subpoenaed email service providers to retrieve any communications.

Some questioned whether U.S. and local law-enforcement officials may have missed signs that the couple had become radicalized. Mr. Farook had communicated with at least one FBI terrorism suspect, for instance. But U.S. law enforcement agencies had no case files on either Mr. Farook, an environmental-health specialist who worked for San Bernardino County, or his wife, whom Mr. Farook married during a trip to Saudi Arabia, where she had lived most of her life.

The U.S. has seen similarly motivated attacks. In May, two Phoenix men were killed in a Dallas suburb after they opened fire outside an event that featured cartoon drawings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad...

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer were the primary targets at the attempted jihad attack in Garland, Texas.

The terror is picking up speed. It's the deadly signature of the Obama interregnum.

Still more at the link.

The Closing of Barack Obama's Mind

Pretty good, although not a new revelation, or anything.

From Peter Wehner, at Commentary:

The Closing of Barack Obama’s Mind - by @Peter_Wehner - https://t.co/wUbkXlTnbP pic.twitter.com/sdCPMioeaf

— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) December 5, 2015

If you want to witness an adamantine mind at work, you could do a whole lot worse tha[n] observe the 44th president of the United States. Barack Obama is the most rigidly ideological president of my lifetime, a man who has a nearly blind adherent to a particular ideology (progressivism). It’s a disturbing, if at times a psychologically fascinating, thing to witness.

We're seeing it play out in multiple ways, but let me offer just one illustration — his approach to jihadism. It has been clear from the start of his presidency that Mr. Obama has decided that Islam is wholly separate from Islamic terrorism, which explains his refusal to use the words (or variations of the words) radical or militant Islam. It also explains why his administration has used absurd euphemisms like “man-caused disaster” and “workplace violence” to describe Islam-inspired attacks. Why the 2009 Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was an “isolated extremist.” Why the shooting at a Kosher supermarket in Paris earlier this year was “random.” (The gunman had declared his allegiance to ISIS.) And why the president, in an effort to protect Islam, invokes the Crusades at a National Prayer Breakfast, despite the fact that the Crusades happened roughly a thousand years ago. On and on it goes.

We have a president who is eager to put a racial frame around incidents in which white cops kills blacks, even if, as in the case of Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, the shooting was justified and there was no evidence that it was racially motivated. No matter; the incidents fit into Mr. Obama’s worldview, and off to the races he went.

But in the case of jihadism, when the killers themselves are invoking the Koran and the Islamic faith to justify their malevolence — when the caliphate established in the heart of the Middle East is called the Islamic State — the president refuses to confront it. He goes into contortions to downplay or ignore the connection to Islam. He has a narrative to advance, and he will do it even if he has to run roughshod over reality to do it.

No one is asking Mr. Obama to indict all of Islam or have America or the West declare a war on it. He should do neither. But what we should expect is the president to understand the nature of the enemy we’re facing. It would also be refreshing if the president did not live in a world hermetically sealed off from facts that are inconvenient to his worldview. But that is precisely what Mr. Obama is doing...

Still more.

Rocky Mountains Planned Parenthood CEO Says No Reason to Believe Colorado Springs Would Be Targeted (VIDEO)

Definitely a sad day in Colorado, and for the nation.

At the New York Times, "During Planned Parenthood Shooting, Fear and Chaos at Shopping Center."

Leftists were off the bat faster than a Mike Trout long ball, politicizing the shooting to advance the far-left extremist agenda.

See Leon Wolf, at Red State, "Planned Parenthood Shooter Finally Convinces Leftists that Beliefs Matter." And at Gateway Pundit, via Memeorandum, "COURT RECORDS: Colorado Planned Parenthood Shooter NOT Republican, Identifies as Woman."

Sounds like a leftist, heh.

More at CNN, "Rocky Mountains CEO Vicki Cowens says she has no reason to believe that their Colorado Springs facility would be targeted by a gunman":

Islam Still Rooted in the Dark Ages

From Julia Hartley-Brewer, at Telegraph UK, "Islam is still rooted in the values of the dark ages – and until we accept that, we will never get rid of radicalism":

British Muslims must “tackle extremism”.

