Read it.

Fighters for one of the factions battling for control of Libya seized the Benghazi branch of the country’s central bank on Thursday, threatening to set off an armed scramble for the bank’s vast stores of money and gold, and cripple one of the last functioning institutions in the country.

The central bank is the repository for Libya’s oil revenue and holds nearly $100 billion in foreign currency reserves. It is the great prize at the center of the armed struggles that have raged here since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. Western leaders had hoped that it might play a crucial role in helping to bring the rest of the country back together.

It takes some real talent to be worse than Qaddafi.

How’s that ‘Arab Spring’ workin’ out for ya?

Read it.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre has really shaken up French political leaders, forcing them to get serious about dealing with Islamic terrorists on French soil. Today Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced strong new measures to combat the rise of Islamic extremism. His planned actions include spending €425 million, creating 2,800 jobs, and… hiring sixty imams!

I feel safer already.

Read it.

Once again, it’s remarkable that this material is finally making its way into major media outlets. Is it possible that the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France has rattled the nomenklatura in Quebec? Have they been forced to conduct an actual investigation into the consequences of the Islamization of their province?

Read it.

The usual scenario is as follows: an arson is started, a shooting or stabbing is reported, some cars are incinerated or similar cultural enrichments take place. The fire brigade or the paramedics stop at the gates and wait for the cavalry to arrive — and then things calm down. Until next week. So far only one incident of shooting at the police has been reported.

Maybe our Muslims are smarter than their French brothers?

Edward Luttwak explains how the Muslim Caliphate was no golden age.

Read it. And watch the video.

Bilal Merhi is a prominent “Australian” scholar and intellectual whose kiddie jihad presentation last year made him (in)famous.

Well, he’s back. In the following news clip from Australian TV, you’ll see Mr. Merhi talking gleefully about the formation of a Muslim army in Australia that will subdue the coward kuffar and establish the rule of sharia Down Under.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

If Obama actually were a secret Muslim, would he be doing anything differently?

Read it.

Last Friday, Badawi received the first 50 of his 1,000-lash sentence in front of a large crowd at the Al-Jafali mosque in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. He was due to receive the next fifty lashes of his sentence on Friday this week, but the beatings have been suspended until next week as he is not medically fit for more lashes, doctors have ruled.

…

Good news, if it means a reprieve or reduction in sentence for Badawi. But he’s going to need a new legal adviser – because his former lawyer (and brother-in-law) Waleed Abu al-Khair was sentenced to more time prison by the Saudi authorities this week.

Last year, al-Khair was given a 15-year sentence for such diverse crimes as “insulting the judiciary and questioning the integrity of judges,” “harming the reputation of the state by communicating with international organizations,” and “preparing, storing and sending information that harms public order”.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

“They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire. And then they threw them [alive] inside the furnace.” — Javeed Maseeh, family spokesman, concerning a Christian couple in Pakistan murdered on rumors they had burned verses from the Qur’an.

Read it.

Kent Ekeroth, a member of parliament for the Sweden Democrats, asked some pointed questions of the government about the its policy of allowing mujahideen to return “home” to Sweden from the jihad in Syria and Iraq.

Deputy Prime Minister Åsa Romson gave a telling response. Notice that she doesn’t want to interdict the jihad warriors because that would not prevent all terrorist attacks. In other words, it’s better to let a hundred Swedes die at the hands of terrorists than prevent the death of ninety of them via sensible border controls.

Welcome to Modern Multicultural Sweden!

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Yesterday, we learned of a high school wrestler from Cincinnati who was about to bomb D.C. because he’s Raheel Mahrus Ubayda now. The Portland Seven were all radicalized here. Same goes for the D.C. Five and the Herald Square Bomber. Jihad Jane is a blonde from Michigan and five of the Buffalo Six were born in America. The Muslim population in Buffalo is soaring as the number of Jews and Christians declines. This has parents such as Muzzammil S. “Mo” Hassan worrying their children will become radicalized. Mo prefers more moderate acts like beheading his wife.

What makes this trend even more dangerous is that the press denies it. They call the terrorists mentally ill lone wolves and insist their religion is irrelevant. As Marc Lamont Hill over at CNN said, “People behead for all sorts of reasons.” When Anton Nolen decapitated Colleen Hufford in Oklahoma, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry called it “workplace violence” and neglected to mention he had recently changed his name to Jah’Keem Yisrael and wouldn’t shut up about Islam. His Facebook page featured the Koran’s “smite ye above their necks” verse.

