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Terrorism Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 01, 2016 4 Comments
At least two people were killed in a terror attack on cafes in the heart of Tel Aviv. The gunman purchased goods at a store then pulled out what is described as a submachine gun and started firing, before escaping. Details on the gunman are still developing, but the latest reports indicate he was an Israeli Arab from northern Israel. Police are not clear on the motive for the attack, and whether it was what Israelis term "nationalistic" in motive. This video appears to show the gunman as he shopped then pulled out his weapon and began shooting on the street:

Posted by Jonathan Levin on December 31, 2015 3 Comments
This week's release of a trove of documents from the Vichy era are a reminder of anti-Semitism's long history in France, even as France's Jews increasingly flee to Israel. NPR reports:
The documents, which were previously only partially accessible to researchers, will make "information such as the activities of the special police, who hunted resistants, communists and Jews accessible to the public, as long as they have been cleared by defence and security chiefs," French radio station RFI reported. These archives also "show the extra-legal prosecution of members of the French Resistance, as well as proceedings against French Jews," says the Associated Press. "France has a painful relationship with this portion of its past, when the government helped the Nazis deport 76,000 Jews during the war," Agence France-Presse reports.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 29, 2015 4 Comments
According to British newspaper Express, city of London and other European capitals have been warned about an imminent terror attack "on or before New Year's Eve." The security alert issued by an unnamed intelligence agency specifically mentions the likelihood of an attack on shoppers and revellers in crowded places around New Year’s Eve in a European city. The warning is considered credible, prompting the police departments across Europe to take security measures in a bid to avert another Paris-style attack. London-based Express writes:
The terror alert was handed to Austrian police from a "friendly" intelligence service, as evidence grows that jihadi sleeper cells are planning to hit Western targets. It has prompted police across the continent to increase security measures in a bid to prevent a Paris-style copycat attack on an unknown location in Europe. (...)

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 29, 2015 32 Comments
Actor Samuel L. Jackson let a little too much information slip in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter. He was speaking to them about his new film The Hateful Eight but the conversation turned to current events. On the subject of the San Bernardino terror attack, Jackson had a different culprit in mind. P.J. Gladnick reports at NewsBusters (emphasis is his):
Samuel L. Jackson on San Bernardino Shooters: Disappointed It Wasn't 'Crazy White Dude' Rush Limbaugh has stated several times that the assassination of John F. Kennedy ushered in the era of modern liberalism. Liberals back then just couldn't handle the fact that the assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist who lived for awhile in the Soviet Union. So they attempted to blame America and the "rightwing" for Kennedy's assassination.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 29, 2015 20 Comments
One of the things that I find amusing about the Democrats' war on the Koch brothers is the fact that it seems to be based more in projection than in fact.  George Soros is notoriously behind and/or involved in a slew of progressive initiatives, websites, and assorted pot stirrings. It's usually a good idea to know what the opposition is thinking, so it's worth taking a look at the article he penned for The Guardian entitled "The terrorists and demagogues want us to be scared. We mustn't give in."   In it, Soros claims that terrorists have discovered that western, "open" societies have a key weakness that can be exploited:  a fear of death. Note how he singles out France's response to the Paris attacks as being particularly "irrational" (as we'll see, he's quite happy with America's president's non-response to terrorism.):
Open societies are always endangered. This is especially true of America and Europe today, as a result of the terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere, and the way that America and Europe, particularly France, have reacted to them.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 26, 2015 13 Comments
Bowe Bergdahl, the deserter who tried to join the Taliban only to be taken captive by them, has been sitting down for a series of interviews with filmmaker Mark Boal and that are available via podcast.  In these interviews, Bergdahl describes escape attempts, the Taliban's weakness for sweets, and their curiosity about whether or not Obama is gay. The New York Post reports:
Bergdahl said he saw his first chance at escape soon after his abduction in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika province, when a water delivery temporarily distracted his captors. He managed to slip off the chains binding his hands and feet and unlatched the flimsy wire holding the door to his cell closed. He was free for only 15 minutes, running barefoot over rocks and climbing onto a roof and covering himself in mud to hide, he said in audio used by the podcast. He was caught in moments and hauled back into his cell, where men beat him with a rubber hose. They then blindfolded him and moved him to a new home, in what he now believes was North Waziristan in Pakistan, he said.
In a later attempt to escape, Bergdahl was longer than fifteen minutes; he managed to evade capture for seven days.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 26, 2015 2 Comments
As Professor Jacobson noted, under the Obama-Clinton foreign policy ISIS has grown in strength and in territory.  Now ISIS's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is goading the west in what might be considered a childish taunt if ISIS hadn't been allowed to grow and prosper into a lethal organization with global reach. The Telegraph reports:
The leader of the self-declared Islamic State issued a defiant message to the West, saying that “Crusader” did not dare fight on his turf.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 25, 2015 9 Comments
When al-Shabab—an al Quada affiliate—terrorists boarded a bus in Kenya and ordered Muslims to separate from Christians so they could slaughter the Christians, the Kenyan Muslims refused. BBC reports:

A group of Kenyan Muslims travelling on a bus ambushed by Islamist gunmen protected Christian passengers by refusing to be split into groups, according to eyewitnesses.

They told the militants "to kill them together or leave them alone", a local governor told Kenyan media. At least two people were killed in the attack, near the north-eastern village of El Wak on the Somali border. The Somali based al-Shabab group says it carried out the attack.
The Muslims who refused to be separated from the Christians were undoubtedly aware of this terror group's MO: they separate the Muslims from the non-Muslims and then kill all of the non-Muslims.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on December 24, 2015 10 Comments
It's a peculiar tradition.  As Christians prepare to celebrate Christmas, the media churns out articles blaming Israel for Christian struggles in the Holy Land. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracy's Cliff May wrote about the phenomenon in 2007:
In this holiday season, there are journalistic conventions one comes to expect: stories lamenting the commercialism of Christmas; stories summing up the 12 months gone by and predicting the direction of the New Year; and stories blaming Israelis for the problems afflicting the Holy Land.
Back then, May debunked accusations the Israel prevented Christians from visiting Bethlehem. This year, USA Today reports that the 2,000 year-old Christian community in Gaza is disappearing. Instead of looking to Hamas, the Islamist, Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization that controls Gaza, writer Matthew Vickery (previously with al-Jazeera) blames "[t]he ongoing Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and the highest unemployment rate in the world."

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 24, 2015 11 Comments
This year saw the destruction of some of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the Middle East. As predominantly Christian Europe braces itself to accommodate millions of new Muslim migrants this year alone, Christianity takes its last breath in region where it was first revealed to the world. Israel remains the only glaring exception to this dismal rule. The armed war against Christians is accompanied by a cultural war on Christmas. This year, Muslim countries like Somalia, Tajikistan and Brunei joined the long list of Islamic nations banning the Christian festival -- in many cases making Christmas celebrations even in private settings a punishable offence. With the rising tide Islamist terror, even in the Christian heartland of Europe the Christmas is now under siege.

Posted by Miriam Elman on December 23, 2015 9 Comments
In two recent posts (see here and here) we reported on the December 20 assassination of Lebanese Druze terrorist Samir Kuntar in Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus. As we highlighted, Kuntar received three life sentences for his role in a 1979 terrorist attack which brutally devastated an entire Israeli family. https://twitter.com/AviMayer/status/678564278195068928 Kuntar was caught at the scene of the attack after a shootout with police and was convicted of murder.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 22, 2015 32 Comments
The 9/11 terror attack changed the way Americans think about and law enforcement / the feds treat hijacked airlines, and San Bernardino and Paris are changing the way that Americans think about "active shooter" situations in the gun-free zones in which they tend to occur. Previously, office workers were taught to hunker down and hide (under a desk, for example) if they could not get away from the building.  This is a bad plan.  Now, however, "active shooter training" for office workers does not recommend hiding, which was often in plain sight; instead, the recommendation is to fight back—with books and other objects that can be used to "distract" a terrorist or assailant. The Washington Post reports:
Spooked by a year of high-profile rampages, hundreds of companies and organizations like NeighborWorks are racing to train their workers how to react to a shooter in their workplaces. And after decades of telling employees to lock down and shelter in place, they are teaching them to fight back if evacuating is not an option. The idea: Work as a team to disrupt and confuse shooters, opening up a split second to take them down.