We must stop tolerating “social segregation”.

“For too long we have buried our heads in the sand” about the growth of extremism among young Muslims in our country.

No, not the words of Ukip’s Nigel Farage but of Labour’s London Mayoral candidate, Sadiq Khan, speaking today at a Westminster lunch.

Mr Khan, a Muslim born in London to Pakistani immigrants, is one of the very few politicians in mainstream politics who is brave enough to speak the truth about the ever growing issues facing Britain’s Muslim population.

Of course, being a Muslim himself, Mr Khan is automatically exempt from the usual barrage of cries of “racist” and “Islamophobe” from the liberal thought police.

Yet it is nevertheless a courageous politician who dares to point out what is blatantly obvious to the rest of us – but which our elected representatives are mostly too timid to admit.

Yes, as Mr Khan said, British Muslims “have a special role to play in tackling extremism”. As he says, that’s not because they – simply by virtue of sharing the same religion as the terrorists – are any more responsible for terror attacks than non-Muslims, but because they can be “more effective” at tackling that extremism.

Britain’s extremist Islamists, after all, are not coming from ordinary Christian, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish or atheist backgrounds. They are coming from ordinary Muslim families, they have Muslim friends and they live in largely Muslim neighbourhoods.

It is therefore those families, friends and neighbours who are likely to be the first to hear those extremist views and thus be in the position to challenge them at the earliest opportunity and, we hope, stem their growth into full-bodied Islamist violence.

And that is crucial to Sadiq Khan’s other key point: it is time the social segregation of Muslims came to an end.

For too many decades, many of Britain’s 2.7 million Muslims have lived here as a separate, co-existing community, right at the heart of our great cities but at the fringes of our society.

As Mr Khan said: “Too many British Muslims grow up without really knowing anyone from a different background. We’ve protected people’s right to live their cultural life at the expense of creating a common life.”

Huge numbers of British Muslims are concentrated in distinct neighbourhoods, often living with, going to school with, working with, befriending and marrying only other Muslims. “This,” as Mr Khan so rightly pointed out, “creates the conditions for extremism and radicalisation to take hold.”

Is it really any wonder then that so many young British Muslims feel they are not really British when they have grown up isolated and alienated from the rest of the population?

British Muslims need to face up to some home truths. But so too does Sadiq Khan.

Because, despite talking so much sense about integration and tackling extremism, the Labour MP still wasn’t brave enough to tell the one truth that really does need to be faced if we are going to end this deadly threat.

“It is ludicrous to pretend that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam. It has everything to do with Islam.”

In the very same speech, Mr Khan said the Paris terror attacks were carried out “in the name of a sick and evil ideology, a grotesque and perverse worldview which has nothing to do with the Islam that I know.”

That is nonsense. It is ludicrous to pretend that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam. It has everything to do with Islam and that is precisely why it has such a potent appeal to so many young Muslim men and women.

As any scholar of Islam will tell you, the ideology behind Isil and al-Qaeda is as rooted in the Koran as are daily prayers and eating halal meat. Like Christianity, it just depends which verses you care to read and how literal an interpretation you choose to give them.

The ideology behind Isil is as rooted in the Koran as are daily prayers  Photo: Getty

While Christianity has certainly been the cause of more than its fair share of violent bloodshed over the centuries, it has now evolved into a religion that is largely a force for peace.

Islam, though, has never been through an enlightenment or a reformation and is still rooted in the values of the dark ages. That is why Islamic extremism has boomed at a time when the rest of the world is embracing the liberal, democratic values of the 21st century.

Sadiq Khan should be applauded for his courage in speaking the truth about segregation and radicalisation.

But until we all accept the truth about the roots of Islamic extremism, we won’t win the battle for hearts and minds – let alone the bloody war that awaits...

Paris Terror Mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud Also Visited Germany

At Der Spiegel, "Abdelhamid Abaaoud's Death: Paris Terror Mastermind Also Visited Germany":

SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind behind Friday's Paris terrorist attacks who was killed in a Wednesday police raid, also entered Germany multiple times.