Read it.

Official Palestinian Authority policy provides monthly payments for convicted terrorists held in Israeli jails. The longer the sentence, the more the terrorist’s family receives.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Roder says the students called it blasphemy and he had to explain that blasphemy is a religious concept that doesn’t exist in French law.

“That was very difficult to explain because their point of view, their lives, are very religious. And they are convinced that the religion is above the law of the French Republic,” he says.

Yeah, that’s the point. A Muslim’s first loyalty is to the Umma, rather than whatever country he may happen to be living in.

Read it.

So Michel Houellebecq quit promoting his new book. Instead he’s hiding out somewhere in the provinces.

Houellebecq, whose name I despise having to spell, is the French satirical novelist who was featured on the last Charlie Hebdo cover before the January 7th deluge of Islamist blood-whining. I have no inside information as to whether he retreated from the capital out of writerly dramatics, or real fear for his life; the news reports are cagey and I am not, alas, a personal acquaintance of the dour genius who was dragged into court in 2002 for calling Islam the stupidest of all religions.

Houellebecq lost a friend in the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and he is famously indifferent to the safety of his neck and liver, so perhaps he’s more in mourning than in hiding—or it could be that the possibility of a Kalashnikov nudging him in the temple for his blasphemies against the unpleasant prophet is suddenly not so abstract.

Read it.

Pretty sad when Arabs are smarter than Americans. (Well, Obama, anyway….)

Steve Sailer looks  at the situation in France.

Last week’s Paris massacres of cartoonists and Jews might suggest to a dispassionate observer that endless mass immigration to France from the continent of Africa isn’t working out as well as expected, and thus it’s time to cut back.

After all, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

But there hasn’t been much willingness on the part of the European establishment to admit mistakes. I’m going to suggest a simple, relatively low pain way for the French ruling caste to swallow their pride and rationalize backing away from their unsustainable immigration policy.

…

Up through the 1970s, progressive Westerners encouraged Africans to engage in population control. But then they stopped, because racism. Why should Africans take responsibility for moderating their own fertility when African mothers can simply immigrate to the banlieue outside Paris, where their sons can amuse themselves by burning cars?

Read it.

Beyond the normal trials of being in Manhattan, they mean.

Read it.

One of the ways liberal politicians and commentators have used to minimize terrorist attacks is to attribute them all to “lone wolves.” Being a lone wolf is a step below the junior varsity, apparently. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, countless media outlets rushed to give it the “lone wolf” label, even though there were at least two “wolves” involved, and they acted with military precision.

As more facts have come out, the lone wolf designation has become risible. The Kouachi brothers likely had accomplices, and they both trained with al Qaeda in Yemen. We don’t know yet whether al Qaeda directed the Charlie Hebdo attack. Further, there was close communication between the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, who followed up their attack with an assault on a Jewish deli. Authorities have said that there were something like 500 telephone calls between Coulibaly and his fellow terrorists. In addition, Amedy Coulibaly’s girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, is now believed to have fled France the day before Coulibaly’s assault in the company of an unidentified man. She is now with ISIS in Syria.

Read it.

The first duty of any government is to protect its people.

John C. Wright reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

Islam is Shariah Law. Shariah Law is Islam.

As impossible as it is for the Western mind to grasp this, Islam is a theopolitical party first and foremost, not a political party supporting an established church. There is no church in Islam.

That this theocratic political party has broken into aristocratic and populist camps, as political parties are wont to do, Sunni and Shiite, but this does not make them what we in the West call a denomination. Theocracy certainly has political elements, but it would be wrong to call “Theocracy” a religious sect or denomination.

So when we ask why the moderate Muslims do not check the excesses of the unorthodox radicals among them, the answer is that the violent Muslims are the orthodox and moderate wing, and the moderates are the radicals far from the mainstream of Muslim official teaching, Muslim history, Muslim thought and Muslim practice.

Read it.

Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes – he received the first 50 in a public square in Jeddah Friday – along with 10 years in prison and a fine equal to $266,666, Reuters reports. His crime? Creating a website called “Free Saudi Liberals,” which advocated greater religious freedom. Saudi Arabia found this “insulting to Islam.”

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Lileks has some comments to make.

One of the murdered French cops was Muslim, and it seems a shame this has been swamped by the discussion of the murder of the magazine’s staff. It is not Islamophobic to note that he was killed by a co-religionist for being on the wrong side of the ledger at that particular moment; it is revelatory of the narrow definitions the murderers apply. I hope France reveres his memory as much as the cartoonist who didn’t share his beliefs.

