Gunman opened fire on a synagogue, hours after one man was killed and three police officers wounded during an attack on free speech event in city.More at NYT, "Fatal Shootings at Cafe and Near Synagogue in Copenhagen."
From the airport, Pres Obama heads to the golf course at the Sunnylands Annenberg Estate. He's played there 5 times on previous visits.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) February 14, 2015
U.S. President Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America.The left's Jew-hater-in-Chief.
This week, apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.
Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as “a bunch of violent vicious zealots,” who “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”
In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just “a bunch of folks in a deli,” presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches.
No matter that Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews.
As far as the leader of the free world is concerned, his massacre of four Jews at the market can teach us nothing about anything other than that some random people are mean and some random people are unlucky.
And anyway, Obama explained, we’re only talking about this random act of senseless violence because as he said, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The media, desperate for an audience, inflates the significance of these acts of random violence, for ratings.
Obama’s statement about the massacre of Jews in Paris is notable first and foremost for what it reveals about his comfort level with anti-Semitism.
By de-judaizing the victims, who were targets only because they were Jews, Obama denied the uniqueness of the threat jihadist Islam and its adherents pose to Jews. By pretending that Jews are not specifically targeted for murder simply because they are Jews, he dismissed the legitimate concerns Jews harbor for their safety, whether in Diaspora communities or in Israel.
If nothing distinguished Coulibaly’s massacre at Hyper Cacher from a mugging or an armed robbery gone bad, then Jews have no right to receive unique consideration – whether for their community’s security in London or Paris, or San Francisco – or for Israel’s security.
As subsequent statements from administration spokespeople made clear, Obama’s statement was not a gaffe. When questioned about his remarks, both White House spokesman Josh Earnest and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki doubled down on Obama’s denial of the anti-Semitic nature of the massacre at Hyper Cacher. Earnest said that the Jews who were murdered were people who just “randomly happened to be” at the supermarket.
Psaki said that the victims didn’t share a common background or nationality, pretending away the bothersome fact that they were all Jews.
Just as bad as their denials of the anti-Jewish nature of the attack on Hyper Cacher, were Psaki’s and Earnest’s belated revisions of their remarks. After coming under a storm of criticism from American Jews and from the conservative media, both Psaki and Earnest turned to their Twitter accounts to walk back their remarks and admit that indeed, the massacre at Hyper Cacher was an anti-Semitic assault.
Their walk back was no better than their initial denial of the anti-Jewish nature of the Islamist attack, because it amplified the very anti-Semitism they previously promoted.
As many Obama supporters no doubt interpreted their behavior, first Obama and his flaks stood strong in their conviction that Jews are not specifically targeted. Then after they were excoriated for their statements by Jews and conservatives, they changed their tune.
The subtext is clear. The same Jews who are targeted no more than anyone else, are so powerful and all controlling that they forced the poor Obama administration to bow to their will and parrot their false and self-serving narrative of victimization.
The administration’s denial of the unique threat Jews face from jihadists is not limited to its anti-Semitic characterizations of the attack at Hyper Cacher.
It runs as well through Obama’s treatment of Israel and its actions to defend itself against its jihadist enemies from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran...
In some hours will speak about freedom of speech at a panel debates with Lars Vilks in Copenhagen
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
shots during our panel in Copengagen
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
i ran away with some people though the back door, didn't see anything, heard 20 shots at the entrance to the building of our panel
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
with me at the room there was Lars Vilks, french ambassador and dozens people from the audience
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
i didn't see anything, i heard around 20 shots while speaking and then people started to run
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
i am not sure what was that, i don't know what we heard but everybody was running
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
another escaper joined me: we got info policemen were shot and some civilians
i dont confirm it
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
the event we were at was protected by police. They were at the entrance of the building. as it is reported now, some of them were shot
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
in the room with me there were few dozens of people, french ambassador Francois Zimeray, Lars Vilks
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
police is everywhere around
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
We are in police station now
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
I was at the point of ny speech when i was saying that often it is an illusion that we have freedom of speech in Europe.then we heard shots
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
1/2"We dont have to talk about freeedom of speech, we have to practice it" was the point of my today's speech
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
2/2 it was interrupted by someone who was practicing his ideology
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
We are all in police station describing today's attack in #Copenhagen pic.twitter.com/HCyem0Bhb0
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
One dead in shooting at a Copenhagen cultural centre, where a meeting about freedom of speech was being held - organised by a Swedish artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.