The man who has been described by French officials as the mastermind and "brains" behind Friday's terror attacks in Paris has been confirmed dead. The local public prosecutor said Thursday that Abdelhamid Abaaoud was killed during a raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on Wednesday. Officials identified the terror suspect by way of skin samples of the 27-year-old Belgian extremist.

According to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, Abaaoud made repeated visits to Germany. Federal Police at the Cologne-Bonn Airport registered him on Jan. 20, 2014 as he tried to catch a flight to Istanbul. At the time, he told officials he wanted to visit friends and relatives in Turkey before returning to Cologne. Officials believe he then used another route to return to Europe.
At the time, Belgian authorities had issued orders to track Abaaoud's movements in the Schengen Information System (SIS), a database used by countries that are members of the European Union's Schengen area of borderless travel. Under the Belgian orders, he was not to be arrested or detained. German officials passed the information on to Belgium at the time.

Security sources in Germany say that Abaaoud also visited Cologne back in 2008, when he reportedly applied for an export registration plate for a large vehicle. But the circumstances surrounding the visit remain unclear. Investigators say they have no further information about the visit.

Abaaoud was considered Belgium's most dangerous Islamist extremist and was believed to have been a key figure in Friday's deadly attacks in Paris. The Islamist extremist, born in Brussels' Anderlecht district, is suspected of having organized the attacks, and security forces had conducted a desperate search for him after the massacre. French security forces killed Abaaoud during a seven-hour police deployment early Wednesday morning in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, during which officers fired more than 5,000 rounds.

In addition to Abaaoud, Hasna Aitboulahcen, a woman identified by officials as the terror mastermind's cousin, also died in the raid on Wednesday after detonating a suicide vest...

Actually, reports now say that Hasna Aït Boulahcen did not detonate a suicide bomb. See the London's Daily Mail, "'Cowgirl' cousin did NOT blow herself up... but died when third ISIS terrorist detonated suicide vest standing next to her in Paris siege apartment, police reveal."

In any case, still more at Der Spiegel.

Paris Attacks Undercut Western Hopes of Containing Extremists

Containment's obviously not working. If the West is going to do something, leaders need to get off their asses. I'm not optimistic in that regard.

At WSJ:

WASHINGTON—The consecutive terror attacks that killed 224 people on a Russian charter plane Oct. 31 and well over 100 in Paris on Friday have undercut what remained of Western hopes of containing extremists, a goal sought through years of faltering wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.

A day before the Paris attacks, President Barack Obama sounded an optimistic note about the campaign against Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria. “I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” the president told ABC News in an interview Thursday. “From the start our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.”

Now that French President François Hollande has blamed Islamic State for the attacks Friday in Paris, world leaders are certain to take a new look at the extremist movement.

Many parts of the world, particularly in the Middle East, are in a state of chaotic and deadly upheaval, with weak or nonexistent governments creating huge voids for terror networks to flourish. U.S. military planes have peppered parts of Syria and Iraq with drone strikes, killing senior Islamic State officials. Islamic State computer wizard Junaid Hussain was killed by a drone strike in Syria in August. A separate drone strike is believed to have killed a British citizen known as Jihadi John in the same city just this week.

But even after dozens of such strikes, the terror attacks continue. They have emanated from cells within Islamic State as well as terror groups stretching from North Africa, across the Middle East, to South Asia. And they often are of such scale that intelligence agencies and police forces are left dumbfounded and searching for answers.

Militants killed 17 people in France in January, most of them employees of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in a brutal slaying that raised fears about what radical Islamic militants could do after returning from war-torn areas like Yemen and Syria.

In Turkey, more than 100 people were killed by twin suicide blasts Oct. 10 at a peace rally in Ankara, with Islamic State the main suspect. On Thursday, more than 40 died in a Beiruit suburb in a double suicide bombing for which Islamic State claimed responsibility.