And that’s important to note: Not even being Muslim oneself will protect one from the more-Muslim-than-thou crowd.

To see people who enjoy the benefits and diversions of Western Civ nod with understanding when illustrators are shot in the head for inappropriate drawings – it suggests that there are people who respond to such events as though a tuning fork had been struck. It is impossible to know how many people heard the resonance of the note. It is impossible to know how many first felt understanding but immediately, or subsequently, revised their emotions. It’s a case of “the cartoons were wrong BUT” vs. “the murders were wrong BUT”. Who knows how that played out in the minds of millions, and at what pace? It’s not a question you can answer, but that doesn’t mean it’s a question you can’t ask.

…

If there is pride in Europe among these people, it is a nonexistent state they believe they can will into existence, a version cleaned of its historical sins by the elimination of its national (i.e. sectarian) divisions. Okay, okay,: you had a bad experience with nationalism a hundred years ago. Get over it.

Read it.

Dean’s formula is consistent with the syllogism we have heard many times from American politicians: Islam is a religion of peace; terrorists aren’t peaceful; therefore the terrorists are not “true” Muslims.

The problem is that someone forgot to tell a great many of the Prophet’s followers. A poll taken by ICM in August, for example, found that 16% of French respondents have a positive opinion of ISIS. Among French youth, ages 18-24, a whopping 27% said they have a positive view of ISIS. This is a little mystifying, as there are reported to be five million Muslims out of France’s population of 66 million, or around seven percent. It is hard to see where the remaining support for ISIS, as reported by ICM, would come from.

The Other McCain dishes the dirt.

Most people don’t know what Islam actually teaches, and those who tell the truth about Islam are often denounced as warmongers, bigots and even “racists.” Islam is a religion not a race, of course, and Muslims of every race murder non-believers of every race. Some of the most dreadful savagery committed in the name of Islam has been perpetrated against Africans. The claim that critics of Islam are “warmongers” is even more absurd: Islam is at war with us, whether we fight back or not.

The most influential Muslim leaders are determined to annihilate every Jew in Israel and, because the United States is Israel’s strongest ally, America has been branded “The Great Satan.”

Nothing we say or do as Americans — no policy of our government — can ever appease our Islamic enemies. Even if we were to abandon our alliance with Israel, the resulting slaughter of every Jew in Israel would only be the prelude to our own slaughter. Islam commands this, it requires this, and we should be grateful to the editors of USA Today for allowing Anjem Choudary to tell us the truth….

Read it.

Four of France’s most revered cartoonists – Stephane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski, Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac and Jean Cabut – were among 12 people executed by masked gunmen in Paris today at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Two masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the magazine’s headquarters this morning, opening fire on staff, also shooting dead revered economist and contributor Bernard Maris, 68.

Police officers were involved in a gunfight with the ‘calm and highly disciplined men’, who escaped in a hijacked car, speeding away towards east Paris. They remain on the loose, along with a third armed man.

Read it.

“Several men in black cagoules were heard to shout ‘the Prophet has been avenged'”, wrote Pierre de Cossette, a broadcast journalist with Europe1 News.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; built of black volcanic rock, they were begun by the Romans and then added to by Arabs and Ottomans. In 1915, the Ottomans turned the city, the surrounding province, and much of modern-day Turkey into a killing field, in a campaign of massacres and forced expulsions that came to be known as the Armenian genocide. The plan was to eradicate the empire’s Armenians—“a deadly illness whose cure called for grim measures”—and it was largely successful. The Ottomans killed more than a million people, but, somehow, not my grandfather.

Read it.

One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities.

Yet another centennial.

Read it. And watch the video.

Mahmoud al-Zahar is a co-founder of Hamas and the Foreign Minister of the Palestinian National Authority. He is said to be Khaled Mashal’s rival for the leadership of Hamas, now that the latter is running his Gaza fiefdom from exile in Doha.

The following BBC interview with Mahmoud al-Zahar was originally conducted in English, and then dubbed into Farsi. As far as I know, the English version was never made available by the Beeb.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Davutoglu’s Putin-Medvedev-style master, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is notorious for his Sunni supremacist (and anti-Alevi) views. During his election campaign in 2011, he reminded tens of thousands of party fans at rallies in seven different cities that his political rival and main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was an Alevi. “You know, he is an Alevi,” Erdogan told crowds in a cynical way while thousands booed “the Alevi Kilicdaroglu.” In that election, Erdogan’s votes in all seven cities rose from the previous election.

