Not So Isolated, And More Than Extremist
Claudia Rosett, Forbes:
The airline bomber was an al-Qaida-linked terrorist. So why is Obama mincing words?
“Isolated extremist” was the label President Barack Obama initially slapped on the Nigerian Muslim who flew into Detroit on Christmas Day, burning himself in a botched attempt to take down the plane with explosives sewn into his underwear.
If anyone seems isolated here, it is the U.S. president himself. For three days after the terrorist attack, Obama carried on with his Hawaii holiday, “monitoring” the situation while leaving his staff to deal with the public. When Obama finally appeared on Monday to make a statement, he gave a boilerplate nod to the potential terror connections of the “suspect,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: “We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable.” But in the same statement he went on to say that “This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.”
At what point, in Obama’s scheme of the universe, did Abdulmutallab qualify as “isolated?”
[...]
Terror probes – what you’re not being told
By Doug Hagmann, CFP:
On August 1, 2001, Hollywood actor James Woods witnessed four men of Middle Eastern appearance engaged in suspicious behavior on a transcontinental flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Mr. Woods’ first public recounting of his observations was five months after 9/11 on The O’Reilly Factor. During that February 15, 2002 broadcast, Mr. Woods stated that the suspicious behavior of the four men “would have been blatantly obvious to the most casual observer.”
Investigation ultimately confirmed that the actor witnessed a “practice run” for the 9/11 hijackings. He ultimately learned that all four men he observed aboard his flight were terrorists who took part in the murderous hijackings on 9/11 – and that they were not all on the same plane during the actual hijackings.
Fast forward to Christmas Day 2009, when Islamic terrorist Umar Farouk Abdul-Mutallab carried PETN onto Delta-Northwest flight 253 and attempted to detonate the explosive package using a catalyst in a syringe.
[...]
Church Bomber in Nepal Repents, Admits India Link
CDN:
Disillusioned with Hindu nationalists, the leader of a militant Hindu extremist group told Compass that contact with Christians in prison had led him to repent of bombing a Catholic church here in May 2008.
Ram Prasad Mainali, the 37-year-old chief of the Nepal Defense Army (NDA), was arrested on Sept. 5 for exploding a bomb in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, in the Lalitpur area of Kathmandu on May 23. The explosion killed a teenager and a newly-married woman from India’s Bihar state and injured more than a dozen others.
[...]
Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks Publish Mainstream Scientific Paper Exposing Flaws in Avida Evolution Simulation
ENV:
In 2003, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski, philosopher Robert Pennock and others co-published a Nature paper titled “The evolutionary origin of complex features” reporting results of a computer simulation of evolution dubbed “Avida.” Though publicly arguing that Avida refuted intelligent design by showing the evolution of irreducible complexity, their paper refused cite the work of Michael Behe or any other ID proponent. Now, Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks expose in a paper in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics why Lenski and Pennock’s “Avida” simulation fails to accurately model Darwinian evolution.
Darwinian evolution has no prior knowledge about the search target, but Avida’s programmers have intelligently designed Avida by smuggling in “active information” to help the program overcome the handicap of Darwinian blindness.
[...]
Surprise …
‘J’lem haredim still harass Christians’
THE JERUSALEM POST:
Incidents of haredim harassing Christian religious leaders and nuns in the capital are still being reported, according to the Polish honorary consul in the capital, Zeev Baran.
“Yeshiva students hurl insults at nuns and spit at them,” Baran told Israel Radio in a report aired Thursday.
He also said four monasteries were recently sprayed with graffiti and that dead cats and garbage were thrown onto the premises.
Baran further claimed that there had been an attempt to torch a monastery.
[...]
How utterly stupid. Talk about alienating potential allies. Do they spit on muslims too? How brave.
Returning Gitmo’s detainees to Yemen defies common sense
WSJ:
President Obama has belatedly declared that the near miss above Detroit constituted “a catastrophic breach of security” and ordered a review of America’s intelligence efforts. We’re glad to hear it, but let’s hope the Commander in Chief also rethinks his own approach to counterterrorism.
Recent events have exposed the shortcomings of treating terror as a law enforcement problem and rushing to close Guantanamo Bay. A new wave of jihadists is coming of age, inspiring last month’s deadly attack at Ft. Hood and nearly bringing down Northwest Flight 253, and next time we may not be so lucky.
Their latest sanctuary lies in unruly Yemen, headquarters for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, which last year pulled off a series of local bombings, including at the U.S. embassy in the capital Sana, killing 13. The al Qaeda chapter in Yemen has re-emerged under the leadership of a former secretary to Osama bin Laden.
[...]
2009 Chickens and Their 2010 Roost
By Victor Davis Hanson:
In the coming year, plenty of our chickens will be coming home to roost.
Take foreign relations. In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions. As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes and those with whom we had uneasy relationships.
But so far these leaders — like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — have only interpreted Barack Obama’s serial goodwill gestures as weaknesses to be exploited. They play the part of the pushy class bully, we the whiny nerd.
[...]
Raw courage — but it must be focused
Melanie Phillips:
Reflecting on the enormous anti-regime demonstrations in Iran following the death of the dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Stephen Suleyman Schwartz makes an important point:
If, in his death and its aftermath, Montazeri impels the Green Movement to a wider and more powerful challenge to the clique of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, his life will not have been in vain. But Iran must move beyond debates between clerics and others loyal to the basic order, over the real nature of the Islamic Republic, and find new, younger leaders who do not depend on religious status or past service to the regime for their credibility. Iran needs the emergence and growth of a civil society that will subject the entire historical experience of the Islamic Republic to a rigorous examination, and will find a way to end its experiment in clerical domination.
There is no doubt that among these courageous dissidents are many who long for freedom from all clerical tyranny. But the opposition movement is complicated by intra-clerical feuding which could mean that the Iranians find they once again jump from the frying pan into the fire.
[...]
More Radicalizing of Higher Education Ahead
By Jay Schalin, AT:
In 2008, Congress disbanded the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) because according to the website Inside Higher Ed, the panel “had become too politicized.”
If the previous committee was “too politicized” to permit its continued existence — its big sin was to press for establishing universal, easily understood, quantifiable academic standards — then what are we to make of way the Obama administration is loading up the newly formed NACIQI with diversity advocates and left-wing activists?
[...]
Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: ‘I was visited by the FBI’
By Aaron Foley, MLive.com:
Following up on a visit from FBI officials about an eyewitness account first described to MLive.com, Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell described the visit in comment sections across MLive on Wednesday.
Haskell and his wife, Lori, were aboard Flight 253 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to destroy the plane. They say another man tried to help Abdulmutallab board the plane in Amsterdam.
Haskell had two detailed posts in two different stories. Here is Part One, originally posted here:
“Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.
[...]
Obama’s Only Real Accomplishment
By Daniel Greenfield, CFP:
Let’s get it straight, behind all the hubbub and noise, the international trips and summits, the TV specials and constant addresses to the nation and any other nation that would let him in, the huge spending plans and the photoshoots—Barack Hussein Obama has accomplished only one thing in his first year in office.
Obama’s only real accomplishment is that he took hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, and directed them to his donors on Wall Street, in the unions and the insurance industry. Barry Hussein took in nearly 15 million dollars in donations from securities and investments companies, and his first priority was to pay it back with a massive bailout that has exploded the deficit.
[...]
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