The midair breakup of a Russian passenger jet late last month, while still under investigation, is believed to have been a rare mass casualty event caused by a bomb on a plane. And the attacks Friday night in Paris came after the country had ramped up its surveillance laws and devoted more resources to tracking citizens returning from Iraq and Syria.

The U.S. and Western countries have spent billions of dollars trying to disrupt terror networks in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, but the war seemingly has countless fronts...

Keep reading.

Yeah, well, it's full spectrum terror. See, "Islamic State Shows Mastery of 'Full-Spectrum Terrorism'."

Paris Attack Was Work of 3 Teams, An 'Act of War' by Islamic State, France Says (VIDEO)

You've got huge banner headlines running at the New York Times.

It's major.

See, "Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS":

PARIS — Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.

The man with the Syrian passport — which Greek officials said had been registered at the Aegean island of Leros on Oct. 3 — was 25, and died at the stadium. Another assailant, who died at the concert hall, was 29 and a native of Courcouronnes, about 20 miles south of Paris. He had a criminal record and was known to be involved in extremist Islamic ideology, Mr. Molins said.

The hunt for possible accomplices of the terrorists gained steam on Saturday. Officials in Belgium announced three arrests, one of them linked to a rental car found in Paris. In Germany, the police were exploring whether a man they arrested last week with weapons in his car and his GPS navigator set for Paris was linked to the attacks. But it remained unclear how a plot of such sophistication and lethality could have escaped the notice of intelligence agencies, both in France and abroad.

Mr. Hollande declared three days of national mourning, and said that military troops would patrol the capital. France remained under a nationwide state of emergency.

Mr. Hollande vowed to “be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” adding that France would act within the law but with “all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”

The attacks, and the possibility that the Islamic State was to blame, promised to further traumatize France and other European countries already fearful of violent jihadists radicalized by the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere...

Keep reading.

Scale of #ParisAttacks Underscores Global Threats

The free flow of people across borders is going to be a thing of the past --- or at least it should be, if Europeans wake up.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Paris Attacks’ Scale Underscores Global Threats":

The sophistication, resources and scale of Friday’s attacks in the heart of Paris underscored to officials across the globe that the challenges of containing extremist violence have reached a new level, and that the calculus of the Western effort against terrorism had fundamentally changed.

European governments in the past few months have sought various means to guard against national security threats, with some erecting barbed-wire fences to stem the flow of migrants, while others, including France, devoted hundreds of millions of euros to strengthening electronic surveillance systems.

Friday’s attacks highlight the weakness of those strategies in a world where global extremism flows across nations. It also raises questions about transnational agreements on open-border travel that have been a bedrock of modern Europe. In his first comments to the nation after the attack, French President François Hollande announced the closing of his country’s borders.

French authorities didn't immediately name a culprit, but the nature of the attacks left little doubt they were the work of a well-organized terrorist group. A French official said Friday the attacks were “unfortunately well-prepared and coordinated.” The apparent use of explosives and the likelihood that a significant number of people were involved were particularly alarming to U.S. counterterrorism officials.

At the same time, officials in several countries have voiced strong suspicions that the recent downing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt was the work of a terrorist bomb. If Islamic State or another terrorist group is blamed for that attack, in addition to Friday’s carnage, pressure could increase to ramp up the war on such terrorist organizations to a new level.

That could include more pressure on Western countries to step up the military intervention in Syria. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization doesn't have a formal role in strikes against Islamic State, although members of the alliance are taking part in the U.S.-led coalition...

More.

More, at Time, "ISIS Attack on Paris Suggests a Change in Strategy."

Russian Jet Crashes in Egypt, Killing 224 People (VIDEO)

Boy, you can bet there's going to be monstrous conspiracy theories.

At WSJ, "Russian Passenger Jet Crashes in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Killing 224 People":

A Russian passenger jet crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board, after losing contact with aviation authorities on Saturday.

Egyptian officials said the Airbus A321 jetliner, which was operated by Russian carrier Kogalymavia, was flying to St. Petersburg from Sharm El Sheikh, a resort town popular with Russian tourists, when it disappeared from radar screens.