Only three weeks before Davutoglu’s speech, a professional German-Turkish footballer, Deniz Naki, announced that he decided to leave his club and Turkey following a religious and racist attack. Naki, who in the past was the victim of abuses and insults for being a Kurdish Alevi and carrying a tattoo revealing his faith, had been attacked by unknown assailants in Ankara and suffered minor injuries. “This is the first warning,” the assailants told him. The footballer said he now feared to go out alone in Ankara and had decided to leave Turkey for Germany.

Tolerance in Islam is an aberration, not a virtue.

Read it.

Yves Francoeur, the president of the police union in Montreal, has gotten himself in trouble for publicly pointing out certain facts about mosques and Muslims that everyone knows, but no one is allowed to talk about.

Read it.

In Berlin, Reda Seyam was a very diligent Mohammedan: As welfare recipient he sired one child after another (after all, the unbelievers paid out plenty of booty for them); and on top of that, he then named one of the children “Jihad”, or “holy war” (photo above). As well, the completely idiotic Berlin Superior Court awarded him the right to do it. Wonderful, so he is allowed quite officially to raise fighters who will later be obliged to wage war against us and subjugate us. But Reda Seyam will no longer bring Jihadists into the world, for now he has ridden off to the 72 virgins.

French driver reportedly heard yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ slams pedestrians, injures 13

Pakistan makes arrests in Taliban school massacre

Mastermind of Pakistani school massacre identified (autoplay video)

Malmö Bombed Again

Isis Mines Compound Hidden Killer That’s Plagued Iraq For Decades

Activists Detail Abuse Of Women At Hands Of Isis

Second France car attack on pedestrians in as many days injures 11

Satellite Images Show 290 Heritage Sites In Syria Damaged By War

Mastermind of Pakistan school attack ID’d as militant known by ‘Slim’

Jihad by Truck in Nantes

Iraq crisis: The last Christians of Dora

The End of Tolerance? Anti-Muslim Movement Rattles Germany

Grisly finds in Iraqi Yazidi village taken back from ISIS militants

ISIS ramps up persecution of Christians in Middle East (autoplay video)

Taliban attacks complicate US drawdown in Afghanistan, raise 2015 concerns (autoplay video)

Read it.

In the French news report below, you’ll see a woman explaining to the TV audience that the man who ran down a number of pedestrians in Dijon a couple of days ago while shouting “Allahu akhbar” was in fact a lunatic. He had a psychiatric history, had been institutionalized, etc. etc. It was had nothing to do religion; the attacker wanted to “commit a political act”.

Somebody should have explained to this well-meaning lady that politics, religion, and insanity converge in Islam. Islam is in fact the Perfect Storm of lunacy, politics, and religion.

Read it.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, there were about 200,000 Jews in Turkish lands – when the entire population was barely 10 million. Today, the Turkish population has reached 77 million – and there are fewer than 17,000 Jews.

Mois Gabay, a Turkish Jewish writer for Salom, the Istanbul Jewish newspaper, recently wrote in his column, “Are Turkish Jews Leaving?”: “We face threats, attacks and harassment every day. Hope is fading. Is it necessary for a ‘Hrant among us’ to be shot in order for the government, the opposition, civil society, our neighbors and jurists to see this?” The ‘Hrant’ to whom he referred is Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian journalist who was shot dead in 2007 by a gang of nationalist Turks.

John C. Wright reminds you what Islam is all about.

Maybe we can find Baptist on Mormon violence around the time of the Civil War, or something else not in living memory.  For Catholic versus Protestant atrocities, we can uncover many in Ireland, and, before that, we need to dive back far enough in history that everyone is wearing lace or ruffs. My amateur’s knowledge of history tells me of few or no battles between Catholic and Greek after the Great Schism, and some tumults and riots between Orthodox and the Nestorians or Arians. The next time religious atrocities appear in Western history is the persecutions of Diocletian or Nero. Before that, the Roman pagans engaged in the greatest witch-hunt in history, wiping out members of a cult whose practices were abominable.