In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.Still more.
The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.
But what he and many others miss is the conviction that Western core values come from a faith in which God enters into human history precisely to save the world from the erring reason that fails, among other things, to recognize that terrorism is an affront to God and humanity.
The all-too-common narrative goes like this: Centuries ago, Catholics and Protestants gladly burned heretics up and down Europe by the thousands until, thank God—or All Powerful Goodness, as Ben Franklin would put it—the rise of Enlightenment thinkers banished the barbarity that is somehow native to religious fervor. Only with the liberalizing mandates of Vatican II (1962-65), we’re told, did Catholicism—usually the main boogeyman in this version of history—come to grips with the idea of democracy and religious freedom, and finally extinguish the last embers of the Inquisition.
This narrative is false according to the historical record and to the origins and abiding ethos of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. Historians call this the la leyenda negra—the “Black Legend”—because it blackens the name of Catholicism in particular and religion in general. According to this legend, the Inquisition is on a continuum with the Holocaust and the terrors of Stalinism.
Yet objective historians realize that in the most infamous example, in Spain, several popes condemned the Inquisition’s excesses. Moreover, the 6,832 members of the clergy executed by the Spanish Republican Red Terror in 1936 is more than twice the number of those executed in 345 years of the Inquisition in Spain.
Far from being an enemy of reason and peace, Christianity’s overwhelming message through the centuries has been one of tolerance, a message that underpins many of the values that people of all faiths, and of no faith, can live by. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI ’s work as a theologian has done great service in trying to correct the erroneous view that faith and civil tolerance must always be opposed.
He looks forthrightly at the negative aspects of the rise of democracies in the West, while not forgetting their positive legacies. As then- Pope Benedict pointed out in a 2005 address to the Roman Curia—the church’s governing body—popes of the 19th century condemned democracy because so many of its exponents were claiming “to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make” God completely “superfluous.” He thus reminds us that a Western culture beset by nihilism cannot provide a way out of the nihilism of the jihadist...
In October, Brianna Wu failed to attend a scheduled recording of an internet radio show hosted by the present correspondent in which she was to answer charges that she was responsible for whipping up a media frenzy about GamerGate supporters, accusing them of crimes to which she cannot possibly have linked them to the satisfaction of any law enforcement agency.
Wu later claimed to be “on the run” and “in fear of her life” while continuing to conduct media interviews from her home. She has since positioned herself as what some call a “professional victim,” soliciting pity and crowdfunded donations on the back of ever-more outlandish and implausible claims of real-world persecution on social media. But there has not been a single arrest or prosecution on the basis of any complaint she has made, either to the police or to the FBI, about the harassment she says she has received.
It sounded like a close call when the story broke. Little did we know how close it truly was.More.
On Thursday, the Pentagon disconfirmed reports that a successful ISIS assault on the al-Baghdadi district of Anbar Province culminated in an assault on the al-Asad Airbase. That 25-square mile facility houses 320 U.S. Marines and other American military personnel who are tasked with advising the Iraqi Security Forces in their fight against ISIS.
According to a Navy spokesperson, early reports that indicated the base had been surrounded and under assault were inaccurate. Only “ineffective indirect fire” near that base had been reported, the Navy insisted. Despite the fact that this facility has come under mortar and rocket attacks in the past, this particular assault was not a threat to American servicemen and women.
A CBS News report published on Friday morning indicated, however, that this attack was more threatening and coordinated than the Pentagon initially conceded. No fewer than eight militants and at least three suicide bombers penetrated al-Asad before they were dispatched by ISF troops. According to CBS News, however, American soldiers were deep enough inside the base at the time of the attack that they were in no immediate danger.