Egypt’s flagship state-run newspaper, Al Ahram, quoted an Egyptian aviation official as saying the plane’s pilot had requested to land at the nearest airport after an unspecified mechanical problem shortly after taking off at 5:50 a.m. local time. The newspaper later cited another Egyptian aviation official as saying the pilot hadn’t made any distress calls or requests to land.

Egypt’s chief prosecutor said the cause of the crash was being investigated. He didn’t say whether terrorism was suspected.

Sinai Province, the Egyptian branch of Islamic State, claimed responsibility for downing the plane, but officials have cast doubt over whether the group has the capabilities to carry out such an attack. Islamic State and its affiliated groups have frequently made exaggerated claims.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to form a state commission to investigate the crash, the Kremlin said Saturday.

The Russian Embassy in Cairo said on its official Twitter account that all those on board were killed.

Mr. Putin “expressed his deepest sympathies to the families of those who died in the crash.”

The wreckage was located south of the city of Al Arish in the sparsely populated, mountainous north Sinai, according to the aviation authority. As many as 50 ambulances were dispatched, it said.

A spokesman for Egypt’s prime minister said 15 bodies had been recovered and sent to a morgue in Cairo, while investigators continued to search the crash site for evidence and victims. One of the black boxes, which record flight data and audio, was located and taken into the custody of the prosecutor general’s office, he said.

According to the spokesman, the passengers comprised 214 Russians and three Ukrainians, of which 138 were women, 62 men and 17 children. The count didn’t include the seven crew members.

According to the Kremlin, Vladimir Puchkov, Russia’s minister of civil defense, emergencies and disaster relief, was ordered to send aircraft to Egypt to aid in the recovery of the wreckage of the aircraft. Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said five aircraft were flying to Egypt with first responders and forensic investigators on board. The ministry also set up a hot line to aid families of the victims.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in March warned U.S. airlines to avoid flying over the Sinai Peninsula below 26,000 feet. Airline routes traversing the region “are at risk from potential extremist attacks involving antiaircraft weapons,” the FAA said, including shorter-range, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. “Some of these weapons have the capability to target aircraft at high altitudes,” or when approaching or departing airports, the U.S. aviation regulator said, noting that an Egyptian military helicopter flying at lower altitudes had been downed by extremists using a missile...

More.

Also at Russia Today, "Bodies of 224 7K9268 crash victims delivered to Cairo morgue," and "Russian A321 fell 'almost vertically', technical fault behind crash."

Iraqis Live in Constant Fear of Islamic State

The Obama administration doesn't really care. The recent shift to a larger U.S. role in Iraq is the result of political expediency. The White House wants to make it look like it's doing something before handing off its failed Middle East policy to its successor.

At USA Today, "Life under Islamic State rule in Mosul one of constant fear":

DOHUK, Iraq — Journalists are beaten or executed as spies. Children routinely witness executions and no longer go to school. A portion of government workers' salaries are seized.

That is what life is like living under the brutal rule of the Islamic State in Mosul since the extremist group captured Iraq's second largest city in 2014, according to residents lucky enough to escape to this Kurdish enclave about 45 miles to the north.

Yousuf Saba, 41, a former journalist with local news channel Sama al-Mosul, said he fled for his life in recent weeks after the militant group began rounding up journalists suspected of leaking negative information about the Islamic State.

“Anyone who was part of the journalist union in Mosul was taken,” Saba said. “They accused them of spying and threatened to kill their families. Some of my friends ... were interrogated and beaten, even though they had no proof against them.”

In early September, the militants executed 15 local journalists as suspected spies in front of a large crowd in the center of Mosul and forced children to watch, said Saba, who witnessed the killings.

Two weeks after he fled the city, the Islamic State killed his younger brother as an "example for others who were trying to escape," he said. "If more people leave, they will lose their credibility in front of the world."

Mohamma Bakour, 32, a schoolteacher who escaped in September, said the militants initially shut down all the schools. Now, he said, they have revised the courses to be consistent with their radical view of Islam.

“Books that discuss evolution are banned, and (many) science labs in schools have been burned," Bakour said. "'Only God created the world, and you don’t need experiments to tell them the world exists.' That’s their philosophy.”