Hence there is no moral equivalence here. What is the occasional and historically anomalous aberration for Christendom is the heart and soul of the Dar-el-Islam. What for us is a freakish departure from our code of conduct is their code of conduct. A more perfect and absolute evil than performing the most grotesque and nightmarish atrocities the vile imagination of man can conceive in the name of God does not exist. Even the Nazis were more civilized than this — they did not use nerve gas.

The battle is existential and absolute. Compromise or coexistence is not possible if the enemy is unwilling to compromise and coexist.

Read it.

Islam is a charnel house. It was born in fire and blood and slaughter in the 7th century and has maintained the same modus operandi for the past fourteen hundred years.

When it is strong it wages aggressive jihad. It slaughters victims who refuse to convert. It takes slaves and distributes concubines to its warriors. It rapes and loots and destroys the wealth of civilized societies to feed its insatiable lust for booty and plunder, battening on the flesh of the prosperous. It reaps what it does not sow and harvests where it does not plant.

When it is weak, it goes into dormant mode. It turns its aggressive energies in upon itself, ferreting out blasphemy and unbelief and punishing the malefactors. Deprived of plunder, its cities fall into decay and desuetude. Poverty and degradation become the norm. The soldiers of Allah bide their time and await the moment when they may resume their rapacity.

With the emergence of the Islamic State in the Middle East, we are now moving out of a three-century hiatus of Islamic weakness into an era of renewed Islamic strength. What seems an unprecedented horror of bestial behavior is actually just a return to the Islamic norm as practiced before 1683 throughout the lands conquered by Islam.

All of the above is easily discoverable by any non-Muslim who cares to look into the matter. None of it is hidden. Yet the average Westerner is wearing a blindfold and earplugs when it comes to Islam. The arrant nonsense that is peddled by our media and our political leaders is swallowed by millions of people who should know better. And who could know better, if only they would raise a corner of the blindfold and take a little peek.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Well, to start with, there are still a lot of Muslims out there….

For two decades now, Pakistan’s all-powerful intelligence service called the ISI – equivalent of CIA – has played a complicated game of “good terrorist, bad terrorist” based on whether a group serves its geopolitical ends against India or not. And it has cultivated the “good” ones, giving their noxious ideology a pass and offering them a safe haven in the country.

Read it.

I guess “Black Lives Matter!” doesn’t apply to Nigeria.

Read it.

A non-Muslim who studies Islamic law in any depth soon learns that certain words have different meanings in Islam than they do in ordinary usage. Terms used in Islamic law that have specialized definitions include justice, peace, freedom, innocent, human rights, terrorism, slander, and any number of other seemingly commonplace English words and phrases.

Spokesmen for Islamic organization — and particularly those for Muslim Brotherhood front groups — rely on our ignorance about these “terms of art”. One reason that they are winning their information war with the West is that we simply do not understand what they really mean when they use these deliberately misleading words.

Read it.

At least 126 people, mostly children, have been killed in a Taliban assault on an army-run school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, officials say.

Read it.

Back in 2009 Sheikh Haron, the allegedly late alleged hostage-taker in Sydney, was arrested and charged with sending hate mail to the families of deceased Australian soldiers. He was a self-declared man of peace in those days. He said, “This pen is my gun, and these words are my bullets.”

I’m sure everyone believed him back then, just as they are now expressing their solidarity with self-declared “peaceful” Muslims and warning against a “backlash”.

By the way — also in 2009, in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, famously said: “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Some things never change.

Read it.

TV Showing Cafe’s Customers With Hands Up; Islamic Flag Displayed.

…

It wasn’t clear if the attack was linked to hard-line Islamist groups, such as Islamic State, which have been the focus of a crackdown by authorities in recent weeks.

Just another day in the Religion of Peace. Nothing to see here — move along, move along….

Read it.

The following pronouncement originated with Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Rulings by Al-Azhar are instructive, because there is no higher authority on Sunni Islamic doctrine. The institution is the closest equivalent to the Vatican that can be found in Islam.

Al-Azhar has now declined to pronounce takfir against the Islamic State, which would have placed the Caliph and his followers outside of Islam. This raises an important question: if Al-Azhar — whose scholars know more about Sunni Islam than anyone else in the world — will not anathematize ISIS, how can dilettantes such as Barack Obama and David Cameron declare so confidently that the Islamic State “has nothing to do with Islam”?

Read it.

Systematic Islamist indoctrination in Turkey is becoming less stealthy.

Education is the new battlefield. Turkey’s government is pushing to advance its declared policy goal of “raising devout (Muslim) generations.”

Read it.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Gee, I’ve been saying that for years.