Posted by David Gerstman on December 20, 2015 15 Comments
Iran and its allies have taken a beating in Syria according to recent reports. Perhaps the most spectacular was the airstrike overnight that killed the notorious child killer, Samir Kuntar and eight other terrorists in a Damascus suburb. Prof. Jacobson rightly called Kuntar "among the most notorious and vicious terrorists," for shooting Danny Haran to death in front of his four year old daughter, Einat, and then killed her by smashing her head against a rock with his rifle butt. Needless to say Kuntar was treated as a hero by Hezbollah, who traded the bodies of IDF soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, to free Kuntar in 2008. He also received the Syrian Order of Merit from Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad shortly after his release. But Kuntar's killing is just a symptom of the recently reported problems plaguing Iran and its allies who are backing Assad.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 20, 2015 8 Comments
Chuck Hagel was Obama's third Defense Secretary--the other two: Robert Gates and Leon Panetta--to leave his position under difficult circumstances. As late as November 19, 2014, Hagel told Charlie Rose that he didn't wake up in the morning worried about his job, and in less than a week, on the 24th of November, news broke that Hagel had "stepped down."  Despite the rumors addressed by Rose, people were surprised by the news, and Joe Biden is reported to have been "ticked off" by the move. At the time, The New York Times reported that Hagel had stepped down "under pressure" from the White House.
Aides said Mr. Obama made the decision to remove his defense secretary on Friday after weeks of rising tension over a variety of issues, including what administration officials said were Mr. Hagel’s delays in transferring detainees from the military prison in Guantánamo Bay and a dispute with Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, over Syria policy.

Posted by New Neo on December 20, 2015 23 Comments
Why indeed? After all, 9/11 was far, far worse in terms of loss of life. The attacks themselves during 9/11 were far more high-tech and fiendishly clever, as well. There have been many, many terrorist attacks since, and they have all caused outrage and consternation. But something about the Friday the 13th attacks in Paris and the recent one in San Bernardino seems to have affected people more deeply than any other attacks except 9/11. 9/11 was so spectacular, so creative in a near-diabolical way, that it seemed almost otherworldly or like science fiction. The targets were major national symbols. Paris and San Bernardino were relatively pedestrian, as evil inspiration goes. They were fairly low-tech, and involved the sort of places we go to every day: random cafes and restaurants, a stadium, a concert hall, a business meeting and holiday party. Places to relax and enjoy, the sort of places nearly all urban people go to on a regular basis, or at least on occasion. That's why it took very little imagination to put ourselves in the place of the unlucky (and mostly young) people who lost their lives there.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 20, 2015 17 Comments
An Air France flight was diverted to an emergency landing after a bomb-like device was found in a bathroom. It was a fake, made of cardboard with a crude timer on it, as would have been obvious to anyone handling it. But the pilots took no chances. CBS News reports:
Kenyan authorities are questioning several suspects who were on an Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris that was forced to land early Sunday in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa after a device suspected to be a bomb was found in a lavatory. The CEO of Air France said hours after the plane had been grounded that the device discovered in the bathroom was a fake bomb. The Boeing 777 was heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from Mauritius when its pilots requested an emergency landing at early Sunday in the Kenyan city of Mombasa. Frederic Gagey, the head of the airline, said the device was made of cardboard, paper and a household timer, and had been found in a little cupboard that is behind a mirror.
Here are images being widely reported as the fake bomb [See also Featured Image]:
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