Bakour said many children have been traumatized by the regime's brutality.

“When they cut a throat in front of the children, some children get psychologically affected and other children accept it as normal," he said. "In more than one year, the Islamic State has created a society where it’s normal for children to watch their elders being murdered by them.”

Most children don’t go to school and could end up joining the militants, Bakour said. Child labor is common. Many children “sell water and snacks on the streets to make $5 a day to support their families. But if they get recruited by (the Islamic State), they make much more money, and many families need that," he said...

Still more.

The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada

From Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Atlantic:

Knife attacks on Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere are not based on Palestinian frustration over settlements, but on something deeper.

*****

The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.

When Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem in June of 1967 in response to a Jordanian attack, the first impulse of some Israelis was to assert Jewish rights atop the Mount. Between 1948, the year Israel achieved independence, and 1967, Jordan, then the occupying power in Jerusalem, banned Jews not only from the 35-acre Mount—which is known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary—but also from the Western Wall below. When paratroopers took the Old City, they raised the Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock, but the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, ordered it taken down, and soon after promised leaders of the Muslim Waqf, the trust that controlled the mosque and the shrine, that Israel would not interfere in its activities. Since then, successive Israeli governments have maintained the status quo established by Dayan.

There is another status quo associated with the Temple Mount, however, that has been showing signs of weakening. This is a religious status quo. The mainstream rabbinical view for many years has been that Jews should not walk atop the Mount for fear of treading on the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple that, according to tradition, housed the Ark of the Covenant. The Holy of Holies is the room in which the Jewish high priest spoke the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, on Yom Kippur.

The exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known, and Muslim authorities have prevented archeologists from conducting any excavations on the Mount, in part out of fear that such explorations will uncover further evidence of a pre-Islamic Jewish presence. This mainstream rabbinical view concerning the Mount—that it should be the direction of Jewish prayer, rather than a place of Jewish prayer—has made the lives of Jerusalem’s temporal authorities easier, by keeping Muslim and Jewish worshippers separated.

In recent years, however, small groups of radical religious innovators who oppose the mainstream rabbinical view have sought to make the Mount, once again, a site of Jewish prayer. (Here is a New York Times Magazine story I wrote about these radical groups.) These activists have gained sympathizers among some far-right political figures in Israel, though the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not altered the separation-of-religions status quo.

Convincing Palestinians that the Israeli government is not trying to alter the status quo on the Mount has been difficult because many of  today’s Palestinian leaders, in the manner of the Palestinian leadership of the 1920s, actively market rumors that the Israeli government is seeking to establish atop the Mount a permanent Jewish presence.

The comments of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—by general consensus the most moderate leader in the brief history of the Palestinian national movement—have been particularly harsh. Though Abbas has authorized Palestinian security services to work with their Israeli counterparts to combat extremist violence, his rhetoric has inflamed tensions. “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by God,” he said last month, as rumors about the Temple Mount swirled. He went on to say that Jews “have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet.” Taleb Abu Arrar, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, argued publicly that Jews “desecrate” the Temple Mount by their presence. (Fourteen years ago, Yasser Arafat, then the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me that “Jewish authorities are forging history by saying the Temple stood on the Haram al-Sharif. Their temple was somewhere else.”)

Keep reading.

Competition Among Major Regional Players Fuels Rise of Islamic State

At WSJ, "Regional Discord Fuels Islamic State's Rise in Mideast":

Pretty much everyone in the Middle East is supposed to be fighting against Islamic State. Yet, the Sunni extremist group retains large swaths of Syria and Iraq and is spreading elsewhere in the region.

This isn’t because of its military might or strategic sophistication. The explanation is different: For most of the major players in the complicated conflicts ravaging the Middle East, the defeat of Islamic State remains a secondary goal, subordinate to more pressing objectives.

For some of these powers, Islamic State’s existence and its barbarism are actually useful, for now, because they serve as a lever in conflicts with more immediate and dangerous foes.

Though able to take advantage of sectarian fissures in Syrian and Iraqi societies to carve out a territory the size of the U.K., Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, isn’t strong enough to represent a conventional military threat to the region’s biggest nations.

But these countries do live in existential fear of some of their neighbors.

In particular, the Saudi-led bloc of Sunni Arab nations bitterly competes with Shiite-dominated Iran in what has become a zero-sum contest for influence—a contest that Russia has now entered on the Shiite side by supporting the Syrian regime.

That contest is also playing out in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has been battling Iran-supported Houthi militants while Islamic State affiliates strengthen their position and attack both sides.

“Everyone hates their neighbor more than they hate ISIL,” said a senior Obama administration official.

Among the powers involved in the conflict, the U.S. is probably the only one, together with its European allies, focused on degrading and eventually destroying Islamic State as a primary goal.

But that effort, too is subordinated to the Obama administration’s overriding concern about preventing American casualties. This severely limits America’s ability to help forces fighting against Islamic State. It has also given rise to widespread theories claiming that Washington, too, doesn’t actually want the group to be defeated because it supposedly seeks to perpetuate regional instability.

The gap between American objectives and means has bolstered Islamic State’s narrative of invincibility, allowing it to draw thousands of recruits.

“We have an interest in defeating ISIS, but we don’t want to do that ourselves: We want other people to go in and lose their lives in doing it,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy...

More.

Turkey's 9/11 Divides Nation

At USA Today, "Turkish PM says ISIL is focus of bombing probe":

The Islamic State group is the “No. 1 priority” in the investigation into twin bombings that killed nearly 100 people in the Turkish capital, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Monday.

The premier told private broadcaster NTV that authorities were close to identifying the two suicide bombers who carried out the attacks in Ankara on Saturday. He declined to name the organization behind them, but said the focus is on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to the government, on Monday reported that investigators were testing DNA samples from the families of 20 Turks they believe belong to ISIL.

The Hurriyet newspaper said the type of device and explosives used in Saturday's attacks were the same as those used in a suicide bombing the government says ISIL committed near the town of Suruc, which borders Syria, that killed 33 peace activists in July...

Also, "Thousands of mourners gather near scene of Ankara's bombings":

ANKARA — Thousands of mourners flooded the streets of Turkey's capital on Sunday, a day after twin explosions killed at least 95 people and injured hundreds of others in the deadliest terrorist assault ever carried out on Turkish soil.

The mood was tense during the largely peaceful gathering, as demonstrators alternated between grief for lost loved ones and anger towards Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government, which many believe could have done more to prevent the attacks.

The crowd chanted slogans including “we want justice” and “Erdogan is a thief and a murderer,” as some mourners carried photographs of victims. Riot police and water canon vehicles surrounded the rally, but remained in the distance.

On Sunday, the government, which denies any involvement in the blasts, said it has appointed two chief civil inspectors and two chief police inspectors to investigate the bombings, which also wounded at least 246 people, according to the prime minister’s office.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu suggested that the attack could have been carried out by the extremist Islamic State, Kurdish militants or radical leftist groups.

Earlier in the morning, police used teargas to stop people bearing carnations in memory of those who lost their lives from entering the site of the blasts. About 70 people were eventually allowed to enter the cordoned-off area outside the main train station, the Associated Press reported. The pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) said in a statement that police attacked its leaders and members as they tried to leave flowers at the scene.

Saturday's attack, during a peace rally near Ankara's central train station, sent shockwaves across the country. The blasts, which came just seconds apart shortly after 10 a.m., happened when hundreds of demonstrators — many of them supporters of the HDP — had gathered to protest escalating violence between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatist insurgents.

“This is as close as it gets to being Turkeys 9/11,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “But whereas most countries would unite after a massacre like this, Turkey has become so polarized between supporters and opponents of Mr. Erdogan that almost immediately the reaction has been a blame game in which  supporters of the government blame the (Kurdish rebels) and opponents blame the government.”

After declaring three days of mourning and calling for national unity against terrorism, the prime minister exchanged barbs with HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas over responsibility for the violence...

More.